Google Releases the First Chrome OS Code – Cue the Doomsayers!
By Johan De Lange

I just love how we are as human beings, especially the geek brigade. Whether IBM, Microsoft, Apple, Novell, any Linux distro, and now Google, we are always either completely in love or completely out of love with their product/service, and highly complimentary or highly critical!

This past week Google makes more news and some code available of the upcoming Chrome OS, and makes it very clear that this is still pre-alpha stuff, just to get us warmed up to the idea. No sooner has the day ended or out come the doomsayers (doomsayer – ‘One who predicts calamity at every opportunity.’ – thefreedictionary.com), and we have blogs and articles all over the web stating how Google missed it, how Chrome OS is dead before it has even begun, and how Chrome OS will take down Microsoft, or how Microsoft will take down Google, and so on and so on and so on. Btw, if you want to know my personal favorite, it has to be Randall C. Kennedy’s Why Chrome OS will fail — big time… EISH! and you have to be South African to understand that I am not complimenting him here at all!

With Microsoft it was the same, remember Bing? Wow, we saw all kinds of comments coming out of the woodwork on that one, no matter that for once Microsoft started getting it right with the move to a single search platform within their offerings, or that the data on usage in those first weeks had very little to do with Bing’s ultimate success as a search engine and more to do with people trying out the new platform.

Doomsayers are always going to be around, but these days of instant reports over multiple mediums, pretend experts, self promoting blogs, reporters writing reports based on the opinions of other reporters who heard news from unnamed often unverified sources, tend to lead to some seriously misguided comments! And since when have we become so cynical that we shoot down new ideas even before they’ve truly been tested? Imagine hearing about two brothers who made bicycles for a living believing they could FLY!

Are companies also guilty here? Possibly, watching Apple over the years they seem to have a trick to successfully release news of new ideas, concepts, services or products, though they too have not been spared this treatment. I don’t think Google is perfect in how it does that either, and so too Microsoft or even Apple. With the ease with which people can publish their own thoughts on anything these days (you’re reading mine right now) controlling how these new concepts or products are written about in better and more accurate ways, may become the issue for public debate, but it is something we as geeks can improve on here and now.

Like Google Wave, Chrome OS already suffers from public hype, the perceived solution that it is not, and I wonder just what is going to happen when finally it is released to the world. For the greater part of that hype we the geeks are to blame. There is so much misconception from the very crowd of people others look to for balanced opinions, that it is depressing to me to think what these doomsayers are doing when they are not writing such drivel.

Can you imagine being an owner of a company where these individuals work, and the critical decisions they make on your behalf? Just imagine how many dollars their opinionated choices have already cost you, because they prefer to follow their own opinion instead of conducting a ‘fair evaluation’ of a new solution without bias?

When a product is put out to the world in code for a collaboration or comment so early on in its development it would be nice if we could all put our collective efforts into trying it out and making constructive comments about the code, the intended functions that are or are not delivered, and the resulting user experience only, instead of acting as the town-criers that we are not and prophesying biased drivel.

We all suffer from this habit of isolating ourselves into camps, don’t we? Geeks and technologists are so guilty of this, myself included, but lately I have realized that when it comes down to it, no product or service is perfect, no brand saintly, and no consultant worth his or her salt should pretend otherwise.

We should be ‘cross-platform, open-minded individuals’ who look at the problems experienced by our clients, their budget and resource constraints and then to the pool of available solutions or solution components that could offer them relief without taking brand bias with us into that decision-making process.

The EU will not be the end of Microsoft, Bing does not mean the end of Google, Chrome OS does not mean death to all other OS’s, and Google’s Phone won’t kill Nokia or iPhone for that matter. Logic must prevail when we offer opinion, we must base what we say on fact, and we must know when to say the things we do. If we do this our integrity remains intact and those who value our opinions become better informed and make better choices.

http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9141207/Opinion_Why_Chrome_OS_will_fail_big_time

Yet Another Reason To Learn Linux – It’s Free
By Levi Reiss

Are you old enough to remember the 1992 Janet Jackson song entitled The Best Things In Life Are Free? Or maybe you are so old that you can remember the 1956 Hollywood movie of the same name. In any case we do not guarantee that you will find Damn Small Linux and our associated tutorials to be among the best things in your life. But we do guarantee that they are both completely free. Well, wait a minute. They are both free, but…

You may have to shell out some of your hard-earned cash to learn Linux, especially if you are downloading the software and running the tutorials on your home computer. Yes, you will have to pay for an Internet connection at least during the time devoted to downloading the files. Now by today’s bloated standards Damn Small Linux is really small; it weighs in at a mere 50 Megabytes. So downloading this software distribution is fairly quick, especially if you have a high-speed connection. And yet as we all know, sometime during the following month your Internet Service Provider will want money.

Once you have downloaded Damn Small Linux you won’t need the Internet to run it. But you may want to activate one or both of the Internet browsers that are part of this distribution. And you may want to download additional applications; there are lots of them and since this version of Linux is so small, you should still have scads of disk space available.

Your Linux costs don’t end with the Internet. I don’t think that the electricity that powers your computer is free. And the longer your days and nights spent in front of the computer the higher your light and heat bill. Furthermore, the more time you spend on Linux the more money you may end up spending on snacks, new eyeglasses, and taxis when you miss the bus to work because you just couldn’t tear yourself away from the computer in time. I think you get my drift. But we repeat. Linux, this website, and many of the references on the web are free. Should you outgrow Damn Small Linux the larger versions of Linux are free, or at least quite inexpensive when compared to ostensibly similar versions of Microsoft Windows.

Most people don’t run operating systems for their features but for the applications they enable. Reason number two: Damn Small Linux provides lots of free applications.

Levi Reiss has authored or co-authored ten books on computers and the Internet. He loves the occasional glass of wine as exemplified by his wine websites including http://www.theworldwidewine.com. He teaches Linux and Windows operating systems plus other computer courses at an Ontario French-language community college. Visit his new website http://www.linux4windows.com which teaches you how to download and run Damn Small Linux on Windows computers, even if they are “obsolete.”