Surely that can't be right. What can you do with 100 MB?
If you are usually using it places with WiFi connectivity and only occasionally need access over 3G, probably enough to satisfy many users (or at least to make the 100MB monthly free usage + 1-2 $9.99 unlimited day passes a better deal than the $20-50 2-5GB monthly plans.)
If almost all of your use is out of WiFi coverage, you'll probably want a higher limit than the free plan.
Will it have USB support? I'm not sure if Google told anything about that?
Per TFA, USB support in Chrome OS is one of the issues that is still being worked on. I presume the Cr-48 hardware will include USB, but I wouldn't expect it to work on day one.
Chromium [wikipedia.org] is 24 on the periodic table of the elements.
Chromium (Cr) 48 is the isotope of Chromium with atomic mass 48, an unstable isotope of Chromium with a half-life of about a day. (The most common isotope of Chromium is Cr-52, which is stable.)
So Cr-48 is a fairly clever name for a beta test device for running the OS developed through the Chromium OS project.
However, all these things are either irrelevant to cellphones(unless your cellphone has SAN storage and a GB link to the redundant cellphone in your other pocket...) or artefacts of the fact that legacy software largely sucks at things like isolation and versioning.
The legacy software compatibility think is pretty much exactly the use case for this, since it allows the business VM to present exactly the environment that the business organization wants (e.g., a standard, controlled environment for the apps the business uses) independently of configuration changes made to the users personal environment (including such things as OS updates on the personal environment.)
So, no, I don't think all virtual advantages you point to are irrelevant to phones.
But it's not clear which books have DRM, nor is it clear which books have been locked by their publishers to be online-only (ie., no downloadable version).
The "no downloadable version" ones are, per the help, identified as such prior to purchase; the distinction between DRM and no DRM, on the other hand, does not seem to be identified anywhere. The latter point is one I'd like to see Google address -- and, in fact, while I think the reader is fairly nice and will use the library function for free books that are available, I won't buy anything from the store until it is -- and I'd like the former to be evident in listings rather than just when you go to buy the book.
I'm amazed that people are cool with buying device-locked books. People have pretty much laughed device-locked music out of the marketplace.
Lots of people are not cool with buying device locked books and, OTOH, lots of people had no problem with buying device-locked music when that model first appeared. It got "laughed out of the marketplace" (to the extent that's accurate) only because of the problems people encountered with it in practice.
iOS and Android have a dedicated app for accessing the store
This is not really true; the iOS app is a reader, and it accesses your online bookshelf. For accessing the store (when you select the "Get eBooks" button) you are transferred to Safari.
I'm sure that's the case, but I don't think it's much of an Android dev phone, either, since it's not dual core, which is the Next Big Thing to come at CES next month. Really, the only interesting thing on it for a developer would be NFC and gyroscope.
By Android Dev Phone, I don't mean a generic phone of interest to Android developers, I mean the baseline unlocked reference phone that Google has committed to always have available so that developers are never inhibited from developing from the platform by not having a phone supporting the currently-important platform features except those burden by carrier restrictions or other barriers to development.
Google would be quite happy if third parties were to market better phones for Android developers. Selling phones isn't a business Google seems to want to be in in any serious way.
Too bad - this phone is gonna get slaughtered by the phone announcements at CES next month. This phone will not sell well after the xmas rush.
I'm rather suspect the point of the phone isn't to sell well in the general market, its to sell to the narrow slice of the market for which an unlocked-out-of-the-box Android phone is key, and to serve as the next Androd Dev Phone.
"Sharing You may not lend or co-own any of your Google eBooks purchases with another person."
Restricting co-ownership with a spouse is somewhat difficult; if you live in a community property state most property acquired during marriage is, by law and with only the specific exceptions existing in the law of the State, jointly owned. This includes intangible personal property, which seems to be what is at issue here.
Consequently, in many cases it is legally impossible to own Google eBooks purchases without co-owning them with another person.
from what i can tell all the books are scanned in, including the new ones
The ones that only have scanned page images are listed as "Better for larger screens". The ones without that notation also have reflowable text. (The scanned page images are PDF, the reflowable text is ePub, as I understand it.)
