...how on earth could anyone justify buying a machine and only running this on it? what a waste, unless of course we see some clever integration of this into advertisement channels as a tool to woe the masses, having this run on an ATM or credit card or bus and train tickets would be really cool...
Call me old fasioned, but personally I have no interest in putting my entire life on "the web" and trusting all my data etc to the hands of people I don't know, working for companies in some other part of the world.
I'll use the internet as a resource and that's it. All other computing, I will always trust to my own physical device located in my personally secured environment where I control who has access to it.
So called "cloud computing" is one of the dumbest ideas ever IMO.
T-Mobile are the latest company to get in to hot water over rogue employees selling customer details to third parties.
Sorry, but I'll never trust other people with anything but the absolute minimum of my personal information.
I think the idea makes sense, but we need a better way to make web apps. We also need a way to integrate the existing ones into the browser. This should be easy, there are already a lot of frameworks designed to get "objects" defined by your apps and then use those objects in other apps. For example, we have OpenOffice defining object "document_edit". If you want to edit a document in your browser, you just call that object, and the same form that you use to edit objects in openoffice shows up in your browser. In Linux, the framework to do this was ORBit, but now it's obsoleted for things that are directly built-in GTK.
Another example would be the WebKit object in Qt. You just use this object in your apps, and it displays web pages.
So the first step into cloud computing /as Google interpret it/ will be integrating existing apps into the browser with a unified framework.
However, I don't see anything bad about using a not-only-browser OS for only browser tasks, so there isn't a big point of a browser-only OS. I feel that Google OS will be HIGHLY overrated!
Also, we are not ready for clouding YET. What about 4 GB games? We still need the same hybrid mode.
BTW, I develop a Linux distro called "Linvo", and I once had the idea of putting the whole personal data/home directory into the internet. Currently, I'm working on the realization, and I have to tell you that there is no reason to be worried about your data, at least in my case, because the data gets compressed and encrypted. Basically, you have a directory mounted via ftpfs, then posixovl, then a compression filesystem (that encrypts) overlayed over the whole thing. This means that to de-crypt your data, I need your password. Which is stored in a md5 hash on the server, rendering it useless if I want to de-crypt exactly this.
And If you use the internet, you have to trust someone. If you don't trust anyone, don't register here, don't register anywhere.
I can imagine we(consumers of home pc's and notebooks)will have a place in our lives for such light weight clients such as this. For example let us imagine that for Google chrome's OS to become of any use it would need to be run on such hardware that 1. is truly light weight and portable for example credit card sized, 2. infrastructure of networks and broadband providers to support the use of and coverage to be increased country-wide ten-fold. A major factor is the BB providers imo, if such a light weight client was available our BB providers could charge for the use of it when out and about as part of our BB package ie. the client is registered and has a unique key to connect to any public AP.
If newtork infrastructure supported such clients and we were able to tie our 'home' data and pc's with such a mobile client, off-board processing could also become a possibility through our 'personal network' and mobile apps.
Two bottle-necks:
Network coverage
light-weight hardware
...it's the only way this OS will be worth while imo...
Huh? I'd have thought it was pretty self explanatory. Essentially any information that relates to you as an individual. (eg addresses, photo's, friends & family etc).
The logical conclusion of "cloud computing" is that all of this information will no longer reside on your home pc, which will become a "dumb terminal", and will be located within the "cloud" network. i.e. on servers and databases belonging to the companies running the network.
I've seen google's office apps being used in companies. I'm not saying that it's a good idea, but I am saying that the system seems to work quite well and is substantially cheaper than the old Microsoft solution.
Things that work and don't cost a lot tend to do quite well. Historically, particularly in Britain, we've closed our eyes to privacy issues on the web. The public doesn't understand it and doesn't want to try so technology companies will continue to gain more and more control over our personal identities and ultimately small businesses.
But i don't see any good reason to switch to Google Chrome OS,now or ever.
I want data to be on MY pc,this way i can keep my eyes on my files and,if something bad occurs to my HD,i know im the only one that got on them.
Google is already a big info collector:what you like,what you look for,what you think,their search engine has the whole world stored on their servers.
I don't want to be the reason behind a 1000000000 servers purchase.
Chrome OS, at the most basic level of description, is the Chrome browser running as a front-end to a minimal Debian Linux installation.
The idea behind it is not to replace desktop operating systems in general, but to create an operating system for cloud computing for users who don't use their computer for much else other than browsing the web and communicating via email. A lot of office workers would fall into this category.
Chrome OS isn't the only piece of Google's cloud system. There is also the Google App Engine, which is intended to power the next generation of web-applications.
Funnily enough, the "cloud" thing makes me think back to the days of dumb terminals and mainframes.
