That headline is half truth. Price of a cloud database depends on so many things. what is the I/O, what is the storage utilization, cross-region traffic, etc. Picking one scenario and claiming the cost to be half is too simplistic and a marketing gimmick.
Also which dynamo price are they comparing to? On demand? Provisioned? Reserved provisioned? We had a huge spanner db with low throughput so had to add idle nodes just for storage which also ballooned costs for spanner(the increased storage size here helps)
In the world of high interest rates, companies like Snap that have not figured out a business model in the 10 yeas of their existence are not likely to survive. Not surprising. Unfortunately there will be more of these from Snap and the likes of it.
This is a slick visualization and agree with your point. I feel ZIRP for such an extended time period was nuts and it was responsible for the asset bubble, let weak players survive and supported more risk taking.
As I was looking at the chart, I noticed there was a big bump from 1994 to 1995 (like from 3% to 6%). What happened then? Was it inflation? I recall rates were about 6ish since when I was in undergrad. I guess Greenspan/Y2K/dot com days.
> This is a slick visualization and agree with your point. I feel ZIRP for such an extended time period was nuts and it was responsible for the asset bubble, let weak players survive and supported more risk taking.
I think it might also end up being important to remain competitive in a global market where the other economic superpower's government is willing to invest trillions into building whatever it wants and needs despite profitability[1].
Some things we want/need won't be immediately profitable, or even profitable in the long run. They might not even be things we realize we need until something unprofitable is researched and developed.
Not saying that Snap is something we need, but if the US is forced to strictly rely on market forces to compete, "free" capital via low/no interest rates is a way to kind of do it.
How much of ZIRP-inflated capital went into chasing fanciful ventures like UberEats, Wework, Doordash, Airbnb, crypto and Twitter? State-run capitalism channeling funds into strategically important areas feels like a breath of fresh air compared to handing it to venture capitalists.
There is a nice Youtube channel called asionometry that shows that this was done time and time again (maybe more in Asia and Europe) in things related to electronics and semicon manufacturer, and it failed most of the time. TSMC was a shocking exception though I'm sure there are others.
In the old days, these investments were tiny compared to what is being currently spent on the chips act. I think for STEM a better approach would be a govt sponsored entrepreneurship thing .. imagine the same YC deal but we give this to any PhDs (or maybe even Masters) once in their career. I'm from Canada and when I see the cash wasted on other initiatives, I can't help but wonder why this is done. Not to say Masters or PhDs are geniuses. It is just the current system means only the well-to-do or well-pedigreed can get into places like YC (and maybe elite schools like Berkeley) while intelligence, grit and ambition are more widely distributed.
I agree, hence my comment about the US choosing to rely strictly on markets to allocate capital. If the only lever the country is willing to pull is to adjust interest rates, it's sort of a means to that end, however inefficient.
But how many businesses that might have been profitable just fine and that will be wanted/needed at one point have disappeared or just never happened because their market was killed by one of those post-profitability unicorns high on ZIRP-fueled market cap? Up to what point is it still market capitalism and where does it become barely more than an elaborate hoax benefiting those who lack neither collateral nor the will to leverage?
When I finished undergrad, the most desirable tech company to work for was Microsoft. They paid 55-60K (starting comp) I recall? Interviews were nothing like today (with the insanity of leetcode). What is mind boggling is that I'd have a better quality of life in those days (houses were super cheap) and work was not as competitive/backstabby as today.
The million dollar compensations (when counting stock growth) and intensity/stress around interviews and promotions is what ZIRP wrought for the elite in tech.
Would be interested if people who were mid-career in the mid 90s can comment on their perspective.
> Interviews were nothing like today (with the insanity of leetcode).
Would that mean it was the era of "Why are manhole covers round?"
I don't want to sound like someone who supports leetcode (mostly because I don't), but it seems like it's at least an attempt at measuring something related to programming skills.
Eh...interviews were a mix of brainteasers like the manhole question and coding questions. IIRC some of my MSFT interviews back when allowed pseudocode but mostly wanted to fill the role of e.g. FizzBuzz. Then IIRC there was some validation of C or C++ competency.
Leetcode is FizzBuzz on steroids, but IMHO is not on its own likely to be more predictive of success at a company than the old MSFT way.
Being able to reason about possible design decisions and constraints of things you encounter sounds much more related to programming jobs than being able to code a red-black tree from the top of your head.
Looking back, the highest quality of life I ever enjoyed was when I was working my first software development job out of university in the 90s. $45K/year comp and I bought a condo for $45K. Imagine: being able to buy an actual house for a mere 1X your yearly salary. Unheard of now. It's been all downhill from there in terms of the cost-of-living:compensation ratio. And that's for software development, one of the more financially lucrative careers out there. It's been even steeper downhill for non-techies.
Was there 96-2000 and agree completely. It was a paradisical time and I knew it, because this was nowhere near my first job. Best work situation I ever had. People were great, and bureaucracy was big enough to be useful but small enough to be intrusive.
> It's worth pointing out that, historically speaking [0], we're not an in era of particularly high interest rates yet, just not absurdly low ones.
The question is what is the right level of interest rate in 2023 as compared to say 1960.
19060s were boom time with GI bills, lots of new industries started by veterans, a booming suburban household, booming number of children. People and companies of the time had very low debt aka there was room for them to take on more debt. All of this leads to rising credit, which requires a higher interest rates to keep inflation low.
2023 is an anomalous post-pandemic boom coming from trillions added to US government debt. There is no population boom, no business boom, no new tech boom (excluding the AI stuff going on now). Nobody can take on more debt as most people/companies are completely tapped out. This actually requires lower interest rates but we have high inflation so the FED is keeping interest rates artificially high.
