Leaked Document Sheds Light On Microsoft's Chromebook Rival (windowscentral.com) 91
Microsoft has announced plans to host an event next month where it is expected to unveil Windows 10 Cloud operating system. Microsoft will be positioning the new OS as a competitor to Chrome OS, according to several reports. Windows Central has obtained an internal document which sheds light on the kind of devices that will be running Windows 10 Cloud. The hardware requirement that Microsoft has set for third-party OEMs is as follows: 1. Quad-core (Celeron or better) processor.
2. 4GB of RAM.
3. 32GB of storage (64GB for 64-bit). 4. A battery larger than 40 WHr.
5. Fast eMMC or solid state drive (SSD) for storage technology.
6. Pen and touch (optional). The report adds that Microsoft wants these laptops to offer over 10-hour of battery life, and the "cold boot" should not take longer than 20 seconds.
2. 4GB of RAM.
3. 32GB of storage (64GB for 64-bit). 4. A battery larger than 40 WHr.
5. Fast eMMC or solid state drive (SSD) for storage technology.
6. Pen and touch (optional). The report adds that Microsoft wants these laptops to offer over 10-hour of battery life, and the "cold boot" should not take longer than 20 seconds.
Cloud: insecure, unreliable. Just say no. (Score:2, Insightful)
As long you can completely turn off the "cloud' thing, yes.
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LOL!
Re:Could be useful (Score:5, Insightful)
No, that would ruin it for this niche. You can buy a cheap laptop right now that is not locked down. The benefit to a Chromebook or Chromebook clone like these is that you can hand it to a school age kid and not worry at all about viruses, malware, misconfiguration, etc. It just works all the time.
I completely agree that it makes these things unattractive to a large number of Slashdotters. I'm one of them, and I only have Chromebooks for the kids and wife, not myself. I have spent _zero_ hours screwing around with the Chromebooks*, which is something I cannot say about any other computer that I've ever owned.
* So technically, I did screw around with them because I'm a big dork. I played with developer mode, but my wife blew away my efforts by hitting the space bar on boot. Which is for the best. Also, printing can be hard to set up but I got lucky because I already had Chrome set up to share a printer.
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It wouldn't matter because the virus would go away on the next boot - just like Chromebook.
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The weakness is if you never turn it off (make it sleep once in a while at best) and never need to reboot for crashes either.
A mild example of this is running an out of date version of Firefox because recent 64 bit versions don't crash anymore or crash all your web pages but not the browser.
Solutions like "delete cookies when browser closes", "wipe VM or OS to known clean state on shutdown/boot up" don't always work, if the hardware is too reliable and the software doesn't even crash or recovers instead of
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How do I discern between a laptop with SecureBoot turned on and one that has corrupted firmware that pretends to have SecureBoot turned on? If this takes more than a few seconds, then your product is less compelling to one that is simply locked down.
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You could do the same thing with "DeepFreeze [wikipedia.org]" software for Windows which protects the drive from any changes, such as misconfiguration, viruses, or malware. While you could "unfreeze" a small area of the drive for personal documents, or store your data in the cloud.
And of course, you get a full operating system, not one designed to use you as a product and exploit your personal data, especially in the case of Google.
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That kind of thing has been around forever - in the early 90s my college ran their computer lab with dual partitions on the hard drives: a write protected system partition and a user partition that was cleared every night.
But Chromebooks are still easier to manage - if they turn on at all, you know they are good to go. No set up at all, no drive images, nothing - just turn it on and go.
The Russians (Score:5, Funny)
The Russians did what now?
go Microsoft (Score:3)
Q: what do you call a stalker who waits six years before taking a step to follow target
A: not much of a threat
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Q: what do you call a stalker who waits six years before taking a step to follow target
Implying that they never tried the model of a locked down OS with minimal capabilities before? Have you been living in a cave for the past 10 years?
You're on a roll today. You've posted nothing but garbage.
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you're confused, this one is "cloud enabled"
now pony up on those MS stocks, boy
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MS market share declining, their chunk of the console pie is half the size of Sony's. Better than the usual Microsoft following of a trend late in the game I'll agree, though. the list of other laughable failures, too little too late, is huge
Microsoft naming (Score:2)
It will go unnoticed (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm sure it will be noticed (Score:2)
Just not in a positive way - just for all the reasons you've mentioned and more.
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I don't have any desire to get a Windows "Chrome" Book- we have a couple of Chromebooks at home for the kids, but I won't be getting them a Microsoft equivalent one unless it is demonstrably better.
