act like his wants and opinions are more important than anyone else's.
Actually, when it comes to the Linux kernel, his opinions are more important than anyone else's, because he has final say on it.
True, but it's worth considering why it is that he has the final say. Sure, it was his baby originally, but 20 years later, Linux is an asset worth billions to many big companies with deep pockets and lots of top-notch engineers -- and it's GPLd. If, say, IBM wanted to they could fork the kernel and push their fork farther and faster, make it better-tested, more featureful and more reliable than Linus' fork. They could adopt better policies that would make contributors happier, and Linus would quickly fade into irrelevancy.
Or could they?
The fact is that Linus is still in charge of the 800-pound gorilla that Linux has become for one simple reason: he does a great job. He makes good decisions, manages the process well, and generally keeps things moving along well enough that no one is really even tempted to seriously try to fork the kernel in a way that pushes Linus out of the picture.
What all of that means is that his opinions are more important than anyone else's because he has good opinions. Not that he's perfect (in fact I can name a number of things I strongly disagree with him on), but by and large, what he says on kernel-related topics is worth listening to on its own merit. And because he has final say on it.
I'm going to stop short of saying it'll happen, but it's far from inconceivable.
Of course it's not inconceivable, but is it worth a front-page./ post title? I'd say it isn't. You might as well ask if Apple plans on going into the search business. I'd say they're equally likely (in that both companies would like for these to be viable, but both assertions are very very bad bets).
I estimate Google's chance of success at this as much higher than you do. Time will tell.
Well, my Chromebook cost much less than a Pixel... but I'm not so sure the Pixel doesn't make sense for anyone.
Your life may be different, but I'm rarely disconnected, including on airplanes, etc., and lack of Internet access is becoming rapidly less common, particularly since my Chromebook has 3G. Also, my employer doesn't allow engineers to put code on laptops. As a result, I find that I rarely use my MacBook Air any more, except for photo editing.
I could see myself getting great value out of a Pixel, assuming it's as nice as all the reviews say (I haven't actually seen one yet).
There's also the fact that there are already simple hacks published that allow you to run a full Ubuntu distro in a chroot on your Chromebook, with a hotkey to toggle back and forth. I haven't tried that yet, though, and I probably won't. I do have that MacBook for the rare cases I need something more than my Chromebook (about once every two weeks).
The "consumer market" is not what drives Office sales and use, it's business sales and use.
True. On the other hand... Chromebooks are more attractive to businesses than they are to consumers, because there's no administration to be done. Office is a big barrier to Chromebook adoption, but if Google can convince businesses that Quickoffice and Docs can accomplish the same purpose, that barrier falls.
I'm going to stop short of saying it'll happen, but it's far from inconceivable.
So what you're saying is that a Chromebook is just dandy if you have a real computer to connect it to?
For the things that you can't currently do on the web, yes, you need a real computer, somewhere. However, it doesn't have to be the computer you carry around. In fact, for some of the development I do, I'd far rather use a Chromebook to connect to my desktop than use a laptop. My desktop machine (Eight 3.1 Ghz cores, 32 GiB RAM) is much more powerful than any laptop.
My did got a VHS camcorder in the 1980s and spent a significant amount of time and money on tapes to record as much as he could of my and my sisters' significant life events - proms, sports, graduations, weddings, etc. To this day, those VHS tapes sit there decaying, never watched. It seems like everyone is too busy living their current lives and experiencing the present to have time to start delving into even the "important" moments of the past. Photos? Sure. Video? Hasn't happened yet. Maybe I'll be proven wrong some day.
I think that's largely a limitation of the technology.
Suppose all of that video was on-line and searchable (by the person who recorded it). Even better, suppose you had a voice-control interface and that it was smart enough to understand the context of events. What if you could say, "Show me the first time I met so-and-so", or "Generate a video of clips of my sister scoring in school basketball games" or "plot me a graph over time of the amount of time I spend reading slashdot", or "Show me the commands I entered last time I built <project I haven't touched for a while>", or...
Those capabilities are coming.
And note that this doesn't mean you become unable to forget when your wife did something that annoys you. It just means that you have the capability to recall it if you want to. In fact, if you're at all like me, having this automated, searchable life archive would cause you to be able to forget even more stuff, because you wouldn't need to have to remember it. And why would you ask to have unpleasant events recalled for you?
In the meantime, you'd never have to take notes again, never forget a face (assuming you also add augmented reality glasses and automated lookup), could recover exact details of any conversation... and on and on.
