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Robert Pogson reports:
Recent news about the popularity of Chromebooks with schools may seem puzzling.
Schools in Hillsborough, New Jersey decided to make an experiment out of its own program. Beginning in 2012, 200 students were given iPads and 200 students were given Chromebooks. After receiving feedback from both students and teachers, the schools sold off their iPads and bought 4,600 Chromebooks.
After all, a keyboard is a great input device and writing is one of the three "Rs" but why not just [buy] a notebook PC? The answer is that the high cost of maintaining the legacy PC is too great. Keeping content on the server makes the job easier and with Chromebooks, schools don't even need to own the server.
...then there's the malware, the slowing down, the re-re-rebooting with that other OS.
That makes the ChromeBook a winner in education and probably a lot of organizations large and small, even consumers. Of course, they could get those benefits with GNU/Linux but it would take more technical knowledge. Again Chromebooks win.
See iPad vs. Chromebook For Students
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Friday August 15 2014, @03:30AM
Phonegap is just a toy to build applications for mobile devices using JavaScript, HTML5, and CSS3. There's no hardware access to even think about.
Some 1980s computer could go "10 Graphics mode" and then "20 Circle 80,90,150" without any networking whatsoever. And if you needed physical I/O there was always peek & poke to handle it. Assembler was also an option.
Prior to Bluetooth v2.1, encryption is not required and can be turned off at any time. Security is shaky at best. Sending password over links like this is a really bad idea. When Bluetooth security sucks. School shall not require or default to its use. Instead offer USB based alternatives (USB sucks tos, but is better).
USB devices may be reprogrammed to be evil [soylentnews.org]. In essence many of them have a microcontroller and they are connected to a computer bus that lacks strict access control. This means any USB device has the potential to become an attack device.
One way to reduce the USB threat vector is to not require more USB devices than absolutely needed. And those that needs to be used could be screened to make sure they use one-time-programmable (OTP) microcontrollers (MCU).
What we have now is a an operating system that spies on the user connected to a mainframe that logs your every action for eternity and is also connected to other devices that may turn out to evil. And the user is uninformed and can't really use the machine as a real physical independent platform. Seems you need to be better updated on these issues.