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Linus Torvalds on new Chromebook Aura UI

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Re: Linus Torvalds on new Chromebook Aura UI

#61

Post by gloob »

wavephorm wrote: post #41
goodgracious wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nonsense. True, companies will encourage voluntarily uploading your stuff to their computers. Why shouldn't they? Just like they solicit your email address, track your movements, snarf your smartphone address book and other neat tricks. There's value in getting that info. That doesn't mean everyone is going to fall for it. Some will, no doubt. But GB's are getting cheaper every day. And not just for "cloud providers"…

Are we to imagine a future where consumers cannot purchase storage media? Yes that's coming. Many countries are starting to put tariffs on hard drives. And in my country, Canada, they also slow down your internet when downloading large files and it costs $1.5 per gigabyte to exceed my 85GB/mo limit. I might as well redirect my downloads to an online service and keep all my data online until I need. My bet is within 3…

I feel like I'm missing something terribly obvious, but...

How does "it is getting harder and slower to move large files over the net" lead to the conclusion "therefore we should store all our large files on the net and retrieve them whenever we want, rather than keep them on local media with negligible latency and huge storage space"?

Re: Linus Torvalds on new Chromebook Aura UI

#62

Post by checker659 »

prophetjohn wrote: post #18
AndrewNoNumbers wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

http://googlesystem.blogspot.jp/2012/04/new-window-manager-f...

Looks like Windows 7 if it had OS X's launchpad.

I bet they wanted to make the UI as Windows like as possible because that's what most of the users are used to. The fact the chrome icon sits where the 'start' button sits on windows clearly isn't a coincidence.

Re: Linus Torvalds on new Chromebook Aura UI

#64

Post by jodrellblank »

wavephorm wrote: post #21
furyofantares wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Care to explain why you believe native apps are toast in the long run, or how that's related to data moving to the cloud? Web apps solved the problem of having to figure out how to find, install, or update software and not having it everywhere you go. App stores have caught up on discovery/installation/updates, and mobile has solved the problem of not having it everywhere I go. Web apps will eventually catch up on pe…

Mobile apps, especially iOS apps, are hobbled by their curators. iPhone's don't even have an open file system and the platform was purposely designed so that apps are isolated, and funneled through a strict paradigm. This most certainly is not what I, or a lot of people want in a computing device -- it will not work, simply because a majority of innovators do not want to be locked into that universe. Apple has design…

And what open file system is there for "web apps"? Dropbox and a cobbled together flash uploader / email attachment / webapp specific API which probably only goes to FaceBook?

Aren't webapps isolated? Funneled through a strict paradigm? And also at the other end of a comparatively slow link?

The idea of a general purpose computer as it exists in the current desktop form must be put aside. We can't head to a future of everything we do in one portable device and from there to ubiquitous life integration when every app can read all your data and send it to anyone for any purpose, Android is falling fowl of that right now, we have to have isolation and sandboxing, different trust levels, restricted access to more important data (contacts, for example), to make a solid and trustable future platform.

Re: Linus Torvalds on new Chromebook Aura UI

#65

Post by goodgracious »

wavephorm wrote: post #41
goodgracious wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nonsense. True, companies will encourage voluntarily uploading your stuff to their computers. Why shouldn't they? Just like they solicit your email address, track your movements, snarf your smartphone address book and other neat tricks. There's value in getting that info. That doesn't mean everyone is going to fall for it. Some will, no doubt. But GB's are getting cheaper every day. And not just for "cloud providers"…

Are we to imagine a future where consumers cannot purchase storage media? Yes that's coming. Many countries are starting to put tariffs on hard drives. And in my country, Canada, they also slow down your internet when downloading large files and it costs $1.5 per gigabyte to exceed my 85GB/mo limit. I might as well redirect my downloads to an online service and keep all my data online until I need. My bet is within 3…

Solution: VPS outside Canada to do your downloads from.

But what you describe is a networking problem (transit costs of your ISP passed on to you). Not a storage problem.

A "cloud storage" provider is just going to keep the data you store in a datacenter near to you anyway, not halfway around the world. But it's not like keeping your physical stuff with a storage company. You can easily store the data yourself with many more advantages. The marketing teams for "cloud storage" services will no doubt try to convince people otherwise.

Re: Linus Torvalds on new Chromebook Aura UI

#66

Post by jahmed »

kristopolous wrote: post #28
wavephorm wrote: post #8

The "All-Web" paradigm is coming, folks. And it really doesn't matter how much you love your iPhone, or your Android, or Windows phone. Native apps are toast, in the long run. Your data is moving to the cloud -- your pictures, your music, your movies, and every document you write. It's all going up there, and local hard drives will be history within 3 years. And what that means is ALL software is heading there too. N…

Even if you were 100% correct, hard drives aren't going anywhere. Browser cache is around 1GB and web developers are itching for vast landscapes of local storage systems. And where do you expect the operating system and marvelous web stack where all these things are created to reside? Burned in EEPROM? I think the consumer already can't really differentiate between what is local or over the internet, they don't know…

>But if what you say is right, the pendulum, at the consumer level, will soon swing back the other way the first time that someone can't access the "cloud" on a trip or forgets to pay their "cloud access bill" (phone/internet whatever) and then gets locked out of ... well, everything.