I doubt they'll re-introduce remote work. Mayer comes from Google, which has a very strong belief in the value of everyone being in the office to facilitate communication.
Think headphones will help? Try it, and find out what a heart attack feels like when some asshole comes up behind you and taps you on the shoulder to get your attention.
Etiquette where I work, in an open plan environment (Google), is that you get someone's attention by IMing them. Yes, my teammate who sits right next to me, less than three feet away, often sends me an instant message to ask a question. I respond by yanking off my headphones and turning to face him. It's weird, I suppose, but it works, providing both easy collaboration and strong isolation, as necessary.
Ah - there you have it. I suspect that Google doesn't have a shabby work space that houses 3 engineers to a single table... Where support calls are king, interrupting everyone else that might also have work to get done. Did I mention there were multiple tables in one room?
You have just described the Google ChromeOS Ninja room. Google definitely has workspaces like that, and some open pan areas do "hotbunking", where you bring in your laptop, find an available spot, and plug it into a large moniter or monitors, a keyboard, and mouse (if you want to use them).
Any comments on the pros and cons of such work areas, Terry?
This is an issue that's very important to me, personally.
I've relocated my immediate family far from all of our extended family for a job. It's a great job (Google), but the relocation has imposed some real hardships on us, and I'd very, very much like to be able to move back "home" but keep the job, working remotely. I came to Google from IBM, a company which has gone largely distributed, and I spent the ten years prior to joining Google working from home.
So I have both motivation to convince Google that I can work remotely with great effectiveness and experience to show that I have, in fact, done it. Further, Google has outstanding tools for facilitated distributed work... not only do we use Google Docs and Google+ Hangouts extensively, they're also integrated with each other and with Gmail, and Google Chat, and Google Voice. Plus, of course, all of our source control tools are well-suited to remote work, our code review and systems management interfaces are all either command-line or web-based (either works great remotely). It really is a world-class remote collaboration suite.
However, I've had to grudgingly admit that Google is right in its assertion that distributed work is less efficient, that remote teams move slower and accomplish less than co-located teams. I'm in the Boulder office, but much of my work has reached across site boundaries to include teams in Mountain View, San Francisco, Boston, New York and Zurich. And, as a result, I've ended up spending a lot of time in those cities (I'm in Zurich now) because it is so much more effective to communicate with people in person.
How do I reconcile the conflict? Was I just ineffective at IBM? I mean, there I was e-mailing Office docs and talking on conference calls. That had to have been even worse than at Google, right? No. Remote work can work, and very well, but it requires a massive cultural shift. The technology is there, and has been for a while, but what's lacking is the motivation to be willing to suffer the large cost of essentially re-training your entire company on how to communicate.
IBM made this shift because it was drowning in red ink and Gerstner decided a first step to fixing that problem was to eliminate most of IBM's real estate, and the resulting lack of office space led the company scrambling for solutions. IBM had decades-long task forces focused only on finding and addressing obstacles to remote work. There's no doubt that IBM's productivity did take a big hit during the transition, and it lasted for a long time. But IBM was at the same time fighting its way out from under massive internal bureaucracy, and the improvements from eliminating the bureaucracy papered over the problems caused by retraining. Another source of improvement was the fact that IBM built, at the same time, a whole new -- and very large -- services business, which was inherently distributed.
A key to IBM's success, though, was that almost everyone was pushed out of the office. The people who couldn't be productive working remotely ended up being slid out of the company, many in the course of a few layoffs. If you want to make remote work effective, everyone needs to be comfortable dealing with remote collaborators all the time, and by sending nearly everyone home, IBM achieved that.
Google, on the other hand, is already a highly productive, efficient company, one which doesn't really have massive layers of bureaucracy to clear out. As a result, any widespread transition to remote work would cause the company's performance to take a large hit, and not briefly. 5+ years, I estimate. I think Google could make the transition faster than IBM did, partly due to better tools, mostly due to better people -- not everyone, mind you, there were lots of highly capable IBMers, but there's hardly anyone at Google who is not highly capable. But it would take years and Google's apparent dominance notwithstanding, Google can't afford that.
IBM's market position was built primarily on long-term, solid c
My Nissan LEAF also tracks all your driving. Nissan's solution to the question of privacy is to pop a dialog on the in-dash touchscreen every time the car is started, asking you if you want to send your data to them. Unless you press "Yes", that drive is not tracked.
