[geeks] Google announces Google Chrome OS

[Mike Meredith]

On Wed, 8 Jul 2009 08:24:04 +0100, Mark Benson wrote:
> OS. For all the effort so far at places like Canonical and the like
> nothing has arrived that is as polished and as complete as it needs
> to be. A large company with community leverage (and money) like

To be fair to Canonical, it takes a _lot_ of work to get a fully
polished desktop operating system, and they're not doing too badly
(providing you accept their way of doing things) given how far
Linux/Ubuntu has come since it started. It's easy to overlook how far
it's come, although it does still have a way to go.

> chance. Dismiss it when it's actually out and it's actually crap.

I don't think anyone is dismissing them. We (or at least I) just don't
trust them, or don't much like the idea of putting all our data into
'the cloud' ... which is the direction it looks like this Chrome OS is
going in.

> > ...especially one that spies on its users like they do with their  
> > browser.

> Why pick on Google alone anyway? Are you sure the other browsers you

Browsers? Who cares about just browsers? Google already picks up on a
_lot_ of information on you from what you currently do with google
services. Imagine how much more information they will have, when
everything on your hard disk is stored on a google branded cloud.

Maybe Google are 'good people' right now, but what happens if they have
a change of management and want to exploit all that information they
have on you ? A quick change of their policy and it's theirs. You might
think that if they do that, you'll stop using Google, but by that time
it will be too late ... they'll already have your information, and
you'll probably be hooked on Google by then anyway.

And of course it's not just Google ... are they able to say no to the
US Government if the feds insist that Google implement a 'hook' to
allow them to snoop on all your data ? Perhaps there are US laws to
protect the privacy of US citizens from that kind of snooping but I bet
it doesn't protect foreigners!

Paranoia ? Perhaps, but Google is big enough that they shouldn't be
trusted blindly.
 
> I say give it a chance, it *might* be really good, and it *might* not.

Given the cloud orientated nature of what they're likely to produce, I
dare say most of us on this list wouldn't be too happy with it. But
ordinary people ? Quite possibly. Given it'll essentially be a Linux
kernel starting X and running Chrome as the "window manager" (there'll
be no need for a window manager), then all the user interface is
"Google's home page". That seems pretty usable already.


-- 
Mike Meredith (http://zonky.org/)
 Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from
 religeous conviction
  -- Blaise Pascal