No. The term "cloud" may have started as a buzz word but it has taken some serious shape in less than a year. For a serious, comprehensive definition, check a short document [nist.gov] posted by NIST.
That definition is pretty much what "cloud computing" has meant since the term started getting tossed around. If anything, its become more of a meaningless buzzword (not less) over time, as it has increasingly been used to refer to a variety of things that, while they are areas in which "cloud computing" might be applied, have no necessary nexus to cloud computing (particularly, remote application hosting, which existed long before cloud computing.)
I would hope that the government used their own "cloud" datacenters, either managed by GS employees or a contractor, rather than a completely commercial facility...
Government policy on what is done internally vs. what is done externally is shaped very strongly by:
1) Politicians with (or attempting to appeal to consituents with) the belief that everything is inherently magically more efficient done outside of government, 2) Politicians seeking to appeal to big-money interests, including those receiving government contracts, 3) Politicians and managers who very much want someone else to blame when things go wrong.
Contracting out, even for essential, core services, appeals to all of those interests.
Maybe these devices and this system isn't perfect, but it's better than the alternative, which is doing nothing.
I am unconvinced that, in cost-benefit sense, there is any rational basis for concluding that. Even if one argues that no other cost or benefit can be weighed against lives saved, I'm not convinced that these regulations are saving lives or, if they are at all, that the same resources expended in other areas wouldn't save more lives.
What about the 2-kinects video where the scene was shown from the viewpoint of a non-existant camera located somewhere between the two kinects?
Synthesizing depth information from the differences in simultaneous stereographic images sufficient to produce images from any point between the cameras that took the stereographic images is something that was done in software (and available in lots of consumer packaged software, though I don't think any of it was particularly popular) long before Kinect (I first saw it ca. 1998, IIRC).
Having the processing power to do it realtime with video may be a testament to the progress of hardware, but being able to do it at all is nothing special about the Kinect or its depth-processing ability.
Application development benefits everyone, and why shouldn't everyone pay for everyone's benefit?
The extent that it benefits everyone, everyone does pay -- by whatever mechanism that pays for the apps they use (whether direct payments, ads, or whatevers).
Another tack: If there are no mass-market devices that allow software development, then what will members of the mass market use when they decide to take up software development as a hobby?
Software development would be far from the only hobby to have a buy in cost that involves purchasing equipment not generally used outside of the hobby or a related professional industry.
Its certainly convenient for hobbyists to be able to use consumer gear (and, heck, is there any locked-down consumer computing gear that hasn't been jailbroken, thus making it usable by hobbyists without the restrictions intended by the supplier?), I don't think hobbyists have an entitlement to demand that mass market gear be designed to accomodate that desire.
True, the Nexus One and the unlocked Galaxy S are comparable in price. But is there anything that's not a phone on which one can get his feet wet developing Android apps? Something in the price range of, say, an iPod touch? I have a cousin who wants to know this because he wants to get his feet wet developing Android apps but can't afford smartphone service.
I don't know anything that is unlocked-out-of-the-box in that price range; the Nook Color is an Android device similar in price to an iTouch and there is a jailbreak process published for it.
And you need a whole new OS for this? What about using *nix machines, setting the login shell to/usr/bin/firefox and limiting the network accessibility to the corporate LAN?
That would seem likely to be heavier and less capable then ChromeOS, which is pretty much doing the same thing with Chrome instead of Firefox -- but with Google having spent a lot of time tuning Chrome for just this use, as well as tuning the underlying Linux environment to support that setup specifically.
As for thin client, ChromeOS is nothing more than what I just described with a specialized browser with customized hooks for Google's proprietary app world/framework.
Well, except that most of the specialized hooks are for things that are not proprietary, but instead are open specifications. Because, really, it would defeat the purpose if Google was the only one providing online services that took advantage of them.
Oh, and how does one print if you can't install printer drivers?
Looking at Google Cloud Print information, it looks like the intent is not only that you can use the Google Cloud Print service to access a Cloud-aware printer (or one with a cloud-aware proxy), but that support will exist for compatible third-party cloud print services. So, presumably, if you had both a cloud print service and a cloud-aware printer on your local network, you could print via cloud print without access to the internet and the Google Cloud Print service.
(Nevermind the fact that Nexus One & Nexus S are not just developer phones, despite what anyone tells you.)
No, they are the Google-branded fully-unlocked consumer phones. Whether there is, at any point, one of them available is not all that consistent.
