I was just reading a few articles and watching a couple of videos about Chrome OS and the Cr-48 laptop. From what I’ve seen this is pretty much a netbook that boots and loads a browser as your UI. You do everything from within the browser including additional “applications” that you install in the browser.
As I watched this I immediately thought of Emacs and the jokes about Emacs being a nice operating system. Let’s see, Emacs has been ported to many different operating systems (many more than the Chrome browser and not tying you to ChromeOS), has many different forks incase you would like something a little bit different than the GNU version, has a rich library of extensions and packages (like the Chrome Web Apps), contains a scripting language to customize or further extend it, and some people even use it as a text editor. This sounds a lot like what Google is trying to do with Chrome without the added “benefit” of making sure your eyeballs land on Google web properties (ad placement, user tracking, etc).
The other big hype about Chrome OS seems to be that you can get to your data from anywhere. You just fire up any copy of the Chrome browser on a regular computer or your ChromeOS laptop, log into your Google account and everything is there. All of your applications and all of your data available anywhere. All of it tucked away on Google’s servers for them to mine, use to target you with advertisements, better track you, and if they ever need a bunch of cash, to sell. The universal access to your data is, like Emacs, nothing new; though, selling your soul and identity for it is. Before the Internet was prevalent (or existed) you could use a modem to connect to your computer from anywhere that had a phone line and fire up your copy of Emacs and run all of those great applications and extensions in it. Today, this is just as easily accomplished with an SSH client and internet connection instead of a modem and phone line. SSH clients are available on a far larger number of platforms than is ChromeOS. It’s a default part of Mac OS X, pretty much every Linux distro (don’t know about ChromeOS or if it is even considered a Linux distro), all of the BSDs, and with a copy of PuTTY (a single file) on a USB stick, it’s available on any Windows machine you encounter. The best part is that all of your information is on your own computer safe from any data mining.
So far all of the hype about this revolution that Google has created, all they have done is re-invented what has been around since the mid-1970s. I’m sure there are many examples other than the ones I chose, but it all comes down to a quote “Those who don’t know history are destined to repeat it, poorly”.
P.S. I’m a vi user.
theory14 