What Google's Chromium OS Is Reaching For 216
MojoKid sends in a piece that takes a step back from Google's much-analyzed OS to look at what it is trying to accomplish. "Last week, Google open-sourced its Chromium OS project, more than a year before the operating system is scheduled for release. In doing so, Google hopes a variety of developers and companies will become involved in the project, and has pledged to release regular updates as well as a comprehensive log of bug reports and fixes. This article takes a look at Google's design vision for Chromium, the unique benefits it offers, and a bit of why Google is throwing its hat into this particular ring in the first place. Chromium, after all, is a Linux-based OS entering the smartbook/netbook market at a time when the product segment is already being well served by a variety of Linux distros, XP, and Windows 7. In the midst of all these options, do we need another operating system? We just might."
Diversity is good. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:The real reason (Score:2, Insightful)
Obviously, Google is planning on copying Scientology and making all of us their slaves. We will all be forced to view advertisements on web pages without ever being paid for our work.
Re:The real reason (Score:4, Insightful)
Niche Product (Score:5, Insightful)
I can seriously see the advantages of Chrome OS in an ultra-portable device. . . netbook, smartbook, Crunchpad-like gadget. . . Simplicity and efficiency and speed are needed there, and it could have a real advantage.
NO WAY can I see it replacing my OS on my primary desktop computer (currently an iMac BTW). I can't see web apps replacing: Second Life, iTunes, Aperture, GIMP, my word processors and text editors, games, and a number of other programs.
Re:The real reason (Score:5, Insightful)
There's even *already* been announcements that it will be the worst piece of *DRM* ever in front of security. If *anything* is changed in the system, the OS downloads it and replaces it again.
The core OS itself is being treated more like a piece of firmware than a traditional OS. You can update it. You can make changes to settings. You can install programs. But the core of the OS will repair itself if it thinks it is corrupted.
First off, Windows already does this. Secondly, this doesn't mean you can't intentionally change things. Lastly, since Chromium is completely open, you can remove this feature if you don't like it.
DRM stops you from making copies of material you own. This isn't DRM. It's a system recovery feature.
Re:Diversity is good. (Score:3, Insightful)
"I for one would wish that a fork would come into existence that would:
-Let it run on all Linux supported HW and not just Google approved HW
-Use the full potentional of a cloud OS but used local storage first and upload later
-Has a one-click-USB-storage-backup-solution-X(tm)"
PS: and removes phoning home too...
Remember when Google became a search engine? (Score:5, Insightful)
"Chromium, after all, is a Linux-based OS entering the smartbook/netbook market at a time when the product segment is already being well served by a variety of Linux distros, XP, and Windows 7."
Remember when Google entered the search engine space? It was being well served by Yahoo, Dogpile, MSN, Excite and a bunch of other search engine vendors... I mean really, how could they improve internet searching?
Re:The real reason (Score:3, Insightful)
I think it depends on how you define cloud computing. If you keep it broad, it's like saying email is the worst thing in the world, because 90% of it is spam. 90% of cloud ideas are dumb are poorly implemented (or thought out), but it doesn't mean that there aren't uses for it to solve problems that are really hard any other way.
Do you think google should get rid of GFS and bigtable and move off their cloud to a more centralized datastore? I'm sure they can handle all of their data and computing needs without using a cloud....
How Can Someone Possibly Be That Stupid? (Score:1, Insightful)
"Why not just bundle Chrome with any Linux distro"
My god, it's late 2009. I can see your average dumbass teenage Slashdot poster asking something that stupid back in 1999. But today???
Re:The real reason (Score:5, Insightful)
I think you have it backwards. We already are without those restrictions simply by using another distro. This is taking GNU/Linux to a new architecture, a new way of operating. If you don't like it, there's still only about 20,000 other distros to pick from, so go there instead.
More likely is that any advance seen here would be added to the other distros post-haste. And that already is happening with chromium - the JS, rendering, and security models are already available on other distros before Chrome OS was even opened up, let alone released.
This is just Google entering the Linux-distro market in an Apple-like way: bundling everything (hardware, software) as a unit to provide a better end-user experience to their target market. If you don't like Macs, don't buy one. If you don't like Chrome OS, don't buy one. I know some people for whom this would be awesome. Just not me.
Re:Remember when Google became a search engine? (Score:3, Insightful)
I do remember when Google entered the internet search market. Google gained search share precisely because that market was not being well served by the existing search engines. Google's results were better (thanks to PageRank [wikipedia.org]) which is why more and more users switched to Google as their primary search engine.
In the case of notebook/netbook OSes, the current crop of mainstream contenders (Windows, Mac OS X, Linux) has more functionality than ChromeOS, which makes it very unlikely to displace the current mature offerings. This strategy, of providing a more poorly functioning offering, is exactly the opposite of how Google came to dominate Web search.