Correction: Your Nissan LEAF also tracks all your driving.
It looked like I was logged out, because I had to log in back to gmail on another tab
That doesn't necessarily mean you were logged out. There are states in which Google thinks you need to be re-authenticated before you're allowed access to private stuff (in case you're not actually you!), but that's not the same thing as having logged out.
GDocs is missing very many features for almost all of my work use cases.
Which?
If you haven't looked lately, it may well have changed. New features are being added all the time.
My use of docs is pretty basic, I'll readily grant. Relatively simple calculations (though I occasionally do some fairly hairy stats stuff) in spreadsheets, simple design docs in the word processor, basic presentations. However, the primary feature of docs for my workflows is shareability. After so many years of passing requirements, design docs and contracts around, either trying to avoid concurrent modifications or to usefully merge versions when time is so tight that concurrent work is unavoidable, it's a huge relief to have shared docs with real-time collaboration.
I fought so much with trying to collaborate successfully with MS Office tools that eventually (pre-Gdocs) I wrote a series of markup languages and document processing systems so we could use CVS (and later SVN) to manage the collaboration. The markup language approach meant that everything was ultimately text, which source control systems manage well. We were constantly running into missing features, which required everything to stop while I improved the tools, but it was still faster than using Office (or anything similar).
In contrast, it's really common for me now to write nothing more than the bare outline of a design doc before I share it with my closest collaborators, who begin commenting on and even tweaking my document while I'm still writing it. When one of us has a question, there's a builtin chat client, or with two (IIRC) mouse clicks we can fire up a Hangout. Once it gets to solid draft state, I open it up to a wider audience, incorporating their feedback as it comes in -- and with trivial changes they often don't bother to tell me about the issues they see, but just fix it themselves. I've had upwards of 20 people looking at and commenting on a design simultaneously, with me able to respond in realtime, whether in-doc, in-chat or via VC.
Of course, depending on the quality of the people in your team, getting that much feedback may be a negative rather than a positive (you risk design by committee-itis), but with my team, it's awesome. We routinely write, review and approve non-trivial designs in days, rather than weeks, and small ones in hours -- and with full input from all of the relevant people.
If you really produce non-trivial docs all by yourself, then that's not an issue for you, but for my work GDocs is so much than a standalone office suite, there's no comparison. A minor formatting capability here or there is irrelevant in the face of that huge advantage. Of course, standalone apps and real-time collaboration aren't mutually exclusive, and I think that's what MS Office365 is supposed to provide (I've never used it).
Back to the core point... for many people GDocs or similar is not just an adequate solution, it's a better solution. And if that describes a large chunk of your daily work (not for you, apparently), then a Chromebook can be a very productive platform -- and $1300 for a heavily-used tool isn't unreasonable.
My Nissan LEAF also tracks all your driving. Nissan's solution to the question of privacy is to pop a dialog on the in-dash touchscreen every time the car is started, asking you if you want to send your data to them. Unless you press "Yes", that drive is not tracked.
People actually exploit this to game the driving efficiency rankings. Hop in, hit "No", drive to the top of a hill, then turn the car off and on, hit "Yes" and coast to the bottom of the hill. Do that a little and you can look like you regularly achieve 20+ miles per kWh.
And if you never login to any google services on that browser, yeah, it won't know who you are. If you ever do, not so much.
If you really don't want to be tracked, Google allows you to opt out and even provides an extension that ensures your opt-out doesn't get lost. You may be skeptical, that's certainly your right, but I know one of the guys who works on the opt-out stuff and they take it really seriously. If there is some way that you can be tracked by Google's systems even with an opt-out cookie in place, it's a bug and they fix it.
I've logged out of Google, and still seen the G+ counter increment.
RLZ identifier and that initial unique identifier/registration when you first run Chrome. So even if you don't sign in to your google account, you can still be tracked down to the system/machine/local account level.
Which contains no identifying information, is not unique (it tags you to a download "cohort" and a first search "cohort") and is not included if you downloaded your copy of Chrome from the Google web site. RLZ is used to track Chrome copies distributed through promotional campaigns.
Umm, it asks you which search engine you want to use and offers you the option of signing into your Google account to enable Chrome Sync (keeps your bookmarks and other data synchronized across multiple machines).
Oh, yeah, and it also takes your grandmother hostage. Forgot that part.
Under State law, I am required to stop the progress of a Felony by law, or be an accessory.
