Why would you choose a chromebook over a normal netbook? That is a point. I wouldn't, unless Ik wanted the hardware. You wouldn't. But, what about corporate? I see the whole ChromeOS thing aimed mainly at corporations, because you don't have to worry about most infections, you don't really need to manually monitor each machine(IIRC, there's a great remote administration infrastructure). It seems like it would be a boon for high-turnover positons: Each can be issued a chromebook, get their own profile, and not be tied to any one device. Also, losing the physical hardware shouldn't be a problem: Since everything's server side, you just write off the lost hardware, take out another from your stores, and keep working. I think this is the main benefit for these machines.
As far as "apps" go, I can see quite a few industries where they're basically just server interfaces anyway, so why go with a single-platform, potentially unsupported language like VB or IE6-html? It seems like those are the people Google might just get on board. Especially since they could simply write it in generic-html and have it work with both Chrome and FF, etc. Once it works there, it works cross-platform. The IT folks can use the apps on their Linux machines, the graphics department on their Macs, others on Windows, and even use it on the Kiosk Chromebooks.
It seems to me that while you may like your Mac, what happens when Corporate makes you use a Windows PC for a week? If the important bits are simply HTML and tied into Google Apps, you could literally just log in and have all your preferences right there.....At least, that's the/theory/.
(Oh, just so you know, I don't use Chrome myself. I have a copy for debugging purposes, but don't use it more than once a week normally. Compared to the 50+ tabs I have open in FF...)
Well, the way I see it, they are allowing apps - They simply need to run inside the sandbox and be written with a specific language(in this case, html/js). Is this much different than Android was, until they allowed native code? Sure, the language is different, and there is more in the way of low-level functions, but I see them as fairly close. Admittedly, a lot of functionality *won't* run completely as a "web app"... But I think they're trying to fix it by adding local storage and other important bits. And if you look at Mozilla as an example - where you have XULrunner being the backend browser bit, and then Firefox, Thunderbird and the like simply being huge scripts on top of it... It could work. Obviously, though, in order to do the same type thing in ChromeOS, they have to add more low-level interface functionality... but it's doable. They could probably drop in a locally-stored suite of scripts - Media player, document editor etc - and while still running in the browser sandbox they'd be effectively equivalent to native apps aside from perhaps speed.
The one interesting thing about this approach, though, is it should allow for moving your chrome webapp profile around between devices - both ChromeOS netbooks and conventional machines running Chrome(which could be just about anything from ARM-based tablets and phones, to x86 Windows, OSX, Linux) - quickly and effectively, something that's impossible with traditional native apps. I could see someone using a Windows PC with Autocad, having their general corporate apps running in Chrome, then use one of a "pool" of ChromeOS netbooks on the go, then accessing the same content from their Linux PC at home... or smartphone if needed. Do I think it a replacement for somewhat locked down Windows? No. But it *might* compliment it, for people who only need web, email etc.
Sop you know what? Keep 51% of the stock in "friendly" hands and say "Screw you. You can either wait for results, or get out of the way", and having 51% means they shouldn't be able to do jack shit to you.
Alternately, buy back all your stock as quickly as possible - though it mignt take years - and not be a slave to Wall street.
Sorry, I'm not exactly happy with the whole short-sighted money-grubbing attitude at wall street. I don't think we'd lose too much of value if the entire industry vanished overnight.
"dangerous" as in being able to run unsigned excecutables that can change the disk image, and thus potentially could be malware. See Android and Windows. Of course, most of us choose to take that risk for extra control over our machines, though in some cases - A kiosk being a perfect example - having it locked down to a pre-set bunch of signed excecutables and read-only disk image is preferable: It's impossible to get malware, and you don't *want* people installing custom excecutables anyway! Not to mention, I know quite a number of people who really would be better off with a locked down OS: They don't need the capacity, and that way they don't get infected with malware from an accidental click(Remember, these people are the ones who still use IE because they don't know any better).
That all being said, I find the notion that Google has brainwashed me laughable at best: I, for one, won't ever run a device I cannot root, though I take full responsibility for my devices and can reinstall or fix most anything I need. When I first heard of this generation of Chromebooks, the first thing I asked was "Does it still have the dev switch?". Also, I don't have one myself... I just like the idea, though I personally wouldn't run ChromeOS.
