Google Chrome OS: Why it will suck, and why I don’t want it

Ah, yes, the much-speculated Google Operating System.  Rumors about a possible OS from Google have been floating about for years now, and it seems that Google has finally delivered the cornucopia of computing goodness to your door.  Coming soon to a netbook near you:  Google’s new operating system.  The news is practically flooded with articles about why Google’s fancy new OS is so important and interesting.

I’m here to tell you why it sucks, and why it isn’t really that special at all.

First and foremost, Chrome OS is based on Linux, and Linux has already been out for a long time, with Ubuntu being the most well-known and possibly the most available distribution.  What makes Chrome OS different from any other Linux distro?  It’s Linux with yet another face, but under the hood it still shares far too much with Linux to be considered its own “operating system.”  (Watch for my next post to clarify the difference between a true operating system and what is merely labeled an OS but in fact is more of a “software environment.”)  Chrome OS = Linux with another pretty face.  End of story.  If you want Linux, download Ubuntu or Debian or Fedora or ArchLinux.  At least they offer up real applications and a fully featured environment…

Second, Chrome OS suffers from the most serious problem that other “cloud-centric” distributions of Linux are plagued with: the all-too-often wrong assumption that the computer will be connected to the Internet most of the time.  The OS is centered around the Chrome browser and the primary apps are online apps, with support for traditional offline apps likely to be minimal.  Case in point: gOS, which came with my Sylvania G netbook.  The first thing I did was toss out gOS and install something else–anything else– because it was such a nuisance.  gOS comes with icons for OpenOffice.org and Firefox, and that’s really about it.  Every other “application” seemed to be Internet-enabled.  Most of the “applications” were Google, Blogger, Facebook, MySpace, Google Docs, and other garbage that requires a (fast) Internet connection to work.  What good is having an ultraportable laptop if you need an Internet connection to use 90% of its functionality?  That’s one reason I documented some of the things you can do to get more out of the G netbook, because it actually comes with the majority of the standard GNOME environment, which includes a significant number of games, control panels, applications, and other tools…none of which has an icon in the default installation at all!  Chrome OS is doomed to suffer the same fate, because it is nothing more than “gOS reloaded” for all intents and purposes.

FEW PEOPLE WANT TO BE TETHERED TO THE INTERNET WITH THEIR LAPTOPS AT ALL TIMES.  LEARN THIS, GENIUSES: INTERNET APPLICATIONS SUCK.

Which brings us to my third point:  INTERNET APPLICATIONS SUCK. The ones that don’t suck aren’t Internet applications at all.  I don’t know anyone that uses Google Docs, and Google Docs is no replacement for an installation of OpenOffice.org or Microsoft Office.  One might be tempted to counter with a mention of the heavily-used Google SketchUp or Google Earth, but the difference is that those are true applications which just happen to be Internet-enabled or come from a site on the Internet.  Google Earth uses data pulled from the Internet, and Google Earth totally rocks.  Google Docs, though, is sparse on features and not very compatible with other office applications.  It is not a viable replacement for a real office package for most people, and it feels like “Microsoft Works lite” in general.  Looking beyond Google, we see sites such as MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, and other “social networking” sites taking longer and longer to load, being plagued by excessive use of widgets, and other serious issues.  Contrast this with traditional instant messenger applications and even the ever-hated AOL, which may not be the smallest programs in existence, but provide much better performance, a larger feature set, and better integration with other programs.  Internet applications are limited in their implementation and capabilities, as well as by the lack of proper support for industry standards that have been around for a long time now.

What’s very depressing is that I actually see many reputable sites hyping Chrome OS and discussing whether or not it threatens Windows, Linux, Mac OS, or even embedded operating systems.  Chrome OS is nothing more than a Linux distribution with a stupid idea behind it, and Google has spent considerable time and money on dumber things (can you say YouTube?)  This isn’t like Android, which opened up options in the mobile phone market considerably.  This is something targeted at machines that can already do more than Chrome OS can do.