That said the "Under 20 second Cold Boot" isn't a goal- it's a worst case scenario. They very well might boot in 6 seconds just like a Chromebook does. Until it is released we can't know. They're saying the very worst device in this classification would have to be able to boot in 20 seconds, not the best, nor
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It may boot in 20s, but once you enter your login info you will have to wait another 30s just for the anti-virus software to load, then 5s for the Bing! toolbar, then 8s for Edge preload, then...
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If it does all that then it can't call itself a Chromebook competitor, it's just a cheap lower-end Windows laptop, which we already have and most people pass over for Chromebooks already.
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If it is anything like the bullshit windows desktop boots, they can bugger off. Ohh, look I can see my desktop, what the hell, can't launch any applications not a one, some time latter staring at empty desktop, whilst all the delayed start services start up, ohh look, I can now actually use my desktop. M$ does so many shitty things when it comes to marketing.
Big advantage of Chrome, all required school work apps are there ready to go free. Personally I would still go cheap Linux notebook of what ever flavo
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Under 20 second cold boot
As an owner of a Windows 10 tablet, the one thing I've never done to it is cold boot it, and I've certainly never waited 20 seconds from pressing a button to it coming on.
Price? (Score:5, Interesting)
It depends on the price, if it is ~$249 it will be nice especially if we can install a linux distro on it!
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http://www.dell.com/ca/p/inspi... [dell.com] Dell Inspiron 11" lattop/netbook with 4 gigabytes of ram and 32GB eMMC drive is $329.99 Canadian, which translates to $240 US, probably lower in the USA. We get shafted on prices here in Canada.
Back in the 1990's, you only needed 4GB... (Score:2)
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According to several gaming sites and such like HCP 12GB ram for a gaming computer seems to be the sweet spot.
System RAM, GPU RAM or both? It's been a long time since I had a video card with more RAM than the system.
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So to me the problem is flat out simple that we waste our computing resources with gay abandon.
I paid $50 for 8GB DDR3 RAM in 2016. The same price I paid for 4GB DDR2 RAM in 2007. When I upgraded my nine-year-old system last year, I doubled the specs for the same price ($150).
[...] just to run your programs elsewhere, "in the cloud"?
I run my programs on my systems and store my data on my file server. Hackers can't steal what isn't in the cloud.
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I had 8GB in the PC I built 5 years ago wasn't really a problem, but I always planned to upgrade. I recently switched out the memory for faster 16GB RAM. I haven't really noticed an improvement over when I only had 8GB yet.
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My phone as 6GB Ram. It rarely uses more than 4, occasionally 5. But phones are funny, they prelaunch apps you use, until most of the RAM is used. Because it is less battery bringing app to the foreground, than launching it from storage. I suspect that if you had more RAM, your RAM usage would go up.
Re: Back in the 1990's, you only needed 4GB... (Score:1)
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When I took Introduction to Computers in the early 1990's, the instructor informed us that 4GB with a 32-bit CPU was all the memory we would ever need.
For our younger readers, back in the early 1990s home computer RAM was measured in Megabytes, and 4GB would have seemed ridiculously, almost impossibly huge.
Competition (Score:3, Interesting)
Can I reformat the Hard Drive and install Linux? (Score:2)
Can I reformat the Hard Drive and install Linux? One of the reasons that I have steered away from Chromebooks, is the whole "Developer mode Wiping out the OS" thing. I will not accept a situation where I cannot install whatever I want, or have to wait 30 seconds to boot, or if I don't press Space Bar then Enter it will wipe my OS. I would only consider this if I knew I could:
1. Disable UEFI Secure Boot, and load a Linux of my choice.
2. Nothing would trigger it to delete my Linux install and start reinstalli
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Your list of features is directly at odds with the goal of making a laptop that is immune to malware and brainless to administer. The whole system needs to be protected against any kind of modification by the end-user. So no, this will not meet your needs. And that's OK, because not every product needs to be for Slashdot readers to use directly. I imagine there are a lot of us whose lives have been made way easier by the broad adoption of Chromebooks, even if we don't use them ourselves.
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Does it? Wouldn't protecting against unintentional/inadvertent/accidental modification achieve the same thing, while still empowering those who know what they're doing?
