javanix

I guess the question really comes down to whether or not Google is planning significant work on the hardware hooks into the OS - will it be possible for manufacturers to write ChromeOS drivers for their devices, or will Google develop that on their own?

I already have a thin and light laptop that I'm pretty happy with - hopefully I can install Chrome OS from an image onto it to tinker with.

That sounds a lot like most theology I've heard, and I suspect that the HN crowd is not one that puts a whole lot of stock in theology.

For someone who is not a native English speaker, Linus really has an awesome way with words.

Perhaps even setting up each already-existing mirror as its own seed-center would help - there are plenty of them around, and by definition they all have the same data. Worst case you end up getting only one connection, and you have the same performance as now, but in the best case you can download from multiple locations at once and get some rudimentary load balancing.

I wonder whether there'd be major security concerns if a torrent layer was stuck over the main centralized backbone? It could probably reduce bandwidth costs for hosting and provide better speeds to people, though keeping the "swarm" updated might be kind of tricky.

If there was a cheap, e-book-only publisher around that could help with all of the traditional publisher duties (editing, typesetting, advertising, etc) without the overhead of actually printing anything (or at least with being able to print things on demand rather than buying a big batch and praying) I think there would definitely be money to be made.

The number of submissions that large publishers get every day has got to be staggering - what if a small company could dedicate their extra resources to actually reading through more of them than Random House can? The beauty of the novel that it is pure content, especially on an e-reader.

A lot of the cost of e-books comes from publishers needing to support various paper-related overhead like binding, printing, etc. If it was possible for an author to self-publish I suspect it'd be very easy for them to equal the per-book profits (obviously, advertising would be a different story) that they'd get going through Harper-Collins or the like.

Has Bezos ever actually used Amazon's search functionality?

I know it isn't the easiest problem in the world to solve, but their search is by far the worst of any of the major shopping sites that I use on a regular basis.

Not really sure why people feel like misrepresenting articles like this all the time, but this is one of them.

The problem with using slide rules as a replacement is that students would complain too much about learning something they won't ever use to ever get the deeper understanding that Cook talks about. Most young people who don't want a career in math, science, engineering, etc do not want a deep understanding of the principles - they want an A on the test. Unless you can use one of the external tools as a shortcut they won't be willing to put the effort into learning from it rather than using it.

Ban calculators, ban slide rules, ban everything except pencil and paper and hope that people gain some smidgen of understanding through sheer force of not having any other option.

As others have mentioned here, Johnny Lee had something similar running with the Wii hardware but as far as I remember the display was all driven by a PC which was (presumably) much more powerful than the iPad.

It would be like a built-in spamming vector for any less-than-legitimate site out there.

I suppose I am just wary of change simply for the sake of change. I would like to be able to see the same 24fps and 60fps scene side by side and evaluate the advantages myself.

In my opinion, higher framerates just end up making everything look like a sitcom.

Of course.

I suppose this is good for the community as long as every one of these gambles works, but the reality is that not every one does, and I would imagine investors would become increasingly skittish because of it.

John Lasseter and Ed Catmull did more to save the company than Jobs ever did ... most accounts I've read of him paint his contributions as "not screwing up quite enough to ruin the company".