This is to say, that companies like SNAP just cannot continue to exist in a higher interest rate environment. Neither can companies like Meta, Uber, Google, Microsoft without cutting costs somewhere or without letting the stock collapse.
A recession is the only way out because companies will NEVER let the stock collapse in favor of saving their employees.
> A recession is the only way out because companies will NEVER let the stock collapse in favor of saving their employees.
Only as stock in this case is a useful proxy for the finances of the business. It would be better to say that, outside of ridiculously comfortable and easy financial environments, companies will prioritise investing in activities that make money (directly, such as making products, or indirectly, such as security) over activities that don't.
> It would be better to say that, outside of ridiculously comfortable and easy financial environemnts, companies will prioritise investing in activities that make money (directly, such as making products, or indirectly, such as security) over activities that don't.
And these activities are designed to increase the stock price. Everything they do is for the price of stocks. That's how the system is.
That seems a jaundiced viewpoint though. Stock prices are a proxy for the business's value going up, which businesses should in general strive for, unless they have it so monopolistic that they don't need to compete with anyone else. This is just as true in a business without stocks even being available.
I'm not claiming that companies shouldn't strive to raise value of business.
All I said was their activities are designed to boost stock prices, given the prevailing economic conditions. Stock prices may be related to business value or financial engineering or whatever. Doesn't matter how they get there. Their goal is to just keep stock prices rising.
With this in mind, if it ever comes to choosing between employees, customers, product, or anything versus the stock price, they will choose the stock price.
I don't think there's any point saying this in this way, though. Not every company will do anything it takes to hit a stock market goal, even financial engineering. Many will just work on fundamentals, and either go broke or get outcompeted or succeed.
And there are plenty of companies that aren't public companies with any stock to buy.
It just seems far too simplistic. You seem to be critiquing the times that some company use slightly dodgy financial engineering to boost their stock price. But that's not many companies, and not all the time - it's never a permanent fix. There's certainly no need to attach stock price reason to these layoffs, which are much more likely just cost-cutting measures designed to save the company a load of money it thinks is more valuable than the work of those people.
Over the longer term that is true, but the world had gotten used to well over a decade of ZIRP or near-ZIRP after the GFC. It's an assumption that is now deeply ingrained in a lot of business models.
The ECB aims for "2% inflation on average". Inflation and interest rate have a close relationship, so at least for them that's the new normal. I seem to remember that the Fed and other central banks likely talked about the 2% inflation target.
Since 2008, the interest rate was much lower and nobody _quite_ cared, now both inflation and interest rate are higher and the ECB widened the window they consider for their average substantially to straighten things out even though they're way about 2% now.
Still, there has been a shift in the finance world, and the target seems to be 2%. Having interest rates and/or inflation at twice that (or more!) seems to justify the label "high" to me.
Are you saying that central bank interest rate is targeted to be 2%? If so, I don't believe that is true. The target is 2% inflation and full employment, the interest rate is adjusted to whatever level achieves those goals.
It's about inflation (see https://www.ecb.europa.eu/mopo/strategy/pricestab/html/index...), but there's a relationship because their interest rate informs the interest rates across the region they maintain monetarily (practically the baseline, where every other lender adds their margin on top), and the interest rate is the strongest tool they have at their disposal to adjust inflation rate.
So the central bank interest rate isn't targeted to be 2%, but it will be somewhere close to it: too high, and they drive inflation well above 2% all on their own. They can stay lower for quite a while (see the past ~15 years) but that was already considered an emergency situation.
We'll have to see where things go from now, but the recent shift of their language towards "2% in the _medium_ term" indicates to me that we'll stay in the higher end of the spectrum for a while instead of quickly trending down again.
> So the central bank interest rate isn't targeted to be 2%, but it will be somewhere close to it: too high, and they drive inflation well above 2% all on their own.
Isn't it the reverse relationship? Increased rate decrease the velocity of money and decrease inflation?
(At the risk of causing a recession)
Central banks have been raising interests to fight inflation so far.
As long as we’re pointing things out, we should also point out that unsustainable companies have not quite yet collapsed due to interest rates. We’re only seeing some pain, but once we due reach a proper high interest rate era these companies will be gone.
Why wouldn't SPACs count? What allowed those financial scams, spacs, crypto, zombie companies, was this low interest rates environment, for over a decade. Of course SPACs count, they are a consequence of LIR.
I think SPACs are a bit different. They have been around since the 1990s, and for a long time there were maybe a dozen SPACs in a year. In 2021 there were about 600.
I think they will stick around and go back to their previous volume. Grift-o-currency is a scam and I hope it dies soon.
It doesn’t. But if it did, I would still say the collapse wasn’t due to interest rate hikes but rather from increasing regulation banning these scooters from major cities and from a flood of cheap competitors.
Technically, they were trying to innovate a new business and failed. Your comment is effectively blaming them for trying to "figure out a business model", which I find odd. Damned if You Do and Damned if You Don't...
How is a social network supported by ads a new business model by the time Snap came along?
By that point you already had:
1. Facebook, obviously
2. Google+
3. Twitter
4. Tumblr
5. Foursquare/Swarm
6. MySpace
7. Friendster
8. Orkut etc
The only real innovation they brought was the ability to parlay teens sending each other legally dubious dick pics by deleting them almost immediately into venture funding and then an IPO.
