231–240 of 256 posts
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I know several developers whom I consider very good at their jobs who use Chromebooks exclusively for work.
Smart people can still make bad decisions for a variety of reasons.
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3 years ago: https://plus.google.com/+LinusTorvalds/posts/dk1aiW4JjHd
In october 2015: http://www.zdnet.com/article/linus-torvalds-would-like-to-se... > we'll actually see a real ARM (well, preferably ARM64) machine one of these days that you can actually develop on, rather than treat just as a development target. The Rasberry PI's, Beagleboards etc are all fun, and all the cellphones and Chromebooks are clearly selling well, but as a developer I feel something is still missing in the…
Only he doesn't (say different things) here. He's talking about the Chromebook as a computer -- he couldn't care less about the Chromebook concept itself and the underlying OS for himself. But he likes the hardware. He himself runs a Chromebook now (used to have a Macbook Air 2-3 years ago), but with the OS wiped and regular Linux installed.
But when it comes to Linux adoption in general, he sees Chromebooks as a positive development.
My sister works in a semi-developed area of Africa where electricity is unreliable in quality and presence at the best of times, and it's turned out the computer equipment she brought over years ago was pretty ill suited to the conditions and developed problems immediately. She went with all Apple because that was the craze at the time, and most of it was inoperable by the end of the third year. After listening to he…
>if they have good electricity, air conditioning or potable running water Even in Africa, not having those and having good, stable and cheap internet is a really weird case.
It's true that it is weird from the Western perspective, but it's actually true.
I work in a building with a company who build Flow-batteries. Their biggest markets are in South America and Africa where the mobile networks are often more reliable than the electricity networks because they run batter backups on their towers.
Communications are often seen as more important than anything else. If you have access to a phone you can find out where to get clean water.
See for example More Africans have cellphones than have electricity or piped water: http://www.timeslive.co.za/scitech/2014/11/19/more-africans-...
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> In less than 12 months, optimizations have increased the performance of Web applications using asm.js from 40% to within 67% of native, which is still about the current figure, per arewefastyet: http://arewefastyet.com/#machine=29&view=breakdown&suite=asm... Not going to cut it for AAA games. Most likely it can be improved significantly with enough work, especially with WebAssembly, but I'll wait until I see it.
Anyways, what does the end game look like here? Only very small games can be downloaded every time you want to play. Most games have large resources that will need to be cached. But the cache will be large enough that you'll want to surface it to the user, and let them decide what to uninstall, especially on Chromebooks with their puny storage. Plus games are something you want to be able to play offline. So we just…
Offline webapps is a thing now. With things like Service Workers hopefully we'll see it more frequently.
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I gather that you're implying the primary purpose of Chromebooks is tracking users to deliver ads? Are users tracked any more on a Chromebook than a) a MacBook Air running Chrome b) a MacBook Air running Safari?
> Are users tracked any more on a Chromebook than a) a MacBook Air running Chrome b) a MacBook Air running Safari Can you use a Chromebook without being logged in to a Google account? Can you block ads, trackers, and other creepy JavaScript on a Chromebook? Even the ones from Google?
That's a good point. You log in to the OS via a Google account. You can log out of that account from Chrome-the-browser, though. (In fact it looks like I'm currently only logged in to my employer's Google Apps account, and nobody's told https://accounts.google.com about my Chromebook account.) And I log into my Chromebook with a dedicated Google account, but I realize that not everyone will.
However, you can install Privacy Badger or anything else that you could install on other Chrome platforms, and it should effectively block Google's cookies from reaching other domains. There's probably some JS involved in running the browser itself that's shipped on the device, but if you want to avoid all google.com-delivered JS, you should be able to do that. (I believe this is no different from Chrome on the Mac.)
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>Adobe Creative Suite, Microsoft Office, CAD etc... only runs on Windows. That's flat out incorrect. I'll bet Adobe sell more Mac licenses.
You are right of course, I was comparing them to ChromeOS. Now that ChromeOS about to be able to run Android apps Photoshop Express and Office Mobile will be available, but they are essentially offering a different feature set.
I'll also be surprised if it doesn't suck compared to the desktop version.
You can just about justify running Photoshop and Illustrator on a remote server. But most of the world doesn't have the bandwidth for 4K video previewing. Or even for uploading native 4K from a camera.
I think it's hilarious how little the HN community knows about Chromebooks. Every time it pops up, there's a wave of people saying "I don't know a single person who has one!" and "They seem useless without an internet connection!" and "I wonder how they compare to mac books." People forget that most of the world doesn't write code, and doesn't need native applications. They write email, take selfies, and write extrem…
Moreover, Chromebooks, when paired with a good cloud IDE like https://c9.io , are excellent for writing code - more so than any "traditional" OS, since the local system is only dedicating resources toward keeping the interface responsive, and not wasting them on background distractions like local search indexing or filesystem defragmentation. Meanwhile, if you accidentally forkbomb a cloud development server, your mu…
But off the top of my head:
Not all developers work on projects which can be hosted by a third party company and require always-on super-stable internet access.
My sister works in a semi-developed area of Africa where electricity is unreliable in quality and presence at the best of times, and it's turned out the computer equipment she brought over years ago was pretty ill suited to the conditions and developed problems immediately. She went with all Apple because that was the craze at the time, and most of it was inoperable by the end of the third year. After listening to he…
This is interesting. Where in Africa does she live where dust is a problem but Internet is not?
So to answer another way, wherever the internet is good or bad, so is the dust. That's why these systems had to be field-capable.
e: I should clarify that I meant wired internet. The smartphones are for providing cellular internet, which she gets more places than not. Wired internet is less generally available to her far outside of the cities. She's not particularly interested in technology, so she doesn't use smartphones as USB modems for her portable network for their Chromebooks, opting to transfer documents to the phones to upload or email. If I understood right, she waits until they're back to transfer any other contents to their office computers.
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How is it a different way of computing? You can use it offline and frankly any laptop nowadays without internet is pretty crippled. It's actually really easy to believe and frankly not particularly interesting. The cost of a chromebook is like 1/3 or something of that of a mac. I'd sure hope that unit volume was higher..
Most of my friends (ages 20-ish on up to 50s), when told to write a resume, build a spreadsheet, make a drawing, etc. will reach for Word, Excel, Illustrator/Photoshop, whatever. Local computing, while fading in importance, is still the dominant mode for most people for some tasks. Other tasks have completely made the transition for many people. Listening to music; everybody under 30 streams it, and looks at me funny…
Personal anecdote - I like updating my resume at least once a year. A few years back I struggled to find the latest local copy of my Word resume. Frustrated, I found one that was a few years old, updated it with details for the intermediate years and proceeded to import it into Google docs. Now I don't have to look too hard to find it.
Does it bother no one else that this is so locked to the Google eco-system? Perhaps more than any other device on the market is locked to an eco-system, including Apple's iOS walled garden? I also fear that between this and iOS, we are starting to see a divide between production and consumption devices more than ever. I don't consider that a good trend.
Not really. Ideally you go into these things with your eyes open. I can see our house going from five heavily used Apple devices to zero in the next couple of years. If the barriers were as bad as people pretend we could not do that. It probably helps that I have an awareness of the issues involved and haven't bought in too heavily to the more restrictive services. I likely will have to buy some of the kid's games ag…