Chrome, the iPad and the Crossroads of Civilization

Photo: æƒŸâ‘ åˆ»Â¾ John Brownlee on the shift to tailored, mobile-style user interfaces on personal computers:

There's a lot of criticism of Google Chrome OS by the old vanguard of legacy computer users. "We already have netbooks, and those netbooks already run more full featured operating systems like Windows or even Ubuntu that everyone's already familiar with. Chrome OS is a backwards step: why would you give up local storage and backwards compatibility with older programs to be in the cloud when you can use a proper operating system and still be in the cloud too?" These people are missing the point.

Unevenly Distributed: Chrome, the iPad and the Crossroads of Civilization [Gearfuse]

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regeya

Three hundred dollars for something that relies on overly complicated web apps to enable offline capability? For $250, I got an Aspire One that shipped with Windows 7, and Ubuntu and other Linux distributions (currently running Fedora) work just fine.

I realize most people won’t take this into account, but it seems to me that they’ve made the plumbing overly complicated. For universal binaries, modify Android OS for netbook/tablet use (which they’re working on) and make a Dropbox-style service available for Google Netbook available.
bcsizemo

I don’t really feel like I’m missing the point.

What really does the iPad get me? It’s an upgraded e-reader that can surf the web and runs “apps”…

While I’m writing this on a 13″ notebook that’s fairly portable and has a keyboard, and runs proper apps.

And this whole idea of having a dumb device with remote cloud apps could have been done by Apple a long time ago. OS 8.6 allowed you to move applications just by taking the program directory with you. It wouldn’t have been hard to have a harddrive for local installs of programs and the OS. While all your programs and data could have been stored on a compact flash/sd card. Alas nothing like this was ever done, but it wouldn’t have been hard to do.

And while I going on here, I don’t like when people start waxing poetically about file management and how it is some evil that needs to managed by someone else. I never understood the idea of “metadata” and indexing my searching or having all your data piled into one directory. I might be a geek, but I know what data is on my pc, where things are, and what they are.

Perhaps would shouldn’t be making products more dumb, but the users more intelligent.
shutz

It’s simple, Google: make the Internet actually ubiquitous (some variant of wifi that’s at least 5x as fast as a 56k modem, free — or offered by practically all providers for peanuts — and available anywhere) and the cloud automatically becomes ubiquitous as well, at which point th Cr-48 becomes relevant.

As for the whole “replacing Caps Lock with a search key” debate, I think it’s a good idea to replace caps lock, I’m just not 100% sure I want a search key in that spot. I can’t think of a better function for it, right now, though.
Anonymous

The key to this is, as Sun once said “The network is the computer”.
ikoino

@roboton, wow “scrub points”! Have to check out those Cisco devices.

I wonder how encrypted P2P would figure in? Just finished Corey’s Little Brother and now am reading Greg Egan’s Zendegi, which both use plausible peer-to-peer communication to bypass said scrub points. As for crypto underpinnings, I recall some work from Chaum, Goldreich, Micali, Widgerson, and a few others – and that was from 10 years ago! Ancient stuff. All that is needed are private beacons of relatively prime numbers, which we already have, and a widely deployed protocol (SIPP perhaps?) to allow devices to talk to each other directly.

And, oh yeah, a will willing populace – a much harder problem.
Anonymous

The author doesn’t appear to be familiar with the state of the modern operating system.

“[Mac OS X] assumes the necessity of backwards compatibility with the Power PC architecture…”

Mac OS X is no longer backwards compatible with the PowerPC architecture. 10.6 won’t run on the PowerPC. There is support for apps compiled for the PowerPC architecture through Rosetta, but that’s an optional download, and not installed with the operating system — because that backwards compatibility is not assumed.

“…and local storage…”

Any modern Mac can netboot OS X. Local storage is not a requirement.

“…and compatibility with plugins…”

There’s no plugin architecture for Mac OS proper. There can be kernel extensions, control panels or applications, but plugins are for applications. That’s true of what the CR-48 is accessing as well — applications have plugins, too (cf WordPress).