Cite? I'm quite familiar with this area of the law in several states, and I'm skeptical that Florida requires you to intervene.
People on slashdot are always saying that even the police don't have an obligation to intervene in a crime in the US, which is why they justify shooting intruders dead on the basis that they can't rely on the police to turn up and protect them, so I don't see how an ordinary citizen could be expected to.
I agree completely. And it's true... police don't have any obligation to intervene.
As specs evolve and advances slow down, what software something runs will probably increasingly become the differentiating factor.
True, and for a lot of uses ChromeOS has some pretty compelling advantages. It also has some non-trivial limitations, but those limitations make it both a lot easier to use and much more secure. As the web becomes a more and more capable platform, and as disconnected operation becomes less common (it's already pretty rare for me), the importance of the limitations will decline, too.
(Disclaimer: I work for Google. I don't have an particular interest in ChromeOS, though, other than the fact that I find I prefer it over OS X or the common Linux distros for about 90% of what I do. I haven't used Windows in anger since shortly after Windows 2000 was released, so I can't really compare with that.)
Inferior OS? I dunno. I have a Samsung Chromebook and a MacBook Air, and for most work I prefer the Chromebook -- mostly because the OS gets in my way a lot less than OS X does.
If the attacker is within arm's reach then using a firearm may be not an option anymore.
Not arguing against a Taser -- they are great and work very well -- but if you can retrieve and deploy a Taser, you can use a gun. Unless your hands/arms are pinned or otherwise controlled by the attacker, it's nearly always possible to draw to and fire from retention position. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nqQAgtNMwDY, for one example of the technique.
Slashdot Mirror
act like his wants and opinions are more important than anyone else's.
Actually, when it comes to the Linux kernel, his opinions are more important than anyone else's, because he has final say on it.
True, but it's worth considering why it is that he has the final say. Sure, it was his baby originally, but 20 years later, Linux is an asset worth billions to many big companies with deep pockets and lots of top-notch engineers -- and it's GPLd. If, say, IBM wanted to they could fork the kernel and push their fork farther and faster, make it better-tested, more featureful and more reliable than Linus' fork. They could adopt better policies that would make contributors happier, and Linus would quickly fade into irrelevancy.
Or could they?
The fact is that Linus is still in charge of the 800-pound gorilla that Linux has become for one simple reason: he does a great job. He makes good decisions, manages the process well, and generally keeps things moving along well enough that no one is really even tempted to seriously try to fork the kernel in a way that pushes Linus out of the picture.
What all of that means is that his opinions are more important than anyone else's because he has good opinions. Not that he's perfect (in fact I can name a number of things I strongly disagree with him on), but by and large, what he says on kernel-related topics is worth listening to on its own merit. And because he has final say on it.
I'm going to stop short of saying it'll happen, but it's far from inconceivable.
Of course it's not inconceivable, but is it worth a front-page ./ post title? I'd say it isn't. You might as well ask if Apple plans on going into the search business. I'd say they're equally likely (in that both companies would like for these to be viable, but both assertions are very very bad bets).
I estimate Google's chance of success at this as much higher than you do. Time will tell.
Well, my Chromebook cost much less than a Pixel... but I'm not so sure the Pixel doesn't make sense for anyone.
Your life may be different, but I'm rarely disconnected, including on airplanes, etc., and lack of Internet access is becoming rapidly less common, particularly since my Chromebook has 3G. Also, my employer doesn't allow engineers to put code on laptops. As a result, I find that I rarely use my MacBook Air any more, except for photo editing.
I could see myself getting great value out of a Pixel, assuming it's as nice as all the reviews say (I haven't actually seen one yet).
There's also the fact that there are already simple hacks published that allow you to run a full Ubuntu distro in a chroot on your Chromebook, with a hotkey to toggle back and forth. I haven't tried that yet, though, and I probably won't. I do have that MacBook for the rare cases I need something more than my Chromebook (about once every two weeks).
The "consumer market" is not what drives Office sales and use, it's business sales and use.
True. On the other hand... Chromebooks are more attractive to businesses than they are to consumers, because there's no administration to be done. Office is a big barrier to Chromebook adoption, but if Google can convince businesses that Quickoffice and Docs can accomplish the same purpose, that barrier falls.
I'm going to stop short of saying it'll happen, but it's far from inconceivable.
So what you're saying is that a Chromebook is just dandy if you have a real computer to connect it to?