One day the idea that you don't have internet access will be just as silly as saying you don't have electricity. Its in the very infant stages but its coming. For what its worth Im typing this on my Cr-48 which has 3G so I'm pretty much there.

I'm inclined to agree especially in cases like movies or music. The idea that we all have a copy of a song on our hard drives is odd. Leaving aside ideas of copyright and licenses there really isnt a reason all media shouldnt live in some kind of shared music/video folder in the sky. I'm going to watch Breaking Bad S2E4 maybe a handful of times and eventually forget about it. Keeping it in the cloud frees the user from needing to think about keeping it or backing it up or deleting it.

Or maybe I'm biased from living in a fairly cloudy world already.

Re: Linus Torvalds on new Chromebook Aura UI

#67

Post by jodrellblank »

snarfy wrote: post #36
wavephorm wrote: post #8

The "All-Web" paradigm is coming, folks. And it really doesn't matter how much you love your iPhone, or your Android, or Windows phone. Native apps are toast, in the long run. Your data is moving to the cloud -- your pictures, your music, your movies, and every document you write. It's all going up there, and local hard drives will be history within 3 years. And what that means is ALL software is heading there too. N…

I'm waiting for it to come full circle - the day when the browser VM is so advanced it's basically a VMWare shim and each web page is really an OS that boots up, then we can finally throw away all the development crap collectively known as web duct tape and use real tools for software development.

Presumably you've seen http://bellard.org/jslinux/ ?

If someone (Google, Mozilla) pushed for it, this could be merged with a browser API / VirtualBox for speed and completeness, and you could download a paused machine with state.

It's not happening now, but it's possible already.

Re: Linus Torvalds on new Chromebook Aura UI

#68

Post by Camillo »

wavephorm wrote: post #38
cageface wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This most certainly is not what I, or a lot of people want in a computing device Most people don't even understand what a filesystem is, nevermind whether it's open or not. I agree with you that data is moving online but that's orthogonal to the native vs web app question.

I want a "cloud filesystem", but want it controlled by ME, not Apple, and not iCloud. That's the problem. Apple wants to control the filesystem, and I, and others are not willing to accept this horrific scenario.

I find it hilarious that you are embracing cloud computing as your personal savior because you want MORE control. It's almost oxymoronic!

Re: Linus Torvalds on new Chromebook Aura UI

#69

Post by Arelius »

wavephorm wrote: post #41
goodgracious wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nonsense. True, companies will encourage voluntarily uploading your stuff to their computers. Why shouldn't they? Just like they solicit your email address, track your movements, snarf your smartphone address book and other neat tricks. There's value in getting that info. That doesn't mean everyone is going to fall for it. Some will, no doubt. But GB's are getting cheaper every day. And not just for "cloud providers"…

Are we to imagine a future where consumers cannot purchase storage media? Yes that's coming. Many countries are starting to put tariffs on hard drives. And in my country, Canada, they also slow down your internet when downloading large files and it costs $1.5 per gigabyte to exceed my 85GB/mo limit. I might as well redirect my downloads to an online service and keep all my data online until I need. My bet is within 3…

The problem with this is generally speaking, if you take possession of a file, either locally, or on a remote filesystem. You are likely to use it, and also likely to use it shortly after taking possession. Be it Music, Photos, Documents, or a Movie, the data that normal people take possession of needs to be downloaded and viewed to be useful.

If at this point, there is no local storage, and it's stored in the cloud, you need to pay the bandwidth price every time you wish to view it, rather just on taking possession.

This particular example, about Canada increasing bandwidth charges, actually works against your argument.

Sure, some data won't need to make it to the client, but that's mostly only true if your a scientist, or otherwise run computation on data, but that's hardly the case for the general person.

Re: Linus Torvalds on new Chromebook Aura UI

#70

Post by Arelius »

goodgracious wrote: post #65
wavephorm wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are we to imagine a future where consumers cannot purchase storage media? Yes that's coming. Many countries are starting to put tariffs on hard drives. And in my country, Canada, they also slow down your internet when downloading large files and it costs $1.5 per gigabyte to exceed my 85GB/mo limit. I might as well redirect my downloads to an online service and keep all my data online until I need. My bet is within 3…

Solution: VPS outside Canada to do your downloads from. But what you describe is a networking problem (transit costs of your ISP passed on to you). Not a storage problem. A "cloud storage" provider is just going to keep the data you store in a datacenter near to you anyway, not halfway around the world. But it's not like keeping your physical stuff with a storage company. You can easily store the data yourself with m…

That's not a solution, you still need to get the downloads to a local system to use them for that vast majority of media.
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