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$600 Chromebooks are a dangerous development for Microsoft

arstechnica.com

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Re: $600 Chromebooks are a dangerous development for Microsoft

#361

Post by pjmlp »

gmueckl wrote: post #301
krn wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Office does a lot of things their own way and without a lot of the cross-compatibility that's a feature of most Microsoft products. That's probably because unlike most Microsoft products, Office is cross-platform and has to support multiple operating systems, including MacOS, iOS, and Android.

Isn't Office for Mac a completely diverged fork from an old Windows version of Office? I remember some blog posts from the understaffed Mac Office team stating that much several years ago. I don't know if they rebased it in the meantime. The posts read as if the big Office team was focused entirely on Windows and everything else was done by understaffed teams struggling to keep up.

Since 2014 not anymore.

The Office team did a couple of session at CppCon about how they refactored the code.

"CppCon 2014: Zaika Antoun "Microsoft w/ C++ to Deliver Office Across Different Platforms"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3HROqnw-nf4

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MGMoRu5yrVc

Re: $600 Chromebooks are a dangerous development for Microsoft

#362

Post by orionblastar »

High school my niece goes to gives students free Chromebooks to take home and work on. My son went to a high school that made us buy iPads. So there is an academic issue here and the new Chromebooks might eat iPad sales or cause Apple to make cheaper iPads.

Windows laptops are a joke because low end laptops uses slow CPUs and Intel graphics. Mid end laptops for $600 have faster CPUs and Nvidia graphics but suffer preloaded bloat and virus issues a Chromebook can avoid.

I got a 10 year old laptop with Linux Mint on it that runs great. Windows 7 and above run too slow on it.

Re: $600 Chromebooks are a dangerous development for Microsoft

#363

Post by mrep »

awucs wrote: post #126
ChrisSD wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The iPhone was beating MS phones before Android was even a thing[0]. They were certainly way more than "2% or 3%" in the markets they operated in. I can't see how Ballmer's statement was even slightly correct. [0] https://www.macrumors.com/2008/02/05/iphone-with-28-of-u-s-s...

I don't think "2% or 3%" was very realistic, but you have to remember that when the iPhone first came out it wasn't very good. I didn't have 3G, GPS or App Store (nor a couple of other things). Apple was certainly ahead, but the market also wasn't ready nor big at that. When it actually matured there were a couple of solid offerings including from Microsoft, which among other things had arguably better design than An…

> I didn't have 3G, GPS or App Store (nor a couple of other things)

I bought the first iphone on the day it came out and I believe most phones did not have 3G at the time, almost all didn't have GPS (no real use case as navigation apps didn't really exist for phones), and most just had crappy App Stores.

> iPhone first came out it wasn't very good

Unequivocally false! It did everything a normal phone did fine. However, it did something no other phone came close to offering and it singly handley made it the best mobile device. It had an astoundingly intuitive and fast UX for browsing the web combined with an unlimited data plan. That's why I convinced my parents to drive me to the apple store so I could buy it despite the high price (they had to reduce the price by 200$ soon after because it was so freaking high (400-500$ for a phone in 2007)). The phone and app stuff was all moot. I wanted to be able to browse the web just as well as I did on a computer anywhere and everywhere and the iphone was what completely revolutionized that.

Re: $600 Chromebooks are a dangerous development for Microsoft

#364

Post by NicoJuicy »

idiomatic1 wrote: post #357
satysin wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Those aren't even installed and you can turn off app recommendations They installed the moment it saw a network connection which was before I even finished setup because it set that up during the OOBE. > Settings->personalization->start-> make sure "Show suggestions occasionally in start" is off. That setting does not seem to have any effect on Candy Crush, Twitter, etc. on a default install. > Minecraft is awesome…

Couldn't agree more. I'm trying Windows 10 after many years on Linux, and I'm amazed at the hot mess I find. There isn't even a usable terminal. ConEmu looks like it could work with enough tweaking, still trying to get all characters to show up properly (many do, some don't).

I think they are working on that though.

