Google: Good for the economy

There are many things in this world that do nothing but take up space(like sprawling suburbias) and money(like the Government). Few things, and I mean very few things, actually push us forward.

Google is the Saviour of our times. Apple gave us the coolest machines, Microsoft stole the idea and learned how to market and now we have Google to usher in the next generation of technological advances and mindsets. Let us not forget The Pirate Bay and their heroic efforts!

See, Google learned fast from it’s predecessors and has ‘boldly gone in a way others never have before’. For the longest time I thought Apple would be the ones to give us the proper choice for digital freedom. They have the coolest looking ‘stuff’ and are on the cutting edge (barely). The problem is their system is completely closed. There are pros and cons to this. Pro: more control (ain’t is always about control?). Con: Less compatibility with others (Microsoft tries to play nice while trying to subtly maintain it’s control).

Now we have Google. The technological juggernaut that it is becoming is staggering. They do things and do it right. Have a look at their path thus far:

1/ Create the best search engine in the world. Check.
2/ Create the best advertising campaign that blends traditional advertising with Internet Technologies. Check.
3/ Create the best free email service. Check.
4/ Create the best free office suite online. Check.
5/ Create the best web browser…..in the works but publicly available and looks very promising. Half-Check.
6/ Create the best open source operating system for a ‘smart phone’ target=”_blank. Check.
7/ Create the best operating system for a netbook. On it’s way.
8/ Create the best free music system. Check!

The obvious next step will be to simply scale up their network OS(Chromium) to desktops but not much of a leap there. Finally consumers will have a viable 3rd choice when buying a computer! Competition is good! Google is good for the economy.

Floppy Disks? In 2009???

Ok, so why can’t manufacturers get their act together? What is it that make them believe that Floppy Drives are still a viable tool in the midst of USB ubiquity. USB became popular starting around Windows 98 (it was available for Win95 even!) so the demise of the floppy drive was inevitable. For all intents and purposes 9with the exception of installing Windows XP in a RAID format) floppies are dead to the average consumer.

Why is it that you still cannot install a pair of HDs in a RAID format without a Floppy drive today? I got this system here that I had to replace the motherboard with native RAID support build in. There is still a floppy controller built on to it. I mean seriously, what is with ASUS (or any other mobo manufactuer)? There is zero need for them in the mass-consumer market and even worse that you are forced to make a ‘RAID boot disk’ in order to install an OS!

And a shot across the Microsoft bow….why did you build your install with only Floppy drive for ‘RAID/SCSI driver’ install option??? What is wrong with CD-ROM’s and an option? Hell, Compact Disk Read Only Memory drives have been around since the early 90s (I recall the first commercially available one priced at $1000!).

Well, since I have pretty much concluded that my tech support days will end with XP being the highlight of it and trying to touch Vista (let alone Windows 7 , why are the guys in this video such idiots? Does watching those script-reading-morons really make you want to love Windows 7? It’s no wonder MAC ads are better! ) as little as possible, I hope that future installs go a lot easier for future techs. As a side note, Vista got such a bad rap that M$ has gone away from using names to numbers. Maybe it’ll fool people into thinking that windows 8 will obviously be a better version if Windows
7 crashes in the marketplace.

For me, I’ve pretty much jumped the fence and hit the *nix(Linux, Unix…) group of Operating systems. While I still have one working PC left (A dell 1100 system, my wife’s Compaq Laptop just died 2 weeks ago), I’m looking and possibly install Unbuntu  and saying ‘good riddance’ to Windows all together. With my move to Google  I’m freed from the needless Windows eventual slowing down to run bloated office programs taking up precious CPU time.

In case most of you aren’t paying attention, this is the way things are going. The circle is closing. The Client/Server model will prevail and your ‘computer’ will look amazingly like a Terminal once again. Oddly enough, I wrote a sci-fi story some years ago showing this exact thing. How prescient of me.

Let me explain in simple terms. Wayyyyy back when computers took up rooms the size of small bungalows, the only way to access them was through a screen/keyboard ‘terminal’ was was essentially just a screen and keyboard with a loooooong cord running back to the big ‘computer’.  You were directly plugged into the ‘mainframe’ and did your requests for programs to be run though just a keyboard and a screen. That which you typed on did zero computing. It simply was in input/output device for you to tell the mainframe what to do and it would tell you want the results were.

Fastfoward to Aug 2005 and Google Docs appears. Here you simply go to a website, log in with an account, and click on an option to create a document. Other than your screen, absolutely nothing is done on your computer. Gee, mainframe/terminal -> client/server anyone?

Google is THE company to watch for. They have been sooo smart in their product releases and marketing that noone will expect the surprises that are in store. See, everyone is concentrating on the Microsoft/Apple conflict that’s going around and with fairly good reason. Apple is the only commercial company that challenges Microsoft on a daily basis. This is why I currently own 4 MACs and 2 PCs(one working). Now, if you have been paying attention, Google has
created an operating system for a cell phone called Android. With the popularity of cell phones/smartphones, this is a natural place for a company to be in order to grown and keep being profitable. Now, in case you missed reading between the lines….allow me to emphasize with a quote from Android’s description “Android is a software stack for mobile devices that includes an operating system, middleware and key applications…”. Did you catch that? Operating System and ‘key applications’. I give it no more than 3 years before you see a “Google Computer” that is nothing more than a ‘netbook’ with a network plug and zero storage on it. See, Google is poised to be the 3rd major competitor in this game of ‘who so controls the Internet will control the world’. Keep an eye on Google Labs for future developments.

In the mean time…..anyone got a spare Floppy drive that I can borrow? Ugh.