For the things that you can't currently do on the web, yes, you need a real computer, somewhere. However, it doesn't have to be the computer you carry around. In fact, for some of the development I do, I'd far rather use a Chromebook to connect to my desktop than use a laptop. My desktop machine (Eight 3.1 Ghz cores, 32 GiB RAM) is much more powerful than any laptop.
I've never seen one.
Are you sure about that?
Plus anyone else who wanted to see it....
Nonsense. My home videos are online now. Can you see them?
My did got a VHS camcorder in the 1980s and spent a significant amount of time and money on tapes to record as much as he could of my and my sisters' significant life events - proms, sports, graduations, weddings, etc. To this day, those VHS tapes sit there decaying, never watched. It seems like everyone is too busy living their current lives and experiencing the present to have time to start delving into even the "important" moments of the past. Photos? Sure. Video? Hasn't happened yet. Maybe I'll be proven wrong some day.
I think that's largely a limitation of the technology.
Suppose all of that video was on-line and searchable (by the person who recorded it). Even better, suppose you had a voice-control interface and that it was smart enough to understand the context of events. What if you could say, "Show me the first time I met so-and-so", or "Generate a video of clips of my sister scoring in school basketball games" or "plot me a graph over time of the amount of time I spend reading slashdot", or "Show me the commands I entered last time I built <project I haven't touched for a while>", or ...
Those capabilities are coming.
And note that this doesn't mean you become unable to forget when your wife did something that annoys you. It just means that you have the capability to recall it if you want to. In fact, if you're at all like me, having this automated, searchable life archive would cause you to be able to forget even more stuff, because you wouldn't need to have to remember it. And why would you ask to have unpleasant events recalled for you?
In the meantime, you'd never have to take notes again, never forget a face (assuming you also add augmented reality glasses and automated lookup), could recover exact details of any conversation... and on and on.
I doubt they'll re-introduce remote work. Mayer comes from Google, which has a very strong belief in the value of everyone being in the office to facilitate communication.
Think headphones will help? Try it, and find out what a heart attack feels like when some asshole comes up behind you and taps you on the shoulder to get your attention.
Etiquette where I work, in an open plan environment (Google), is that you get someone's attention by IMing them. Yes, my teammate who sits right next to me, less than three feet away, often sends me an instant message to ask a question. I respond by yanking off my headphones and turning to face him. It's weird, I suppose, but it works, providing both easy collaboration and strong isolation, as necessary.
Ah - there you have it. I suspect that Google doesn't have a shabby work space that houses 3 engineers to a single table ... Where support calls are king, interrupting everyone else that might also have work to get done. Did I mention there were multiple tables in one room?
You have just described the Google ChromeOS Ninja room. Google definitely has workspaces like that, and some open pan areas do "hotbunking", where you bring in your laptop, find an available spot, and plug it into a large moniter or monitors, a keyboard, and mouse (if you want to use them).
Any comments on the pros and cons of such work areas, Terry?
This is an issue that's very important to me, personally.
I've relocated my immediate family far from all of our extended family for a job. It's a great job (Google), but the relocation has imposed some real hardships on us, and I'd very, very much like to be able to move back "home" but keep the job, working remotely. I came to Google from IBM, a company which has gone largely distributed, and I spent the ten years prior to joining Google working from home.
So I have both motivation to convince Google that I can work remotely with great effectiveness and experience to show that I have, in fact, done it. Further, Google has outstanding tools for facilitated distributed work... not only do we use Google Docs and Google+ Hangouts extensively, they're also integrated with each other and with Gmail, and Google Chat, and Google Voice. Plus, of course, all of our source control tools are well-suited to remote work, our code review and systems management interfaces are all either command-line or web-based (either works great remotely). It really is a world-class remote collaboration suite.
However, I've had to grudgingly admit that Google is right in its assertion that distributed work is less efficient, that remote teams move slower and accomplish less than co-located teams. I'm in the Boulder office, but much of my work has reached across site boundaries to include teams in Mountain View, San Francisco, Boston, New York and Zurich. And, as a result, I've ended up spending a lot of time in those cities (I'm in Zurich now) because it is so much more effective to communicate with people in person.
How do I reconcile the conflict? Was I just ineffective at IBM? I mean, there I was e-mailing Office docs and talking on conference calls. That had to have been even worse than at Google, right? No. Remote work can work, and very well, but it requires a massive cultural shift. The technology is there, and has been for a while, but what's lacking is the motivation to be willing to suffer the large cost of essentially re-training your entire company on how to communicate.