In short, Google Chrome OS is obsolete before it ever rolls out.  Apparently, I’m not exactly alone in my opinions, and this article sums it all up quite nicely.

Sylvania G’s VIA C7-M versus Windows XP

I changed my Sylvania G (original, non-Meso) netbook to Windows XP/Linux dual-boot to test some software I’m working on, and discovered that while Windows XP certainly does boot and run in general on the G, some kind of system timer or timing loop is severely out of whack!  I wanted to use my little G as a portable gaming machine from the Windows XP install, and to my horror, ZSNES couldn’t decide what speed it wanted to run!  Now, I’ve never had a single issue with ZSNES on any computer I’ve ever tried it on, even preferring the Windows port of it over the Linux native one, and not once has a problem existed with ZSNES that I couldn’t find an easy fix for, until now.

I’ve been researching the matter and gathering evidence, and I may have a potential answer to the problem.  Linux requires activation of the VIA C7 Enhanced PowerSaver module e_powersaver to clock the VIA C7 CPU properly between 400 and 1200 MHz; apparently the default speed of the CPU is only 600 MHz instead of 1200 MHz, because Linux installs without e_powersaver and Windows XP report a ~600 MHz processor where a 1.2 GHz one exists.  Here’s the extremely weird part, though: if I check the System control panel shortly after bootup and read the clock speed, sometimes it registers a clock speed of 198 MHz (about 200 MHz) which isn’t even one of the ACPI P-states for the VIA C7-M 1.2 processor.

I’ve unlocked the Windows HAL options (I’ll post how to do that at another time) and switched between ACPI Multiprocessor PC (the default for the image I used) and ACPI Uniprocessor PC and MPS Uniprocessor PC, all of which use the local APIC for IRQ routing but the MPS variant of which doesn’t theoretically touch ACPI.  Nothing seems to have helped.  I have two working theories as to what’s going on here, and how it might be fixed:

1. A calibration loop in Windows a la BogoMIPS in Linux is being screwed up by the VIA C7, or
2. The VIA C7’s PowerSaver feature is ignored or incorrectly used by Windows (via generic ACPI P-states) and it’s throwing off some kind of timer that ZSNES relies on for proper emulation of the 65816 CPU and SPC audio processor.

So far, I haven’t found a solution to this problem, and Sylvania’s site is extremely unhelpful, with only Windows drivers and a new version of gOS, but no BIOS updates or further information.  I’m looking into the technical stuff on the VIA c7 now, and it looks like the solution (assuming Windows isn’t doing something sinister) lies in clever manipulation of the C7 model-specific registers (MSRs) that control the processor’s power state.  If ZSNES is mis-calibrating some kind of tight internal timing loop because of some kind of CPU clocking issue, then tweaking the MSRs may be the solution to the problem.  Unfortunately, I’m no Windows developer, so I’m not certain how I should approach the problem.  I don’t think it’s isolated to ZSNES either, but I don’t recall what I saw that justifies that belief.  In any case, I’m working on it.  It’s just one of many pesky projects I’m hitting my head against at the moment.  We’re still working on that remote access software package; in fact, someone found our site and called us, and I had to sort of turn her away.  It’s all a bit behind schedule, and there’s not really much I can do to make things proceed any more quickly.  Stay tuned…

What about your OS of choice drives you insane?

I’m writing a huge post about operating systems, and I thought that examining what other people don’t like about the OS they use currently would be an interesting and fun thing to do.  So, leave a comment on this post with your own little laundry list of ideas about what you’d like to see changed or fixed.  Please observe the following restrictions, however:

1. No zealotry/fanboyism allowed.  This isn’t the place for “XXXXX OS sucks because it’s not YYYYY OS.”  Too much of that junk already exists.
2. Have something original to say.  We already know Linux can’t run (all) Windows software and that Windows is a gaping security hole.

Go for it!