ChromeOS appears to be motivated entirely by wishful thinking. "We (Google) wish that the only thing users wanted to do is use web apps cause then we could sell more ads, so lets make an OS that only does the cloud!" It's a lame attempt at vendor lock-in in the guise of convenience.
Unfortunately for Google, in the case of ChromeOS, less is less.
Re:Remember when Google became a search engine? (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:The real reason (Score:3, Insightful)
"It's quite common knowledge that Chrome OS will be locked down."
Sometimes common knowledge isn't all that accurate. No matter WHAT you don't like about ChromeOS, you can fix it. The source code is available. Recompile for whatever architecture you want, use common Linux drivers, modify the conf files to your liking. The same thing has been done with Slackware, Suse, Debian - there is really nothing new here.
Given a kernel and a browser, you can do just about anything you want under the hood. Do it!! It's open source!
Re:Remember when Google became a search engine? (Score:5, Insightful)
I think that the iPhone has broken the idea that users want MORE functionality. What your average user wants is a good experience with a popular product that has an excellent price point. If they can do what they want to with a device, feel good about owning it, and pay as little as possible for it then that device WILL be a success.
Now all Google needs to do is fire the marketing people behind "droid" and find someone who will make the Chrome OS devices appear trendy while making sure they work well and cost as little as possible.
There's your "beat the world" strategy for any product or service that you care to sell.
Re:The real reason (Score:3, Insightful)
Mmmm, so far, we've learned that
1- we can't trust the cloud for availability: gmail outages....
2- we can't trust the cloud to not lose our data (sidekick fiasco)
3- we can't trust the cloud with our confidentiality (all those SSID heists and others)
What more is there to learn ?
Re:The real reason (Score:5, Insightful)
Mmmm, so far, we've learned about traditional desktop software that
1- we can't trust desktops for availability: my PC needed repair last fall.
2- we can't trust desktops to not lose our data (my hard drive crashed that one time)
3- we can't trust desktops with our confidentiality (some spyware dudes haxored me once)
What more is there to learn? Clearly desktops can never work as a business model.
Re:The real reason (Score:3, Insightful)
You're correct as far as saying that web apps could use the GPL or other licenses. However, I believe the problem is that the GPL only covers distribution, and an app sitting on your server and your server only is not being "distributed."
Re:The real reason (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:The real reason (Score:3, Insightful)
1) I can't move from amazon web services to go grid? even if I the data synced?
Even so, when Gmail was down I could get my email from gmail. (only the web frontend was broken, IMAP and POP3 were still available.)
2) Initial outlay to do off site backups is so much higher if using UPS instead of doing it over the wire. Initial setup time is longer on the cloud,
The lesson is not don't use the cloud, the lesson is do not use closed non-portable data storage formats.
3) Did you check to see if there is a wire going from your keyboard to your ethernet card?
Some Dell laptops shipped that way.
Saying you have never been hacked is just asking to be made a fool of. All you know is that you have seen no evidence of being hacked. If you are running snort, aide, and tripwire, that evidence may leave very few attack vectors unmonitored.
Most users notice that cloud services are so much more reliable than services run by the in-house it department.(You know you are getting things somewhat reliable, when you no longer think twice about turning off the primary server in the middle of the work day,because, no one will lose more than a couple minutes work at worst case, and you have about an 90% chance of nobody noticing.)
The idea of the old computer sitting in the closet during emergencies is not the same as having something live If you use
The lesson that the Mainframes, minis, pcs, and the cloud have given us over and over again is trust nothing, trust no one,
have a failover plan, have a backup to take to court, and plan around the bleeding edge future technology, because by the time you are done planning and have a pilot project out, the bleeding edge will be on sale at the local store.
Avoid vendor lock in, don't trust the drive you are writing to, don't trust the processor, but use them anyways. work around the lake of trust.
Re:Televisions, the next frontier! (Score:3, Insightful)
Imagine a non-Chrome distro controlling your DVR though a non-browser 10' interface, and imagine the content stored in a way (called "hard disk") that is faster and more reliable than any internet connection can ever hope to achieve, and very likely at a higher bitrate.
The box you describe does indeed make sense, for the boxmaker and service sellers. For the user, though, it sounds like the same living hell they just escaped from some time in the last 10 years.
Out of the Comcast pan and into the Hulu/Netflix fire? No thanks. Multimedia and communications are realms where the interests of users and other parties who wish to control them, conflict so dramatically, that moving functionality from user-controlled into either remote servers or proprietary apps, is the worst thing you can do. I want my client fat and Free.