IBM made this shift because it was drowning in red ink and Gerstner decided a first step to fixing that problem was to eliminate most of IBM's real estate, and the resulting lack of office space led the company scrambling for solutions. IBM had decades-long task forces focused only on finding and addressing obstacles to remote work. There's no doubt that IBM's productivity did take a big hit during the transition, and it lasted for a long time. But IBM was at the same time fighting its way out from under massive internal bureaucracy, and the improvements from eliminating the bureaucracy papered over the problems caused by retraining. Another source of improvement was the fact that IBM built, at the same time, a whole new -- and very large -- services business, which was inherently distributed.
A key to IBM's success, though, was that almost everyone was pushed out of the office. The people who couldn't be productive working remotely ended up being slid out of the company, many in the course of a few layoffs. If you want to make remote work effective, everyone needs to be comfortable dealing with remote collaborators all the time, and by sending nearly everyone home, IBM achieved that.
Google, on the other hand, is already a highly productive, efficient company, one which doesn't really have massive layers of bureaucracy to clear out. As a result, any widespread transition to remote work would cause the company's performance to take a large hit, and not briefly. 5+ years, I estimate. I think Google could make the transition faster than IBM did, partly due to better tools, mostly due to better people -- not everyone, mind you, there were lots of highly capable IBMers, but there's hardly anyone at Google who is not highly capable. But it would take years and Google's apparent dominance notwithstanding, Google can't afford that.
IBM's market position was built primarily on long-term, solid c
My Nissan LEAF also tracks all your driving. Nissan's solution to the question of privacy is to pop a dialog on the in-dash touchscreen every time the car is started, asking you if you want to send your data to them. Unless you press "Yes", that drive is not tracked.
Correction: Your Nissan LEAF also tracks all your driving.
That's what they want you to believe.
It looked like I was logged out, because I had to log in back to gmail on another tab
That doesn't necessarily mean you were logged out. There are states in which Google thinks you need to be re-authenticated before you're allowed access to private stuff (in case you're not actually you!), but that's not the same thing as having logged out.
As for the extension, linky? Sounds interesting.
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/keep-my-opt-outs/hhnjdplhmcnkiecampfdgfjilccfpfoe?hl=en
GDocs is missing very many features for almost all of my work use cases.
Which?
If you haven't looked lately, it may well have changed. New features are being added all the time.
My use of docs is pretty basic, I'll readily grant. Relatively simple calculations (though I occasionally do some fairly hairy stats stuff) in spreadsheets, simple design docs in the word processor, basic presentations. However, the primary feature of docs for my workflows is shareability. After so many years of passing requirements, design docs and contracts around, either trying to avoid concurrent modifications or to usefully merge versions when time is so tight that concurrent work is unavoidable, it's a huge relief to have shared docs with real-time collaboration.
I fought so much with trying to collaborate successfully with MS Office tools that eventually (pre-Gdocs) I wrote a series of markup languages and document processing systems so we could use CVS (and later SVN) to manage the collaboration. The markup language approach meant that everything was ultimately text, which source control systems manage well. We were constantly running into missing features, which required everything to stop while I improved the tools, but it was still faster than using Office (or anything similar).
In contrast, it's really common for me now to write nothing more than the bare outline of a design doc before I share it with my closest collaborators, who begin commenting on and even tweaking my document while I'm still writing it. When one of us has a question, there's a builtin chat client, or with two (IIRC) mouse clicks we can fire up a Hangout. Once it gets to solid draft state, I open it up to a wider audience, incorporating their feedback as it comes in -- and with trivial changes they often don't bother to tell me about the issues they see, but just fix it themselves. I've had upwards of 20 people looking at and commenting on a design simultaneously, with me able to respond in realtime, whether in-doc, in-chat or via VC.
Of course, depending on the quality of the people in your team, getting that much feedback may be a negative rather than a positive (you risk design by committee-itis), but with my team, it's awesome. We routinely write, review and approve non-trivial designs in days, rather than weeks, and small ones in hours -- and with full input from all of the relevant people.
If you really produce non-trivial docs all by yourself, then that's not an issue for you, but for my work GDocs is so much than a standalone office suite, there's no comparison. A minor formatting capability here or there is irrelevant in the face of that huge advantage. Of course, standalone apps and real-time collaboration aren't mutually exclusive, and I think that's what MS Office365 is supposed to provide (I've never used it).