“…and interaction with networks…”

The CR-48 needs to interact with networks in order to access the cloud. This isn’t just a prerequisite for Mac OS, it’s a prerequisite for any device that wishes to access the cloud.

“… and legacy third-party hardware.”

This is the one place where the Chrome OS actually represents something different. But not for long, as the Chrome OS builds in support for different devices released over time.
Frank W

Here’s what I think the point is:
On a proper computer, I’m a citizen.
On a tablet, I’m a consumer.
- Anonymous
  
  Beautifully said!
  
  We’re becoming more and more passive consumers, not active and involved citizens!
Frank W

I think “cloud” is a misnomer. Wrong metaphor. “Hive” is more like it. Swarms of drones servicing the Queen Bee in that big corporate beehive. You get the idea.
The crossroad of civilization I see is all about centralized vs distributed, vertical vs horizontal models of sharing the love. I’ll stick with local storage for life, thank you very much.
CuttingOgres

What point are they missing?
rebdav

My wife works on collaborative projects for a living. She uses a 9″ Eee-PC and a 3G modem to use Google Docs. Where we live it seems to take forever sometimes for Google to load or save. She uses the cloud most of the time but always has OpenOffice and an offline copy of Wikipedia and her work pages for when she cant get Internet for whatever reason.

One upside to a dumb terminal would be longevity, it should be just as useful in 10-15 years, but I think that it would end up like most other computers and phones; useless or dead in 2-3 years.
Guesstimate Jones

“If not for just a few niggling technical issues â€” the trackpad sticks, video runs sluggishly, itâ€™s a little too heavy â€” the Cr-48 would be the perfect gadget. ”

That’s where I stopped reading…
dimmer

“Have to check out those Cisco devices.”

Please do. While the specs are impressive, the in-field performance is still trying to catch up with Juniper/Netscreen, and doesn’t come quite to the specs you are quoting (plus, you’d need to ensure that all internet traffic was symmetric (good luck with that), and load-balance all of that traffic over your mega-arrays of firewalls.

And don’t tell anyone about the “Established” bit — that screws their numbers right up.
Anonymous

Although I disagree with Brownlee… goddamn he’s a good writer.

I wish he’d stay put in one place for longer though so I could actually follow him easier. Kotaku, BoingBoing, Wired… etc, etc.
Aloisius

Mind you that most of these devices would work without an internet connection. They simply cache the software & data on your machine and update it when you’re connected to the internet.

That said, the ultimate goal of these software as a service cloud computing platforms is to extract more money from you by forcing you to start paying a monthly fee to use your software. It also means an end to piracy which does cost the industry some money.

Now, a lot of businesses love software as a service because it means less IT, but plain old consumers? I don’t see it.
Anonymous

The best quote from the post is “old vanguard of the legacy computers”. Is the author, by chance, referring to XT-clone users? :D

I understand the need for simplicity, but complexity in these supposed ‘legacy computers’ hasn’t stemmed from some arbitrary want for power, but actual need for wide-ranging functionality. They did not appear overnight, but have evolved over time.

These arguments about ‘simpler=better’ were pretentious when the ipad was announced, and they still are with the Chrome OS. Yes, I understand the need for simplicity, but you have to keep in mind that it is inversely proportional to functionality. Case in point; iphone multitasking update. Switching between apps was annoying and difficult before this update, which is resolved by adding functionality. But now it requires you to force kill background apps if you want to run that graphics-heavy game, or save battery life. The maintenance-free platform for ‘Regular People(TM)’ requires maintenance. That update also added Folders. File management. Its a little bit more complex now. And it will keep evolving into a more complex platform with more features.

Chrome OS is a noble idea. And the execution is sound, from what I have seen through Chromium OS beta. But I already see countless issues that will affect all users. The lack of even temporary local storage means that all webapps ‘installed’ must either be cross-compatible, a logistical impossibility, or having a permanent free cloud access for all users provided by Google themselves, which is more likely to happen, but which will more or less destroy the ‘freemium’ business model of cloud based apps.

