TL;DR: No matter what Richard Stallman may say, there is a place for cloud computing.
In an article in The Guardian, Richard Stallman calls using web based programs "worse than stupidity" and a trap to get people locked into proprietary systems.
Is he right? In some ways, maybe, but as I see it, for the population in general, he's off base.
I'm probably not the right person to criticize. I've only got about 20 years of programming behind me, mostly for companies no one has heard of. I've worked for one ISP, one OS developer, and a bunch of other places. I graduated with a CS degree long enough ago that OO was still a university concept, not actually in use in the field, and I never took to it for several reasons. As it happens, I'm sick of all of that now, and would rather carve stone, but that doesn't matter. I still do a lot of things on computers, using cloud computing of one sort or another, as well as some local computing power too.
Oh, and I know Stallman will never see this, which is just fine with me. I'm a nobody in comparison, but I still think I have a valid point.
Stallman claims that cloud computing is all marketing hype. But let's look at this a bit more deeply.
If you have a computer at home, the chances are it runs Windows. Alternatively, if you don't run Windows, it is most likely you're an Apple Mac user, and thus run MacOS. If you fall into those categories, Stallman has no use for you. Those are both proprietary operating systems and lock you into the same evils that cloud computing does. You're screwed, by definition.
In terms of popularity, I think after that come tablets and smartphones. Those generally run Android - which is open source - or IOS (from Apple) or Windows. Let's just assume that Stallman hates anything from Apple and Microsoft - probably a good bet - and think about Android for a minute.
I have an Android phone, and I love it, but it is running an old version of the OS. It's not even two years old but - despite promises to the contrary - both the manufacturer and mobile carrier have failed to update it.
Yes, technically, I could root the phone, back it up, and install the latest version of Android myself. But that takes time, risks turning the phone into a brick, and requires me to do all ongoing maintenance from there on out as well. While I might eventually attempt it, most of the people who own smart phones aren't going to bother. Too much trouble. So, many people running Android are locked into an old, unsupported OS by a combination of their carrier and phone maker. Stallman probably writes them all off to, if I had to guess, though he might claim the the companies involved are doing evil in the process.
So far, no matter which of the choices I've listed, you're very likely to be in a category that Stallman dislikes.
What does that leave?
In the personal and mobile computing world, that leaves Linux and the latest version of Android, the latter getting updated all the time and leaving more and more people behind as that happens.
So, what makes the few percent that actually run those systems - the ones Stallman might like - tick? They're all serious geeks, for starters. They know their tech and aren't afraid to mess with it. It's fun to do so, in fact.
Let me give a different perspective on this: I run Linux at home and it requires real effort. Here's an example:
Recently, Ubuntu discontinued support for the version of Linux I was using. Their newest version no longer supports older CPUS - like the one found in my laptop - so it cannot run out of the box on it for me. It does run on my desktop, but it has a new UI that I really don't like, which completely changes the way I have to interact with the computer. (I strongly prefer focus-follows-mouse, not click-to-focus, for various reasons, but the Unity UI makes that choice unavailable by default. And there are behaviors in this UI that make no sense on a desktop, but since they are trying to create on UI that will also work on pad computers and smartphones, we're stuck with it. In short, I think it stinks.)
And then there was the time that I had to wait a year for Linux to support a new motherboard, and the time Ubuntu changed to the open source graphics card driver too soon, and it didn't support my system, and getting printing to work was a pain, and I had about three choices for scanners that the manufacturer actually says support Linux, and when I did the recently required OS upgrade, the scanner stopped working and I had to go find 2 totally different things that were required to make it work and execute commands at the command line, as the superuser, to make things right again. Really.
None of that is going to be easy to explain to most users. Stallman would have no problem with it, and compared to most I had little trouble, but I am not about to make Linux support a brand new motherboard. I have a lot of other things to do with my life.
Stallman might argue that I can change to another Linux vendor, and I did look around when Ubuntu unilaterally decided that non-PAE CPUs were so old that no one would care if they weren't supported anymore. But I am not all that happy with anything I have seen so far. Over the years I have used a number of Linux versions, and I have suffered from all kinds of problems with both hardware and software compatibility. Thus far, Linux Mint runs on the laptop - despite being Ubuntu and Debian based - but I am not convinced that I want to run it on my desktop yet. Too many unknowns. I have no idea how that issue will shake out.
Looking at this objectively, Canonical - the makers of Ubuntu - have done their very best to both lock me into their system and piss me off about their hardware support changes. They act just like a proprietary OS vendor in some ways. And given past experience, most of the other Linux vendors I have used do the same.
So on the OS front just about everyone is going to have a problem. Either Stallman won't approve of your OS (walled garden or crap) or, in the unlikely event that we happen to select something he approves of, we're in for a perpetual maintenance nightmare. And I repeat: am fairly well versed in the technology. My parents are never going to run Linux. Never. Way too complicated.
But let's think a bit more about the nature of the beast here. The OS is only the start of the issue, and Stallman's real complaint - at least in that article - is about cloud computing, which goes beyond the OS and into the application arena.