IMO, the overlooked big innovation of Snap, and the thing that got them their initial popularity, was their absolutely arcane interface. They've done a lot over the years to make the app easier to use, but in its early days, there was an almost toy-like quality to trying to figure out the various features and functionality. That acted as a selling point to the teenage demographic: not only did friends showing each other how to access some practically secret part of the app act as viral advertising, it also kept your parents off the app.
It also acted as an overt anti-Facebook, in an era where that was a growing trend: No, and then limited, broadcast communication versus FB's "tell everyone everything" defaults, ephemeral messages in stark contrast to FB's "hey, remember this inane thing you said 3 years ago", and a culture of communicating asynchronously with a face attached.
This (perceived) lack of a panopticon made Snapchat a much more appealing form of social media. IMO, it's still one of the better ones.
Snap also innovated by figuring out how to drive obsessive-compulsive behavior among teens with snapstreaks. And even getting them to pay to restore snapstreaks if they missed a day. This is what the brightest minds of our generation are working on.
The challenges at Snap seem to have nothing to do with interest rates and more to do with a challenging ad market, which has affected pretty much all the major players, including Meta & Google.
I don't think it's so much that Snap hasn't figured out a business model - they make a billion dollars in revenue per quarter, how many companies can claim that? - it's that Snap hasn't developed a rational balance sheet due to excessive SBC. If it wasn't for SBC, they would be making money hand over fist.
Snap & PINS are two interesting case studies in how companies in a similarly challenging ad market can have potentially different strategies and outcomes. Both have very depressed stock prices, but both have a clear path to having a sustainable and highly profitable business.
Again, interest rates seem pretty irrelevant to the fate of both companies, only as much as low interest rates encourage economic investment and can fuel the digital ad market.
Acquired is doing some incredible work there to cover up one billionare who ran his mouth in a legally actionable fashion and got sucked into a business deal that literally everyone on earth, himself included, thought was a bad one.
Also X is now worth 4 billion so apparently it's at the very least, not a growth industry.
when you need to re finance the loans, the new interest kick, also high interest means lower valuation so is higher interest + higher insurance premiums (% debt/valuation)
If Evan sold Snap to Facebook when Mark wanted to buy it, Snap would have been turned into what is Instagram today. Mark & Facebook really only have one trick when buying companies - turn them into a newsfeed and make everything public and push celebrities and public figures to use the platform.
Instagram and Snapchat today are two fundamentally different products, and Snapchat is estimated to capture more of the younger demographics in more markets.
Sure, you can say that Instagram today has about 100 billion valuation compared to 15 billion for Snapchat, but the race is far from over. Snap recently exceeded a 100 billion valuation as recently as 2021.
They have lots of revenue. They would need to pare back their operating costs quite a bit to break even, and who knows if they can do that without overly impacting revenues.
Somebody should start a company called Transition Teams. This would be a firm that helps people organize into cohorts during life’s crucial transitions—after college, after divorce, after a professional setback, after the death of a spouse, after retirement. These are pivotal moments when the most humane learning takes place, and yet America today lacks the sort of programs or institutions that could gentle the transitions and maximize the learning through mutual support.
Why would anyone use this as opposed to using Postgres? The value prop of run-anywhere applies to Postgres as well. I see column store and index advisor as the two features but if I don't need these, is there any reason?
It's twice as fast as out of the box PG for most things, and up to 100x faster for reads, depending on what you're doing. So there's that.
Also, from a manageability, on top of the index advisor, there's also vacuum management, so it will figure out when the best time to do the garbage cleanup while minimizing impact on performance.
The 100x analytics seems due to columnar storage like with TimescaleDB, but how do you get improvements on the other things? Is it really faster on a database with good indexes?
It really is, yes. I can't go into a lot of detail on the "why" because it's not open source and the product team would murder me...but I highly encourage folks to try it for themselves. Nothing else convinced me until I did it for myself. :)
We use Postgres as a Datawarehouse, once AlloyDB Omni is stable there is virtually no reason for us not to use it.
Obviously, we use Postgres not for its performance but for its ergonomics, first class dbt support and unbeatable extension ecosystem. Now if you're telling, I get all that with no compromises whatsoever and with a 10-100x analytical query performance increase, I'd be crazy not to use it.
From my perspective, Postgres just keeps on giving.
We encourage folks to draw their own conclusions, but we have done comparisons and ours is more efficient and produces faster results. I only say test yourself because I can't give specific details of how/why, so don't take my word for it. :)
However exciting this is, I wonder how the support and future development will be accounted for. Porting an application is probably easy but the moment android adds a feature that is not supported by the Microsoft abstraction, you are either opting to choose the least common feature set or are maintaining two separate code bases. Both very unfavorable outcomes.
I love windows phone and don't really miss many applications on it but I know many people do. Hope this fixes it.
Exactly. The ability to just tap some buttons on your phone and have an item show up doorstep is magical. The dash button is just another step in that direction. Its ultimate in convenience for people who want it.
> This is a colossal, market-moving play from Google.
Is it that or is it just an effort to stay relevant? If you can get a laptop/tablet that can do the same thing that this Chromebook does and has a full OS for a few bucks more, would you do it? There are tons of tablets from HP/Dell that cost 100-200$ and run full windows OS and have comparable specs to the Chromebooks. As far as I know they are selling quite well. I am wondering if this is Google responding to that pressure.
It's sad to see folks celebrating computing devices that are more extremely locked down than even the iDevices. A Windows PC/laptop is much more open than a Chromebook.
