OMG, I have a tin foil hat on and a paper bag over my head now because Google Street View has my house on their database. Members of the resistencia will now know where to send their thank you notes.
I live in an apartment behind the Ficus trees.
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.
Although it looks like a Google bomb, currently, if you type “Microsoft is…” into the Google search box, the top result is a gleeful April 2007 article by Paul Graham: “Microsoft is Dead”
My reason for discovering this amusing fluke is a recent warped decision by the Seattle software company to hire a former Yahoo! executive to manage their search and online ads. How desperate can you be when you hire someone from a struggling company to save yours? So I googled it and…khazam: there it was! (see image above)
Major software companies like IBM, SAP and Microsoft slowly stifled developers like me in the past decade. Fresh out of college I saw writing software in much the same way as I saw writing literature: creative, exciting and limitless. The business world smacked that idea out of my throbbing head. Businesses are not interested in creative writing of anything; does it sell?
Microsoft’s main competitors, Google, Apple and the Open Source movement answer: “Yes.” It is their spark of youthful creativity is gnawing away at the Microsoft/Intel cartel. That spark is my hope for a more spiritually satisfying career. Hopefully it will also pay the bills.
Google Earth is a wonderful time waster educational tool. Now we can enjoy 3d models of the buildings of ancient Rome in 320 AD. To see them you may need to download an update your version of Google Earth. Enjoy!
After a looooong wait, Google Chrome is now live. It’s a tad LOT faster and uses only a bit less memory than Firefox, kinda like even better than Apple’s Safari, its older sibling. I’m using it to blog right now. Try it out!
Microsoft usually drags its feet in the browser arena, and this time it could cost them. Internet Explorer is usually years behind its peers in performance and features. Opera and Firefox boasted tabbed browsing much before IE7, and IE8 is bringing and ad blocking feature that has been available in Firefox several versions ago.
Microsoft’s monopoly in the OS market gives it no motivation to excel in the browser wars, because it has an absolute advantage no competitor could even get close to. Even Apple used Internet Explorer for Mac as its default browser for five years. But the prevalence of the internet has proved baffling to the OS behemoth. Google’s tremendous success, and the departure of key Microsoft employees to it, has made CEO Steve Ballmer famously throw a chair and vow to “kill Google”.
How would Microsoft kill Google? By blocking its ads. Online text ads are Google’s major source of revenue. Ad blocking is one of the most touted of yet-to-be-released IE8’s features. Coincidence?
But Google was probably expecting that…and is preemptively releasing its own browser today, Google Chrome, with many innovative features, before IE8 is officially released. Google just might have a chance.
I can’t wait to try it out! Google has described Chrome’s inner workings in this web comic. Unfortunately, Chrome will not be available to download until after Google’s press conference at 11am, Pacific time.
One of its key features reveals Google’s open secret to replace Microsoft’s Windows with a “Google Operating System“. Each browser tab runs in a separate process, with its own memory space (called a heap) and objects (called a stack). No process can read or write from the other processes. If one process fails, it is deleted, and it’s memory is reallocated, but the system remains stable. This is exactly the way operating systems run programs. Chrome even has its own task manager, just like an operating system. Please get the chairs out of Mr. Ballmer’s way!
Its other impressive features are a Javascript virtual machine (called V8) which promises to make web apps run much faster, and blacklists to protect web users from phishing and malware.
The most promising thing about this browser, and probably the most irksome to Microsoft, is that the entire code is open source. This means any developer can see its inner workings, and tailor software to run efficiently on it, or improve on what Google has done. In fact Chrome is indebted to open source code from Mozilla Firefox and Apple’s Web Kit.
Open source software has created an environment where creativity and innovation are thriving. This freedom has the tendency to promote standards and consensus among developers. Even if Chrome never becomes the dominant browser, the “browser-as-an-OS” approach will influence other browsers and weaken Microsoft’s stranglehold…not on the internet, but on operating systems.
I’ve said this before, Google how do I love thee! Let me count the ways.
Image by Eszter Hargittai, used with a Creative Commons license. P.S. This is a Google employee’s car, not hers.
Even employees at the headquarters of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy would envy the amenities Google employees have. Someday, if I’m not at Pixar, I want to work there!
Google has anounced a new product named “Lively“, a 3D chatroom many have likened to Second Life. Three-D chatrooms have been around for a while, and while Second Life has become inmensely popular, how is Lively different?
Apparently Google wants to leverage it’s enormous user base and the ability to embed these chatrooms in webpages. The difference is that if enough people get a “Lively” avatar, they’ll be able to interact accross many web pages with a single user account.
The main problem is reaching a critical mass. On the plus side, furniture and accessories are free, and look pretty good. Also, creating a virtual world is addictive and fun for many (ask my Sims-addicted nephews and neices). A local installation is also necessary, WHY?
I doubt this will take off any time soon, but feel free to wander in the virtual Pensieve café. Capuccinnos are on the house.
This makes Google fanboys get dewy-eyed, but it’s worth thinking about, the chart in the blog post that includes this video was what got me to blog about it. I wonder if the low reporting of spam is not merely people getting tired of clicking the “report this as spam” button?
‘Tis but thy name that is my enemy;–
Thou art thyself, though not a Montague.
What’s Montague? It is nor hand, nor foot,
Nor arm, nor face, nor any other part
Belonging to a man. O, be some other name!
What’s in a name? that which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet;Shakespeare–Romeo and Juliet
A few days back I blogged about this blog, Pensieve, reaching the 10th spot in Google results. That is now history. My page rank remains at zero, but now my page is also nowhere to be found. You can find individual posts, but not the blog itself. I fear it may have been condemned to Google hell!
The reason is easy enough, the name doesn’t fit the content very well. With a name like Pensieve, the content ought to be about a boy wizard and his faithful friends challenging the evil He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named. But although I am a fan of the books, I don’t endorse magic or feverishly blog about it. So, wrongly but sensibly, the Google algorithm decided that I was cheating and did not deserve to be in the top 10.
Should I change the name of the blog? Could you, gentle reader, help me find a better one? It should be unique, even a misspelling would do the trick. It might be related to myself, like the obvious choice of my name. It should be in English or easy to pronounce Spanish or something like it. The closer it is to the content, the better.
If you think I should change the name of the blog, I’ll choose 5 of your ideas so we can vote on them. I will be very grateful for your suggestions and shall enshrine your ideas in a blog post like the one you’re reading!
Here are a few suggestions for you to brainstorm off of:
Image by Rick Kimpel, used with a Creative Commons license
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