311–320 of 425 posts
It's netbooks all over again.
This is a colossal, market-moving play from Google. Look at the brand names. TRUE, XOLO, Nexian. Recognise them? Consumers in Thailand, India and Indonesia do - they are local smartphone brands. Look at the promo video. Notice how many Asian faces there are? This isn't about cheap Chromebooks, it's about a major strategic effort to court the global middle class. As with the Android One initiative, Google are seeking…
> This is a colossal, market-moving play from Google. Is it that or is it just an effort to stay relevant? If you can get a laptop/tablet that can do the same thing that this Chromebook does and has a full OS for a few bucks more, would you do it? There are tons of tablets from HP/Dell that cost 100-200$ and run full windows OS and have comparable specs to the Chromebooks. As far as I know they are selling quite well…
And that's why the education sector is flocking to these things. OK, the price is good, but when you factor in order of magnitude less support costs, it's a very compelling proposition.
Where is the $149 Windows-Based laptop with SSD, 2-4GB RAM, and moderate graphics, that can run your usual Office to Minecraft software? The Chromebook-killer from Microsoft should be here, but all I hear about are the Surfaces. Honestly, the only reason my kids don't have Chromebooks is because they don't easily run Minecraft or downloadable games. Sure they can do their school work on them, but they also like to pl…
Microsoft isn't as good at collecting and reselling all of your personal information, so have to charge the actual cost of the hardware.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
How ubiquitous is Java? Containers, VMs, etc..., ARE all the rage. Sun was correct as to what technology belongs to the future, they just couldn't position their company properly. Odds are we're all using technology that's part of Sun's legacy...
That wasn't the vision that I recall. Maybe part of some of it, but I'm talking about the Internet Terminal idea. A lot of cool things came out of Sun. I don't think this was one. Have you tried Web IDEs? They're probably decades behind their desktop counterparts.
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It is a derivitative product, you're just splitting hairs. As squeaky clean as everyone in the valley believes Google to be, even most Googlers would be surprised with the type of work and contacts taken on by Google Federal (hint: it's not just Google Apps for the military). Here is a list of their current unclassified military contracts: https://www.fpds.gov/ezsearch/fpdsportal?indexName=awardfull...
(Standard disclaimer: my opinions, not my employer's. Not representing anybody else. I work at Google, not on these projects.) Most googlers who are also engineers can find out what most of these things are, and I would expect many are already aware of what those projects are likely to be. It is a core part of our culture that we share information openly within engineering, and don't leak it. We can't tell you what's…
The NSA thing is disappointing and it's important that the electorate hold the government accountable, but democracy has not broken down yet, and the situation isn't quite as dire as, say, North Korea.
(Waiting for the "google employee compares US government to North Korea" headline, sigh...)
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How ubiquitous is Java? Containers, VMs, etc..., ARE all the rage. Sun was correct as to what technology belongs to the future, they just couldn't position their company properly. Odds are we're all using technology that's part of Sun's legacy...
That wasn't the vision that I recall. Maybe part of some of it, but I'm talking about the Internet Terminal idea. A lot of cool things came out of Sun. I don't think this was one. Have you tried Web IDEs? They're probably decades behind their desktop counterparts.
I'm pretty young, so I was woefully ignorant of this. However the more I read about it, the more it sounds like 'Cloud computing' and 'internet of things'. In fact, Chrome OS isn't too far from their Java Internet Terminal idea.
> Have you tried Web IDEs? They're probably decades behind their desktop counterparts.
I have. My main IDE, and probably my favourite ever, is R Studio which runs in a Webview (or as a webpage) and uses Ace for editing. Two fairly popular upstart IDEs, LightTable and Atom both use web technology. I quite enjoy Caret as well.
Not sure why you think they're decades behind. If anything the fact they're as advanced as they are is impressive, given most have been developed only in the last few years, whereas Visual Studio, Eclipse, etc..., have been around much longer.
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> There are no native apps on ChromeOS—the correct question is not "Can Mozilla write a browser for ChromeOS", its "Can Mozilla write an app for ChromeOS" Exactly - ChromeOS is a browser. "Can Mozilla write a browser for ChromeOS" makes about as much sense as "Can Mozilla write a browser for Chrome" or "Can Google write a browser for Internet Explorer". ...or it would have made that little sense before Mozilla wrote…
The fact that the Chromium process is what's compositing windows is relatively uninteresting to the end user. It's Linux with a different GUI system. Ubuntu is ditching X11 also, as I understand it, so people other than Google appear to be prepared to redo Linux GUIs. There's Native Client, so you can write native code. I believe there are things like Emacs for NaCl, though Emacs is relatively useless until someone a…
I purchased my 88 year old father a chromebook two years ago.
It just works, and is the only computer he has not messed up.
Highly recommended.
A few caveats:
+ We've found Chrome more responsive with 4 GB of RAM, especially when you keep open many tabs, such as large spreadsheets in Google Docs. We didn't see any improvement moving to 8 GB.
+ We have struggled with editing PDFs. Dochub has the rotate and delete page functions we need, but can't save in place to Google Drive (it only edits). NoteablePDF is supposed to add rotate and delete soon.
+ We had to buy a new scanner that can save directly to Google Drive. http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00EKW6JZ4 worked well, after the Epson required being tethered to a PC.
+ We found Google Cloud Print to be unreliable, so we bought a hardware print server that works great: http://www.amazon.com/Lantronix-XPS1002CP-01-S-xPrintServer-...
We're not the market for $149 Chromebooks, but I'm glad to see Google investing to expand the market for ChromeOS.
This is a colossal, market-moving play from Google. Look at the brand names. TRUE, XOLO, Nexian. Recognise them? Consumers in Thailand, India and Indonesia do - they are local smartphone brands. Look at the promo video. Notice how many Asian faces there are? This isn't about cheap Chromebooks, it's about a major strategic effort to court the global middle class. As with the Android One initiative, Google are seeking…