Libertad para {¿manchar?} el pueblo

Esdras Amado Lopez complained today that someone is creating interference with his media, Channel 36 and Cholusat, by transmitting western movies and other content in the same frequency. Reuters has issued a report about this.

Whoever is doing this is doing more damage than good. Even with the incendiary and patently false content Cholusat and Channel 36 discharge into the Honduran airwaves, they should not be able to claim anyone is impeding their freedom to address the Honduran public. Although I would rather watch Osama Bin Laden than them.

UPDATE: Thursday Nov 26, 12:39 am

It is becoming increasingly clear that Esdras Amado López is faking this and other government “repression” against his news media in order to get international news media to give Roberto Micheletti bad press. Today, the channel shows an TV color test pattern and the words: “Interfieren Señal de canal 36 para impedir que informemos.” Translation: “{They’re} interfering channel 36’s signal to stop us from informing”. La Gringa writes in her blogicito, that immediately before this image came up, López stated that he would take the channel off the air “in protest”.

As the trend for smaller, cheaper, more portable computers drives on, Google is preparing to replace Microsoft as the software company for the world. The concept of the browser as an operating system has been a dream since the early nineties.

I remember a conversation with a Costa Rican friend, Juan Manuel Brenes, where he made the prediction, 15 years ago, that someday, the operating system would disappear, to be replaced by the browser. Since then, many in the computer industry have dreamed of a “cloud computer”.

Google is very near achieving that goal. Most surprising of all is the news that they are borrowing the Apple business model of selling the computer hardware with the software pre-installed. Microsoft does largely the same thing but still provides copies of Windows to install on old machines.

But, users would not be able to download Google’s operating system, called Chrome OS, and install it on their computers. The reasoning behind it? The operating system would not be stored in each computer, but in the internet itself. Any upgrades will happen in a server farm somewhere in the arctic tundra. Applications would be hosted on the internet and accessed as services. All data would be stored in servers, not your own computer.

This has several implications for privacy, and also for graphics performance. Most graphically intense applications have long since moved to game consoles, or the Mac OS. Apple would not lose much of it’s market share; the big loser in this would be Microsoft, because Windows is what powers cheap netbooks and most business machines, which only need scheduling and office software.

With Chrome OS, Google could easily become a larger giant by far than Microsoft ever dreamed of being.