(An interesting effect is that the reflowed text lists the original page number -- or range of page numbers -- from the scanned source material corresponding to the text on the screen.)
Maybe I haven't studied this too in depth, but how is this not a conflict of interest over the stated goals of Google Books?
How is it a conflict with the goals of that project?
You know, the Google project to index books so that they were searchable?
Which did, indeed, make them searchable.
Yeah, it turns out they were indexing them to sell eBook versions.
They are only selling eBook versions of the ones that are in-copyright where the publishers allow them to sell the digital copies.
The out-of-copyright ones are not being sold, and the in-copyright ones that aren't sold through Google eBooks (and even the ones that are) provide links to purchase the book at online bookstores.
I would love it if their Library project partners sued them for it.
How have the Library partner projects been harmed by this? Why would they sue?
The most data entry one does on the web is a quick email, or forms for ordering stuff.
I'm not sure that Google -- a company that, after all, maintains a web-based office suite with a continuously-expanding feature set -- views the role of "what people will do on the web" the same way your comment suggests.
Google's current online offerings -- coupled with technology like Native Client that is a key technology for the Chrome browser and Chrome OS and which enables native code to be run in a browser sandbox -- suggest that Google has a much more expansive view of what can be done with "web apps", and that that expansive view is a major factor in the design of Chrome OS.
Now that Chrome browser renders pdf files ridiculously fast, what else can Chrome OS do that Chrome Browser can't?
It can be used by the user without going through the hoops of booting up another operating system and clicking through whatever desktop UI that presents to get to the browser.
Chrome OS is essentially the Chrome browser with a specialized Linux distribution underneath designed to get out of the way with the browser as the main UI paradigm. Many of the features of Chrome browser are were developed to support Chrome OS's planned model of an OS where everything the user does is done through the browser; Flash and PDF integration are part of that, Native Client to run native code in a sandbox (and, thereby, not be constrained by the performance constraints of typical web apps), the app store that is being developed, etc., are all part of that model.
But almost all of it is available in Chrome browser on other operating systems, but the idea is to make Chrome browser powerful enough that you don't need the rest of the OS (at least, the user facing parts) so that the user experience is cleaner and simpler.
Apparently most slashdotters do math on a daily basis. I can't recall the last time I needed to do integrals - in fact, if you had asked me 5 minutes ago how to calculate the area under a curve, I would have needed a trip to google/wolfram to look it up.
Can't really fault someone who isn't doing it on a daily basis for not knowing the "obvious" answer.
Honestly, I'd probably have to pull out a math book to do any but the most basic calculus, having not had much call to use it in nearly 15 years.
That being said, if I had a problem dealing with areas under curves, I would recognize that it was an area of mathematics for which there were well-developed mechanisms, and while it might be more convenient to work out a practical method for the particular problem without searching for something that already had been done, I wouldn't be trying to publish a paper on that method as a novel mechanism without doing at least a cursory review of what was known in the field.
And while web search tools might not have been as well-developed in 1994 as they are today, libraries had been invented and how to use them for literature reviews has been a fairly routine part of even undergraduate college education for quite a long time.
I agree with you that this makes no sense, which makes me hope that the "nothing stored on the local computer" is a bit of an exaggeration.
I think its a bit of a simplification. From everything else I've seen from them on Chrome OS, I think its perhaps more accurate to say that the real intent is nothing stored directly on the local filesystem by applications (other than basic OS components.) Things might be cached in the browser cache, stored using HTML5 local storage APIs, and so forth, and by those means "stored on the local computer" in a physical sense.
The obvious other way it could be an interesting/successful product is by doing what a large number of users want more cleanly and with less distractions than Windows. Which, after all, is largely the point of using the browser as the central UI paradigm.
Its the same model that made the iPod a success -- and, for that matter, did the same for Google's clean-interface, good-results search engine in the era of search engines trying to be portals and everything else at the same time.