Can Mozilla even make a Firefox browser for ChromeOS? Only Google can make system and native apps, unlike the iDevices where you can access most of the native functionality even if you have to go through Apple's approval and you're not forced to upload all your information into Google's cloud with paltry local storage like 64GB on even a 1500 dollar machine where the information is mined by Google and is accessible to various parties like the Government. They now even track which retail stores people visit using their Android phones or iPhones. http://digiday.com/platforms/google-tracking/
Looks like user and developer freedom are a big concern only when Apple or Microsoft infringe it(even though Win32 is much more open than ChromeOS, after all Google exploited it with the Chrome browser and bundling it with Flash and Java updates), but Google gets a free pass to lock everything down and still call itself open.
Actually, I upvoted this, but on reflection I think this is wrong. Here's why:
- Most Chromebooks are freely bootloader unlocked, allowing
any operating system to be loaded on them.
- ChromeOS follows the same open source model as Chrome—Most core features open, with things like Flash/Wildvine/API keys held secret.
- There are no native apps on ChromeOS—the correct question
is not "Can Mozilla write a browser for ChromeOS", its
"Can Mozilla write an app for ChromeOS" and "Can Mozilla
write a browser for Chromebooks". Both of these
statements are absolutely true.
So I fail to see how Chromebooks are "more extremely locked down" than iDevices.
It's an interesting experiment but I don't think Google is aiming to please the crowd with the need for "native apps" anyways and they wouldn't be terribly interested in keeping the native VLC dependencies alive and/or compatible. It seems pretty obvious to me that Google is trying to push the mainstream consumer market into a "cloud computing/services lifestyle", it only makes sense because their whole business model revolves around web users. So VLC is out, Netflix/Playstore is in.
Not for me, don't get me wrong, I'm not that kind of consumer and it may be safe to state that most people within the HN crowd isn't either. I'm personally following and waiting for the Novena[1] laptop and open hardware to be launched.
Even if chromeOS is removed and Gnu/Linux is loaded instead, chromebooks' keyboards look abysmally ugly and useless to me, otherwise I would at least be excited about the inexpensive hardware.
So yeah, as a consumer I can distill my opinion about this product to "meh...", but as a web developer though, that's a different story, the possibility of Google hardware converting handheld mobile users to desktop-ish mobile users and reaching a broader international audience makes me almost enthusiastic about Chromebooks.
After all, until some potentially better hardware project (Firefox OS [2] or Indie Phone [3], who knows) expands to the netbook-ish form factor ("Lapfox"?/"Indiebook"?), the not-so-open inexpensive Chromebook hardware & affordable by hundreds of millions (potentially billions, we'll see) introduces and welcomes new demographics to the web and is better for the world (in the short run) than almost-fully-open expensive hardware that only a few million can afford (for now), don't you think?
Hmm... If you can port VLC to Chrome OS with ARC, I wonder what happens if you try to shove Firefox for Android into it. Are there fundamental roadblocks that would prevent it from working, or would you just end up with a slow and buggy waltzing bear?
I suspect their sandbox doesn't allow code generation since they statically verify you aren't using instructions they can't protect against and that would break it. That means that while you could probably get a Firefox running, it'd be with a Javascript interpreter, not a JIT.
While I don't work on any of the related pieces, it should be noted that NaCL has dynamic "check this code" support precisely so you can JIT-compile code and execute it safely.
> There are no native apps on ChromeOS—the correct question is not "Can Mozilla write a browser for ChromeOS", its "Can Mozilla write an app for ChromeOS"
Exactly - ChromeOS is a browser. "Can Mozilla write a browser for ChromeOS" makes about as much sense as "Can Mozilla write a browser for Chrome" or "Can Google write a browser for Internet Explorer".
The fact that the Chromium process is what's compositing windows is relatively uninteresting to the end user. It's Linux with a different GUI system. Ubuntu is ditching X11 also, as I understand it, so people other than Google appear to be prepared to redo Linux GUIs.
There's Native Client, so you can write native code. I believe there are things like Emacs for NaCl, though Emacs is relatively useless until someone also ports your favorite programming language, version control, etc. to this model. For programmers, it's tough to have to redo everything, and because we tend not to use the ability to run unaudited native code to install viruses on our machine, it seems like a lot of work for no reason. For the end user, though, things are a bit different. It's a long road but ultimately computers that are easier to use and get fewer viruses is a worthy goal, I think.
Someone could port Firefox to ChromeOS if they found it to be interesting. It would probably be quite difficult, however.
I use ChromeOS as my primary workstation because it removes a lot of headaches I have with computers. I hate configuring things. I just want a terminal with Emacs and a web browser. ChromeOS gives me this. I log into my laptop and it has the exact same configuration as my desktop.
ChromeOS auto-updates and takes 8 seconds to reboot afterwards. It doesn't nag me about auto-updates or checking that Windows Defender is up to date. All my work is saved somewhere other than my desktop/laptop, so if I lose the computer or get another one all I have to do is log in again.
It's very much a thin-client thing, which some people hate, but I find quite suitable for my normal workflow. sshing into a Linux box is generally great for doing work. Using the GUIs is an effort in frustration. ChromeOS solved that issue for me. (Yup, I need an Internet connection to get to my ssh-able Linux box somewhere. I always have one.)
If you are convinced Google is out to get you with configuration syncing, SSH clients that run "in a web browser" (but are native code and preserve all keybindings that you're used to), and "cloud storage" then ChromeOS is probably not for you. Enter developer mode (one keypress) and install your favorite Linux distribution instead -- all the patches necessary to make the devices work are in the open source tree, and unlike with Linux on random Windows laptops, your WiFi will work and you'll get the advertised battery life.
I have given ChromeOS laptops to family members where my previous attempts at giving them computers have failed. A year later their laptops are running the latest version of the OS and didn't have any viruses. I even got them using two-factor authentication with security keys! I was surprised.