For example, apparently Stallman doesn't like gmail. Because it - and other webmail systems like it, one assumes - will lock their users into one solution, and put them at the mercy of Google (or Yahoo, or Microsoft, or whoever).
Perhaps, but...
I ran my own instance of sendmail for several years, so I could totally handle my own email. It's a configuration nightmare. Not fun. No way is grandma going to do it. And you have to update the software all the time to patch for security issues, and there are always things breaking in weird ways. It is my belief that mail server administration is only for those who enjoy pain.
Beyond, that, though, come other issues. If I run my own mail server at home, I've got no simple way to do something like have email that gets delivered to that home computer also be available on my Android phone when I am not at home. I could setup a POP or IMAP server, I suppose, but then I have to have some way to make it visible to the outside world, when my ISP NATs everything by default. Possible, maybe, but way too much trouble. And not something my mother is ever going to want to understand.
Oh... maybe Stallman wants everyone to have their own server in a data center somewhere, with a public IP address. That would let them run all of this server software in a simpler way, I suppose, but does grandma really want to do that? Or maybe we should all be using virtual machines for this? But wait... that's cloud computing. Can't do that.
What else does using a webmail system get me? Over the years I've had disks fail and lost everything on them. So running my own email system means a very intensive backup system is required. Gee... with webmail, someone else is backing things up, storing multiple copies, and generally making sure the hardware isn't going out of date or failing. I'd call that a win. They are also monitoring capacity and adding more (and faster) CPUs when they are needed. Another thing I can avoid.
So, let's summarize: with gmail - or any of the other major webmail systems - I can read my email anywhere, it's backed up, and I don't have to do hardware or software maintenance on anything on the server side. That adds value in my eyes. But according to Stallman, it's all just there as marketing hype and to lock me into a particular service. I guess the choice is obvious to him.
How about other software?
My various Linux installs come with LibreOffice (formerly Open Office, before Oracle did the nasty to Sun), and it's a fine office suite as these things go. But sharing documents with others - and having edits done in just one place, rather than having to sync up everyone's changes, which is something I actually do - isn't easy with LibreOffice, just as it isn't easy with MS Office. But Google's office apps - available via Google Drive - do a nice job of that. And I never have to update the software. They make my life easier, not harder. And there are other office suite vendors as well, so I have choices. And Google lets me export my data in a number of open formats. So I am not really locked in at all. Huh. Interesting.
I also use the image manipulation program Gimp regularly, and while it is very powerful, it isn't as easy to use for some photo work as I have found some cloud photo software to be. And again, there are many choices here. And since images can be downloaded in common formats... no lock in. Fascinating.
What does all of this mean?
For me - and I suspect for most of us - cloud computing provides real value in the form of simplicity. Of course it is possible to pick a bad provider and/or get locked into something you cannot get out of, but as my examples above indicate, that is happening on the open source side as well. Just how many times should the average user have to reinstall Linux until he gets a version that works for him? And how much research should he have to do to keep it running? (And never mind figuring out how to configure the nightmare that is sendmail.)
For Stallman - and those like him - running everything themselves on their own local hardware may be fine. And I don't mind a bit if he does that. In fact I hope that over time it gets easier for all of us to run this stuff ourselves if we want to. But most of us aren't going to be able to master all of the knowledge needed to make these things run well, or even work at all in some cases. Cloud computing can help simplify things for the end user immensely if all they need is an OS and an up to date browser. That's a lot less to maintain, backup, and keep virus free.
On the business side things get a bit less clear, I admit. But what some forms of cloud computing offer is hard to beat. If your business grows, do you really want to have to add racks of servers yourself to support it? Maybe, but perhaps you'd rather use Amazon's cloud services to deal with at least some of that. If it saves you time and/or money, it might be worthwhile.
Are you locked in if you go that route? Yes. But you're just as locked in with any solution. If you do it yourself you're locked into the OS you pick, the hardware you chose, the data center you lease space from (or the building you lease or own to build your own data center), and so on. And when you go down the application route, you're locked into whatever you buy or build.
Lock in, to some degree, is a matter of fact, and no major change is simple when you think about these things. None.
But if cloud computing means you can get more capacity quickly, when you need it, rather than waiting two weeks for the servers you need to arrive and get configured, that could be a real win for at least some businesses. To discard it as all marketing hype is to miss the point.
I respect Richard Stallman for his principled stance, but in reality, things are a lot more complicated than he lets on. There is a place for cloud computing - of various kinds - for both end users and businesses. Of course there are tradeoffs - and even risks - but if he thinks that doing everything locally avoids those issues, his head is firmly planted in the sand.
Showing posts with label cloud_computing. Show all posts
Showing posts with label cloud_computing. Show all posts
Tuesday, June 11, 2013
Sunday, September 25, 2011
Living With A Chromebook, Part 3
My other posts about the Chromebook are available here:
This post contains some additional notes on my Chromebook experience and isn't quite as upbeat as the others, I am sad to say.
