Chrome OS and Android "Will Likely Converge" In the Future 155
xchg writes "When Google first announced that the company would be pursuing development of two distinct operating systems, many questioned Google's motivation. 'Google executives, including CEO Eric Schmidt, have downplayed the conflict ever since, asking for time to let the projects evolve. And a few days after Chrome OS was revealed, Android chief Andy Rubin said device makers "need different technology for different products," explaining that Android has a lot of unique code that makes it suitable for use in a phone and Chrome has unique benefits of its own. But Brin, speaking informally to reporters after the company's Chrome OS presentation on Thursday, said "Android and Chrome will likely converge over time," citing among other things the common Linux and Webkit code base present in both projects.'"
Google is suffering from success (Score:1, Interesting)
Thus they're pursuing what I call the "spaghetti cannon strategy". They blast buckets of spaghetti up against the wall and hope that some of it will stick.
Eventually any such company becomes large enough that it cannot coordinate what the various bits and pieces are doing. The self-cannabalising overlap of Android and ChromeOS is a sym
Re:Google is suffering from success (Score:5, Interesting)
Kernel: Linux
WM: Chrome
GUI kit: HTML + CSS
Media player: Flash and OGG
Graphics library: WebGL
Application store: The internet with Google Gears
Coding language: Javascript
Backup: automatic online gratis storage
Need I even say more? Yes;
Chromium needs semantic file management and a better use of tabs (WM's that can only display fullscreen Windows sucks) and the ability to hook up an extrenal storage device and a one-click-offline-backup-solution and a better way to store webapps offline with Gears.
Okey... 'nuff said. If there is anything that could on the long run kill proprietary, monoplies, vendor lockin, etc, etc. then it is Chromium.
Not that I would make it my primary OS is the near future, but it will be installed on my netbook for sure...
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Let's take a trip down memory lane.
Network protocol stack: TCP/IP
Application protocols: HTTP, MIME
File format: HTML, GIF, JPEG
Security protocol: SSL (designed by their main competitor)
Scripting language: JavaScript (designed by their main competitor)
User profiling: Cookies (designed by their main competitor)
If there is anything that could on the long run kill proprietary, monoplies (sic), vendor lockin, etc, etc. then it is IE 3. During the early browser wars, Microsoft tried to use open standards [webstandards.org] as a clu
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Why do you need the window manager itself to display partial sized windows? They're always going to be something the browser is showing you so why not just let the browser overlay boxes instead? They seem to be doing that already, those gtalk and chat windows look like overlays.
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Okey... 'nuff said. If there is anything that could on the long run kill proprietary, monoplies, vendor lockin, etc, etc. then it is Chromium.
How on Earth would having all your applications running remote on Google Gears kill your "lockin"? If anything it makes it worse.
well it could.... (Score:2)
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Applications, not operating system. The whole point of Chrome OS is that it makes web applications first-class citizens, and it really doesn't ship with much of a client environment, aside from what a web browser can provide. If you use Chrome OS, the center of gravity for authoring documents is on the cloud, not on the local box.
You can get around this, but you can do that today with Ubuntu. Chrome OS's novel merit is cloud lockin, anything else it gives you, you can already get somewhere else.
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What do you mean, remote on Google Gears? Gears is a local cache 'solution', in which Gears code/tecnology/whatever creates the possibility for a webapp developer to store information on the client in terms of a SQLite database.
Gears does other things to, like client side Javascript execution, notifications, etc.
So what Gears comes down to is: You go to a webapp on the internet. Let's say Google Earth in WebGL with Gears support. So what happens? It will be cahsed. So next time you boot up your netbook and
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I don't think you realy understand Chromium. It is 100% open sourced and available today.
So what limits the FSF, for example, to use the Chromium code, cut out all the phoning home, turn transfer_files_and_data_to_google to transfer_files_and_data_to_personal_ftp_server? So what limits Firefox to support WebGL? So what Canonical to complement Ubuntu Netbook with Chromium tech and integrated it with Ubuntu One instead of Google and ship updates for 'UbuntuChromium' themselves?
It is only natural that Google d
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I was under the impression that any website would be able to expose their services as a Chrome OS app, not just Google. So you wouldn't necessarily have to give any data to Google, and you could even write your own 'cloud' service.
