$149 Chromebooks • Hacker News Board

Re: $149 Chromebooks

#331

Post by Karunamon » Wed, Apr 01, 2015, 3:23 AM UTC

ksk wrote: post #327

asuffield wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(Tedious disclaimer: my opinion, not my employer's. Not representing anybody but me. I work at Google, not on lawful intercept.) That's not what this article says. This article is about what happens when the government lawfully issues a warrant to obtain somebody's private data, and orders a private company to give them the data. When this happens the company has some rights to recover their costs from the government…

>But it's still the law, and companies that operate in the US have to comply with it. It's interesting that you guys figured out how to circumvent the US tax law, by hiding money in tax havens. I guess dodging the NSA warrants is not a priority.

The tax code is byzantine and full of loopholes.

Warrants are comparatively straightforward. The paper says "jump", you say "how high?" or else. In any case, handed a warrant signed by a judge (kangaroo FISA court or otherwise), you hand over the info first and fight it later. Anything else is obstruction.

Re: $149 Chromebooks

#332

Post by bduerst » Wed, Apr 01, 2015, 3:36 AM UTC

maaku wrote: post #258

jhall1468 wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some people don't distinguish a knife from an elephant, but those people are wrong too.

If I don't want people paying someone else to use my information, I don't care whether that party ever actually sees it or not.

I don't get it - are you saying you don't like knives and elephants?

Re: $149 Chromebooks

#333

Post by nl » Wed, Apr 01, 2015, 3:50 AM UTC

jiffytick wrote: post #326

nl wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

10 hour battery life ? maybe on idle, I bet this thing doesn't last 10 hours with 50 tabs opened or when playing youtube videos ... You are right - it's probably more like 8 hours. The older Acer c720 got between 6 and 7 hours streaming Netflix[1]. The Chromebook 13 got 10 hours[2]. [1] http://www.trustedreviews.com/acer-c720-chromebook-review-ba... [2] http://www.engadget.com/2014/09/23/acer-chromebook-13-review...

Those numbers are with hardware decoding, aren't they. I'd be more intrested in something compute-intensive that was compiled to asm.js. I bet they'll last much less. That said, these are machines with mobile processors and an OS that is tailored for mobiles. It isn't all that suprising that they are more capable than their normal counterparts.

Decoding is hardware accelerated, yes.

Chromebooks seem to average around 8 hours of continuous web browsing[1].

[1] http://www.laptopmag.com/reviews/laptops/samsung-chromebook-...

Re: $149 Chromebooks

#334

Post by ksk » Wed, Apr 01, 2015, 4:02 AM UTC

Karunamon wrote: post #331

ksk wrote: post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>But it's still the law, and companies that operate in the US have to comply with it. It's interesting that you guys figured out how to circumvent the US tax law, by hiding money in tax havens. I guess dodging the NSA warrants is not a priority.

The tax code is byzantine and full of loopholes. Warrants are comparatively straightforward. The paper says "jump", you say "how high?" or else. In any case, handed a warrant signed by a judge (kangaroo FISA court or otherwise), you hand over the info first and fight it later. Anything else is obstruction.

OK, your opinion on warrants is noted.

Re: $149 Chromebooks

#335

Post by Scarbutt » Wed, Apr 01, 2015, 4:08 AM UTC

jrockway wrote: post #295

KeytarHero wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 guess the terminal is just a browser tab? can the configs made to the browser terminal tab persist? like font, text size, color, etc...

Also, when running emacs in the terminal through ssh, doesn't emacs keybindings interfere to much with chromeos's browser?

Re: $149 Chromebooks

#336

Post by e12e » Wed, Apr 01, 2015, 4:09 AM UTC

haberman wrote: post #217

ntakasaki wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's sad to see folks celebrating computing devices that are more extremely locked down than even the iDevices. A Windows PC/laptop is much more open than a Chromebook. Can Mozilla even make a Firefox browser for ChromeOS? Only Google can make system and native apps, unlike the iDevices where you can access most of the native functionality even if you have to go through Apple's approval and you're not forced to uploa…

> Can Mozilla even make a Firefox browser for ChromeOS? Can Google even make a Chrome browser for FirefoxOS? All of the PR surrounding the creation of FirefoxOS lauded how it was completely open because it was built on standards like HTML/CSS/JavaScript. But when Google does the same thing, it is an example of "locking everything down while still calling itself open." Mozilla has been arguing for years that compile-t…

> when Google does the same thing, it is an example of "locking everything down while still calling itself open."