OTOH, they've also made a public commitment to always have such a phone available through the developer program, and have done so even when Google wasn't selling Google-branded fully-unlocked consumer phones.
My suggestion upthread was that I would expect Google to do the same thing, for the same reason, with Chrome OS.
I would certainly not be surprised if Google also released Google-branded, fully-unlocked, consumer products, but I wouldn't count on them always having something available in that area.
Because a "development device" is likely to cost far more, as it's not priced for the mass market but instead for established companies that can afford it as a cost of doing business.
Yes, products with features that increase support cost when present in the mass market often cost more, either because they are in mass market version and thus increasing the support costs, or because they are not in mass market versions, and thus in limited-market versions.
The question is whether everyone pays more for those features, or just the people that actually actively desire the feature.
. Consider that a Wii game console costs $200, but a Wii devkit costs $2,000 plus proof of a traditional office, and that's considered cheap for a game console devkit. Likewise, an iPod touch costs $230, but unlocking it to run your own apps costs an additional $540 for Xcode* plus $99 per year for a certificate.
I'd rather consider something more relevant, like the cost of Google's Android dev phones vs. the cost of similar smartphones before any contracting-incentive subsidies provided by carriers.
Of course, that wouldn't really provide much fuel for your argument, would it?
And maybe while they were at it they would have noticed that browser interfaces suck for many applications,
...and done work on improving that (which they have.)
that not everybody wants a gratuitous extra layer of GUI around their app
I'm not sure that, in Chrome OS, it makes sense to describe the browser as an "extra layer" of GUI. Its not like there is a traditional desktop environment within which the browser operates as one window providing multiple "layers" of GUI. The browser is the only layer of GUI, from the point of view of the user or any app.
and browser apps generally do things slower than native apps even when accelerated with shiny new Javacode engines.
See GP, reference to "and provide some way to run native code through the browser to cover the cases where simply making JavaScript run faster wasn't enough."
Native Client is neither a JavaScript nor a "Javacode" engine, its a system for running actual native code within a webapp.
The whole point of Chrome OS is to shift the application from running natively on the hardware to running in the cloud.
No, the whole point of Chrome OS is to shift applications from targetting the OS to targetting the browser (thereby commoditizing the OS.)
This differs from a shift from "running natively" to "running in the cloud" in that one of the major areas where Google has put effort to enable the browser to be the platform for more robust applications is in allowing browser-based applications to run disconnected from the internet and leverage local hardware resources in a way that previously was restricted to native applications. Features and technologies related to that that Google has actively sought to develop and/or promote leading and that are included in Chrome OS include (off the top of my head): * HTML 5 local storage and other offline-functionality related APIs, * Native Client * O3D * Cloud print * More robust in-browser media support, including bundled-in Flash and PDF support
With this in mind, one thing that would be nice to have are offline apps. This way, a glitch in Internet connectivity would not mean a corrupted term paper.
Offline web apps have been a focus of the direction Google has been working very hard to move the browser market for some time, and technologies enabling offline web apps were among the key enabling technologies for Chrome OS.
Prior to having a usable standard for this, Google used their proprietary Google Gears technology to provide this in various browsers for certain Google web apps, now they use various HTML5 features.
Was it ever a good idea for Apache to participate in Java in the first place, knowing that the exact situation that they are complaining about today existed when they started, and has existed for the entire time they've been developing?
Possibly. Certainly, the fact that Oracle is publicly appealing for them to return demonstrates that by participating, they have achieved an important role that even Oracle recognizes. Clearly, that influence wasn't enough to resolve their problems without leaving (perhaps because any suggestions they may have made that they were willing to leave over the issues weren't believed), but I don't think its at all clear that no that they have left, Oracle won't do something to accommodate their concerns to get them to come back.
But why should I have to buy a development device to get a device that isn't locked down?
Why should you care what the label is that is attached to the product that has the features you want?
Its possible that Google-branded or even third party unlocked devices might be made available other than as development devices (as, again, has been the case in the Android world, e.g., the Nexus One and Nexus S, or for that matter the current Cr-48 beta device for Chrome OS which isn't affiliated with any developer-focussed program.) Its also possible that general consumer demand for that feature isn't enough to support a product marketed as a consumer rather than developer device with that feature.
What if someone buys one and for some reason they decide to explore computers (like I did when I was younger) and find that the vendor has decreed they are somehow "second class" and are not allowed?