Disclaimer: I work on ChromeOS as my 20% project. But I work on it because it solved a lot of my computing problems and I find it worth my time. I wouldn't waste my time advocating to help my employer sell $149 laptops.
Apps running in a window can capture whatever keys they want. So Control-W is interpreted by your shell/app, not by the browser (closing the window). In a tab the browser keybindings still exist, so be sure to set "open in new window" by right-clicking the app before running.
Terminal settings are configurable and persistent.
It works on any machine running Chrome. Things don't quite work right on MacOS, I'm told, but it seems native on Windows and Linux. (And CrOS of course.)
I have the i7 model at work and an i3 model at home. Both are fast. I also have a Chromebook Pixel for situations that require a laptop.
As for monitors, both the desktops and laptops handle my 4k monitor OK, but only at 30Hz (because it's a Displayport MST model which are horrible hacks and are thankfully no longer made). At work I use a 24" and 30" monitor. Works as expected.
You can tune the density per-monitor, so you can run your 4k monitor at 1.25x or 2x density and your normal monitor at 1x density and it Just Works.
There's a dialog for setting up resolutions and relative position of the screens to each other. Attaching a screen means that it's automatically fired up with its default settings.
Each screen has the window bar, and clicking on icons there opens the respective website/app on that screen.
When closing the laptop with an attached screen, it merely disabled the display (instead of going to sleep completely) which was confusing the first time but actually makes sense and is how other devices handle the situation as well.
> Can Mozilla even make a Firefox browser for ChromeOS?
Can Google even make a Chrome browser for FirefoxOS?
All of the PR surrounding the creation of FirefoxOS lauded how it was completely open because it was built on standards like HTML/CSS/JavaScript.
But when Google does the same thing, it is an example of "locking everything down while still calling itself open."
Mozilla has been arguing for years that compile-to-JavaScript is good enough (and based their opposition to NaCl/PNaCl on this principle). It is strange to see argument here against Google that "only true native will do", when that argument is what motivated NaCl/PNaCl to begin with.
> when Google does the same thing, it is an example of "locking everything down while still calling itself open."
Well, Mozilla have a proven track record of providing a self-host alternative for their cloud platform (the main reason I'm using Firefox sync -- with Mozilla servers -- is that I could set up a proof-of-concept sync server[1] on my own hw, see that, yes it does work fine. Contrast that with what Google does ("We have a magic database, here's some of the ideas behind it; sorry you can't host your own, so all our service tech will remain proprietary").
I use Chromium from time to time, but I don't use Chrome -- and I avoid logging in to Google services when I can.
I've been waiting for a Cyanogen-mod for my current phone, because I don't like running stock Android in it's sort-a-open, mostly-closed state -- not to mention the amount of spyware that ships with the platform (it doesn't help that Samsung ships its own software too -- which I'm assuming contains its share of bugs).
Try building a working phone kernel+userland with whatever Google+partner have released and try and convince me that they're good at doing "open".
I hope they will keep the dev-mode for all chromebooks -- and that they'll make it easier to boot into custom kernels without a boot-up delay etc -- but I'm not holding my breath.
[1] I actually ran the previous one, but I'll be setting up an updated one, as soon as I move "into" my new server.
Folks aren't talking about FirefoxOS replacing laptops or desktops though, unlike Chromebooks, if you follow this thread. Nor does Mozilla do a lot of cloud business nor is it in the business of tracking users for advertizing purposes.
The PC software ecosystem has been open historically, even with Windows and OS X, and now there's talk of it being replaced by a completely closed alternative
> now there's talk of it being replaced by a completely closed alternative
If Mozilla and Google both do X, but Mozilla's actions are judged as "open" while Google's are judged as "completely closed," then the words open and closed are losing their meaning.
How does Google's other business activities affect whether, in principle, an HTML/JavaScript-based OS is "open" or "closed"?
Yes, it's true that OS platforms are moving towards sandboxing their apps more and more. This is mainly being driven by market forces, because more sandboxed platforms offer important features:
- more resistant to malware
- more secure (one stupid little app can't steal/delete all your data)
But no one is taking away your Windows or OS X boxes. If people keep wanting them, manufacturers will keep making them.
And while mainstream consumer devices are moving towards being more sandboxed, the ability to tinker is being addressed in other ways, like Raspberry Pi, which are very cool in their own way.
You are kind of conflating a few different issues here.
iDevices are locked down for the purposes of Apple maintaining iron-fisted control over the platform at the expense of both developers and end-users. Chromebooks are locked down for end-user security and ease-of-administration.
Chromebooks allow the end-user to unlock the bootloader and/or run them in developer mode if they really want to do that (and this is all well documented by Google, not akin to jailbreaking), and pretty much the only reason a lot of developers even consider Chromebooks as full laptop replacements is for this reason.
Want to run Firefox on a Chromebook? Install crouton (a project developed by a Google employee) and just go ahead and run Firefox, works fine, just like any other Linux app. Google does nothing to stop this (in fact, they go out of their way to make tools to enable it), they just put enough friction into it to let you know that when you do this all bets are off as to the security of the chroot you are running native Linux apps in.
> Apple maintaining iron-fisted control over the platform at the expense of both developers and end-users.
There are legitimate benefits to having a locked down platform which Apple (and developers/consumers) have decided is worth the negatives. There are zero viruses or malware on iOS compared to quite a few on Android. The quality of applications is significantly higher on iOS because (a) developers have a consistent platform to optimize for and (b) majority of iOS users are more than likely on the latest release.
