jr conlin's ink stained banana

i've run Chrome. It's a nice browser. i keep it in a folder next to Safari and Opera for when i test pages. i'm certain that a lot of folks love it. i don't find it useful or compelling enough to switch over to. For me, at least, it's a bit like getting into an economy car that has a speedometer on the dashboard and a slew of idiot lights. Some people like that. Some folks like Segways too.

Of course, there's also the fact that Google loves to collect information about you so that they can make money off of it. Of course, this is also the stated goal of credit card agencies that do all kinds of clever things like potentially consider you a risk because you bought a friend a drink at a particular bar, so i'm not really all that inclined to offer the folks that bought doubleclick more info about myself.

Google wants you to do thing on the web. That means that all that's needed from any OS is

• A way to host TCP/IP
• A driver for the Network connect device (most probably wireless)
• Reasonable disk/memory access
• A way to run a browser

And, well, that's about it. Everything else would be done in "the cloud". Hell, you could probably forgo the local disk options entirely and have the system boot from the network. None of this is new, by the way. Unix systems have had this for decades with remote terminals and X Clients. Microsoft has even had a go at it with their Terminal Services. Google has stated that they're targeting low end, underpowered devices as is, so don't expect to be running TF2 on it. In effect, they're making their own version of Crunchpads.

So, will this amazing "OS" set the world on fire? Possibly. Apple has proven that a minimal, portable web browser is fairly compelling. Palm's PreOS is proving that you can build some reasonably impressive mobile apps with Javascript. Merging the two isn't that much of a trick.

Of course, i tend to like having computers that don't need a full connection all the time in order to work.

The touch isn't a total brick when i don't have a network connection, but i dare say it's close to useless in comparison to when i do. Granted, Apple isn't a "web company" so i would have been terribly surprised to find out if it was. Still, with phone (and phone like) devices becoming more capable, why would you want to carry around a device that's the size of a pad of paper and not be a full laptop? Isn't that a bit like driving around with a segway in the trunk, "just in case"?

i'm sure i'll be wrong about this too, but honestly, i don't really see this OS setting the world on fire quite yet. For that matter, i don't really see it solving any problem i have. Potentially creating a few, sure, but there's no pressing urgency in my life for something like this.

Kinda like how i can live quite happily without a Segway.

My painter did a wonderful job of painting my dining room and kitchen the wrong color. Granted, we were the ones that told him what color to use, so it's not his fault that i had to buy two gallons of a much lighter shade.

Yesterday, Anne Marie and i went up to visit San Francisco, where we both realized that it had been quite some time since last we walked Columbus Ave and Ghirardelli Square. As we walked by restaurants and coffee shops along the main route (as well as a few along the side roads), we realized that we really did have quite a lot of very good restaurants in Los Gatos and San Jose. Also, it's kinda sad when the better selection of Ghirardelli's wares can be found in the grocery aisle of the local PW. Just above the Hershey's. Actually, no, it's just rather telling.

Also, i set up the Neuros PVR and discovered both the cool and not-so-cool bits about it. Currently, cool is outweighing uncool, but since this is a linux based system, i expect to be spending a fair bit of tweaking before i'm really happy with it.

Oh, and finally, my sister-in-law.b's disk died, as these things are wont to do after about five or so years of use. This is typical and on of the reasons you want to do backups, or at the very least, have an external drive you copy important documents, pictures and other bits on to. i'm sending him the same sized drive i use for such things. One of the drives your data is on will die. The more drives that data happens to be on, the less likely you'll be shipping things to DriveSavers.

So, what were you up to this weekend?