I wouldn't say second-class, but, yeah, consumer-focussed gear tends to be less casual-tinkerer-friendly as the technology in the area the gear is in matures. This has been true of pretty much every kind of technology, as maturing technology enables specialization different needs, and the most common consumer needs and those of tinkerers aren't the same.
Say what you will, but at least my iPad lets me install software, store my photos to browse, add eBooks, movies, and music... and I can use it on an airplane.
The only of these that is different from Chrome OS is "install software", and that only to the extent to which "installing a link to a web app which can be cached locally and can store its data locally, and can be run without a current connection to the internet" is different from "installing software", which I would argue is not a meaningful distinction at all.
How will you be able to update to the latest flash player...
The Flash Player used by Chrome OS is -- like the PDF viewer -- an integral component of Chrome and updated with the system (this is, in fact, true of the Chrome browser running on other OSs; the flash has been integrated since, IIRC, either Chrome 6 or 7, and the PDF viewer has been integrated* since Chrome 8.)
* Actually, strictly speaking, it was integrated earlier, but the integrated PDF viewer was disabled-by-default prior to Chrome 8.
I dunno. If your users need to do all their work at the office, this could be great. You either always have connectivity, or nothing would have worked without the net being up anyway. Otherwise, you run into issues. Not only will this take some serious bandwidth, but if your net connection is down, you are out of luck.
Yeah, if only Google had thought about this issue and invested some effort into enabling off-line web applications before deploying an everything-is-done-through-the-browser OS.
Maybe, while they were at it, they might have noticed the performance issues common to web apps and worked on improving JavaScript performance to deal with that, and provide some way to run native code through the browser to cover the cases where simply making JavaScript run faster wasn't enough.
So, unless the article is mistaken (which is possible)... that would be a dumb terminal, with no storage.
TFA is not merely "mistaken", it is either the product of gross ignorance of the subject matter or deliberate deception.
Chrome OS does not require constant connectivity, contrary to what TFA claims. It does everything through the Chrome browser, of course, and so has requirements that are pretty similar to that -- browser based applications will require network connection to the extent that they don't take advantage of the features of HTML5 and other technologies implemented in the Chrome browser for the specific purpose of enabling offline web applications.
And, yes, the Cr-48 at least has no hard drive but not no local storage: it uses an SSD for local storage. Applications can store information locally using the HMTL5 local storage APIs.
Come back in an hour when all those posts have been modded down to -1, Flamebait, and look at the stuff that's been marked up.
The fact that, a little over an hour after parent was posted, many of those posts (including, amusingly, parent) have been modded to +5 Insightful pretty clearly shows that parent is paranoid and that, if there is moderator groupthink on the issue that parent discusses, its not operating in the direction parent suggests.
And I expect that to carry zero weight with 3rd party hardware vendors
Perhaps not. OTOH, I expect that Google -- for the same reason there is a always an unrestricted Android dev phone available -- to always have an a similar Chrome OS dev device available once Chrome OS is generally available.
It was supposed to be more a matter of "everyone use the same kind of electrical outlets." I'm not having any luck finding it now, but I remember something in the Federalist Papers about how this clause is so meek and inoffensive that it was one of the only bits no one objected to.
You should be especially suspicious when the campaign ads for a political proposition characterize some element of that proposition as meek, inoffensive, and/or non-controversial.
And you should recognize that the Federalist Papers were the centerpiece of a high-stakes 18th century political advertising campaign.
Well, for Dalvik (and thus Android), there's a legal dispute between Google and Oracle about whether Dalvik infringes Java patents. As far as I know, copyrights are not in dispute.
As well as claiming patent violations, Oracle alleges that Google illegally copied copyright-protected Oracle code. Whether there is any substance to those allegations I couldn't say.
By being part of a jury pool, you are basically imprisoned during the jury time.
No, you aren't. While I haven't actually been imprisoned, I have been inside a prison and I have served on juries, and they are not even remotely similar.
Slashdot Mirror
That definition is pretty much what "cloud computing" has meant since the term started getting tossed around. If anything, its become more of a meaningless buzzword (not less) over time, as it has increasingly been used to refer to a variety of things that, while they are areas in which "cloud computing" might be applied, have no necessary nexus to cloud computing (particularly, remote application hosting, which existed long before cloud computing.)