This approach is working so well for Apple that Google, Samsung and Microsoft are all trying to emulate it.
I honestly don't see any real benefits of Apple's lock-down approach compared to ChromeOS's lock-down approach. Users who want the full security of ChromeOS can use it as it ships and be happy, users who want to live on the wild side can fairly trivially (but with enough effort that they don't do it on accident) break the locks.. best of both worlds, user gets to decide how much they want to live in a locked box.
I don't disagree that there are benefits to the consistency of the Apple ecosystem versus that of Android, but all of those benefits are rooted in Google's lack of control of what phone vendors do with the OS (though they have been working to change that), not lack of control of users or app developers.. the entire jailbreaking ecosystem proves that such freedom doesn't harm the people who want the safe thing, it is just a shame they are forced to constantly fight against the phone vendor (on the Apple side) to keep things open whereas Google (usually -- they've been uncharacteristically dickish with Chromecast hardware) usually goes out of their way to allow the user to run free if they want to.
And these advantages are meaningful not just for the companies, but for the end-user. Most users don't want to root their own machines, they just want a machine that can help them live their lives, make ends meet, and learn more about their world. A virus that bricks the machine keeps them from doing that.
Of course, for some 15-year-old girl in Jakarta, "learn more about their world" may in fact mean rooting their machine so they can deal with grotty Unix details and 8 years down the road build on that to for an MEng thesis and then startup.
> Can Mozilla even make a Firefox browser for ChromeOS?
Sure, Native Client's there and should have all the functionality you need. It'll technically be running inside Chrome, but so is everything else like the settings dialog.
Just because you can replace an OS does not mean it's open. It's about the ecosystem too. How much percentage of Chromebooks could be running Crouton or Linux? I wager less than 2%.
And how many Windows users installed Linux? If it's easier to run Linux or use Crouton on a Chromebook, then that's an argument against the view that they're less open than Windows or iOS.
You're wrong. 100% of Chromebooks are running Linux. If you don't want to use Crouton you can bootstrap Linuxbrew and have access to pretty much any program you'd have on any other Linux distribution.
not just Linux, but Gentoo Linux. the one everyone used to make fun of[1] before Google made it acceptable, and the only one not going the systemd route.
You can't release Firefox for an iDevice either as Apple does not allow native code that you need for Gecko so they are about equal in ability to run system apps front.
Chromebooks also run Android apps so in the near future there will be a lot more flexibility in what kinds of either web apps or Android apps you can develop. Firefox already runs on Android and presumably will be available for Chrome OS within this year.
Apple doesn't allow third-party interpreters/compilers if they can run code from untrusted sources (Codea and some Python environments get around it by only running locally written code).
> If you can get a laptop/tablet that can do the same thing that this Chromebook does
That's not remotely true.
When my grandparents and parents ask me what computer they should get, or my in-laws ask what they should get their kids, I'm going to seriously consider Chromebooks. If they need to run Office, or Minecraft, clearly it's not a fit. But for the tweeting / facebooking / gmailing universe, a Chromebook is a very nice box.
And the number of zero-day exploits, viruses, keyboard loggers is way smaller for a Chrome OS machine. And the update process is a painless reboot. And I'm not helping them try to read data off of a dead hard drive (because it's in the cloud.) And if they want a second or a third, all of their data is visible on all of them. And the battery is great, the wifi works great, the build quality is great. Get them hooked up with two-factor protection, and their accounts and data are pretty well protected.
You're viewing the Chrome OS machines and their competitors, from a tech-savvy super-user standpoint. Many people don't need, don't want, and are hindered by that flexibility and power.
The maintenance cost on a "full OS" is higher than the maintenance cost on a Chrome OS. Period.
One of the problems I run into when recommending Chromebooks (I tried to convince my 75 year old mother, for example) is that almost every user turns out to have a need for something you can't do on a Chromebook. It ends up being a 90% solution for 90% of people, rather than a 100% solution for 80% of the people.
The thing is, most people are replacing a junky old Windows laptop that's just too slow/malware-ridden to use anymore, right? Keep that thing around, drag it out when you need that 5% app, and use the Chromebook the rest of the time.
I mean, if you buy a tablet, you don't worry that it can't print out Excel documents, right? It's still the best device for doing what you're doing with it. So with a Chromebook -- it's a better general-web-use device than a Windows laptop, particularly at the price points that Chromebooks live at.
I think most people want one device not two, and they want to improve their experience with everything, not just most things. While a Chromebook met 90% of my mother's needs, the 10% of functionality it lacked was 75% of her usage.
She works as an interpreter/translator and needs to be able to write documents in multiple language systems (e.g. non-Latin alphabets) in a way she understands.
The Google printer "solution" has always struck me as an exceedingly stupid solution. I have a local microcomputer, and a local printer yet the solution is to send my data to the other side of the world and then push it back on to the printer I am stood looking at? Why? It's stupid. Why not talk directly to the printer without the requirement of an Internet connection?
The same goes for sending files via Dropbox to someone next to you on an iDevice. Since it's very difficult for me to send data from my Android device to my wife's iPad or even from my MacBook to my wife's iPad3, the "solution" is to send it to the other side of the world on to Dropbox's servers for her to retrieve it.
Back in thte 50s when people had visions of an interconnected world and a utopian human future, filled with spaceflight and wonder, I am pretty sure they didn't have visions of needlessly sending data through 50+ network nodes just to get it back again on a device right next to them.
