News Google's Chrome OS gets official launch

I do, as well. If bigger netbooks mean under-powered 12" sub-notebooks, I don't really need them, thank you very much.

 

Going to have a go at compiling this now.

 

In the presentation it's repeated a few times that they want this to go on laptops/netbooks/notebooks/call-it-what-you-will with full size keyboard, large screens, and decent resolutions. It wouldn't surprise me to see it appear in at the smaller end eventually, but the first few devices will definitely overlap in the traditionally sized laptop territory

 

If you just want to try it out in a VM there is a vmdk image already floating around the net (don't get the vdi image, it doesn't really work.

http://gdgt.com/google/chrome-os/download/

 

Shouldn't be a problem, it's released in source code form, so just change the source code to allow HDD's.

 

Bear with me as I haven't thought this all the way out, but...

What if you turned it around? Instead of having the data in the cloud and the OS on your machine, you had the data on the machine and your OS was managed through the cloud. I'm thinking of this specifically in terms of servers and network appliances which need smaller or minimal OSes. The automatic update and repair feature, coupled with some sort of online monitoring, sounds very promising.

Imagine for a minute you have a server farm. One of your servers gets hacked or infected or whatnot. We'll also assume you have some sort of automatic backup on another server. A overhead monitoring server or perhaps a connection to a cloud function detects the changes in the target machine's behavior and activates the backup. It then collects the record of the intrusion or infection, wipes the OS drive and re-installs, rapidly bringing the machine back online. In theory, the attack could be automatically analyzed, a patch created, and the OSes on all machines updated, all without any user input.