I would also like to add another nod to APT on Ubuntu/Debian. Its the most magical thing I have ever seen, and I went to school for this crap.
Anonymous

They’re missing the point, yes; but they also only make up a 0.1% of the market and spend 99.9% of their time on tech blogs.

I work directly with users, so am able to sit on the wall between both parties; and while one shouts “it’s underpowred”, the other shouts “but it works and is easy to use”; except they’re not shouting … and they can’t hear each other.

Luckily for us there are companies out there like Google and Apple that employ techs that understand users, and don’t spend all day scratching their own itch.

‘Features’ and ‘Hardware’ only matter to the point of functionality; in the real world no one cares if it has 3 extra tickboxes in the settings or .2mHz of power in the CPU, especially if it makes no difference to the usability of the product and the experience they have when using it.
theawesomerobot

If there is anything my mom is familiar with, it certainly isn’t Windows or even Ubuntu.
t3knomanser

For a very long time, the idea has been that more features, flexibility, and power is inherently better. For a great many situations, this is true. But it is not a universal truth.

The public responds to these devices because they promise simplicity. No local storage also means no file management. Applications managed by a server means no application management, no updates to hunt for, etc.

“But those aren’t exactly the most challenging tasks on Earth,” you might say. True- but that’s not the point. The real question is: “Why are we doing these tasks at all?”

There are cases where we have (and want) to. Full-fledged computing devices designed for maximum flexibility will always be with us. They’re just too damn useful. But limited devices that focus on delivering core use-cases with the minimum of fuss and maintenance are also useful.

I think many people expect this to be an either-or. These two differing models have to compete, because we view marketshare as a zero-sum game. If one company increases its marketshare, some other company loses it. If one product gains marketshare, it must be at the expense of some product.

What these limited devices have done, however, is increased the total size of the market. It’s not zero-sum.
- Bloodboiler
  
  “No local storage also means no file management. Applications managed by a server means no application management, no updates to hunt for, etc.”
  
  Cloud computing does nothing to help file management. You still have something named/tagged that represents an image, text document etc. and you still need some ways to keep those “files” organized.
  
  Application management is a horrible mess only on Windows and maybe OSX.
  Modern real operating systems have zero need for application management because of systems like Debian package management. One click to install and uninstall and occasionally one click give you blessing for upgrading applications. That last click is there by default strictly for philosophical reasons and you can check a box to not need it.
  
  If you give up all control over applications you also give up your right to not have to re-learn to use an application every time cloud administrators decide to move to sexier version.
Marja

When the internet connection went down for two days last week, I could keep working because I had local storage for my projects.

With the state trying to censor the internet, and the hosting companies pulling the plug when Joe Lieberman says so, I think relying on the cloud is only going to less and less realistic.
- Marja
  
  P.S. So it’s unrealistic now, and as censorship spreads, it’s going to be less realistic tomorrow.
  - Anonymous
    
    Absolutely.
    
    Post-wikileaks the cloud needs a major rethink.
    
    To transfer the books you read, your personal writings, accounts, contacts, message history, media you consume, etc in a space which can be closed down at a whim takes what little personal power we have left and hand it over to someone you’ve never met.
    
    Consider that these objects were still physical and you decided to give them to a a major corporation, subject to possibly foreign government influence, to own and control when you can and cannot access them (as well as monitor the contents). People would call you insane.
    
    Sure, you might argue, you aren’t Wikileaks. But the line’s only going to keep on moving. And what if one day you really don’t agree with the government?
- imag
  
  Totally agreed. Google wants us sucking right at its teat for everything we do. I’m sure the NSA wants that too. It makes it really easy to shut us down.
- Anonymous
  
  Exactly! If the response to wikileaks taught us anything it’s that we can’t implicitly trust corporations with any data. We will hear loud and long about the cloud being the next big thing, (because apparently there’s a helluva lot of money committed to it), but short of shared photo albums and small naive municipalities it’s a non-starter.
Andrew Pendleton

So much missing the point, it’s not even funny. If 80% of your computer usage can’t be done online, you’re not the target audience for these devices. If you’re comfortable installing Linux on a netbook, yourself, you’re not the target audience of these devices. If you frequently have to work without an Internet connection, you’re not the target audience of these devices. For technically-inclined users with demanding computer needs, there will always be a cheaper, more powerful option. Nobody is forcing you to buy one of these.