Yes, I am still using my Chromebook heavily, but some flaws are more obvious to me now.
The single biggest problem for me is the feature that make the Chromebook more useful than any tablet: the keyboard. I continue to get key bounce - duplicate letters, numbers, or symbols entered when I am sure I typed only one. I cannot figure out the cause of this problem, and I am perpetually backspacing to delete the second appearance of whatever character it happened to this time.
Additionally there are issues with the trackpad. I've mentioned before that the button built into the trackpad is hard to click, so I turned on tap-to-click, which helps usability overall. That setting, however, may be the source of another problem, or it may just be my own sloppiness, but I regularly find myself staring at a screen in which large chunks of just entered text have gone away. Perhaps one or both of my thumbs (or wrists) hit the track pad as I was typing, but whatever I did, suddenly one or more paragraphs of text just vanish, as if I had selected an area and then replaced it with my continued typing. Except I didn't do that, at least not deliberately.
On top of all that, there is the keyboard feel itself. The Samsung Chromebooks have a keyboard similar to the newer Apple keyboards, with flat keys and limited key travel. Now that I have lived on it for a couple of months I know that it is not an acceptable substitute for a "real" keyboard, at least for me. The action is wrong, the feedback is poor, and my typing is worse on it than on a normal keyboard.
Yes, I could plug any USB keyboard into the Chromebook, but that reduces portability, and would require a mouse as well. The combination would probably eliminate the issues mentioned above, but then I might as well use my desktop machine, which, in fact, I find myself doing when I have substantial text to type.
The combination of those issues gets old. Perhaps some other Chromebook design will have a different keyboard and trackpad combination that works better, but I cannot claim to be happy with what Samsung built into my machine.
Another physical issue is display size. I need a bigger screen when I am doing anything complicated, and that just isn't an option with a Chromebook. Then again I think I would have the same problem with any laptop, so we can chalk that one up as my own issue, not one specific to the machine.
One place I can point to the machine and/or OS as having a real issue is in powering down. The Chromebook has a very nice feature that just lets you shut the cover to turn it off, and open the cover to restart it, right where you were. It's a sleep mode, effectively, and while it isn't new (many laptops have done it for years in other operating systems) it is very much faster than any other system I have used in this way. But sometimes - maybe 1 out of 20 - when I close the cover it doesn't shut down. Instead it continues to run as if nothing happened, and reopening doesn't prompt for a password, since it missed the shutdown signal entirely. Very odd.
A work around is to actually power down, which is still quick, though not as quick as shutting the cover. The boot is fast - another good Chromebook feature - but still not as quick as the restart, so while it will shut down this way it isn't as nice in all cases.
I continue to see some memory leaks, I think, and so I reboot once a week or so, at a minimum. Whether that helps or not is less than clear to me.
The machine also slows down at times that make no sense to me. My Internet connection isn't exactly speedy, so why is it that sometimes I cannot scroll a web page in one tab - possibly for two or three seconds - while the only other open tab is buffering a paused YouTube video? It's like interrupts for incoming network traffic - or perhaps memory allocation to buffer the incoming data - are heavy enough to slow the entire system way down. I can see this when loading non-video pages as well, but in those cases the pages I am loading tend to be large and complex, with lots of items for Chrome to fetch. These slowdowns aren't crippling, but they do cause irritation. I would be curious to know if others are seeing them, or if they are an artifact of my slow network connection in some way.
Finally, I think Google needs to add at least a few visual indicators to the system. I'd like a way to know if I am getting network traffic or not, how busy the CPU is, and whether or not a reboot is required to get updates to Chrome OS installed and running. As things stand there are no blinking lights or system monitors available, which means I don't have the feedback I need to know where problems are, or if a reboot would be a good idea. I can't even tell if the system is in the middle of downloading an OS update when I shut down. Not good design.
Despite the above issues I still use the Chromebook for most of my online activities. I don't have many apps installed, but that's my usage pattern. Overall it is quiet and adequately fast, and certainly good enough for handling email, social networking, blog reading, and the like. That's where most home users spend their time, and I think it will work well for that audience, but there are still some rough edges and I'd really like to see Google address them.
This post contains some additional notes on my Chromebook experience and isn't quite as upbeat as the others, I am sad to say.
Yes, I am still using my Chromebook heavily, but some flaws are more obvious to me now.
The single biggest problem for me is the feature that make the Chromebook more useful than any tablet: the keyboard. I continue to get key bounce - duplicate letters, numbers, or symbols entered when I am sure I typed only one. I cannot figure out the cause of this problem, and I am perpetually backspacing to delete the second appearance of whatever character it happened to this time.
Additionally there are issues with the trackpad. I've mentioned before that the button built into the trackpad is hard to click, so I turned on tap-to-click, which helps usability overall. That setting, however, may be the source of another problem, or it may just be my own sloppiness, but I regularly find myself staring at a screen in which large chunks of just entered text have gone away. Perhaps one or both of my thumbs (or wrists) hit the track pad as I was typing, but whatever I did, suddenly one or more paragraphs of text just vanish, as if I had selected an area and then replaced it with my continued typing. Except I didn't do that, at least not deliberately.