XP Antivirus 2008 and XP SecurityCenter

I swear, if I ever find the person who created these two fake antivirus programs, I will personally beat the tar out of him.  I went to two totally different small business clients today, both of whom had picked up XP Antivirus 2008 and one of which also managed to get XP SecurityCenter and SmitFraud, all at once.  What an annoyance this thing is becoming!

Let me be very explicitly clear: unless you know for a fact that a security product is a legitimate product from a company that operates on the up-and-up, such as avast! antivirus, you MUST NOT DOWNLOAD AND INSTALL IT.  There are literally hundreds of fake security solutions out there today, and they have been growing almost exponentially.  Before XP Antivirus 2008, it was WinAntiVirus 2006 and 2007, and other crummy little beasts like SpySheriff.  Where previously we would see fake or low-quality “registry cleaners” and “cookie washers” finding their way onto peoples’ computers under the guise of “boosting performance” and “fixing errors in the system configuration,” now we see these stupid fake security programs cropping up practically everywhere a Windows PC exists, and it’s maddening to have as many clients as Tritech does and still see a significant percentage of them end up with what I call “nagware” on their machines, despite not using Internet Explorer and generally staying infection-free for months or even years.  Despite my own best efforts to educate my clientele (because user education is the only true way to improve computer security, no software can its place), I am still receiving reports of these horrid little nuisances to this day.

The psychology of how these things work is very interesting.  Basically, computers have taken an ever-increasing prevalence in our lives since the Internet became accessible to home users en masse in the mid-90’s.  Computer security threats have become mainstream news items, and you can’t open one single PC magazine without seeing a plethora of ads for poor-quality (but nevertheless legitimate and somewhat effective) security software plastered all over the place.  With the amazing growth in identity theft awareness, the public’s perception of “what’s out there” must be no less than a step away from complete paranoia!

That’s where the fake security software comes in.  Playing on the conditioning of the common user to seek solutions in SOFTWARE to all of these immense and overwhelming threats, these products end up on computers after such trivial searches on major search engines as “free anti virus” or “free spyware cleaner” or “free trojan remover.”  Combining our fear of identity theft, hackers, scammers, spammers, fraudsters, and lotteries in Zimbabwe with the post-2000 “I want it all and I want it now” instant-gratification mentality, these products are a perfect storm to extort our hard-earned dollars through promises of “threat removal.”

You see, when you install one of these scummy programs on your PC (often by accident or by trickery), you’re greeted with warnings about the status of your computer.  I’ve seen pop-up balloons by the clock with messages that “Windows has detected spyware infection!  You should download the latest antispyware updates to fix them.  Click here to install antispyware!” (that’s not precise but it gets the point across), when in fact there is no such infection other than the software itself.  The “XP Antivirus” series likes to pop up a “scanning window” that shows “viruses” it “found” along with an explanation of why they’re dangerous, along with a fake “threat level” as well.  I called B.S. on the whole thing 100% for certain today, when it listed a virus about which it stated “this virus corrupts your system BIOS.”  If the machine had a virus that actually damaged the BIOS code, the machine wouldn’t boot!  If they meant the “CMOS RAM” instead (a misnomer but still the generally accepted term for where the BIOS stores its settings), the computer might complain a lot on boot, but otherwise would automatically reconfigure itself to sane defaults and boot right on up anyway.  But I digress.

The fake security programs ultimately will attempt to convince you that you have some kind of threat to your security on your computer that is quite serious, and then attempt to get you to pay up for the software or the repairs.  It’s such a simple modus operandi, but insanely clever.  Please don’t be fooled by promises of increased security.  If you’ve already been infected with this garbage and you’re in our service areas in North Carolina, you can check out our spyware and virus advice page or contact us to get it wiped out.  Otherwise, find a reputable independent technician or local computer service shop in your area to take care of it.  (Avoid major chains such as Geek Squad like the plague, because it’s hard to know what the skill level of the technician will be and their prices are usually quite ludicrous.)

As always, you can contact me directly if you have questions or feedback about this article.