Am I wrong, or missing something? Like, will there be certain Chrome OS components (e.g. filesystem) that will be tied to Google 'cloud' services?
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Ah so you want the web to support C instead and have everything precompiled so you can only view websites with an x86 CPU.
I am sure that's good for the web...
Ever worked in R&D? (Score:5, Insightful)
If Google shareholders take windfall profits now and try to mature the company early, they will be killing exactly what makes it innovative. It is not in the long term interests of Google to do that. Remember long term? Before we had day traders and similar idiots trying to turn everything into a casino, we had companies like IBM that were hugely innovative and came up with things like relational databases. Real innovation requires long term commitment and a great deal of luck. You make your own luck by funding people like Cobb, or Mandelbrot, and wait for them to lay golden eggs. Can't do that if the shareholders are whining that they want all their (unearned) profits out, now.
Re:Ever worked in R&D? (Score:4, Insightful)
I am actually a big believer in research spending, and I think that any company with above-normal profitability is mad not to do a lot of it. But there's a difference between "research" and "entering every and all market segments you can hoping that one of them will be profitable".
Basically Microsoft and Google are almost totally reliant on single lines of business (Office + Windows vs AdSense, respectively) for their profits.
Because they're not paying *any* of that money to shareholders, there's no incentive to economise. More to the point, they suck up innovators and lock them up in a structure where they're beholden to internal process and not able just to say "fuck it, this idea is awesome, let's sell it!"
Google are already turning into Microsoft on this front too. Small companies regularly out-innovate (I hate that word too) them. So Google just buys them out.
I think that refusing to pay *any* dividend is just control-freakery. And it's bad for the economy because it encourages speculators to buy on the basis of short-term share price fluctuations. It used to be that you looked at the fundamentals of a company, then bought and held onto the shares in order to get dividends. Now you buy and flip it because paying dividends is old fashioned.
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Microsoft paid a large one-time dividend a couple of years ago and pays a small annual dividend these days (yield is about 1.8%, the total payout is roughly $4 billion a year, which a little less than 1/3 of their net).
(fiscal) 2009 is likely to be a rather soft year for Microsoft, as Vista wasn't particularly successful (it still made heaps of money), and also, the recession. It is very possible that 2010 and 2011 will be (much) better than last year.
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Google are already turning into Microsoft on this front too. Small companies regularly out-innovate (I hate that word too) them. So Google just buys them out.
It's pretty common in the tech industry to let others spend money vetting out ideas and then coming in to buy what survives the process. I suspect you would be hard pressed to find any substantially large name in IT that hasn't done this at least once. The interesting thing is that you get large enough, you find the names hedging their bets - dishing out their own R&D funds as well as simply buying other's R&D efforts.
Incidentally, the only reason I despise the "innovate" term is because of Micros
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Because they're not paying *any* of that money to shareholders, there's no incentive to economise.
Paying dividends has nothing to do with being economical, whatever you mean by that.
MSFT has been paying dividends for a while now. It's exactly what companies do when they can't grow much more. You'll be hard pressed to find a company that has opportunities for growth that pays a dividend. The shareholders wouldn't even want it because the potential returns from reinvesting in the company and increasing stock value are larger than the dividends. MSFT has plateaued, it's a mature company with massive m
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Because they're not paying *any* of that money to shareholders
Google doesn't pay dividends, but Microsoft does.
Dividends (Score:2)
I think its just a response to tax policy. Money spent on dividends directly reduces the value of stock compared to not paying the dividend, and since (but for fairly recent tax policy changes that sunset soon, and so would form a poor basis for corporate policy changes) long-term capital gains are more favored under the tax code than dividends, offering dividends is directly contrary to the financial interests of the shareholders.
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I do partly agree with you. Dividends should be paid from a "wildly profitable company", if it's in a strong long term position. That being said, and my apologies if I misinterpreted you, your attitude strikes me as a bit over the top. Dividends are gravy on the biscuit of increased stock valuation over the long term.
Google, TODAY, is profitable but without reinvestment of this type where will they be tommorow? We as investors and a society have gone way to far in the direction of short term gratification.