Back to the core point... for many people GDocs or similar is not just an adequate solution, it's a better solution. And if that describes a large chunk of your daily work (not for you, apparently), then a Chromebook can be a very productive platform -- and $1300 for a heavily-used tool isn't unreasonable.
My Nissan LEAF also tracks all your driving. Nissan's solution to the question of privacy is to pop a dialog on the in-dash touchscreen every time the car is started, asking you if you want to send your data to them. Unless you press "Yes", that drive is not tracked.
People actually exploit this to game the driving efficiency rankings. Hop in, hit "No", drive to the top of a hill, then turn the car off and on, hit "Yes" and coast to the bottom of the hill. Do that a little and you can look like you regularly achieve 20+ miles per kWh.
And if you never login to any google services on that browser, yeah, it won't know who you are. If you ever do, not so much.
If you really don't want to be tracked, Google allows you to opt out and even provides an extension that ensures your opt-out doesn't get lost. You may be skeptical, that's certainly your right, but I know one of the guys who works on the opt-out stuff and they take it really seriously. If there is some way that you can be tracked by Google's systems even with an opt-out cookie in place, it's a bug and they fix it.
I've logged out of Google, and still seen the G+ counter increment.
I'm deeply skeptical of this claim.
RLZ identifier and that initial unique identifier/registration when you first run Chrome. So even if you don't sign in to your google account, you can still be tracked down to the system/machine/local account level.
Which contains no identifying information, is not unique (it tags you to a download "cohort" and a first search "cohort") and is not included if you downloaded your copy of Chrome from the Google web site. RLZ is used to track Chrome copies distributed through promotional campaigns.
Umm, it asks you which search engine you want to use and offers you the option of signing into your Google account to enable Chrome Sync (keeps your bookmarks and other data synchronized across multiple machines).
Oh, yeah, and it also takes your grandmother hostage. Forgot that part.
Sorry but most of us actually have to use non-web apps like spreadsheets, IDEs, and groupware/office.
Spreadsheets: Google Docs -- far more useful than an unshared document anyway.
IDEs: Chromote into my desktop (I actually am not allowed to put source code on my laptop anyway), plus there's a web-based IDE in development.
Groupware/Office: gMail, Google Calendar, Google Docs.
I can't use Chrome in all cases even for web usage because I need to test my code on multiple client architectures.
I don't do UIs, but, again, I would actually just do that stuff on my desktop machine, remotely. VPN + Chromoting covers most of my work.
Under State law, I am required to stop the progress of a Felony by law, or be an accessory.
Cite? I'm quite familiar with this area of the law in several states, and I'm skeptical that Florida requires you to intervene.
People on slashdot are always saying that even the police don't have an obligation to intervene in a crime in the US, which is why they justify shooting intruders dead on the basis that they can't rely on the police to turn up and protect them, so I don't see how an ordinary citizen could be expected to.
I agree completely. And it's true... police don't have any obligation to intervene.
As specs evolve and advances slow down, what software something runs will probably increasingly become the differentiating factor.
True, and for a lot of uses ChromeOS has some pretty compelling advantages. It also has some non-trivial limitations, but those limitations make it both a lot easier to use and much more secure. As the web becomes a more and more capable platform, and as disconnected operation becomes less common (it's already pretty rare for me), the importance of the limitations will decline, too.
(Disclaimer: I work for Google. I don't have an particular interest in ChromeOS, though, other than the fact that I find I prefer it over OS X or the common Linux distros for about 90% of what I do. I haven't used Windows in anger since shortly after Windows 2000 was released, so I can't really compare with that.)
Inferior OS? I dunno. I have a Samsung Chromebook and a MacBook Air, and for most work I prefer the Chromebook -- mostly because the OS gets in my way a lot less than OS X does.
If the attacker is within arm's reach then using a firearm may be not an option anymore.
Not arguing against a Taser -- they are great and work very well -- but if you can retrieve and deploy a Taser, you can use a gun. Unless your hands/arms are pinned or otherwise controlled by the attacker, it's nearly always possible to draw to and fire from retention position. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nqQAgtNMwDY, for one example of the technique.
Under State law, I am required to stop the progress of a Felony by law, or be an accessory.
Cite? I'm quite familiar with this area of the law in several states, and I'm skeptical that Florida requires you to intervene.