Well, you're getting it as a lightfweight, SSD-based netbook. You can either run it in limited but completely safe mode, or unlimited but dangerous mode. Take your pick.
I have a Lenovo laptop with trackpoint and trackpad. I, for one, *always* use the trackpoint for pointing, as it's way more precise and quick to use. Trackpad gets used for scrolling, though - it's great for that. I will never voluntarily buy a trackpad only laptop. A touchscreen, on the other hand... That's fine. But a trackpad just isn't a good option - Not for gaming, not for web browsing or anything else. I can play FPS games with a trackpoint decently well; I wouldn't even *think* of using a trackpad for that(though I know some do).
As far as internet go, that's a valid complaint. I, for one, can barely even get GSM cell phone access, let alone data at my home. Wifi I have, but when not at home I generally don't have that... Though, aside from some simple coding, I need to have Internet access to get much work done - Or at least preload a bunch of documentation pages.
You can always hit the developer switch on the bottom and load Ubuntu on it if you need... The stock software *is* limited deliberately, and for good reason: It almost completely eliminates all virii and malware, and it certainly prevents it from persisting past reboot.
So build a little tiny switch into the inside of the device, with a little hole for a pin to access it. By pressing that switch, you enable developer mode which is open. Press it again and it goes back to locked mode. That way normal users can be secure in their walled garden, and power users can get what they want easily. It's the approach the Chromebooks are using, and I'm impressed. I, for one, won't buy a device I can't completely root(and has an unlocked bootloader, for running custom OS's), but others may want security instead.
Ah, but wait. You only need to pay to use the telephone on someone's network - I.e. paying for service. You're free to take that telephone and hook it up to your own internal network and not pay a dime. You can take that telephone apart and use it for anything you want without paying any service - the only time you need to pay for service is when you want to use someone else's network.
True, but quite a lot of people(including me) don't care for "appreciating" our food or OS. We want it *now*, which is why fast-food places - and Linux - exist.:P
That may be true, but I've seen otherwise relatively technically-illiterate users solve problems - like the ones this may cause - by simply following tutorials. They may not *understand* what a dns server does, but if they can follow instructions, they can fix the problem. Also, don't underestimate the power of friends providing help - One semi-knowledgable user + Google can help dozens of users to make the switch if needed.
As such, I think most freeloaders & normal users will end up changing DNS if needed(i.e. if something they try to do stops working), even if they don't really understand what they're doing.
I *wish* this was the case. I prefer alsa for everything I can due to lower latency, but for Wine, I *cannot* get my Audigy 2's mic to work - I just get a "pulsing" mic input, dropping every second or so. With PulseAudio(and a latency-reducing environment variable), it works perfectly. Probably due to software resampling. PulseAudio has it's uses - Mainly ones involved with overcoming shortcomings in the hardware - though it may not be needed(or wanted) everywhere.
Erm... Is this an advertisement/spam or a legit post? I can't quite tell... On the one hand, it's well written, unlike most ads. On the other, it has the same one-link-to-paragraph-of-information I've seen several times before. If it had been written by AC, I'd have considered it spam, but...
You don't get progress without getting rid of old crap, else people continue to use it and you get loads of legacy cruft - see the Win32 API for a good example.
I, personally, expect that when I run "apt-get update; apt-get upgrade" everything will be upgraded so it's compatible. Which usually happens unless you're running unstable/untested sources.
As far as 64-bit browser goes, I want it because it fits better with the rest of the OS, and means I don't need compatibility libraries running. If I had to make the choice between flash and 64-bit browser... well, good bye flash. I'd probably try gnash.
I've run into the same problem, but running the latest beta driver it seems to be partially solvesd: The screen freezes for about 15-30 seconds, then continues. Probably the HW/driver restarting when a watchdog times out. Still, it's better than locking up the machine permanately.
Sadly, no. I wish it'd work, but the last several taxing animations I've tried to play with it, well... the animation doesn't play at a constant rate and gets out of sync. On a 3.5ghz, quad-core proc. Adpbe Flash Square 64-bit preview worked fine, though may have dropped a few frames(not that it was using much processing power...).
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Unless the giant hybrid superfsoldiers are *female*!