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Google is in just such a position. They're athwart a river of gold due to adsense. It's an enviable position. They make some money on the side from Apps, but compared to the advertising dollars it's just peanuts.
I've said elsewhere that Google is not really a technology company, they're an advertising company. Follow the money.
That said, where R&D has paid Google back very ha
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The goog is driving to bring everyone under their sphere at all times. I think the only competitor to them is sites like facebook. The targeting of ads available for social networking is beyond what even google can do with all the information they have on you.
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What do you mean, "the self-cannabilising overlap"?
Android is a production product that must be stable, reliable, and operate within the constraints of consumer mobile devices today.
Chrome OS is an R&D platform for emerging markets and technologies.
You don't couple your production product with your R&D platform for a market that does not yet exist, unless you want both of them to fail.
The good news for Google is that by talking so publicly about their R&D products, and giving you the opportunity
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Well, you'd better get your ass to Mar-I mean Google, and let them know about your cutting-edge business analysis. What fools! If only they had your insight, forged in the fires of massive business success.
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Re:Google is suffering from success (Score:5, Insightful)
Google is not a technology company. Google is an advertising company with a sideline in email hosting. That's where their money comes from.
If you look at the technologies you listed, with the exception of Java, almost none of them was made profitable by the company that invented them. I don't know why companies who can afford really serious, advanced "blue sky" R&D so frequently fail to commercialise it, but it's really common.
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Google is not a technology company. Google is an advertising company with a sideline in email hosting. That's where their money comes from.
Someone owes me a refund on past purchases [google.com]. I'm probably not the only one [google.com].
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Semantics. It's true that Google doesn't make most of its money selling technology as a product. However it's also true that technology has been the most critical factor in their success. Why was Google search better than Altavista, or Gmail better than Hotmail, or Adwords more scalable than Overture, or Google M
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Because if they hadn't stumbled on AdSense, they'd probably have gone broke years ago.
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Stumbled upon? My friend, they didn't trip over it in a forest clearing. They CREATED it.
And to prove it wasn't a fluke, this was after CREATING pagerank, the algorithm that won them the status of most used search engine in the world.
Credit where credit is due. Google is where they are for being innovative. They weren't just lucky.
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No, AdSense has been relatively unimportant to their overall business model. It's only about 30% [google.com] of their total revenue, and over 80% of that is paid out to publishers etc. as "Traffic Acquisition Costs". It's AdWords on google.com that is the true golden goose -- Google keeps 100% of that revenue.
You may have accidentally said "AdSense" when you meant "AdWords". If so, well Google didn't "stumble" into AdWords at all,
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A technology company is not necessarily one that developed technology in the past. It's one that develops technology that it hopes to sell in the *future*.
Take for example HP. HP stopped being a technology company as soon as it stopped doing research. A company that is cannibalizing itself in the present, and not in
Which will win? (Score:4, Informative)
I wonder if this means Android will converge towards a more standard Linux, or if Chrome will converge to become less standard. Or if they'll keep the unique aspects of each and just try to unify stuff like browser code. I don't really fancy a phone that can only run web apps, or a "PC" that can only run Java apps compiled to a weird byte code! I don't really like the way Android has reinvented all of userspace, whereas at least Chrome builds on existing code a bit more. But they are solving different problems, which perhaps explains *some* of the differences...
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Be it ever so crumble, there's no plate like Chrome.
Remember when Microsoft was going to converge the native Win32 (post OS/2) code base with the DOS version of Windows 3X/9X/ME? There were some very odd problems that built huge compromises to make each code tree continue to run apps. Google is getting lost in this same trap.
Android is cute, and it's controlled as though it were a MacOS. ChromeOS isn't really an operating system, it's a semi-autonomous browser app scheme.... a bot-like appliance.
But please
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Google wants to force microsoft to be paired into their services, not kill them. Google has no wish to actually run the OS market, they just want to have a position that allows them to strongarm whoever does run it.
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Well, in either case, it's probably a good thing for desktop Linux. Google is one of the only players in that arena that has sufficient market clout to propagate a standard, which might finally make it a viable target for commercial applications.