Government policy on what is done internally vs. what is done externally is shaped very strongly by:
1) Politicians with (or attempting to appeal to consituents with) the belief that everything is inherently magically more efficient done outside of government,
2) Politicians seeking to appeal to big-money interests, including those receiving government contracts,
3) Politicians and managers who very much want someone else to blame when things go wrong.
Contracting out, even for essential, core services, appeals to all of those interests.
I don't think parent understands what "Even if" means.
I am unconvinced that, in cost-benefit sense, there is any rational basis for concluding that. Even if one argues that no other cost or benefit can be weighed against lives saved, I'm not convinced that these regulations are saving lives or, if they are at all, that the same resources expended in other areas wouldn't save more lives.
Synthesizing depth information from the differences in simultaneous stereographic images sufficient to produce images from any point between the cameras that took the stereographic images is something that was done in software (and available in lots of consumer packaged software, though I don't think any of it was particularly popular) long before Kinect (I first saw it ca. 1998, IIRC).
Having the processing power to do it realtime with video may be a testament to the progress of hardware, but being able to do it at all is nothing special about the Kinect or its depth-processing ability.
The extent that it benefits everyone, everyone does pay -- by whatever mechanism that pays for the apps they use (whether direct payments, ads, or whatevers).
Software development would be far from the only hobby to have a buy in cost that involves purchasing equipment not generally used outside of the hobby or a related professional industry.
Its certainly convenient for hobbyists to be able to use consumer gear (and, heck, is there any locked-down consumer computing gear that hasn't been jailbroken, thus making it usable by hobbyists without the restrictions intended by the supplier?), I don't think hobbyists have an entitlement to demand that mass market gear be designed to accomodate that desire.
I don't know anything that is unlocked-out-of-the-box in that price range; the Nook Color is an Android device similar in price to an iTouch and there is a jailbreak process published for it.
You can build the open-source Chromium OS and put it on any computer you want.
"Chrome OS" is a branded product using Chromium OS which will only be available bundled on hardware designed for the OS.
That would seem likely to be heavier and less capable then ChromeOS, which is pretty much doing the same thing with Chrome instead of Firefox -- but with Google having spent a lot of time tuning Chrome for just this use, as well as tuning the underlying Linux environment to support that setup specifically.
Well, except that most of the specialized hooks are for things that are not proprietary, but instead are open specifications. Because, really, it would defeat the purpose if Google was the only one providing online services that took advantage of them.
Looking at Google Cloud Print information, it looks like the intent is not only that you can use the Google Cloud Print service to access a Cloud-aware printer (or one with a cloud-aware proxy), but that support will exist for compatible third-party cloud print services. So, presumably, if you had both a cloud print service and a cloud-aware printer on your local network, you could print via cloud print without access to the internet and the Google Cloud Print service.
No, they are the Google-branded fully-unlocked consumer phones. Whether there is, at any point, one of them available is not all that consistent.
OTOH, they've also made a public commitment to always have such a phone available through the developer program, and have done so even when Google wasn't selling Google-branded fully-unlocked consumer phones.
My suggestion upthread was that I would expect Google to do the same thing, for the same reason, with Chrome OS.
I would certainly not be surprised if Google also released Google-branded, fully-unlocked, consumer products, but I wouldn't count on them always having something available in that area.
Yes, products with features that increase support cost when present in the mass market often cost more, either because they are in mass market version and thus increasing the support costs, or because they are not in mass market versions, and thus in limited-market versions.
The question is whether everyone pays more for those features, or just the people that actually actively desire the feature.
I'd rather consider something more relevant, like the cost of Google's Android dev phones vs. the cost of similar smartphones before any contracting-incentive subsidies provided by carriers.
Of course, that wouldn't really provide much fuel for your argument, would it?
I'm not sure that, in Chrome OS, it makes sense to describe the browser as an "extra layer" of GUI. Its not like there is a traditional desktop environment within which the browser operates as one window providing multiple "layers" of GUI. The browser is the only layer of GUI, from the point of view of the user or any app.
See GP, reference to "and provide some way to run native code through the browser to cover the cases where simply making JavaScript run faster wasn't enough."
Native Client is neither a JavaScript nor a "Javacode" engine, its a system for running actual native code within a webapp.
No, the whole point of Chrome OS is to shift applications from targetting the OS to targetting the browser (thereby commoditizing the OS.)
