News - Xi3 ChromiumPC is world's first Chrome OS desktop

[HEXUS]

The OS designed for netbooks is getting its chance on the desktop.

Read more.

[.havoc]

Not that im a fan...but what is it this does that a tablet doesn't?





In fact...you know what? Both are stupid. I hate both.

With a passion.

[Infinite]

Not that im a fan...but what is it this does that a tablet doesn't?





In fact...you know what? Both are stupid. I hate both.

With a passion.

lol wut?

Did you reply to the wrong thread or something?

[.havoc]

No no - right thread.

What does this system offer that you cant get anywhere else - in particular the new tablet craze which can offer more for what seems like is going to be less - im referring to the cost speculation here by the way - sorry. (The I hate both comment is about this stupid ChromeOS and tablets)

Just seems completely pointless and likely to be expensive for a technology nobody seems to give 2 hoots about really.

Not to mention timing! Really...cloud the thing to be promoting right now?

[MSIC]

Given the very little information about this, I am actually quite curious about this idea of "modular units".
For me, the whole thing about motherboards and PCI cards is now quite outdated, and is a particularly poor way to put a system together when you think about space, heat dissipation etc. It's very clearly a product of incremental upgrades to a very old approach.
I have no idea how this particular 'modular' thing will work (maybe it's just a traditional mobo and slot in cards), but if it really is how i imagine to be a new way of building things, I for one will be very interested.

[crossy]

Really...cloud the thing to be promoting right now?

YES

(Or at least it is according to IBM, HP, Microsoft, Amazon, Google, et al)

Getting back to the topic - I'm kind of in agreement with .havoc's earlier posts - whilst a modular desktop seems like a fine idea, a cloud-based desktop is surely just the dumb terminal rehash that we've seen many times before (and in every case they failed).

[.havoc]

YES

(Or at least it is according to IBM, HP, Microsoft, Amazon, Google, et al)

Meh im still skeptical over the whole concept. The debacle with Sony just goes to show that if the implementation is poor, its going to going come back and bite you on the arse!

The cloud isnt something im completely against - but you know i want it for certain things...like extra storage...not to host my entire OS! Especially say there is an outage of the net (phone line issues/isp has crashed or had bits of its network stolen etc etc) - how does a system like this work then?

[AGTDenton]

I thought the picture was of a heatsink, not the actual PC!

Ideal for grandmothers and people wanting to use the cloud.

[crossy]

The cloud isnt something im completely against - but you know i want it for certain things...like extra storage...not to host my entire OS! Especially say there is an outage of the net (phone line issues/isp has crashed or had bits of its network stolen etc etc) - how does a system like this work then?

Hmm, haven't seen any designs that had OS-less components. Closest to that were the ones where the OS is very restricted (kernel+device drivers) and pretty much all the apps (apart from the low-level ones like the ones that configure the LAN connections) were cloud-hosted. And, as you correctly point out, you've got SAN in the cloud too. The one that gets me is the concept that something like Photoshop could be broken down into "user facing" parts that "rain" down when you ask to your local machine, but the computationally intensive stuff stays in the datacentre in a powerful machine farm.

Yep, sounds great for businesses (or possibly schools) where you can "rely" on a fast, reliable LAN (or even WAN), but for home use I'm not so sure. As you point out the LAN is the 'road' that you're going to drive this bus down - so you must have wide, reliable, freely-available, plentiful and cost-effective broadband otherwise it's a non-starter. The "killer" use for cloudOS's like ChromeOS is supposed to be netbooks and tablets ("use 'em on the bus" etc), but that surely means over the 3G network and most of the providers don't have that good coverage on the higher speeds, plus pretty restrictive data allowances (512MB typically).

At least this desktop would be using home broadband, so (I guess) that's going to be at a reasonable speed. Still, a "desktop" doesn't seem like a good use of the cloudOS concept to me - maybe I'm being old-fashioned? However, it just occurred to me that if you'd got a tech-savvy household (complete with some kind of local server that was syncing to the cloud when needed) then a "desktop lite" like this one could work - less OS means less to go wrong and less patching, so far faster booting plus far better uptimes.