Since they tweaked the CMD for the Linux subsystem

Re: $600 Chromebooks are a dangerous development for Microsoft

#365

Post by Fnoord »

komali2 wrote: post #264
Fnoord wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It depends. For me this is about being future proof. Its more secure than X, but you can compartmentalise as well via VMs (Qubes does this) or Docker (Jessie Frazelle runs everything in Docker). Enlightenment [1] supports Wayland since E20. If you use i3 right now, you can use Sway [2] as drop-in replacement. That's my plan (since I use i3) if I might some time. SailfishOS [3] also already uses Wayland. Tizen apparen…

Ubuntu 18.04 gnome shipped with the option, but if you select there's a 50% of forming a black hole where your machine used to be. I'm joking, but it really is super beta.

Ubuntu uses Mir, developed in-house. Why, I don't know.

Re: $600 Chromebooks are a dangerous development for Microsoft

#366

Post by Buge »

girvo wrote: post #350
Buge wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple has 15%, not 45%. So it's 5-8x, not 22x. And the original quote appears to be about all phones, not just smartphones, so the factor would in fact be even lower.

Apple has 45% in most OECD countries. Even higher in some of them, IIRC.

Is the original quote talking only about OECD countries? I think it's talking about worldwide.

Re: $600 Chromebooks are a dangerous development for Microsoft

#367

Post by Fnoord »

earenndil wrote: post #329
Fnoord wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It depends. For me this is about being future proof. Its more secure than X, but you can compartmentalise as well via VMs (Qubes does this) or Docker (Jessie Frazelle runs everything in Docker). Enlightenment [1] supports Wayland since E20. If you use i3 right now, you can use Sway [2] as drop-in replacement. That's my plan (since I use i3) if I might some time. SailfishOS [3] also already uses Wayland. Tizen apparen…

What if my wm does not support wayland? If it provides more security (I guess applications cannot draw over other applications, nor grab keyboard input unless they're in focus), then how can I have a wm? How can I have a screensaver? Is there any reason to use it if most of my applications are running in xwayland?

Less code runs as root than with X, since the server is far more lean.

There should be zero tearing or artifacts in Wayland, and the latency should be lower as well. Both due to passive compositing.

Screensavers are a pointless waste of energy. I'm not sure why you mention them.

In Wayland, WM/DE use IPC to communicate with each other; not X.

In theory you can run multiple XWayland servers to separate from each other. If security is a concern, Qubes might also be an option. And you're still more secure and better performance with Wayland plus some XWayland than with X.

Re: $600 Chromebooks are a dangerous development for Microsoft

#368

Post by Fnoord »

nl wrote: post #360
Fnoord wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good bang for the buck but I want at least 8 GB DDR4 in a new laptop (bought in 2018), and preferably also TB3 and an AMD GPU. Regardless of the other unnecessary or lacking features Macbook laptops have (butterfly keyboard, touchbar, magsafe, USB-A ports come to mind) if you want a decent amount of RAM and an AMD GPU you pay the jackpot price on MBPs.

https://www.gearbest.com/laptops/pp_651697.html 12.5”, 8gb, full Intel. I haven’t tried it but it looks interesting and well priced.

DDR3. Does have 2.4 GHz + 5 GHz WLAN which is another minimum requirement. Anyway, though I haven't used it this seems like a nice machine with good bang for the buck. Except when it comes to warranty.

Re: $600 Chromebooks are a dangerous development for Microsoft

#369

Post by phobosdeimos »

canhascodez wrote: post #344
candiodari wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe I'm the only one here, but it seem absurd to me to count on Google, an advertising company, not advertise on Chromebooks. Not yet ... perhaps. Perhaps. Not ? No way.

ChromeOS is open-source. Last I looked, their build process was a horror beyond all reason. However, it would at least be possible to strip out any advertising built into the OS. Thing is though, Google controls the advertising on the top two pages on the Internet, and as long as that's true, they don't really need to do anything other than make sure you get there. Which is the strategy behind Google Fiber, Loon, and…

Yep while everyone was fighting yesterday's war with Microsoft another company took over the internet. Well done guys. Google has more power than MS did at any point in the 90s.
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