This differs from a shift from "running natively" to "running in the cloud" in that one of the major areas where Google has put effort to enable the browser to be the platform for more robust applications is in allowing browser-based applications to run disconnected from the internet and leverage local hardware resources in a way that previously was restricted to native applications. Features and technologies related to that that Google has actively sought to develop and/or promote leading and that are included in Chrome OS include (off the top of my head):
* HTML 5 local storage and other offline-functionality related APIs,
* Native Client
* O3D
* Cloud print
* More robust in-browser media support, including bundled-in Flash and PDF support
Offline web apps have been a focus of the direction Google has been working very hard to move the browser market for some time, and technologies enabling offline web apps were among the key enabling technologies for Chrome OS.
Prior to having a usable standard for this, Google used their proprietary Google Gears technology to provide this in various browsers for certain Google web apps, now they use various HTML5 features.
Possibly. Certainly, the fact that Oracle is publicly appealing for them to return demonstrates that by participating, they have achieved an important role that even Oracle recognizes. Clearly, that influence wasn't enough to resolve their problems without leaving (perhaps because any suggestions they may have made that they were willing to leave over the issues weren't believed), but I don't think its at all clear that no that they have left, Oracle won't do something to accommodate their concerns to get them to come back.
Why should you care what the label is that is attached to the product that has the features you want?
Its possible that Google-branded or even third party unlocked devices might be made available other than as development devices (as, again, has been the case in the Android world, e.g., the Nexus One and Nexus S, or for that matter the current Cr-48 beta device for Chrome OS which isn't affiliated with any developer-focussed program.) Its also possible that general consumer demand for that feature isn't enough to support a product marketed as a consumer rather than developer device with that feature.
I wouldn't say second-class, but, yeah, consumer-focussed gear tends to be less casual-tinkerer-friendly as the technology in the area the gear is in matures. This has been true of pretty much every kind of technology, as maturing technology enables specialization different needs, and the most common consumer needs and those of tinkerers aren't the same.
The only of these that is different from Chrome OS is "install software", and that only to the extent to which "installing a link to a web app which can be cached locally and can store its data locally, and can be run without a current connection to the internet" is different from "installing software", which I would argue is not a meaningful distinction at all.
The Flash Player used by Chrome OS is -- like the PDF viewer -- an integral component of Chrome and updated with the system (this is, in fact, true of the Chrome browser running on other OSs; the flash has been integrated since, IIRC, either Chrome 6 or 7, and the PDF viewer has been integrated* since Chrome 8.)
* Actually, strictly speaking, it was integrated earlier, but the integrated PDF viewer was disabled-by-default prior to Chrome 8.
Yeah, if only Google had thought about this issue and invested some effort into enabling off-line web applications before deploying an everything-is-done-through-the-browser OS.
Maybe, while they were at it, they might have noticed the performance issues common to web apps and worked on improving JavaScript performance to deal with that, and provide some way to run native code through the browser to cover the cases where simply making JavaScript run faster wasn't enough.
TFA is not merely "mistaken", it is either the product of gross ignorance of the subject matter or deliberate deception.
Chrome OS does not require constant connectivity, contrary to what TFA claims. It does everything through the Chrome browser, of course, and so has requirements that are pretty similar to that -- browser based applications will require network connection to the extent that they don't take advantage of the features of HTML5 and other technologies implemented in the Chrome browser for the specific purpose of enabling offline web applications.
And, yes, the Cr-48 at least has no hard drive but not no local storage: it uses an SSD for local storage. Applications can store information locally using the HMTL5 local storage APIs.
The fact that, a little over an hour after parent was posted, many of those posts (including, amusingly, parent) have been modded to +5 Insightful pretty clearly shows that parent is paranoid and that, if there is moderator groupthink on the issue that parent discusses, its not operating in the direction parent suggests.
Perhaps not. OTOH, I expect that Google -- for the same reason there is a always an unrestricted Android dev phone available -- to always have an a similar Chrome OS dev device available once Chrome OS is generally available.
You should be especially suspicious when the campaign ads for a political proposition characterize some element of that proposition as meek, inoffensive, and/or non-controversial.
And you should recognize that the Federalist Papers were the centerpiece of a high-stakes 18th century political advertising campaign.
As well as claiming patent violations, Oracle alleges that Google illegally copied copyright-protected Oracle code. Whether there is any substance to those allegations I couldn't say.
No, you aren't. While I haven't actually been imprisoned, I have been inside a prison and I have served on juries, and they are not even remotely similar.