#“Instant Google CloudOS Reaction”

On Monday night I grabbed an image of Google’s not-yet-released CloudOS operating system, stuck it on a USB stick and booted my Acer Aspire One netbook with it.

In under10 seconds I had a login prompt. 5 seconds after that I was in and using it. Pretty shockingly impressive.

It currently a very basic desktop with mainly links to web apps. Browser is obviously Chrome.

Very slow (since it is totally non-optimised for any hardware) but amazingly, video works, network works, decent resolution works. Only audio seemed to be a problem.

Unlike certain other appliances, this will be the netbook OS your granny buys. Why? Cos she can print out her Ryanair boarding pass, she can Skype her grandkids, she can buy music on the Amazon store, download it and use it there and then.

It looks about 6 months away from release and will need lots of sexy design to keep the form-over-function people happy but ye know, it feels just about right even now.

review rating=4 lv:group=technology cloudos netbooks operating systems cloud computing

#“The in-betweeners”

Like many people, my blogging activities have collapsed. A lot of that is due to work commitment but another large part of it is that I post most quick thoughts and ideas to Twitter or Facebbok.

The problem there is discoverability and conversation threads. Sure someone can find a tweet weeks later but they’ll never be able to reply to it in an intelligible way.

But I still don’t have time to do full blog posts.

So think of this as the iPad of my online presence. It’s for stuff that is too long for Twitter/Facebook (and deserves longevity) but is too short for all my Wordpress blogs.

Like my first blogpost in 2001, this may be the last thing I write here for months :-)

Of course Google Cardboard isn’t up there with Oculus but I still have my jaw on the floor over what it can do. These are some of the apps I’ve tried out this week.

• Google Cardboard App itself
• The Hobbit VR Experience
• Lamper
• Jack White: THIRD-D
• Vanguard V
• Kaiju Fury: Trailer
• Chair In A Room
• SpaceTerror
• Tuscany Dive
• Orbulus
• War of Words
• Google Maps Street View
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Does it still work

Here’s a quick potted history of me and computers/languages/OSes to set the scene for talking about Red Hat.

• 1982-1986, Home: ZX Spectrum. Basic, Forth, Z80 Assembler. Loved it.
• 1986-1989, UCD Eng: Some mainframe yoke. Fortran. The horror, the horror.
• 1989-1989, Philips Eindhoven: Computervision Workstation. Cool.
• 1989-1990, UCD Eng: PC, DOS. Final year project. Happy days. C
• 1990-1992, UCD Eng Masters: PC Windows 3.0 and HP Apollo HPUX. Both fab. C, C++. First experience of d’internet and shareware and compiling from source.
• 1992-1994, S3: Vax with VT-100. C. The horror the horror again. Finally got a PC with Windows.
• 1994-1995, S3: Sun Sparc. C. Oh this isn’t bad even if Motif is an abomination. Remote X-Windows cool. Oh what’s this Java thing?
• 1996-2000, Integral Design: PC Windows NT. Rock solid. ¹⁄₃ price of SUNs.
• 1996-1996, Integral Design: Slackware Linux. My first ever Linux install in Sunnyvale. Did not go well.
• 1997-2000, Integral Design: Red Hat Linux. Under my desk. Skunkworks :-) JUst got better and better.
• 2001-2006, Xilinx/EMC/McAfee: PC Windows. C, C++, Java, Perl, Python. Nothing interesting to report.
• 2001-2006, Home: Red Hat, Fedora up to about FC 6. Playing, learning, configuring.
• 2006-2008, LouderVoice: CentOS