On top of all that, there is the keyboard feel itself. The Samsung Chromebooks have a keyboard similar to the newer Apple keyboards, with flat keys and limited key travel. Now that I have lived on it for a couple of months I know that it is not an acceptable substitute for a "real" keyboard, at least for me. The action is wrong, the feedback is poor, and my typing is worse on it than on a normal keyboard.
Yes, I could plug any USB keyboard into the Chromebook, but that reduces portability, and would require a mouse as well. The combination would probably eliminate the issues mentioned above, but then I might as well use my desktop machine, which, in fact, I find myself doing when I have substantial text to type.
The combination of those issues gets old. Perhaps some other Chromebook design will have a different keyboard and trackpad combination that works better, but I cannot claim to be happy with what Samsung built into my machine.
Another physical issue is display size. I need a bigger screen when I am doing anything complicated, and that just isn't an option with a Chromebook. Then again I think I would have the same problem with any laptop, so we can chalk that one up as my own issue, not one specific to the machine.
One place I can point to the machine and/or OS as having a real issue is in powering down. The Chromebook has a very nice feature that just lets you shut the cover to turn it off, and open the cover to restart it, right where you were. It's a sleep mode, effectively, and while it isn't new (many laptops have done it for years in other operating systems) it is very much faster than any other system I have used in this way. But sometimes - maybe 1 out of 20 - when I close the cover it doesn't shut down. Instead it continues to run as if nothing happened, and reopening doesn't prompt for a password, since it missed the shutdown signal entirely. Very odd.
A work around is to actually power down, which is still quick, though not as quick as shutting the cover. The boot is fast - another good Chromebook feature - but still not as quick as the restart, so while it will shut down this way it isn't as nice in all cases.
I continue to see some memory leaks, I think, and so I reboot once a week or so, at a minimum. Whether that helps or not is less than clear to me.
The machine also slows down at times that make no sense to me. My Internet connection isn't exactly speedy, so why is it that sometimes I cannot scroll a web page in one tab - possibly for two or three seconds - while the only other open tab is buffering a paused YouTube video? It's like interrupts for incoming network traffic - or perhaps memory allocation to buffer the incoming data - are heavy enough to slow the entire system way down. I can see this when loading non-video pages as well, but in those cases the pages I am loading tend to be large and complex, with lots of items for Chrome to fetch. These slowdowns aren't crippling, but they do cause irritation. I would be curious to know if others are seeing them, or if they are an artifact of my slow network connection in some way.
Finally, I think Google needs to add at least a few visual indicators to the system. I'd like a way to know if I am getting network traffic or not, how busy the CPU is, and whether or not a reboot is required to get updates to Chrome OS installed and running. As things stand there are no blinking lights or system monitors available, which means I don't have the feedback I need to know where problems are, or if a reboot would be a good idea. I can't even tell if the system is in the middle of downloading an OS update when I shut down. Not good design.
Despite the above issues I still use the Chromebook for most of my online activities. I don't have many apps installed, but that's my usage pattern. Overall it is quiet and adequately fast, and certainly good enough for handling email, social networking, blog reading, and the like. That's where most home users spend their time, and I think it will work well for that audience, but there are still some rough edges and I'd really like to see Google address them.
Saturday, July 30, 2011
Living With A Chromebook, Part 2
In my previous post on this topic - Living With a Chromebook, Part 1 - I discussed my initial impressions of my Chromebook after about a week. I've now had 2 more weeks on it, and have a few more things to say about it.
In general I continue to be very happy with this device. Battery life continues to be great, and the ability to just shut the cover to shut down is wonderful. My power bill will, no doubt, be a few dollars smaller in the coming months since I am not running the big machine all day anymore.
A few things stand out that didn't get discussed last time, or that I have additional thoughts on:
My other Chromebook related posts are available here:
In general I continue to be very happy with this device. Battery life continues to be great, and the ability to just shut the cover to shut down is wonderful. My power bill will, no doubt, be a few dollars smaller in the coming months since I am not running the big machine all day anymore.
A few things stand out that didn't get discussed last time, or that I have additional thoughts on:
- As I previously mentioned, I keep an encrypted file of all my passwords on the big machine, and so far I have found no way to do that on the Chromebook. Encrypted data, in general, is probably the weak link of this device. I am not yet aware of any Google docs encryption options, for example, so if you're storing medical records, financial data, or anything else particularly private and important you may have concerns about using your Chromebook for that purpose, and I understand the issues. For passwords, though, I may have a solution: passpack.com.
