2009/07/09
TheRegister: TechCrunch dubs Linux a 'big ol' bag of drivers'
by Ted Dziuba
Fail and Googasm Google has announced the Google Chrome Operating System, which is the Chrome browser bundled with a Linux kernel and a handful of hardware drivers, targeted at netbooks. Yes, this time it's actually an operating system, but don't cream yourself. Yet again, there is a severe case of the media not knowing what the fuck it's talking about.
When Google Chrome was released last year, pundits completely lost their shit over it, claiming that Chrome was a new web operating system. Meanwhile, I pointed out that in fact it's a web browser and that an operating system is a very complicated piece of software that can't really be written off as "implementation details." Now, I guess Chrome is going to be even more operating-systemy, by way of including, uh, an operating system. Journalistic logic rocks.
The pundits are losing their shit all over again, which is fairly impressive, because multiple Googasms from a single product are very rare. Last year, I highlighted the glorious incompetence of writers who fancy themselves tech journalists. Much in the way that everybody who saw Sideways is now an expert on wine, the tragedy of blogging is that anybody with a laptop and a Gmail account is an expert on technology. So now that Chrome will actually be a full-fledged operating system, let's see what the experts have to say.
The canonical example of failure in tech journalism is TechCrunch, a blog that once declared Google's MapReduce to be a system that "reduced the links found on the web into a map that search algorithms could run over." Yes, this will do nicely. TechCrunch embodies all that is wrong with blogging as journalism: shoddy fact checking, writing that would fail a high school English class, and a pre-adolescent in-the-brain-out-the-mouth reporting style.
TechCrunch, um, editor Michael Arrington quotes my previous El Reg article about Chrome not being an operating system and goes on to explain:
Purists complained that a browser isn't actually an operating system, and brought up mundane issues about hardware drivers, memory, and processor management and other red herrings. Sure, they were right - the Chrome browser isn't an operating system...
Google just bolted a big ol' bag of drivers (also known as the Linux kernel) to Chrome and are calling it the Google Chrome Operating System. It's going to be hard for people to continue to deny its operating systemness now.
Proof that you can lead a horse to water, but you can't punch him in the dick without being brought up on assault and battery charges. I'm sure that Linus is pleased to see that his decades of research into operating systems amounts to nothing more than a big ol' bag of drivers for getting people to Twitter faster.
When Chrome was first released, journalists loved the idea that Google was taking on Microsoft, but it just wasn't so. Now that Google will be releasing an operating system, the Goliath vs. Goliath story gets a little clearer. Yes, Chrome OS will be competing with Windows in the netbook market, which is the a tiny sliver of the PC market. No, Chrome will not replace Windows in the years to come. Let's all just calm down.
TechCrunch goes on to report: "Don't worry about those desktop apps you think you need. Office? Meh. You've got Zoho and Google Apps. You won't miss Office."
Ah, yes. Corporate IT workers everywhere have to port decades of esoteric business logic codified into Excel macros to Google Spreadsheets, but the real problem is, what are they going to do after lunch? Have you ever tried to use Google Docs for any serious task? In the words of a true hacker, it's like trying to build a bookcase out of mashed potatoes. The Microsoft Office institution will not easily be overthrown by a bunch of jokers writing JavaScript.
But it's not just Office that will keep Microsoft's hold on the PC market. Can you replace Active Directory with a web app? Is there a site I can visit to connect to my office's shared printer? What do you mean World of Warcraft doesn't run in the browser? How do I play a DVD in Google Chrome?
Keep whackin' away on that Pareto Principle and let us all know how it turns out. In the meantime, I'm going to go play a few rounds of Counterstrike on my Windows-based PC, because the best that my browser can do is Tetris. I'm sure that HTML5 will bridge that gap any day now.
The notion that Google Chrome OS is going to take any serious market share away from Windows is a product of the pathological Silicon Valley attitude that newer is always better, even if nothing has changed. In terms of functionality, web apps have been a regression from their desktop counterparts. Run business apps over a faulty network instead of from your hard disk? What could possibly go wrong? Can I buy an extended warranty with that?
As Mike Arrington says: "The Internet Is Everything. All the OS has to do is boot the damn computer, get me to a browser as fast as possible and then stay the hell out of the way."
Indeed. That's probably why desktop Linux machines with Firefox have already taken such a foothold in the consumer market.
Oh, wait. ®
InfoWorld: Nehalem workstations: A new era in performance
by Andrew Binstock
Last May, InfoWorld presented a comparative roundup of workstations built on the then-new quad-core processors. In that review, I examined an entry-level machine, two midranges, and a high-end system. While impressed by their muscle, I still felt the need to explain how those workstations were a category separate from high-end desktop systems. The Nehalem workstations I examine this year, however, require no such explanation. They move the flag forward so far that few people would consider purchasing them for standard business applications, where a good desktop or laptop would be sufficient.
In this review, I evaluate three entry-level systems (one each from Dell, HP, and Lenovo) and two midrange to high-end systems (from HP and Dell). In an ideal world, it would have been fun to allow the vendors to send their biggest, fastest system and throw those up against each other to see what shakes out. However, top-end workstations today can hold 192GB of RAM, which alone can push system costs into the multiple tens of thousands of dollars. So we settled for high-end workstations under $9,000. This left unexplored only the super-high-end market, which is dominated by specialty applications and narrow industry niches.