On the other hand, for those people who *do* fit the criteria of not frequently taking the device out of their house, and spending most of their time on email and basic web browsing (and there are many in that category, like half of my relatives, even if none of them read Boing Boing), this device will do everything it needs to do and require absolutely no maintenance knowledge, which is a *big* deal. Things that most of this readership thinks are trivial, like installing updates and avoiding malware, are really hard for less technically-literate users, and a computer with *fewer* features can be *more* useful if, by virtue of its limited nature, it keeps its users from ever having to worry about or fix things.
perchecreek

Not much new here. As I recall, corporations that I worked for in the mid ’90s had replaced all of their workers’ desktops with thin clients, and they worked fine. One of my previous employers now has no servers — everything is subcontracted out. Prior to that, all users’ desktops west of the Mississippi were in SF, the rest in NYC. TCP/IP makes this possible, and William Gibson did a pretty good job of working out the implications in Neuromancer. Doug Engelbart gave us a passable interface, and that’s what we’ve been stuck with for 40 years. It’s still pathetic in comparison to our sense organs’ acuity, but as Gibson pointed out, this is just a technical problem. Anyhow, I’ve got a “cloud” in my closet — I keep my data on the net (that is: in the cloud, in my closet), and mount it locally wherever I am. If I want a desktop, I can use something like NX server.

It’s more correct to picture a world where every device is capable of any computational task, and has infinite storage — and, connected to the net (because of the nature of tcp/ip), is a peer with any other device on the net. Why think about and design for a dumb terminal world when every device has infinite storage and computational power? Now, if we could just solve the interface problem, that would be the thing.
imag

I think it’s the author who misses the point. Several of them actually:

- Computer hardware is cheap. If I’m going to pay a couple hundred bucks for a decent screen and crappy computing power and storage, I can get real computing power and storage for fifty or a hundred bucks more. The computer is now way more useful for only 33% more.

- Mobile devices which can’t work without an internet connection are moronic. End of story. The internet is not ubiquitous. The ability to share documents when the internet is around is nice. Being unable to access your documents without the internet is nightmarish. Is an offline cache so hard to implement?

- As a general rule, the internet will always have more latency than the local machine. This means that certain interfaces will alway suck more over the internet than on one’s machine. And web “applications” are not always superior to local applications. My office switched to gmail and it wastes at least twenty minutes of my day, every day (and I’ve had gmail for five years, so it’s not like I’m a noob). Can people not see that having to click a “next” button to access email 26 is moronic? There’s this great device called a scroll bar which allowed us to look through all of our email in seconds. The superior web applications can’t effectively use them. Try sorting. Click. Wait. Go. Everything you do in a web application is: Click. Wait. A web browser, despite what Google wants us to believe, is not a device which is universally good at everything, especially not Chrome. For godsakes – clicking the “back” button means reload the page you were just at. It’s absurd.

I swear, between this shitpile Android phone I’ve got, and hundreds of hours of wasted time in gmail over the last year, and that stupid-assed insta-search they’ve got going, I’m not feeling real impressed with the genius of Google lately.

Making Android actually work – there’s something I could get on board with. A decent version of Android would kick the crap out of ChromeOS on netbooks any day. It can always have a decent web browser if you want the “window on the world” experience.
- Anonymous
  
  “My office switched to gmail and it wastes at least twenty minutes of my day, every day (and I’ve had gmail for five years, so it’s not like I’m a noob). Can people not see that having to click a “next” button to access email 26 is moronic?”
  