He claims that Android is for the smaller formats, and Chrome OS for the netbooks. It's funny if this is Google's goal, since the netbooks use to have much more flexibility in offering better hardware and performance, not being tied to a small form factor, and then give it the OS that offer only a subset of Android's functionality. Android offers a full OS running native applications, along with the Chrone web browser -- where the latter is the *only* thing Chrome OS offers.
Google developed Native Client for the Google Chrome browser to run native code in Chrome on x86 and ARM. That's always been cited by Google as one of the key enabling technologies for Chrome OS.
So it is inaccurate to say that Android is superior to Chrome OS because it can run native code.
Yes because putting a Java JIT engine in a browser is easy; putting a Dalvik JIT engine in a browser is impossible!
First, Google can include things in Chrome OS that aren't part of the browser, and can allow the browser to provide access to them, so it wouldn't have to put the JIT engine in the browser.
Second, there is no reason that Google couldn't build a Dalvik engine into the browser if they chose to. Heck, Chrome already includes facilities to run sandboxed arbitrary native code (Native Client), so certainly Google doesn't show any signs of conforming to conventional ideas of what "can't" be done in the browser.
Google already has a Dalvik engine, building hooks for it into Chrome -- whether specific to Chrome OS or more generally -- is certainly not impossible.
Google has NO WAY to leverage the base of tools and programs already created for their first OS, they will have to start from scratch...
Google explicitly stated a long time ago that their long-term plan was to converge the two platforms. I doubt that they have that plan and no vision of how to accomplish that, and "throw everything out and start over" is probably not the course to convergence they have in mind.
This whole subthread is about viewing to the sides. Not about the back.
This whole subthread is in response to your claim in G^6P that properly adjusted side and rearview mirrors give you complete visibility from one side, across the back, and to the other side with no blindspots of any kind. That involves both the sides and the back, and is patently false.
Until everyone has had enough and any and all talk about wikileaks becomes background noise "oh they are still releasing stuff?"
Reading the news recently, except for the articles about the really boring stuff (the catty Mean-Girls-esque characterizations in some cables) and the articles about the controversy rather than the content, most of them haven't mentioned WikiLeaks prominently in the lead paragraph or headline (some of mentioned "cables" in that context), and many of them involve information from the cables that have been confirmed and supplement from other sources. (This is true, e.g., of the stories I've seen covering the information that the Chinese Politburo directed the attacks on Google, for instance.)
As long as the cables being released contain information that is fuel for stories where the fact that WikiLeaks is one of the sources isn't the primary focus of the story, the fact that the news audience may be burned out on stories about WikiLeaks, as such, isn't really all that relevant to how reporters dealing with the substance will approach the WikiLeaks dumps.
The stuff that is most prominently associated with "WikiLeaks" (and pretty much all that is covered on TV news that I've seen, but I don't watch that much TV news and there are reasons that every study has shown that the more you consume TV news, the less aware you are of current events) isn't generally the most important stuff coming out of the cables.
Or is this supposed to be some sort of telecom bailout?
I fail to see how you can bailout a business by providing an alternative to their services (metered mobile data.)
It would be like the government "bailing out" GM by, instead of investing in GM the way it did, starting up its own auto factory and providing free government-made loaner cars at federal buildings.
Slashdot Mirror
Per TFA, aside from the $9.99 day pass, $20/month for 1GB, $35/month for 2 GB, and $50/month for 5GB. Its not pay as you go other than the day pass.
If you are usually using it places with WiFi connectivity and only occasionally need access over 3G, probably enough to satisfy many users (or at least to make the 100MB monthly free usage + 1-2 $9.99 unlimited day passes a better deal than the $20-50 2-5GB monthly plans.)
If almost all of your use is out of WiFi coverage, you'll probably want a higher limit than the free plan.
Per TFA, USB support in Chrome OS is one of the issues that is still being worked on. I presume the Cr-48 hardware will include USB, but I wouldn't expect it to work on day one.
Chromium (Cr) 48 is the isotope of Chromium with atomic mass 48, an unstable isotope of Chromium with a half-life of about a day. (The most common isotope of Chromium is Cr-52, which is stable.)
