On 6/10/2011 12:45 PM, Max OrHai wrote:
On Fri, Jun 10, 2011 at 11:09 AM, BGB <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
< snip ... >
there is not a whole lot that seems in common between a browser
and an OS.
yes, there is Chrome OS, but I sort of suspect this will
(probably) fall on its face (vs... say... installing real Linux on
the netbooks...).
BGB, you're being waay too literal-minded! This thread was (I thought)
about architecture, rather than implementation details of current
technologies.
ermm... I think this is my natural tendency, and may have to do some
with psychology...
http://www.personalitypage.com/portraits.html
http://www.personalitypage.com/html/ESTP.html
Chrome OS is a case in point, and FWIW, I expect it to succeed, maybe
even beyond Android, because it's been carefully built to give a
seamless, painless end-user experience. That's what most people want.
Almost everyone who casually uses a computer day-to-day doesn't give a
damn about how "powerful" or configurable it is. They just want it to
work, get out of their way, and not irritate them unnecessarily.
Increasingly, most people spend most of their computer time in a
browser anyway. For quite a few, that is (or easily could be) /all/ of
their time. Chrome OS just trims away several layers of what these
users would consider pointless complexity. As others here have
mentioned, the Web has /already/ become the de-facto universal
communications medium.
dunno...
I got a netbook before, and it came with Xandros...
I was not very impressed, and soon enough ended up replacing it with
Ubuntu...
I actually spend a lot more of my time in the shell though (usually
either Bash or CMD...).
The interesting question to me is, how do we help ordinary people
(like, you know, children) /use/ this powerful new medium to learn,
experiment, express and communicate powerful ideas? As far as this
question is concerned Chrome OS and the Lively Kernel bring us back up
to almost the level of Smalltalk (plus or minus some semantic noise
from Javascript, but hey). Surely we can do better...
dunno about kids now...
when I got started, it was mostly with MS-DOS and QBasic... (and, there
was Win 3.x and Win 95, but generally there wasn't nearly as much
"interesting"/"relevant" in Windows at the time, as most of the "cool
stuff" was in DOS, and if one tried using it from Windows their computer
would generally crash anyways...).
mostly, it all started out as lots of fiddling with stuff...
most of this was in the days where internet was dial-up and generally
exclusive to the computer owned by ones' dad...
oh yays, things were much better with later getting Ethernet in the house...
later, I migrated to C (first TurboC, later DJGPP), and following this,
spent a number of years using Linux (I mostly skipped over Win98 for
being "teh suck"...).
ended up migrating mostly back to Windows with Win2K and WinXP though,
and have been mostly back in Windows land since (mostly for sake of
better driver support and more availability of games...).
my recent discovery of being able to use VMware to run Linux rather than
dual-booting, and VMware being a lot more convinient (albeit the lack of
HW acceleration in VMware is lame...).
or such...
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