  There’s an option to show 100 e-mails at a time. Well, actually 100 “conversations”, so up to 10,000 e-mails at a time. There, I just saved you 20 minutes per day.
  - imag
    
    No. You just now made every page load take almost four times as long. It’s an imbecilic system.
Mitch_M

Like Marja I like the idea of being able to use my computers when the internet is down. I’d try a computer with Google Chrome as a portable web surfing toy if I found one a lot cheaper than a netbook capable of running Debian GNU/Linux, but never as my only computer, or even as my second computer.
classic01

Talking about a failed technology. Indeed it reminds me of the old dumb terminals that depended on the connection to a single server 24/7.

And it is the same technology with an extra downside, today’s computers are mobile! HOW IN THE WORLD would we depend on a reliable connection 24/7 without ANY interruption from anywhere?

The 3g and 4g technology is very flawed and even in major cities you’ll find plenty of blind spots and interruptions.

So, cloud computing is EVEN WORSE THAN 40 years ago, non sense.
Nylund

I have two general categories of things I use my computer for.

1. Pleasure
2. Work

This laptop can probably do about 90% of my “pleasure” tasks, but, at most only about 20% of my work tasks (the simple stuff like email and reading academic journal articles). This can’t replace my computer and it doesn’t really complement it either. Its more of just a redundancy. At least with an iPad, what I lose capabilities is somewhat made up in portability, size, weight, and ability to act as a sort of e-reader.

Maybe cloud computing will one day get to a point where I can actually get work done that way, but we’re still a long way off (at least for my needs). Until then, this neither complements or substitutes what I already have. Its more of an unnecessary redundancy than anything else. If I’m leaving my house in the morning and I need to pick which machine to carry with me and the choices are one that does A, and another that does A and B, I’m going to go with the latter.
Jonathan Badger

What I’ve always been amazed about is how the computing world keeps coming up with variations on a failed idea over and over again. This idea of cloud computing isn’t new — it’s basically just a rehash of the NetPC failure of the late 1990s — which was in turn a rehash of the X-Terminal failure of the early 1990s. Which of course was a rehash of the dumb terminals in the 1980s and earlier — but at least then, there was a real cost benefit to eliminating local storage and computing power.
Anonymous

An Alibaba supplier is sending me details of a 7″ Android tablet, 2.1, with wmcdma phone for appx $300 shipped sample..

Waiting for the market to shake out.. with this I could spend a lot of time in Tokyo..
turn_self_off

Funny thing is, this will be able to work offline. Hell, they demoed pulling the wire and still being able to work on a document in Google doc.

And if one want local storage, insert a usb drive or a SD card. This will be supported, the exact workings are just not finalized yet.

The biggest difference really is that they are now using interpreted code rather then compiled code. This means that the same “app” can be used on any kind of cpu with no effort once the “OS” have been ported.
theawesomerobot

Who do you people have for an ISP? I haven’t been without an internet connection for more than 15 minutes in almost 5 years. If you take 3G into consideration I’ve *never* been without an internet connection for even 15 minutes (at least involuntarily, I do take vacations) for about 4 years. I’m not disagreeing with any points being made as they all seem to be valid, I’m just more surprised that people still have such unreliable services.
- imag
  
  Some of us take our mobile devices outside. And, unless one simply has to collaborate, Google Docs is a joke.
  
  Roboton – at the worst case, I would like to have the possibility to set up mesh networks. That would be a last stand, but it’s worth preserving as an option. If there were serious censorship, meshes could start to make sense.
  - imag
    
    Sorry – I realize now you were addressing 3G. I am in the Bay Area, and I don’t have 3G all the time.
roboton

The internet is easy enough to censor today. Google up a Cisco ASA 5580-40 and do the math to figure out how many of them need to be applied at Mae-East and Mae-West to capture,filter, analyze and act upon a majority of the internet traffic coming into, out of or across the United States. They can perform deep packet inspection on 10Gbps links, with a maximum of 2 million concurrent sessions. 50 or so of these strategically placed throughout is all you really need to capture 100 million internet flows, 100 will capture 200 million internet flows – and these numbers are their real world specs, at wire speed. At 100 thousand dollars each, censorship comes cheap these days.

I would not be surprised to start seeing “scrub points” on the internet that filter out DDOS attacks and other crude “hacks”, especially after the events of last week.