I am not yet 100% certain about this, but it looks very promising so far. Passpack gives you the ability to store passwords on their servers. Encryption is done on your end - in your browser - and they claim even they cannot recover your data if your packing key is lost. They have a reasonable UI which works well with the cut/paste facilities on the Chromebook, so you can click a single button to copy a password into your buffer, then Ctrl-V to paste it into the website you're logging into. It's never visible or readable. They store user name, email, password, URL, and a general notes field with each record, among other things, so you have lots of choices. They can recommend new passwords for your sites, and have a 1-click login facility that I have not yet played with. Their free account lets you have up to 100 password records, and their paid accounts are not all that expensive. As I say, this is looking very promising, and gets around the inability to store encrypted passwords on the Chromebook, at least for me. In a few weeks I will probably be fully converted to passpack and have played with more features. At that time I may have more to say about it.
- A happy discovery of a few days ago: crosh, a command line shell built into the system. It's not a fully featured Unix command line, but it has a few nice built in commands (like top) and an ssh subsystem, which means those of us who want to connect to remove servers using ssh can do so without adding browser extensions or using other machines. Ctrl-Alt-T will get you a crosh command prompt, and from there 'help" gets you a list of commands, and 'exit' gets you out. Alt-Tab moves between your crosh session and the browser window. Inside crosh you can type 'ssh' to get into the ssh subsystem, and again 'help' will get you a list of ssh related commands. For example, you can type 'user foobar' to set the user name, 'host foobar.com' to set the host name, and 'connect' to get an ssh connection to that host. Login with whatever your remote password is and from there it's all familiar. This is a major win for me, though most users will never bother with it.
- If the Chromebook has a weak spot so far it is printing. Google won't install printer drivers on the Chromebook, so you cannot talk to a printer directly. Printing, therefore, requires a different solution... a cloud based solution. Google has a start on this - cloudprint - but it isn't quite ready for me just yet. The general idea is that your local printer is connected to a computer and that you can register that printer with their cloud and then print to it from the Chromebook. Sounds good, but, the local computer has to be powered up to make that work, and the software running on that computer is currently only available for Windows and MacOS, though they say Linux support is coming. I really don't want to have to turn on another computer to print, though. If I do that I might just as well login to Google docs (or whatever) from there and print directly to my local printer, right? And leaving a computer running all the time for the rare times I want to print something seems silly.
HP has a partial solution for this issue: network connected printers that are already cloudprint aware. They are always on and can be printed to (so I am told) by sending an email to the right address. Don't ask me exactly how that works... I haven't printed anything from the Chromebook just yet, and it won't be happening any time soon. I don't happen to own one of these magic printers from HP, and I don't run Windows or Macs at home, so I have no suitable servers. In the meantime I can just fire up the big machine and print from it when I need to, I guess, but a better printing solution would be nice. Mind you, I print rarely, perhaps a couple pages a month. It happens so rarely, in fact, that we destroyed 4 different ink jet printers with gummed up print heads. Ink jets need to be used to continue to work, and we simply don't print often enough to make them last. At the moment we have a cheap color laser printer, which seems to be fine, but isn't capable of talking to Google's cloudprint service on its own. Oh well.
- Another minor issue is keybounce. As I type I see regular appearances of repeated letters, but I'm not sure what is causing it. I cannot force it to happen when I try, probably because I am paying attention more closely - so I rather suspect it is me, doing something a tad odd. My old keyboard has keys that are about 18mm wide, but the tops are only 12mm wide, or so. The Chromebook has keys that are 15mm wide with gaps between keys. I suspect I am a sloppy typist and often hit keys less than straight on. On my old keyboard a miss like that might matter less than it does here, where hitting off center probably means bouncing off the gap filler and (possibly) hitting the key a second time. The newish Mac keyboards are very similar, and I could easily have the same issue there as well. In any case I continue to watch this and try to figure it out.
- Finally, for this post anyway, Spotify is the newest oddity, but it is symptomatic of a general issue. During the past two weeks several people I know have started using Spotify, a music subscription service that seems to be all the rage. To make it work you need to download and install an application, for Windows or Mac, naturally, but I am told the Windows version does run under Wine on Linux. As you can guess, though, I cannot run such an application on the Chromebook, so using Spotify would mean turning on the big machine or getting out a "real" laptop. Thus far I have resisted. I love the portability of the Chromebook, my laptop isn't all that great in general, being ancient, and the desktop, while plenty adequate, is stuck in the den.
What is needed is a chrome browser app for Spotify, or any similar service you might be interested in using. I saw a couple of things that claimed to be Spotify related in the Chrome Web Store, but nothing from the Spotify service itself, and random apps always make me wonder about security issues. So, for now at least, I am not Spotified, which may be a good thing. However, if the available web app list grows up a bit I will probably find it available, and then maybe I will give it a shot.
My other Chromebook related posts are available here:
Monday, July 18, 2011
Living With A Chromebook, Part 1
For a bit over a week now I have been using a Chromebook - specifically a Samsung with both Wifi and 3G - because I am sick and tired of big clunky laptops and desktop machines. In this post - and possibly some others that follow (thus "Part 1") - I will do my best to document the good, the bad, and the ugly of this experience.