It's so stupid; if you had proposed this "solution" 20 years ago they'd have laughed you out of the room, yet today Chromebooks ("store all of YOUR data ELSEWHERE! Struggle to get it back! Find it impossible to send to a device NEXT TO YOU!") and the associated cloud solutions are all the rage.
Good point, but email is understood to indicate remote people, even if in truth your boss is sat next to you.
Printers don't really fit this model - when you tell something to print (for the printer on your desk), getting it sent to the other side of the world just to come back is daft, energy inefficient and wasteful.
> When my grandparents and parents ask me what computer they should get, or my in-laws ask what they should get their kids, I'm going to seriously consider Chromebooks. If they need to run Office, or Minecraft, clearly it's not a fit. But for the tweeting / facebooking / gmailing universe, a Chromebook is a very nice box.
If you really need Office, and not just Google Docs, you can actually run Office on a Chromebook.
With the eventual capability that they'll be able to run Android programs, as well as PNaCl and Emscripten borrowing from each other and getting better offering opportunity for tons of apps to be ported to the web, and then of course HTML5 and Js becoming the technology of choice for all sorts of apps, Chromebooks are the eventual future.
Maybe they're not the present, but they ARE the future.
And this is the main thing - for millions (hundreds of millions, maybe billions soon), a smartphone is their first entry to the internet. Probably an Android. When they see the Chrome logo in a laptop they can afford, and they already like the Android/Chrome ecosystem, they'll buy it, versus Windows which is associated with viruses, scams, piracy, etc...
Keep in mind Googles current business is still search. The net they're casting has nothing to do with the present, they're gunning for 7 billion people to associate them with computing, and to create the new future of computing.
Go to the third world. Yes some families have cheap PCs running pirated XP, but every kid has a cheap smartphone that they can connect to the internet with. They all have Facebook, WhatsApp, Twitter, etc...
> "Maybe they're not the present, but they ARE the future."
That reminds me of Sun in the early 90's.
I'm not saying you're wrong. But I don't think it's inevitable you're right either. Especially since browser UI toolkits are still stuck in the stone age compared to native counterparts.
Until that gets fixed, I actually think it's probably just wishful thinking.
How ubiquitous is Java? Containers, VMs, etc..., ARE all the rage. Sun was correct as to what technology belongs to the future, they just couldn't position their company properly. Odds are we're all using technology that's part of Sun's legacy...
> Maybe part of some of it, but I'm talking about the Internet Terminal idea.
I'm pretty young, so I was woefully ignorant of this. However the more I read about it, the more it sounds like 'Cloud computing' and 'internet of things'. In fact, Chrome OS isn't too far from their Java Internet Terminal idea.
> Have you tried Web IDEs? They're probably decades behind their desktop counterparts.
I have. My main IDE, and probably my favourite ever, is R Studio which runs in a Webview (or as a webpage) and uses Ace for editing. Two fairly popular upstart IDEs, LightTable and Atom both use web technology. I quite enjoy Caret as well.
Not sure why you think they're decades behind. If anything the fact they're as advanced as they are is impressive, given most have been developed only in the last few years, whereas Visual Studio, Eclipse, etc..., have been around much longer.
Depending on the language and stack you choose, a text editor with a terminal and a REPL may be all you need. I spend most of my day switching between emacs, a terminal and a browser.
Is that because HTML/CSS UIs are more robust and advanced than native UI frameworks? Or because native UI framekits solved all the problems that the vast cornucopia of HTML/CSS UI frameworks are still struggling to solve? Or because everybody looks at all the HTML/CSS frameworks, decides none of them solve their problem, and decides to write their own?
It's because it's so easy to create your own. HTML/CSS is very accessible, well tested by lots and lots of small communities.
There are many HTML/CSS frameworks that are doing really great job and not struggling at all. It all depends of course on what you want to do, but finding a good kit that solves your problem is definitely not the bottleneck of creating a modern HTML UI based application.
Where are the real shipping numbers from Google then? Surely they must know the numbers? Why won't they release it then? The only reason I can think of could be that they aren't all that great.
They probably do, but all those are public companies. They all report sales a certain way. Google isn't going to mess with reporting sales that other companies are making. That's irresponsible.
You can use it in guest mode without a Google account or other authentication. I don't remember if you need to explicitly set it up to do that, though.
I'm sure Google has the numbers since the Chromebooks/Chromeboxes auto-update (part of the whole point, really) so given that they likely have unique device IDs (or ethernet MAC addresses), the 'live devices count' would be rather easy to figure out.
Q3 2013 is a long time ago. According to NPD, Chromebooks had 14% market share in 2014, counting retail and commercial (read: education) channels. Growth was up 85% year over year, too, which is amazing in the context of a stagnant/declining laptop market.
You can spin it all sorts of ways. Keep in mind the 'PC' market includes all those legacy Windows XP computers which are languishing in peoples homes, businesses, corporations, etc...
Chromebook sales are a much bigger part of current PC sales. And vendors do keep expanding their Chromebook lines. If it was a failure they wouldn't.
I just bought a Chromebook for my parents-in-law, even though there were slightly cheaper Windows laptops. The reason? I'm off the hook for support. No malware issues, no backups, no nothing - worst case the thing lets out the magic smoke, you buy a new one and log in again.
And that's why the education sector is flocking to these things. OK, the price is good, but when you factor in order of magnitude less support costs, it's a very compelling proposition.
10 hour battery life ? maybe on idle, I bet this thing doesn't last 10 hours with 50 tabs opened or when playing youtube videos ...
You are right - it's probably more like 8 hours. The older Acer c720 got between 6 and 7 hours streaming Netflix[1]. The Chromebook 13 got 10 hours[2].