Why would you choose a chromebook over a normal netbook? That is a point. I wouldn't, unless Ik wanted the hardware. You wouldn't. But, what about corporate? I see the whole ChromeOS thing aimed mainly at corporations, because you don't have to worry about most infections, you don't really need to manually monitor each machine(IIRC, there's a great remote administration infrastructure). It seems like it would be a boon for high-turnover positons: Each can be issued a chromebook, get their own profile, and not be tied to any one device. Also, losing the physical hardware shouldn't be a problem: Since everything's server side, you just write off the lost hardware, take out another from your stores, and keep working. I think this is the main benefit for these machines.
As far as "apps" go, I can see quite a few industries where they're basically just server interfaces anyway, so why go with a single-platform, potentially unsupported language like VB or IE6-html?
It seems like those are the people Google might just get on board.
Especially since they could simply write it in generic-html and have it work with both Chrome and FF, etc. Once it works there, it works cross-platform. The IT folks can use the apps on their Linux machines, the graphics department on their Macs, others on Windows, and even use it on the Kiosk Chromebooks.
It seems to me that while you may like your Mac, what happens when Corporate makes you use a Windows PC for a week? If the important bits are simply HTML and tied into Google Apps, you could literally just log in and have all your preferences right there. ....At least, that's the /theory/.
(Oh, just so you know, I don't use Chrome myself. I have a copy for debugging purposes, but don't use it more than once a week normally. Compared to the 50+ tabs I have open in FF...)
Well, the way I see it, they are allowing apps - They simply need to run inside the sandbox and be written with a specific language(in this case, html/js). Is this much different than Android was, until they allowed native code? Sure, the language is different, and there is more in the way of low-level functions, but I see them as fairly close.
Admittedly, a lot of functionality *won't* run completely as a "web app"... But I think they're trying to fix it by adding local storage and other important bits. And if you look at Mozilla as an example - where you have XULrunner being the backend browser bit, and then Firefox, Thunderbird and the like simply being huge scripts on top of it... It could work.
Obviously, though, in order to do the same type thing in ChromeOS, they have to add more low-level interface functionality... but it's doable. They could probably drop in a locally-stored suite of scripts - Media player, document editor etc - and while still running in the browser sandbox they'd be effectively equivalent to native apps aside from perhaps speed.
The one interesting thing about this approach, though, is it should allow for moving your chrome webapp profile around between devices - both ChromeOS netbooks and conventional machines running Chrome(which could be just about anything from ARM-based tablets and phones, to x86 Windows, OSX, Linux) - quickly and effectively, something that's impossible with traditional native apps.
I could see someone using a Windows PC with Autocad, having their general corporate apps running in Chrome, then use one of a "pool" of ChromeOS netbooks on the go, then accessing the same content from their Linux PC at home... or smartphone if needed.
Do I think it a replacement for somewhat locked down Windows? No. But it *might* compliment it, for people who only need web, email etc.
Sop you know what? Keep 51% of the stock in "friendly" hands and say "Screw you. You can either wait for results, or get out of the way", and having 51% means they shouldn't be able to do jack shit to you.
Alternately, buy back all your stock as quickly as possible - though it mignt take years - and not be a slave to Wall street.
Sorry, I'm not exactly happy with the whole short-sighted money-grubbing attitude at wall street. I don't think we'd lose too much of value if the entire industry vanished overnight.
"dangerous" as in being able to run unsigned excecutables that can change the disk image, and thus potentially could be malware. See Android and Windows.
Of course, most of us choose to take that risk for extra control over our machines, though in some cases - A kiosk being a perfect example - having it locked down to a pre-set bunch of signed excecutables and read-only disk image is preferable: It's impossible to get malware, and you don't *want* people installing custom excecutables anyway!
Not to mention, I know quite a number of people who really would be better off with a locked down OS: They don't need the capacity, and that way they don't get infected with malware from an accidental click(Remember, these people are the ones who still use IE because they don't know any better).
That all being said, I find the notion that Google has brainwashed me laughable at best: I, for one, won't ever run a device I cannot root, though I take full responsibility for my devices and can reinstall or fix most anything I need. When I first heard of this generation of Chromebooks, the first thing I asked was "Does it still have the dev switch?". Also, I don't have one myself... I just like the idea, though I personally wouldn't run ChromeOS.
Well, you're getting it as a lightfweight, SSD-based netbook. You can either run it in limited but completely safe mode, or unlimited but dangerous mode. Take your pick.
I have a Lenovo laptop with trackpoint and trackpad. I, for one, *always* use the trackpoint for pointing, as it's way more precise and quick to use. Trackpad gets used for scrolling, though - it's great for that.