First, a bit about me, just to set the stage and my own expectations. I have done software development for 25 years now, with a couple of breaks when I was deliberately jobless. I have used computers starting with a TRS-80 model 1, then on to a Compaq Deskpro, innumerable different machines at college, from mainframes on down, then DOS, OS/2, Windows, and Apple machines at work. Then I abandoned Windows and Apple and went to Unix via a different series of jobs. My home machines now - other than the Chromebook - all run Linux of one sort or another.
In terms of what I do with computers, I am one or two steps above most users in terms of complexity, but I am not among what I would consider the elite power users. I don't generally write programs for fun, but I do maintain my own website, for example. The place where I probably do the oddest thing at home involves maintaining an encrypted file system that can be mounted (or not) in which I store a list of the jillions of passwords I have around the internet.
Most of what I do, like others, is done in a web browser. I read email, watch a few videos, use a few social networks, and consume news and other media. You, your mom, and maybe your grandmother do the same things on their computers. The things that we also share that generally happen outside the browser - word processing, spreadsheets, etc. - are also things that are happening inside the browser now, and which I have been doing there for some time.
Games are another matter entirely. Mostly I don't bother as I find a lot of them boring and/or repetitious. Still, a few hold my interest for a while.
With that all stated up front, this post will list out the things I consider good and bad about the Chromebook so far. Here we go...
The Good
First, a bit about me, just to set the stage and my own expectations. I have done software development for 25 years now, with a couple of breaks when I was deliberately jobless. I have used computers starting with a TRS-80 model 1, then on to a Compaq Deskpro, innumerable different machines at college, from mainframes on down, then DOS, OS/2, Windows, and Apple machines at work. Then I abandoned Windows and Apple and went to Unix via a different series of jobs. My home machines now - other than the Chromebook - all run Linux of one sort or another.
In terms of what I do with computers, I am one or two steps above most users in terms of complexity, but I am not among what I would consider the elite power users. I don't generally write programs for fun, but I do maintain my own website, for example. The place where I probably do the oddest thing at home involves maintaining an encrypted file system that can be mounted (or not) in which I store a list of the jillions of passwords I have around the internet.
Most of what I do, like others, is done in a web browser. I read email, watch a few videos, use a few social networks, and consume news and other media. You, your mom, and maybe your grandmother do the same things on their computers. The things that we also share that generally happen outside the browser - word processing, spreadsheets, etc. - are also things that are happening inside the browser now, and which I have been doing there for some time.
Games are another matter entirely. Mostly I don't bother as I find a lot of them boring and/or repetitious. Still, a few hold my interest for a while.
With that all stated up front, this post will list out the things I consider good and bad about the Chromebook so far. Here we go...
The Good
- The Chromebook is small and light. That turns out to be very nice. Nicer than I expected, in fact. The screen is large enough to be easy to use, but overall this device is quite capable. I am not yet certain if I could use it as an eReader, though. Reading with it in bed might be a challenge as it pretty large in comparison to a kindle or ipad, and the dedicated keyboard I wanted so much (see below) would be a hindrance for that application. Or so I suspect. I'll have to try that at some point, but in the mean time I am quite happy with its size, shape, and weight.
- Good Screen. Nice and bright, easily read, etc. I am pleased with it.
- A Real Keyboard. I didn't want a tablet because I wanted a real keyboard. Imagine trying to write this blog entry on an on-screen keyboard. No thanks. And while an outboard keyboard is possible for a tablet, it makes it two separate things and thus rather hard to hold onto while sitting in a comfy chair, or whatever. For me a built in keyboard was a requirement, and this one has good key feel, though it appears the key spacing may be different from what I am used to. (Lots of typos that I have to fix. Will get over that with more time.)
- The apps just work, mostly. I am not a big app user. My G1 has just a few loaded onto it, and I've only paid for one app ever over there. I am still mostly living in the web itself (rather than in apps running withing the browser) on the Chromebook, but I see there are apps here - I've even poked at a couple - and I am certain they will continue to grow and thrive. In fact, the offline aspects of the Chromebook will require more apps over time, so seeing them is a good thing. The only issue I see so far is that at least some of the apps I have looked at in the Web Store indicate they won't run on the Chromebook. I am guessing there are some differences between the Chrome browser as it runs here and on a "real" computer. Everything I have installed so far has been fine, but that isn't a guarantee they will all work.
- Fantastic battery life. I am getting 8 hours or so out of a charge, and I pretty mush just ignore it until the warning pops up to tell me I have 15 to 20 minutes left. Then I plug it in and let it charge while continuing to work. Simple, and quite nice to be unplugged for so long.
- Amazingly quick start up. A cold boot really is 10 seconds or less. (My linux boxes boot in 50-70 seconds, depending on what you count as boot time. I discounted login time but did include time to launch X and start the browser, to make it a fair comparison with what the Chromebook does.) Even better, though, is sleep mode. Close the cover and it's off. Open it up again and within 2 seconds it's at the login prompt, waiting for your password. For me this is a game changer. I no longer have to leave a computer running all day to have access quickly when I want it. Just open the lid, enter my password, and I'm there. Nice, but it does require changing some habits. No need to set the machine aside - lid open - when I go do something else. Close it. Open when done. Easy, but different.