Well, Mozilla have a proven track record of providing a self-host alternative for their cloud platform (the main reason I'm using Firefox sync -- with Mozilla servers -- is that I could set up a proof-of-concept sync server[1] on my own hw, see that, yes it does work fine. Contrast that with what Google does ("We have a magic database, here's some of the ideas behind it; sorry you can't host your own, so all our service tech will remain proprietary").

I use Chromium from time to time, but I don't use Chrome -- and I avoid logging in to Google services when I can.

I've been waiting for a Cyanogen-mod for my current phone, because I don't like running stock Android in it's sort-a-open, mostly-closed state -- not to mention the amount of spyware that ships with the platform (it doesn't help that Samsung ships its own software too -- which I'm assuming contains its share of bugs).

Try building a working phone kernel+userland with whatever Google+partner have released and try and convince me that they're good at doing "open".

I hope they will keep the dev-mode for all chromebooks -- and that they'll make it easier to boot into custom kernels without a boot-up delay etc -- but I'm not holding my breath.

[1] I actually ran the previous one, but I'll be setting up an updated one, as soon as I move "into" my new server.

Re: $149 Chromebooks

#337

Post by largote » Wed, Apr 01, 2015, 4:11 AM UTC

fpgeek wrote: post #323

noteloop wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There are no native apps on ChromeOS This is not correct, you can run native apps for Chrome OS via Native Client (NaCL) or App Runtime for Chrome (ARC). VLC, a poster child for native apps, will be released for Chrome OS in a few months using ARC. Anandtech has already tested a beta version: http://www.anandtech.com/show/9082/the-chromebook-pixel-2015...

Hmm... If you can port VLC to Chrome OS with ARC, I wonder what happens if you try to shove Firefox for Android into it. Are there fundamental roadblocks that would prevent it from working, or would you just end up with a slow and buggy waltzing bear?

You'd have Firefox running on top of Chrome, so that doesn't make that much sense.

Re: $149 Chromebooks

#338

Post by Mikeb85 » Wed, Apr 01, 2015, 4:18 AM UTC

ssmoot wrote: post #325

sjtechie wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You mean like Atom? A lot of the web IDEs are pretty good nowadays. Not decades behind desktop software.

No. Atom is a text-editor with plugins. It's no more a competitor for IntelliJ than UltraEdit was a competitor to Visual Studio.NET. (IMO) But I was actually talking about in-browser environments like CodeAnywhere.

Atom is in-browser. It just so happens to ship with its own browser (Atom-Shell is based on Chromium)...

Re: $149 Chromebooks

#339

Post by amaranth » Wed, Apr 01, 2015, 4:21 AM UTC

fpgeek wrote: post #323

noteloop wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There are no native apps on ChromeOS This is not correct, you can run native apps for Chrome OS via Native Client (NaCL) or App Runtime for Chrome (ARC). VLC, a poster child for native apps, will be released for Chrome OS in a few months using ARC. Anandtech has already tested a beta version: http://www.anandtech.com/show/9082/the-chromebook-pixel-2015...

Hmm... If you can port VLC to Chrome OS with ARC, I wonder what happens if you try to shove Firefox for Android into it. Are there fundamental roadblocks that would prevent it from working, or would you just end up with a slow and buggy waltzing bear?

I suspect their sandbox doesn't allow code generation since they statically verify you aren't using instructions they can't protect against and that would break it. That means that while you could probably get a Firefox running, it'd be with a Javascript interpreter, not a JIT.

Re: $149 Chromebooks

#340

Post by analog31 » Wed, Apr 01, 2015, 4:24 AM UTC

e40 wrote: post #49

dpcan wrote: post #6

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…

My son uses a Chromebook for homework and a Windows PC for games. I consider it a huge feature that they are separate devices. Much too tempting otherwise.

We're doing a similar thing but with a Raspberry Pi that I've stripped down so it runs nothing but a plain text editor. It's just what we had lying around when the issue came to a head. There was the temptation of the Web, but even the fonts and settings of a regular word processor were too distracting. He's happy with the solution. It's a little bit geeky and weird, which is an attraction for him.