Why Nehalem matters
Intel's Nehalem processors represent a truly new generation in the storied x86 processor history. Their release adds so many new features to the processor family that it appears almost unrecognizable. The key new elements are a built-in memory controller on each chip and high-speed interconnect between processors and peripherals. The interconnect, called QPI (QuickPath Interconnect), replaces the long-maligned FSB (front-side bus) that Intel chips were known for, while providing a superset of its functionality. QPI and on-chip memory controllers are both ideas initially implemented for x86 chips by AMD. In this first release, Intel has clearly refined the implementation. The result of both technologies is consistently greater levels of memory transfer than could be attained previously. (As shown in the accompanying benchmark table, the slowest system we review here has memory bandwidth that's twice that of the fastest system a year ago – even though memory latency has decreased by only around 20 percent.)In addition to these advances, Nehalem sports two important changes. First, the cache architecture has been moved to a three-tier system from the previous two tiers. The outermost, Level 3 (L3) cache is a stout 8MB shared by all four cores. When fewer cores are busy, the remaining cores get access to more of the cache. Each core can actually run two threads at once. This SMT (simultaneous multithreading) is a redux of Intel's earlier Hyper-Threading technology, although it scales better on Nehalem than in its original implementation. Hyper-Threading means that eight threads can run at once on a single processor – that's a lot of instructions in flight at any given moment.
The second important change to note is a Turbo mode that kicks in automatically when some cores are unused or underused. Their resources, including power, are contributed to the work of busy cores and can accelerate their performance by 5 to 10 percent, depending on the processor.
Given these numerous improvements, it's no wonder that Intel and its OEM partners promise a massive performance boost over the previous generation of Xeon processors.
CNet: Why Chrome OS? Google says, why not?
by Tom Krazit
Apparently, organizing the world's information and making it universally accessible and useful will require a new operating system.
Google has long worked on expanding its reach beyond mere Internet search. And as many had suspected, it confirmed late Tuesday night that it plans to develop a lightweight operating system based on Linux and Web standards for personal computers.
Why? Well, Google's standard response to any question about why it's working on something other than search is to declare that any product that helps people get on the Web, and enjoy their experience on the Web, benefits Google's advertising customers in that more Web users equals more Google searches.
Yet, Chrome OS represents something more. There's a competitive impact that can't be ignored, no matter how often Google insists that it's in this world to do good rather than inflict pain on other corporations.
Few details were available Wednesday concerning one of the most important and ambitious projects Google has ever undertaken. Sources familiar with the Chrome OS project say Google engineers have only been working on the project in earnest since the beginning of the year, so there's likely a lot that still needs to be ironed out.
Chrome OS is the byproduct of Google thinking it can do better than Windows, Mac OS X, the various flavors of Linux, and even its own Android operating system. It's long been obvious that the world has changed from a personal computing model built for individuals working offline or businesspeople sharing files across a workplace to one where the consumer/business lines have blurred and people are expected to be online anywhere and everywhere.
Accompanying that shift has been the decreasing importance of processing power and operating system complexity. For years, the dirty secret of the computer industry has been that most people don't use nearly the amount of headroom provided to them by modern microprocessors and operating systems.
After all, if you're searching the Web, sending e-mail, typing up documents, touching up photos, and updating your Facebook status-
hardly an uncommon usage model-you're more concerned with speed and battery life than raw power. Those still playing Doom or editing video will always need something more robust, but most people do spend an awful lot of time in the browser and have embraced smartphones and Netbooks as a way of staying online on the go.Google's general idea seems to be twofold. First, it wants to make it easier for regular people to use a computer by making an operating system that is fast, secure, and lightweight enough to run on portable devices.
Sources familiar with Google's plans for the Chrome OS said that the company is working on a new method of "windowing," or switching between multiple applications. Google also believes that the whole idea of storing your files and applications in folders is an archaic way of organizing your data, and plans to unveil a new user interface that handles things a little differently.
Secondly, Google believes that through the use of Web standards like HTML 5-
promoted heavily during its recent Google I/O conference as the development platform of the future-software development on a browser-based OS will be easily understood by developers reared in the Web 2.0 era.This is not a new idea. Palm is betting its future on such a strategy, having introduced WebOS on the Palm Pre as a Web-friendly development environment based on a browser engine running atop Linux. Sound familiar?
Google brings much more to bear than Palm, however. It has an entire suite of Web applications and services that already form much of what you want a computer to do: send e-mail, compose documents, edit photos, and, of course, browse the Web.
But why does Google think it needs two operating systems to address this evolving usage model? Much of the language used to introduce Chrome OS could have been pulled from a blog post two years ago introducing Android, Google's lightweight Linux-based open-source smartphone operating system.
Just a few months ago Google's Andy Rubin declared Android to be "a revolution" that would help Google conquer the write-once, run-anywhere goal that has eluded the non-Microsoft software community for so many years. And Google executives have endorsed the concept of other companies building things other than phones based on Android.
However, Android appears to now occupy a different role in Google's thinking. According to Tuesday night's blog post, "Android was designed from the beginning to work across a variety of devices from phones to set-top boxes to netbooks. Google Chrome OS is being created for people who spend most of their time on the web, and is being designed to power computers ranging from small netbooks to full-size desktop systems."
As noted, there are an awful lot of details that still need to surface before we can glean Google's true intent with Chrome OS, not to mention the potential impact. Google said it plans to release the code for Chrome OS later this year, with the expectation that devices based on the OS could arrive in the second half of 2010.
But one thing is for sure: Google's ambitions are boundless. The company is proposing to do nothing less than rewrite the rules that govern personal computing.