I will never voluntarily buy a trackpad only laptop. A touchscreen, on the other hand... That's fine. But a trackpad just isn't a good option - Not for gaming, not for web browsing or anything else.
I can play FPS games with a trackpoint decently well; I wouldn't even *think* of using a trackpad for that(though I know some do).
As far as internet go, that's a valid complaint. I, for one, can barely even get GSM cell phone access, let alone data at my home. Wifi I have, but when not at home I generally don't have that... Though, aside from some simple coding, I need to have Internet access to get much work done - Or at least preload a bunch of documentation pages.
Anyone who needs more power can simply flip the developer switch on the bottom and load a real OS / mess with root, etc.
You can always hit the developer switch on the bottom and load Ubuntu on it if you need...
The stock software *is* limited deliberately, and for good reason: It almost completely eliminates all virii and malware, and it certainly prevents it from persisting past reboot.
So build a little tiny switch into the inside of the device, with a little hole for a pin to access it. By pressing that switch, you enable developer mode which is open. Press it again and it goes back to locked mode.
That way normal users can be secure in their walled garden, and power users can get what they want easily.
It's the approach the Chromebooks are using, and I'm impressed. I, for one, won't buy a device I can't completely root(and has an unlocked bootloader, for running custom OS's), but others may want security instead.
Ah, but wait. You only need to pay to use the telephone on someone's network - I.e. paying for service. You're free to take that telephone and hook it up to your own internal network and not pay a dime. You can take that telephone apart and use it for anything you want without paying any service - the only time you need to pay for service is when you want to use someone else's network.
Mod parent up!
True, but quite a lot of people(including me) don't care for "appreciating" our food or OS. We want it *now*, which is why fast-food places - and Linux - exist. :P
Heck, I'd not consider that a problem at all - Why type a number when you can copy and paste the value?
That may be true, but I've seen otherwise relatively technically-illiterate users solve problems - like the ones this may cause - by simply following tutorials. They may not *understand* what a dns server does, but if they can follow instructions, they can fix the problem.
Also, don't underestimate the power of friends providing help - One semi-knowledgable user + Google can help dozens of users to make the switch if needed.
As such, I think most freeloaders & normal users will end up changing DNS if needed(i.e. if something they try to do stops working), even if they don't really understand what they're doing.
XD
Actually, if they could pull somehing like that off... that'd be impressive.
Fair enough, thanks.
Unless you need software resampling. That's where it shines - especially if your app isn't aware of such things, like stuff running through wine.
I *wish* this was the case. I prefer alsa for everything I can due to lower latency, but for Wine, I *cannot* get my Audigy 2's mic to work - I just get a "pulsing" mic input, dropping every second or so.
With PulseAudio(and a latency-reducing environment variable), it works perfectly. Probably due to software resampling.
PulseAudio has it's uses - Mainly ones involved with overcoming shortcomings in the hardware - though it may not be needed(or wanted) everywhere.
Erm... Is this an advertisement/spam or a legit post? I can't quite tell...
On the one hand, it's well written, unlike most ads. On the other, it has the same one-link-to-paragraph-of-information I've seen several times before.
If it had been written by AC, I'd have considered it spam, but...
_ I've seen enough APK posts to find that funny. :P
You mean like now?
You don't get progress without getting rid of old crap, else people continue to use it and you get loads of legacy cruft - see the Win32 API for a good example.
I, personally, expect that when I run "apt-get update; apt-get upgrade" everything will be upgraded so it's compatible. Which usually happens unless you're running unstable/untested sources.
As far as 64-bit browser goes, I want it because it fits better with the rest of the OS, and means I don't need compatibility libraries running. If I had to make the choice between flash and 64-bit browser... well, good bye flash. I'd probably try gnash.
I've run into the same problem, but running the latest beta driver it seems to be partially solvesd: The screen freezes for about 15-30 seconds, then continues. Probably the HW/driver restarting when a watchdog times out.
Still, it's better than locking up the machine permanately.
Sadly, no. I wish it'd work, but the last several taxing animations I've tried to play with it, well... the animation doesn't play at a constant rate and gets out of sync. On a 3.5ghz, quad-core proc.
Adpbe Flash Square 64-bit preview worked fine, though may have dropped a few frames(not that it was using much processing power...).