So Cr-48 is a fairly clever name for a beta test device for running the OS developed through the Chromium OS project.
The legacy software compatibility think is pretty much exactly the use case for this, since it allows the business VM to present exactly the environment that the business organization wants (e.g., a standard, controlled environment for the apps the business uses) independently of configuration changes made to the users personal environment (including such things as OS updates on the personal environment.)
So, no, I don't think all virtual advantages you point to are irrelevant to phones.
The "no downloadable version" ones are, per the help, identified as such prior to purchase; the distinction between DRM and no DRM, on the other hand, does not seem to be identified anywhere. The latter point is one I'd like to see Google address -- and, in fact, while I think the reader is fairly nice and will use the library function for free books that are available, I won't buy anything from the store until it is -- and I'd like the former to be evident in listings rather than just when you go to buy the book.
Lots of people are not cool with buying device locked books and, OTOH, lots of people had no problem with buying device-locked music when that model first appeared. It got "laughed out of the marketplace" (to the extent that's accurate) only because of the problems people encountered with it in practice.
This is not really true; the iOS app is a reader, and it accesses your online bookshelf. For accessing the store (when you select the "Get eBooks" button) you are transferred to Safari.
By Android Dev Phone, I don't mean a generic phone of interest to Android developers, I mean the baseline unlocked reference phone that Google has committed to always have available so that developers are never inhibited from developing from the platform by not having a phone supporting the currently-important platform features except those burden by carrier restrictions or other barriers to development.
Google would be quite happy if third parties were to market better phones for Android developers. Selling phones isn't a business Google seems to want to be in in any serious way.
I'm rather suspect the point of the phone isn't to sell well in the general market, its to sell to the narrow slice of the market for which an unlocked-out-of-the-box Android phone is key, and to serve as the next Androd Dev Phone.
Restricting co-ownership with a spouse is somewhat difficult; if you live in a community property state most property acquired during marriage is, by law and with only the specific exceptions existing in the law of the State, jointly owned. This includes intangible personal property, which seems to be what is at issue here.
Consequently, in many cases it is legally impossible to own Google eBooks purchases without co-owning them with another person.
The ones that only have scanned page images are listed as "Better for larger screens". The ones without that notation also have reflowable text. (The scanned page images are PDF, the reflowable text is ePub, as I understand it.)
(An interesting effect is that the reflowed text lists the original page number -- or range of page numbers -- from the scanned source material corresponding to the text on the screen.)
How is it a conflict with the goals of that project?
Which did, indeed, make them searchable.
They are only selling eBook versions of the ones that are in-copyright where the publishers allow them to sell the digital copies.
The out-of-copyright ones are not being sold, and the in-copyright ones that aren't sold through Google eBooks (and even the ones that are) provide links to purchase the book at online bookstores.
How have the Library partner projects been harmed by this? Why would they sue?
True, some publishers do without DRM. And Google eBooks allows publishers who choose to do without DRM to deliver their ebooks without DRM.
I've never had a reason to try it, but I've seen comments that DE works fine under WINE.
I'm not sure that Google -- a company that, after all, maintains a web-based office suite with a continuously-expanding feature set -- views the role of "what people will do on the web" the same way your comment suggests.
Google's current online offerings -- coupled with technology like Native Client that is a key technology for the Chrome browser and Chrome OS and which enables native code to be run in a browser sandbox -- suggest that Google has a much more expansive view of what can be done with "web apps", and that that expansive view is a major factor in the design of Chrome OS.
It can be used by the user without going through the hoops of booting up another operating system and clicking through whatever desktop UI that presents to get to the browser.
Chrome OS is essentially the Chrome browser with a specialized Linux distribution underneath designed to get out of the way with the browser as the main UI paradigm. Many of the features of Chrome browser are were developed to support Chrome OS's planned model of an OS where everything the user does is done through the browser; Flash and PDF integration are part of that, Native Client to run native code in a sandbox (and, thereby, not be constrained by the performance constraints of typical web apps), the app store that is being developed, etc., are all part of that model.
