Solid Gold OS | Linux Magazine when I was surfing around
reddit.com. It looks as though someone appreciated your blog
so much they decided to bookmark it. I’ll certainly be returning here more often.

As for the whole cloud concept and other harbingers of slavery to come: you get what you pay for. Be happy, no taxes (and schools with no money, begging for survival).

Cloud computing solves the dynamic load problem and has privacy. A cluster can be thought of as a private cloud. When it\’s overloaded, jobs are sent to the public cloud. Otherwise, one would have to buy hardware which would become idle and outdated once the load crisis was past, thus wasting money on hardware, electricity, and personnel.

The business outsourcing side is a completely different animal and shouldn\’t be confused with their consumer side. The outsource side is a side benefit of the technology they maintain for their consumer side. I doubt that companies which pay Google for services are getting little ads for their employees to click on (although maybe companies can leverage their employees eyeballs by getting a cut of the action). The outsourcing business is a nuts and bolts business like web hosting. You either build and maintain yourself or buy it according to your specs and trust in the person/company that is saying they can deliver..

Consumer IT on the net is another animal altogether from business outsourcing but is just like any other consumer medium. You get the programs for free because you are willing to work on ignoring the advertisements. This is no different than television, newspapers or magazines. Cheap media always comes with advertising. If you are willing to pay the difference one can get rid of the ads (or in the case of email just use a desktop client but look how hard that is for consumers who are hooked on web mail). Google is an advertising delivery engine that uses search as its hook but is always looking to get additional hooks into its users who can then be exposed to even more ads.

The economic problems of newspapers have burst the bubble of those who thought \”content providers\” were fishermen rather than bait. Since money is the only nearly universal standard for keeping score of worth in this world, one can easily get a handle on how much value content (whether news, entertainment or email program) has without any advertising subsidies. Most who try this route are quickly disappointed and realize that though they think what they are doing has enough intrinsic value, the people who count don\’t.

The value of Chrome OS to Google without the ads is zero since no one would pay for this web OS. We simply don\’t need it. We can already get on the web and launch an ad free browser and go wherever. The whole point of Google with this OS is to position Goggle in the minds of consumers as the Web OS in the same way that Microsoft positioned itself (not really positioned, Microsoft just got lucky with that IBM deal since the people at IBM were clueless about personal computing and so Microsoft was able to piggy back on IBM\’s brand) as the Desktop OS.

Google knows like Microsoft did that consumers are a bunch of \”technophobes\”, most don\’t know how a toilet works let alone a computer. Technology companies are in the business of trying to convince people that convenience and an anxiety free ride are theirs for the buying and oh yes they have the \”most apps\” which theoretically is supposed to mean greater convenience and ease even though most are trivial and useless but let\’s face it, it\’s a numbers game (think Mhz or Ghz or storage etc, anything but truly increased functionality beyond what has already become a commodity).

In the end, Google is hoping that people will eventually consider it a necessity to have Goggle on their computer just like people think they have to have Microsoft. At some point in the future people won\’t even have local desktops, just web based ones and having Goggle will seem as necessary as Windows on a stand alone machine. Once that happens, maybe Linux can once again try to capture the vacuous mind space of the consumer. Maybe then consumers will wake up to the fact that free and with no ads is as good as it gets. But I\’m not holding my breath.

Google does good job following standards. You get bookmarks, addresses, documents, photos etc in standard format from Google services.

But that is not always enough. You need to be sure that the data is as well deleted from their services when you move them away.

And that is not enough! The Google Chrome OS service idea is terrible. Would you store RAW photos as JPEG\’s to Picasa or HD videos to youtube as lenght of 10 minutes? Hah. But Google Chrome OS is not idea to offer a full software system what we have used to. It\’s idea is to offer just a fast and easy \”living on edge\” software system.

Only thing what now matters us, is that Google choosed to use Linux kernel as operating system in the Google Chrome OS. Thats right, nothing more actually we should not care about. Google Chrome OS includes the Linux kernel as it\’s operating system and that is the greatest thing what they have choosed. Same way Google did with Android software platform, they choosed the Linux kernel to be it operating system as well. So they have two different software systems what both the Linux kernel operates. As long Google follows the Linux operating system (=kernel) license, what is GPLv2 by the way, everything is fine.

There is lots of problems on the actual \”cloud\” idea and it is the main problem all the times. RMS is good person to warn about it as well. But we should not be totally 1/0 idealistics, even that is how we should take our freedom.

ChromeOS is a lightweight, thin cloud computing system of operating on the Internet via Chrome(Chromium).

Simple, elegant, and more extensible (when you really think about it) than any desktop operating system existing otherwise.

GoogleDocs sux, but then again they\’ve purchased DocVerse (Now, Google DocVerse), and there\’s currently work on developing a DocVerse plugin for OOo too.

VP8, in the form of WebM is here now too, thanks to that Google purchase.

Grand Central is now Google Voice, and Google Wave federation server is open sourced too.

w/Gmail, Voice, Wave, DocVerse, Calendar, Bookmarks… see where I\’m going with this? These are the things that people spend 90+ percent of their time doing – online.

Now, add a three second boot and you have a complete solution – even in the enterprise if you integrate thin-client enterprise computing into the picture.

I wrote more on this in my article here: http://northtech.us/content/20100519/its-official-googles-vp8-goes-open-source

Hope that helps!

Kindest regards,

Bradley D. Thornton
http://NorthTech.US

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