- Touchy trackpad - it's huge and easy to tap accidentally. I find that at times my cursor has suddenly moved elsewhere thanks to a stray finger or palm grazing the track pad. This is a learning thing, and (to be honest) I have never liked track pads before, but this one is growing on me. It's large enough to let me accomplish quite a bit with one or two gestures, which is good. But it is really sensitive, and click-to-tap, which I have enabled for another reason, makes it more so. I expect to be past this in another week or two and just using it like it was completely normal. I could plug in a USB mouse simply enough, but I really want to keep this to be just the one thing, not something I have to have dedicated space to use.
- The mouse button in the track pad is stiff. There is a single mouse button built into the trackpad, and if you push down hard enough on it you will hear it click. I wanted to use it (as opposed to tap-to-click) but it is so stiff as to make that difficult. I've resorted to tap-to-click and the corresponding risk of accidental mouse clicks when fingers stray. So far it's working, but a slightly less stiff button would have made me happier.
- Unknown keyboard shortcuts and unexpected happenings (like tabs opening). Another thing I have to get used to (and figure out) rather than a real problem. If you're prone to typos, these things happen. Just a few minutes ago I figured out that the key with a magnifying glass on it - where the caps lock key would normally be - opens a new window, and also closes an unused window. (Or maybe it closes the current window... I don't really know which it does yet.) Between hitting that when going for 'a' and the occasional stray mouse movement as described above, I find that a few times a day I am wondering what the heck just happened and have to take my hands off the keyboard and undo whatever I just did. There is a map of the various keyboard shortcuts available, and I looked at it once from an online tutorial I read a week ago, but I have no idea where it is now. (Keyboard shortcuts bug me in general, though. Having them is fine, but make them really, REALLY easy to find out about, OK? Both Windows and MacOS have zillions of these things now and I never seem to know what they are. I can navigate my way around inside vi, though, so go figure.)
- Occasional glitches in video. On my first day I was going through Google's tutorials and there were some videos. Loading them was simple, and they mostly worked, but on one page there were just black boxes where YouTube videos should have been. On another the video played but without sound. In both cases I reloaded the page and everything worked, and I haven't see the issue since, so I don't know what it was I saw.
- A fan. I was hoping for a totally fanless computer, finally. No such luck. There is a CPU fan on this puppy and it varies in speed depending on what you're doing, though it is pretty quiet overall. There are also vents on the bottom of the case that bug me. Setting this machine on your lap won't make you sterile, but I don't know if it will overheat if those vents are blocked by your clothing.
- Oddities in 3G registration. I have barely tried 3G yet. WiFi in my house works fine, and it has also worked at at local restaurant just as well. But I did register for 3G and had two glitches in the process. The first was that registration would not work at my home. I am in a rural area, but we have Verizon service here and it should have worked. In fact, once I registered it elsewhere it does work at home, but I had to do the registration in town. The second glitch was that the registration form was designed by someone whose elevator didn't go all the way to the top. It kept bouncing back to me saying my credit card information wasn't accepted, and I kept looking it over and it was fine. Eventually it dawned on my that I had to remove the spaces from the CC number. Why they couldn't remove them while processing the form data - particularly since they let me enter them in the first place - I don't know. But once I deleted the spaces everything went through. A nit, I know, but user experience matters, and this was just stupid.
That's my list, at least for now. I clearly have to make some changes in my life, like move my passwords out of my encrypted file system and into some sort of online password repository. I am researching those and may have an answer for that soon.
I'd like to see a command line here so I can ssh to to remote machines. That would make things much simpler for me when I work on my web sites. I'd also like to see some blinking lights on the menu bar when it's doing network access. It would be nice to know if any bottle necks are related to data not moving at all, or just moving slowly.
I expect these sorts of issues will be resolved with time, and I have every reason to think that Google's Chromebook idea is going to work out well in the end. Having my data stored in the cloud doesn't bother me. If I have private data of some sort, though, I'd like a way to encrypt it here before it goes to the cloud. I expect that is coming someday, from some cloud based service provider.
In the meantime, google docs is a great set of apps for all kinds of work, and the so called limitation of having to be online while working isn't really that big a deal, at least not to me.
Tuesday, March 30, 2010
Embrace the Cloud
I've got multiple friends who hate the entire idea of cloud computing. They despise storing their data on the servers maintained by someone else, particularly Google.
I am rapidly coming to the opposite conclusion, and that's despite having a less than optimal ISP and a connection that rarely gets any faster than about 850kbps.
As I have used the cloud I keep finding things it makes better or simpler. The first - and most obvious - is backup. If my cloud providers are backing up the data for me, I don't need to worry about disk failures. And as I am one who has suffered traumatic data loss in the past - at work, in an environment where there was no automated backup of desktop systems - I really appreciate letting someone else worry about the safety of my data.
