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The Chromebook Pixel

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Re: The Chromebook Pixel

#501
post #499

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What makes the x86 instruction set more powerful than ARM?

It's CISC rather than RISC, and ARM chips are also designed to use as little power as possible, reducing performance.

I don't see how being CISC rather than RISC results in any inherit advantage. "The CISC approach attempts to minimize the number of instructions per program, sacrificing the number of cycles per instruction. RISC does the opposite, reducing the cycles per instruction at the cost of the number of instructions per program."

Re: The Chromebook Pixel

#502
post #457

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If tall thin windows are better, why not have a widescreen with two windows side by side?

What I want is as many vertical pixels as possible; this is the first new screen I've seen that's got more than my 10-year-old CRT (1536). (At this point some wag is going to suggest portrait mode, but I've never seen a laptop with a portrait screen that can be used at the same time as the keyboard).

Apple's 13 and 15 inch retina Macbook Pro models have 1600 and 1800, respectively.

Re: The Chromebook Pixel

#503

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the sort you should be using if you're working regularly on a computer Could you go into more detail on this? I've been using 12 and 13" screens regularly for my day job for years, and I find the extra physical area of larger screens rather arduous. Basically, if there's some kind of ergonomics concern I'm prepared to change, but not otherwise. > wider aspects -- they use your eyes better Seems false, otherwise let…

> Seems false, otherwise letters would be typed in landscape. There are other things in my FOV and that's a good thing. It's true that in reading, we're only good at scanning approximately 8-10 words per line. This is why letters are the width that they are. But I'm not talking about making a single document fill the width of the screen. That document behavior is a relic of a small-screened world. Modern computer wor…

> Maybe you've only ever opened documents fullscreen or your work involves little more than punching brief commands into a terminal window

No, neither of these things are the case. I'm currently working with Xcode, Blender, terminals and a debug app, as well as my internet distractions, and it's not slow. I do make heavy use of virtual desktops and cmd-tab, and when I was working on a dual-screen workstation I found that most of my work centred on a single screen because I would rather move the app than scan the screen. For me at any rate, a large spatial organisation is visual clutter, and lends itself to hunting for information, whereas the apparent bottleneck of cmd-tab actually sorts information efficiently.

I'm not sure if this is making sense, I'm going down with a cold and focus has gone out of the window in quite a different sense today, but there's my 2c.

Re: The Chromebook Pixel

#504
post #484

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll grant you that if you only do one thing at a time, it works all right. I just tend to jump around a lot -- I use Tree Style Tab for Firefox just to figure out how I got somewhere -- and the Chromebook is a really bad machine for that purpose.

I doubt the Chromebook was ever designed for people like us. We demand far more from our technology and multitask in ways the average user simply doesn't. My Android tablet is nice, but I can't even open up 10+ new tabs at once on a whim and let them all load in the background without it dying. And forget having them all loaded where I left them when I next return to Chrome.

A friend of mine once put it that if you're the kind of person that thinks a Chromebook is neat, you're not the target market for a Chromebook. I think you and he are both right. The only reason I even attempted it is because I damaged my Series 9 so much that it wouldn't start, so for a few months I just used what I had.

Re: The Chromebook Pixel

#505

There are only three meaningful things you can do with a computer with specs like this: development, design, or gaming. And yet ChromeOS can't do any of these things. Perhaps this is a vanity product for the wealthy. But wealthy people are going to just surf the web on an iPad. I really don't get this product.

I agree but the only explanation I can think of is in preparation for Native Client. But why buy now when the price is high, right?

Oh yeah http://tech.slashdot.org/story/13/02/27/038254/pixel-picture...

Re: The Chromebook Pixel

#506
post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

'brain-dead easy ... assemble my own personal distro' :))

* Enable developer mode.[1] * Drop Crouton[2] onto Chromebook to get a full dev stack and unfortunate Ubuntu/XFCE environment. * Set up chroot and start building other people's crap. * Write to SD Card/internal storage and reboot. Which step here is hard? Tedious to roll your own I'd give you, but you don't even need to as there's stuff like ArchLinuxARM[3] which skips the middle two steps. [1]: https://sites.google.…

Any words on the performance? I feel like my Samsung Chromebook is already pretty busy running five browser tabs at the same time.

Re: The Chromebook Pixel

#507
post #478
post #385

Had a few friends who got invites and have one to play with for a month now. Must say I'm somewhat feeling meh about this on many levels. Initialy the price was a wake up and I thought, ok I'm missing something so I did a little digging and still think its too expensive for the sum of parts. Issues I have are: 1) Price 2) Limited local storage 3) Only USB2 and no USB3 4) No 3g or 4G options in the UK and given the pr…

The vent is along the back of the hinge. We don't have any API's in js to access the microphones other than getUserMedia API. On the Drive integration, there is access to other developers for FS for apps and extensions, so it is not just tied to drive http://developer.chrome.com/extensions/fileBrowserHandler.ht... There is quite a lot of local Storage 32gb and 64gb.

Thank you and reinsuring too know. With that I'm apprecieting the platform more and more :)).
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