But almost all of it is available in Chrome browser on other operating systems, but the idea is to make Chrome browser powerful enough that you don't need the rest of the OS (at least, the user facing parts) so that the user experience is cleaner and simpler.
Honestly, I'd probably have to pull out a math book to do any but the most basic calculus, having not had much call to use it in nearly 15 years.
That being said, if I had a problem dealing with areas under curves, I would recognize that it was an area of mathematics for which there were well-developed mechanisms, and while it might be more convenient to work out a practical method for the particular problem without searching for something that already had been done, I wouldn't be trying to publish a paper on that method as a novel mechanism without doing at least a cursory review of what was known in the field.
And while web search tools might not have been as well-developed in 1994 as they are today, libraries had been invented and how to use them for literature reviews has been a fairly routine part of even undergraduate college education for quite a long time.
I think its a bit of a simplification. From everything else I've seen from them on Chrome OS, I think its perhaps more accurate to say that the real intent is nothing stored directly on the local filesystem by applications (other than basic OS components.) Things might be cached in the browser cache, stored using HTML5 local storage APIs, and so forth, and by those means "stored on the local computer" in a physical sense.
The obvious other way it could be an interesting/successful product is by doing what a large number of users want more cleanly and with less distractions than Windows. Which, after all, is largely the point of using the browser as the central UI paradigm.
Its the same model that made the iPod a success -- and, for that matter, did the same for Google's clean-interface, good-results search engine in the era of search engines trying to be portals and everything else at the same time.
Google developed Native Client for the Google Chrome browser to run native code in Chrome on x86 and ARM. That's always been cited by Google as one of the key enabling technologies for Chrome OS.
So it is inaccurate to say that Android is superior to Chrome OS because it can run native code.
First, Google can include things in Chrome OS that aren't part of the browser, and can allow the browser to provide access to them, so it wouldn't have to put the JIT engine in the browser.
Second, there is no reason that Google couldn't build a Dalvik engine into the browser if they chose to. Heck, Chrome already includes facilities to run sandboxed arbitrary native code (Native Client), so certainly Google doesn't show any signs of conforming to conventional ideas of what "can't" be done in the browser.
Google already has a Dalvik engine, building hooks for it into Chrome -- whether specific to Chrome OS or more generally -- is certainly not impossible.
Google explicitly stated a long time ago that their long-term plan was to converge the two platforms. I doubt that they have that plan and no vision of how to accomplish that, and "throw everything out and start over" is probably not the course to convergence they have in mind.
This whole subthread is in response to your claim in G^6P that properly adjusted side and rearview mirrors give you complete visibility from one side, across the back, and to the other side with no blindspots of any kind. That involves both the sides and the back, and is patently false.
Reading the news recently, except for the articles about the really boring stuff (the catty Mean-Girls-esque characterizations in some cables) and the articles about the controversy rather than the content, most of them haven't mentioned WikiLeaks prominently in the lead paragraph or headline (some of mentioned "cables" in that context), and many of them involve information from the cables that have been confirmed and supplement from other sources. (This is true, e.g., of the stories I've seen covering the information that the Chinese Politburo directed the attacks on Google, for instance.)
As long as the cables being released contain information that is fuel for stories where the fact that WikiLeaks is one of the sources isn't the primary focus of the story, the fact that the news audience may be burned out on stories about WikiLeaks, as such, isn't really all that relevant to how reporters dealing with the substance will approach the WikiLeaks dumps.
The stuff that is most prominently associated with "WikiLeaks" (and pretty much all that is covered on TV news that I've seen, but I don't watch that much TV news and there are reasons that every study has shown that the more you consume TV news, the less aware you are of current events) isn't generally the most important stuff coming out of the cables.
I fail to see how you can bailout a business by providing an alternative to their services (metered mobile data.)
It would be like the government "bailing out" GM by, instead of investing in GM the way it did, starting up its own auto factory and providing free government-made loaner cars at federal buildings.
Pay for it out of the reduced market-clearing prices for higher-limit data plans and data overage charges that result from more access to WiFi?