Posted on 07/08/2009 4:56:31 AM PDT by comps4spice
I apologize, in advance, for not being very diplomatic. That said, Google can kiss my Firefox’s butt.
“Things”, being what they are these days, I’ll stick to Firefox and OffByOne.
10-4?
Bing is crap. It won't even do a search on my last name without incorrectly correcting the spelling.
Free browser wars
ZZZZZZZZZZzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz...
If I try it it'll be on a virtual machine firewalled from the rest of my network.
That's definitely a hit at Windows.
I'd say it's right in their area of expertise. They've had years of experience heavily modifying the Linux they use in their hundreds of thousands of servers.
I’d like to see Google satellite maps feed into a Google photo-realistic flight simulator, where the 3-D computation is done on centralized high end supercomputers with only the final video frames downloaded. Home computers typically only need supercomputer class computation for short periods, the rest of the time spent web surfing. It doesn’t make sense to buy an expensive high-end home computer that will be second rate in a year.
Exactly.
It seems as though many of the folks pushing this stuff have either forgotten or deliberately ignored the huge number of users who do plenty of real work that has NOTHING to do with the Internet.
Would they be surprised to know that it's POSSIBLE to accomplish something without an Internet connection?
There is much more to computing than Facebook, Twitter and email.
And millions of Michael Jackson fans answered---HUH ?
If that's all they are doing, then why bother? I can get a nicely tailored linux for my netbook already.
They're apparently not using the heavy UI that you would, like X-Windows. Plus they probably stripped a lot of stuff out of the kernel that wouldn't be needed for their application.
My "heavy" UI uses about 400M out of the 1G of memory in the netbook. You can't buy a netbook with less memory. Apps add more, but no more than Google's apps. Using powertop I see that power consumption of the UI is perhaps 1W more than the minimum 10W it uses at the console with no UI running (mainly due to Intel chipset inefficiency).
As for the stripping the kernel, that's useful. But any random linux geek can do that.
As long as Google doesn’t bundle Chrome with the O/S. That would be an anti-trust violation and unfair.
‘in their sites’? websites or buildings? do not understand.
Well, then that's something under 400M less on that little netbook, and apps don't add much more when all you're using is the browser.
Kewl. I like that thought. I cannot believe we don't already have this. I'd LOVE to fly over real satellite maps done 3D
The stuff in parentheses is my commented. It was early; I misspelled “sights”.
I mean think about it: why would you want an OS that is very tied to Google itself and won't have the full hardware driver support that MacOS X 10.6 and Windows Vista/7 enjoys?
No, the main reason that they are targeting the netbook is that Google wants everything to be web based. In Microsoft's ideal world, we all run high powered machines as our desktops (or laptops), running Microsoft thick client software that we all rush out to upgrade whenever the next edition rolls out. In Google's ideal world, we bring back the thin client. Our computers are just terminals to access the internet. Once on the web, we search google, use google mail, google docs, google everything so that they can sell billions and billions of little text ads. They wanted to address the shortcomings they saw in the browser, so they built Chrome. Now they want to finish the job and put all of our computing on the web.
The thing is, they aren't far off base. After playing with Chrome for a bit, I must say that I liked the speed and GUI better than Firefox. However, Firefox simply has too many add ons and other goodies I use day to day to switch (though it is possible that this has changed). IMHO, the speed was good, but not too much different than bare bones Firefox. Separate processes is a killer feature that Firefox should have added a long time ago (and will have soon; apparently an alpha of that feature was just released). Where Chrome really shines, to me, is the GUI. It is simple, clean, unobtrusive, and extremely smart. I held off trying Chrome for a while after reading their license, but tried it after they fixed it(http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/150637/google_amends_chrome_license_agreement_after_objections.html). Similarly, I would be really excited to see what kind of a UI they bolt on top of a Linux kernel.
Herein lies the issue for me: Google's products are top notch, but the idea of using them almost scares me from a privacy POV. Take Google Documents. By and large, I prefer to use the office suite (openoffice) on my desktop, but for certain projects and documents the "on-the-go" nature of Google Docs is awesome. Again, the GUI works well and the only real complaint I would have (privacy aside) is some of the odd layout issues I have seen on fairly simple documents when exporting. It seems obvious that Google uses HTML as its intermediary format, and then converts on import and export, so it is easy to see (as a programmer) how this goes awry. The idea of running important documents through Google Docs is kind of scary (most of my stuff in there isn't that important); but the open source alternative, OpenGoo (OpenGoo.org) is noticeably inferior, in terms of UI, import, and export. Sorry for the ramble. :)
Bing is just a new four-letter word on top of an old four-letter word (live). A word on a word. A thing on a thing.
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