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The only way that would work is if there was a trivial, fool-proof way to tell if the firmware had been modified. A blinky light on the external case would probably do it... obviously the light would need to be controlled by a dedicated circuit that cannot be modified by the user. If I were administering a laptop cart full of these, I wouldn't want to have the job of periodically booting each into a bios screen - but checking for blinky lights isn't too onerous.
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Long-tail inclusive (Score:2)
So no, this will not meet your needs. And that's OK, because not every product needs to be for Slashdot readers to use directly.
But on the other hand there are users who DO need such product.
If manufacturers only produce device that cater only to the most popular users, this is going to be problematic. Because nobody will produce any product that could also fill the needs of less common users.
On the otherhand, manuacturer could produce device that could, if the user is motivated enough, be converted to the needs of more peculiar users (e.g.: how easy it is to switch on developer mode on Jolla, and older HP / Palm smartphones), you e
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Are we talking theoretically, or are we talking practically? Because practically there are many choices out there for a cheap laptop that is capable of running arbitrary code.
In theory, sure, there could be a product that fills a niche at the expense of other potential users - that's just not the case here.
Form factor (Score:2)
Are we talking theoretically, or are we talking practically? Because practically there are many choices out there for a cheap laptop that is capable of running arbitrary code.
Cheap : yes.
But cheap isn't the only characteristic that attract people to chromebooks.
The form factor is also another reason.
And most of the "run arbitrary code, and easily install Linux on them" devices tend to be heavy clunky workstation-class laptops
(again for obious market reasons : most linux users tend to be developers, its best to concentrate effort to create pro-laptops catering to them)
Chrome books tend to be extremely light and thin.
If you're on the market of a machine which doesn't break your ba
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Yeah, schools are adopting Chromebooks en masse because of their superior DRM.
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Sooooo.... don't buy it.
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I've never heard of this happening with a Chromebook. There are two ways to run Linux on these boxes, either in a chroot (Crouton) or to wipe the machine and install Linux.
For machines that just need a Linux app or two, I use Crouton. Crouton has a sweet Chrome plugin that pushes X Window frames to a browser tab. So, you can install a Linux desktop manager, and push the whole GUI desktop inside a tab. Or, you can install without a desktop manager at all, and just push the selected app inside a tab. This wor
It lost me when I saw the "Pro" version upgrade (Score:2)
In the previous /. posting, I noted my disbelief when I said that Microsoft would have to seriously change it's operating model and asked about them trying to compete against Google, which doesn't monetize the platform.
Well, if there's a "pro" version of the Windows 10 Cloud OS, then I don't think Microsoft understands what they have to do to be successful in this space.
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Rather than HW Specs, what is SW Infrastructure? (Score:3)
In this space, you're not going to see any Kaby Lakes or massive amounts of memory or even impressive video/audio so listing the hardware doesn't mean much.
What I'm most interested in is what will be the application infrastructure is (ie a useable version Office) as well as document distribution for classes (Google Classroom has developed into a pretty slick tool). Another question would be what Microsoft will do for a browser on the device as Edge doesn't work all that great and pages don't display the same as they do on Chrome, Firefox, Opera, Safari, etc.
So, what will make Microsoft's offering special/compelling against ChromeOS?
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Schools won't want it (Score:4, Informative)
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I think you misunderstood the definition of "Windows 10 Cloud".
i.e. it will be a minimal shell to start a browser, like Chromebooks.
Secondly, I believe since Windows 10, it almost always hibernates the system rather than full cold boot, thus, it literally takes seconds to start up again, especially with an SSD. Perhaps even faster than chromebooks, especially if the system hibernates with no open apps.
Re: Schools won't want it (Score:1)
RT (Score:2)
RT, only shittier, and partially banked by selling your data.
Trash (Score:2)
1. Quad-core (Celeron or better) processor.
Of which generation? I guess it doesn't matter, because Celeron is ass regardless.
2. 4GB of RAM.
I was on 16 GB minimum 6 years ago! I understand that plebs don't need that much, but come the fuck on. If this is a "cloud" OS then it's going to involve shitty web apps gobbling up tons of RAM in a bloated browser. How could you not specify 8 GB as a minimum? It's hardly any more expensive in terms of BoM.
3. 32GB of storage (64GB for 64-bit).
Two fails here. First
Re: Trash (Score:2)
This is what apollo lake is for: e403na - n4200 57Whr full sized laptop with poor, but full hd screen. Just bought it in China for $480 (Chinese VAT bites)
Jesus Christ... (Score:2)
No such thing as MS leaky documents (Score:2)