Chromium OS source released [LWN.net]

Chromium OS source released

Posted Nov 20, 2009 4:56 UTC (Fri) by rsidd (subscriber, #2582)
Parent article: Chromium OS source released

The video says "nothing" will be stored locally. So what good is that 320GB hard disk?

In fact there is one sort of application that everyone I know uses, and runs locally: multimedia. That's the only reason for these monster HDs on home computers, these days. Microsoft Word documents, with all their bloat, won't require more than a few GB, even if you're the world's most prolific writer.

And the multimedia need not be created on the internet either. Nearly everyone has a digital camera, or at least a camera-phone. Many people take videos with it. And then they connect it to the computer and upload it there. Few want to upload everything they have done to the internet. You only upload what you really want to share. Among other considerations, upload is slow comparing to dumping on the hard disk.

If Google's vision comes through, who needs the speed of USB 3.0? The limiting factor will be the internet connection. Who needs a 500-gigabyte hard disk? A flash disk of a few tens of GB will be enough. So it looks like Google is betting on netbooks taking over the world.

A final factor: in many places, including mine (India), there are rather stringent download/upload limits from ISPs. A computer that stored all its data on the net would quickly max out your monthly free allowance.

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Chromium OS source released

Posted Nov 20, 2009 5:17 UTC (Fri) by drag (guest, #31333) [Link] (1 responses)

> The video says "nothing" will be stored locally. So what good is that
> 320GB hard disk?

It's lying. Google gears and other things will store local copies of things
to make it faster. Probably. I think.

I expect what they are saying is mean is that 'there is nothing you will
lose if you destroy this computer'. I hope that is what they mean anyways.
But that sort of thing is too complicated for normal folks to understand.

Chromium OS source released

Posted Nov 20, 2009 9:08 UTC (Fri) by rsidd (subscriber, #2582) [Link]

Yes, this article makes it clearer. You save it locally and it syncs to Google's servers. You can also run some apps locally. They may be oversimplifying but they're not stupid. Still, syncing all one's data -- music, videos, etc -- would take up a lot of bandwidth. I'm still skeptical, but my guess is that they're aiming to make extremely inexpensive devices that will serve as a second computer (purely an internet device) for serious users, and as a first computer for people who don't know computers.

Chromium OS source released

Posted Nov 20, 2009 8:41 UTC (Fri) by TRS-80 (guest, #1804) [Link]

That's a dev machine - I read (somewhere) that they're going to mandate SSDs in production machines.