I think of it as a parallel to Mac OS X - OS X may be based on FreeBSD, but commercial application vendors don't target FreeBSD, they target Mac OS, because Apple has the market share and the mind share. One of the big problems with desktop Linux has been that it's
Re:Which will win? (Score:4, Interesting)
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And I don't think that would bother Google a single goddamn bit. If the web becomes an application platform, then google's domination of many aspects of the web creates a very strong hand for exploitation of that platform.
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What a godawful thought. Nothing makes me shiver more than the attrocity known as the web browser becoming the primary application platform. Between CSS, HTML, Javascript, DOM and whatever other blasphemous half-solutions out there, it is an abomination. It makes Java look like a tight, fast environment.
web browser as application platform (Score:2)
Nothing makes me shiver more than the attrocity known as the web browser becoming the primary application platform.
Wake up grandpa, it happened a few years ago. Apart from a few novel iPhone apps, all the inventive mass-market "applications" in the last few years have been things you run in the browser. As web sites get brave enough to treat MSIE as legacy crap and use HTML5 goodness like SVG and the canvas, audio and video tags, the web application advances will only accelerate. Bitch all yo
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"Groundbreaking" must be a synonym for "slow, clunky and badly rendered". Wordpad has more power than online editors.
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monoculture problem of the desktop
What monoculture? There's a standards compatible browser on each OS.
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Commercial vendors won't target Chrome OS / Linux, they will target the web browsers, and that won't have any impact on the "monoculture" problem of the desktop.
Au contraire - as long as they don't target Internet Explorer, it will have a huge impact.
There are tons of web apps out there, designed by people who know nothing about any non-Windows OS (but they've at least heard of Macs). If these people weren't writing web apps, they'd be writing desktop GUI apps. Because they're writing web apps, and because Firefox and Chrome have sufficient market share for the developers to pay attention to them, I have no trouble running these web apps on Mac OS X or Ubuntu. I
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or a "PC" that can only run Java apps compiled to a weird byte code
that's an implementation detail that you would only care (or even know) about if you wanted to. do you think users care about the programming language used to write the apps they use?
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True. The short answer is that I do personally care, so it does affect my purchase decisions. The longer, wider ranging answer is that I don't think making a platform more limited for programmers is necessarily going to result in a better range of apps for the user, so it's not a strategy I want to see spread.
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I don't really fancy a phone that can only run web apps
Unless I'm misunderstanding, Android is not a browser-based OS. You're perhaps thinking of Android's disallowing anything but a unique variant of Java-based applications - which is no longer the case [wikipedia.org], anyway.
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I was more speculating on a possible convergence - Android going the Chrome way, you might say. Although it'd be a bit surprising if they dropped compatibility completely, I guess. Good to see that the native support for Android has improved, although if they're allowing native code I'm even more perplexed as to why they went the Java route in the first place.
I have an idea (Score:1)
Wrong company (Score:3, Informative)
That's Maemo, not Android.
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Chrome OS does use X.
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A new desktop 'paradigm'? Care to explain how that relates to X11 (and more to the point, how X11 prevents this new paradigm)?
Converge as code base or as products? (Score:5, Insightful)
Perhaps they'll both converge on "cancelled" (Score:3, Interesting)
Google has had the foresight to cut their losses before...
I have an Android phone. It was a gift from Google. Admittedly, it was an early version so maybe Android 2.0 looks better, but frankly when compared to an iPhone it looks like a high school science fair project. I'd rather pay for an iPhone than use the Android phone for free.
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but frankly when compared to an iPhone it looks like a high school science fair project.
Fortunately, when compared with anything other than an iPhone, it looks pretty good.
One problem is that, particularly in the case of the HTC phones, its being pushed out on decidedly sub-iPhone hardware that doesn't quite have the legs to do it justice. The larger screen on the iphone, in itself, is enough to swing it.
(But I hope they fix the WiFi issues - no proxy server support and iffy automatic re-connection - and work out how a fscking "message waiting" LED is meant to work).
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And yet the Android phones are rolling out. Go figure.
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Wow, the Iphone does better compared to a phone you hate. I, and 98% of the market, choose neither...
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Why? What makes the iPhone OS so great compared to Android?
