How To Respond to Google Chrome OS

UPDATE: Fixed 'Response' to 'Respond' in title. Sorry about that.

We all have to do it, so I might as well take my turn.

First impression: no surprise here.

There are expectations in two forms here. We can expect certain things to come of this and we can expect certain things to disappoint us about this. There is a third, external expectation that techies will divide into a camp of people who think its Rilly, Rilly Important and a camp who thinks you're all wasting your time. I mean, gosh, its almost like this is exactly like any other topic we split down some arbitrary middle about. Get over it.

I Expect To Like:

Cheaper netbooks
Installing Chrome OS on old hardware

I Expect To Dislike:

Feeling like I have an OS that won't let me install anything but a browser
Not being able to install Android Apps
Not being able to run real Chrome on Android
Having no way to persist the state of a Javascript VM, so that I can close applications or save memory on long running ones and resume my work later
Still not being able to sync my bookmarks and open tabs and page states properly (or at all) so that applications that are just websites can easily move from my little netbook to my desktop
Not getting Android on netbooks, because Chrome OS gets pushed, instead

I Expect To Be Let Down About:

Getting Chrome OS on Tegra hardware with O3D
Google doing a funny video in time square asking What is an operating system?
Never having Google Notebook on a Google Netbook

My lack of pros in these lists that have anything to do with Chrome OS itself are not lost on me. I'm actually excited about it. I think its a really good thing. The availability of this certainly quality project will do great things for our perception of the web, the price points of netbooks, and Christmas in a down economy. The thing is, Chrome OS, at least initially, will be great for what it is not, rather than what it is.

CARDIAC: The Cardboard Computer

I am just so excited about this. CARDIAC. The Cardboard Computer. How cool is that? This piece of history is amazing and better than that: it is extremely accessible. This fantastic design was built in 1969 by David Hagelbarger at Bell Labs to explain what computers were to those who would otherwise have no exposure to them. Miraculously, the CARDIAC (CARDboard Interactive Aid to Computation) was able to actually function as a slow and rudimentary computer. One of the most fascinating aspects of this gem is that at the time of its publication the scope it was able to demonstrate was actually useful in explaining what a computer was. Could you imagine trying to explain computers today with anything close to the CARDIAC? It had 100 memory locations and only ten instructions. The memory held signed 3-digit numbers (-999 through 999) and instructions could be encoded such that the first digit was the instruction and the second two digits were the address of memory to operat...

Statement Functions

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How To Teach Software Development

How To Teach Software Development Introduction Developers Quality Control Motivation Execution Businesses Students Schools Education is broken. Education about software development is even more broken. It is a sad observation of the industry from my eyes. I come to see good developers from what should be great educations as survivors, more than anything. Do they get a headstart from their education or do they overcome it? This is the first part in a series on software education. I want to open a discussion here. Please comment if you have thoughts. Blog about it, yourself. Write about how you disagree with me. Write more if you don't. We have a troubled industry. We care enough to do something about it. We hark on the bad developers the way people used to point at freak shows, but we only hurt ourselves but not improving the situation. We have to deal with their bad code. We are the twenty percent and we can't talk to the eighty percent, by definition, so we need to impro...

Developing Upwards

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