Those numbers are with hardware decoding, aren't they. I'd be more intrested in something compute-intensive that was compiled to asm.js. I bet they'll last much less.
That said, these are machines with mobile processors and an OS that is tailored for mobiles. It isn't all that suprising that they are more capable than their normal counterparts.
For my mom/grandmother/dad... They're all using chromebooks... not for the reduced cost, but because the environment is more secure, and fits their needs.
No, I did after the 3rd time I had to remotely remove crapware from my grandmother's computer... when the hdd died, I sent her a chromebook... my mom liked it so much, I gave her one too, and she got one for my dad. They all really like them. They simply work for what they wanted.
Why no Skype? Because the owner of Skype doesn't feel like supporting that. That may make these devices unsuitable for you, but consider that this same owner may want to consider dropping service for you on your other devices, too.
(The ubiquitous presence of an ISA/OS pair is a historical anomaly, and I believe it's on the way out)
You can't log in to a Chromebook for the first time while on a plane.
After initialization, for example the Google Docs suite works pretty well with no connection - and so could any other web app that doesn't rely on connectivity for its base operation: eg. Skype on Windows on a plane will work just as bad as Hangouts on Chrome OS on a plane.
exactly. in the US they also launched with the mobile association. leading them to be mostly ignored by everyone.
the only time i heard about chromebooks in the wild was while walking at low income are shopping malls. the Cricket and att stores would often have a little banner on the floor advertising the "cheap kinda of a computer!"
Heh... wonder what your definition of "everyone" is. Another comment posted above points to data that chromebooks are forming 14% of PC sales in the US. From my personal experience, the local highschool and middle school where I live have basically mandated that each student buy a chromebook -- they don't say chromebook exactly but heavily, strongly suggest it for the low price and maintenance factors. 90+% of the students are carrying around lightweight chromebooks in their backpacks now.
They say if a butterfly flaps in Tibet, it changes the wind in Seattle. We say THAT'S TOO LONG TO WAIT. And that's why we go out and buy a fan, so we don't have to wait on some stupid butterfly to wake up and flap. We alter the wind IMMEDIATELY. BECAUSE THAT'S THE SORT OF PEOPLE WE ARE!!!
Are you like us? Do you enjoy working on challenging problems that directly impact and empower customers at a massive scale? Are you interested in innovating and engineering services and website platforms that power our business operations? Are you sick to death of empowering some no-good butterfly? DO YOU WANT TO STICK YOUR HEAD OUT OF THE WINDOW AND SCREAM "I'M PASSIONATE ABOUT FRONT END AND BACK END DEVELOPMENT AND I'M NOT GOING TO TAKE IT ANY MORE"?!?!? If so, maybe this is your kinda place, yeah? Yeah. YEAH. YEAH.
In this job, you’ll learn: that Mr. Tibetan Butterfly isn't so bad, really. He's just a butterfly trying to get by in the world. In fact, you two would really get along. Maybe you should go get a few drinks together some weeknight. Watch the game. You know, talk it out.
Intangible benefits: A chance to build great software for customers. Have you ever touched software? Huh? If you said yes, you're WRONG. You touched the device on which the software is stored. Just like a story. Or a poem. Or song. Or your memories of childhood.
Potential hazards: If you start talking about poems and songs and your memories of childhood too much, someone's gonna punch you in the arm. So just be warned.
If Woot were a superhero team, you’d be: yeah, funny thing. There aren't yet a lot of superheroes who got their powers after being bitten by a mobile app. But the moment a hero like that shows up? That'll be you. That'll be you all the way.
Worst part of the job: when the butterfly shows up drunk and starts ranting about how people don't take him seriously as a weather controlling device. He'll try to convince you that HAARP is just twenty billion butterflies strapped to a board. Just smile and nod. Smile and nod.
Make sure you bring: a custom printed purple shirt that reads "I got tricked into wearing this by the guy who writes the job descriptions." Wear it. Show it off to everyone. They'll totally be checking for it too. snicker
Basic Qualifications:
•Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science or related field
•3+ years professional experience in software development
•Strong understanding of computer science fundamentals, including object-oriented design, data structures, algorithm design, problem solving, and complexity analysis
•Proficiency in, at least, one object oriented language such as C#, C++ or Java
•Solid knowledge of website fundamentals such as Javascript, HTML, XML, and CSS
Preferred Qualifications:
•Experience crafting automated unit, integration, functional, and regression tests
•Experience developing RESTful APIs with ASP.NET MVC
•Experience refactoring code and evolving architectures
•Experience with distributed computing and enterprise-wide systems
•Knowledge of professional software engineering practices for the full software development life cycle, including coding standards, code reviews, source control management, build processes, testing, and operations
•Experience in communicating with users, other technical teams, and management to collect requirements, describe software product features, and technical designs
Tl;dr: Woot is looking for full-stak developers in Seattle.
PM me if you are interested.
When we say virtual reality, there is this implicit expectation (at least in my mind) that its an always ON experience. The Video here did show some of that too but I think scoping it to specific tasks at least initially would be very powerful. So you don't wear these bulky, dorky glasses/headsets all day long but only when you need to do specific things. And then you return to your normal life.
In the early days of computer, the usage was like that...very task oriented. When you are done you go back to your non-digital life. It's only when the technology and public perception changes, you start carrying PCs in your pocket all day long like we are doing today.
Right - but let's say they get less dorky and more comfortable - and really do have the visual quality we really want - objects look solid and real.
That seems much more useful than a VR that you have to plug out of the real world and immerse yourself in - at least for collaboration with others on real world things... like the example with the motorbike design.