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This is a lovely theory, but as we saw with Windows, a peculiar thing can happen when a company essentially corners a market. Even if there are better competitors out there, the momentum the product has in the marketplace can be difficult if not impossible to stop. Google has the overwhelming market share in online search, to the point where it's almost synonymous. Nobody ever said "I'm going to Webcrawl up a page, or Alta Vista some information, or Yahoo my breed of dog", but they do say "I'm going to G
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Nobody ever said "I'm going to Webcrawl up a page, or Alta Vista some information, or Yahoo my breed of dog", but they do say "I'm going to Google that hotel".
Yes, but I can think of people who would say "I'm going to Bing that new secretary before the end of the week".
Both only cellphone level functionality. (Score:4, Insightful)
Both seem very limited and aimed at cellphones essentially. So it does seem they have huge overlap.
I was hoping Chrome OS would be more functional than Android (sort of lightweight Linux replacement) but it seems the opposite. It is just a browser. Yawn.
I really can't see the point of maintaining two cellphone "OS type" products.
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ChromeOS requires an internet connection to be at all functional. When it has that, it's useful.
Android, otoh, has to be a more conventional operating system that can run apps and make phone calls, regardless of whether or not you have a working internet connection.
Different tools for different jobs.
Escaping the Telcos (Score:2)
I'm sure Google had to promise the telcos adopting Android phones that the telcos could "own" their version of the OS. Which means releasing ChromeOS to the public, untied to a given HW platform, vendor or distributor as a "different" OS lets the telco cartel keep plodding down that smug path. Especially now, in the first few years while telcos are just gearing up to sell and support Android phones, telcos could just drop it if their monopolies seem threatened.
But Google gets to release upgrades to each OS.
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Shouldn't that be chromeoid
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Re:First post (Score:4, Insightful)
Wrong. Chrome is an OS which (currently) runs on the Linux kernel. A kernel is not an OS -- pleae see Debian, which runs on Linux, FreeBSD, or even Hurd kernels.
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Thanks, I was about to say that. Now I am redundant. /. audience is losing its punch. Pathetic losers don't even know the difference from an OS and a Kernel... They probably came from MS world, and think being "linux" is cool... LINUX IS NOT AN OS, IT IS A KERNEL. AN OS IS something like Debian, Chrome, and Ubuntu, which is probably the one you as a newbie is using... AND NOW GET OUT OF MY LAWN!
Interesting how
Re:First post (Score:5, Insightful)
At first, everybody is predicting:" OMG Linux will own the desktop! We need KDE 4.x and Gnome 3.x and it is all going to even let your mom operate her computer much easyer than the shitty last incarnation from Microhell!" Etc, etc.
Then when Linux actually gains marketshare, people start to complain. "Oh noes! Not all Linux users are kernel devs anymore! OMGz0rs! When did people forget to man or infor this or that and why do people get so dumb that they can't even convert high level code to assembly and turn it to 1's and 0's with their bare hand, using an assembler! OmG it get's populair!"
Well duh, elitist prick. When you drive your car to a garage because you can't replace your engine yourself, the guy who does that for you won't be complaining about that fact that you cannot do that yourself. "Hey why don't you read the manual on how to replace your backseat yourself! How can people be so stupid that they cannot even replace their own chairs?!"
Re:First post (Score:4, Insightful)
Hell, if you poke around Ubuntu forums, half the time one person has a problem and then there are naught but 50 responses all going "me too!" and no actual solution in site. It's like AOL. There have always been new people coming into the community, but when it gets to the point where the newbs outnumber the established people, it tips the balance in a really weird way. Maybe it's "for the better," but I liked things just fine the way they used to be.
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In the "good old days", someone might post a problem on t
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#2: Everybody starts out as a newb. "News For Nerds, Stuff That Matters" is more of a scare for popular people. I am sure that when people read this, only the nerds and geeks feel like they belong here so only 'the right group of people' will continue to visit /. regularly. Maybe one day they will even become kernel developers... The attitude of your post, don't take this personal ;), discourages learning.
#3: I left Digg for the same three reasons that you have just posted above. Not because I disliked the
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"Repairing cars requires specialized knowledge."