There are a couple of obvious counters to that argument. The first is that my cloud provider might disappear - probably by going bankrupt - taking my data with it, or their backup processes might be less than optimal. For that reason I tend to use major companies as my providers. Yes, bad things could happen, but it isn't likely, and the chances of my laptop being dropped or suffering a disk failure are much higher. And for anything critical I can always download a copy, right?
Another obvious objection is that the cloud provider might decide my data is evil in some way, as when a blogging site shuts down a particular blog for containing spam, even if it really doesn't. Recovery in that case is problematic, but it is possible if your provider has a system in place to review those decisions. My own documents and content are pretty tame, and definitely not spammy or copyrighted by anyone else, so the odds on hitting this issue are slim at worst.
Data security is another objection I hear. "I don't want X to have my data." And I get that to some degree. Some people hate the idea of their cloud provider scanning their data to better target ads, or whatever. At some point, though, it is important to step back and assess the nature of your data usage. An absolute minimum is really private. Financial information needs to be kept safe, of course. Health records might need that kind of protection, but as the nation limps towards electronic storage for that data it might make sense to put what I have online somewhere that my doctor can see it and add to it, right? I suppose the occasional letter or some such should be private too, but in all honesty, who is going to read such things? Who would even want to?
If I had something to hide I can imagine feeling very differently about this, but the vast majority of us are law abiding people who value convenience over that level of security, at least as far as trivial data goes. Yes, I'd love to see something legal that prevents ISPs and cloud service providers from examining your data without your express consent, but until then it's a simple matter of keeping the few things I really care about out of the cloud. The rest can go there, in theory. It's convenient.
And make no mistake about it, convenience is what matters. I like being able to edit documents online and know that they will be there when I change computers, without any complex data migration issues. I like being able to share some of those documents with others too.
Picking the right cloud supplier, though, also requires examining their systems and polices to see what it takes to get your data out if you need to. Here, so far, Google is a star. All the services I use with Google (except Blogger, amusingly) make it easy to get my data out in useful formats. Google docs, in particular, lets me export to my local disk in several ways that can easily be imported into other applications.
I'm sure there will be replies to this post from those who disagree, and I'll be accused of being simple minded about these things. But for me, at least for now, the cloud is looking better and better. Bring on Chrome-OS, too. Something small and fast would be great. Even better than Linux.
I am rapidly coming to the opposite conclusion, and that's despite having a less than optimal ISP and a connection that rarely gets any faster than about 850kbps.
As I have used the cloud I keep finding things it makes better or simpler. The first - and most obvious - is backup. If my cloud providers are backing up the data for me, I don't need to worry about disk failures. And as I am one who has suffered traumatic data loss in the past - at work, in an environment where there was no automated backup of desktop systems - I really appreciate letting someone else worry about the safety of my data.
There are a couple of obvious counters to that argument. The first is that my cloud provider might disappear - probably by going bankrupt - taking my data with it, or their backup processes might be less than optimal. For that reason I tend to use major companies as my providers. Yes, bad things could happen, but it isn't likely, and the chances of my laptop being dropped or suffering a disk failure are much higher. And for anything critical I can always download a copy, right?
Another obvious objection is that the cloud provider might decide my data is evil in some way, as when a blogging site shuts down a particular blog for containing spam, even if it really doesn't. Recovery in that case is problematic, but it is possible if your provider has a system in place to review those decisions. My own documents and content are pretty tame, and definitely not spammy or copyrighted by anyone else, so the odds on hitting this issue are slim at worst.
Data security is another objection I hear. "I don't want X to have my data." And I get that to some degree. Some people hate the idea of their cloud provider scanning their data to better target ads, or whatever. At some point, though, it is important to step back and assess the nature of your data usage. An absolute minimum is really private. Financial information needs to be kept safe, of course. Health records might need that kind of protection, but as the nation limps towards electronic storage for that data it might make sense to put what I have online somewhere that my doctor can see it and add to it, right? I suppose the occasional letter or some such should be private too, but in all honesty, who is going to read such things? Who would even want to?
If I had something to hide I can imagine feeling very differently about this, but the vast majority of us are law abiding people who value convenience over that level of security, at least as far as trivial data goes. Yes, I'd love to see something legal that prevents ISPs and cloud service providers from examining your data without your express consent, but until then it's a simple matter of keeping the few things I really care about out of the cloud. The rest can go there, in theory. It's convenient.
And make no mistake about it, convenience is what matters. I like being able to edit documents online and know that they will be there when I change computers, without any complex data migration issues. I like being able to share some of those documents with others too.
Picking the right cloud supplier, though, also requires examining their systems and polices to see what it takes to get your data out if you need to. Here, so far, Google is a star. All the services I use with Google (except Blogger, amusingly) make it easy to get my data out in useful formats. Google docs, in particular, lets me export to my local disk in several ways that can easily be imported into other applications.
I'm sure there will be replies to this post from those who disagree, and I'll be accused of being simple minded about these things. But for me, at least for now, the cloud is looking better and better. Bring on Chrome-OS, too. Something small and fast would be great. Even better than Linux.
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