-"They are a bunch of people who lack any comp sci education whatsoever, unlike the Slashdot of old"
So at computer science you learn nothing? At least no specialized knowledge? Really? Ok...
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*Chuckle*
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Really? I don't see anyone claiming that it should be called Linux/Chrome...
I demand that you call it GNU\Linux\Chrome!
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I demand that you call it GNU\Linux\Chrome!
Richard Stallman, is that you?
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It's just something we'll have to remember... as we crack open Chrome OS to install proper apps.
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Hah! The kernel is exactly what we used to call an "Operating System", before people started putting Window Managers on top.
MOD UP!!! (Score:3, Interesting)
How true! Instead of trying to confuse things and try to hitchhike a ride on Linux success, people who try to prepend a GNU/ on everything should study history and learn where this "operating system" [wikipedia.org] definition started.
There was a time when every computer was dedicated to running a single program at a time, it often took hours to switch from one program to the other. In many computers confi
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When was this, and who is this "we" you're referring to?
At the very least, the userland api to the system services has been considered a part of the OS since day 1.
Also, microkernels don't include such things as device drivers and protocol stacks, which run in userland. Are they not part of the OS?
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And Android is not even proper Linux distribution.
Android is a hacked up bastard child of Linux only. Does anyone have any info on the ChromeOS. Has Google gutted that just as much as they did to Android?
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Indeed - sadly we've got people thinking that Iphone OS and OS X are the same OS too, due to the same mistake.
Re:First post (Score:5, Informative)
don't confuse google chrome [google.com] (the browser) with chrome [wikipedia.org] (the OS).
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With Chromium, the userspace is mostly the web, from a philosophical point of view. Technically it's a webbrowser app in userspace directly on top of Linux and a WM which is also directly on top of the Linux kernel.
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Rather "My shiny metal OS".
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Fuuusion-HA!
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Those criticizing Google should recognize that were Chrome OS an R&D product at any other company, we might hear about it through a few trade shows and blogs, but that would be it, and no sane commentator would be suggesting it be put into production or merged with a production platform.
No sane commentator should be suggesting it be put into production or merged with a production platform. It makes a lot more sense to use Android across the board than it does to use Chrome OS for anything other than dumb terminals with color screens. The goal of a serious OS should be to do more with less, not to do less with less, which is where Chrome OS seems to be.
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I think everyone is looking ahead to a point when the desktop and the mobile will merge. As much as smartphones are like trying to read a Reader's Digest condensed version of a novel, but even I find myself using my crappy one more than my desktop. Obviously it's too painful to use for a full-time wordprocessor, but I look at my kids use their's, and I get the feeling it isn't so much an issue of utility as a generational issue.
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I think everyone is looking ahead to a point when the desktop and the mobile will merge. As much as smartphones are like trying to read a Reader's Digest condensed version of a novel, but even I find myself using my crappy one more than my desktop. Obviously it's too painful to use for a full-time wordprocessor, but I look at my kids use their's, and I get the feeling it isn't so much an issue of utility as a generational issue.
I don't think it's a generational issue, unless the next generation is going to lose the ability to read and write.
Most kids type very quickly on their cell phones because they're not typing full sentences -- or even full words, in a lot of cases. Anyting you put in your pocket isn't going to be great for text input until one of two things happen:
1) Voice recognition gets to the point where one can dictate flawlessly and have it understood.
2) Projection keyboards like this [thinkgeek.com] get cheaper.
Mostly,
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Yes, obviously those are the only two choices in the market. The remaining 95+% are a figment of your imagination.
(Seriously though, check out a phone store, don't rely on Slashdot for news on the phone market, as it only covers Apple and Google, which represent less than 5% of the mobile market.)
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Its not.
Its primarily designed as an interface into remotely hosted applications (though supporting applications that can run in an "offline mode" is a key feature) using web standards, but cloud computing (server abstraction and dynamic provisioning) have little to do with that except that it can provide a convenient platform for web apps, and the parts of "clo
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Maybe this is what the world needs. God knows I am sick of helping morons who stop windows update from running, even though I set it to "download and install automatically".
Unfortunately, I don't think this will help you. An administrator would never come in contact with this kind of system. Google administers the servers. Anything running Chrome OS is little more than a dumb client.