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Are Operating Systems Doomed?

December 30, 2008 justisengard Leave a comment

Found this in my Infoworld feed this morning.  Are Operating Systems Doomed.

The new philosophy of application development is making the traditional OS irrelevant, but what are the implications for enterprise IT?

The author speaks about Google Chrome and Adobe Air as changing the landscape of application development, to be OS independent.  To be honest I do not see this as a big surprise.  My question is why has it taken this long?

I would love to use Chrome, but the good folks at Google have not decided to let Mac OS X users in on the party.  Something that continues to urk me as Google CEO Eric Schmit sits on the board at Apple.  Rant on the subject: No Chrome for Mac or Linux Users.  So until Google decided to put all that money and developer power into making all Google goodness available to Windows AND Mac and Linux users, I am seeing a hole in this progress.  Adobe Air is a different story entirely.  They support Windows, Linux and Mac.  And guess what, there are tons of apps being developed, and more importantly, used by a growing community.  So Google Developers, a word of advice; lets start seeing a systems requirements page like this for all Google applications and services (Adobe Air Systems Requirements).

Now for the comments on enterprise IT, and possibly security, in my humble opinion, they continue to drag their feet and find ways to keep their jobs.  Consumer technology is the ‘only’ place there is ‘any’ inovation in the IT world.  Even virtualization, which has been the hot technology in IT for  the last couple of years got it start with consumers in the late 90s.  Virtualization has run into the say foot dragging from IT Security and monolithic IT departments wanting to keep doing things the same way.  I mean we just have companies wrapping their mind around instant messaging, and only recently have they started to embrace wiki technology.  How many of you reading this that work in corporate IT, have a 100MB-250MB cap on your email via Microsoft Exchange or Lotus Notes.  While Google is providing the world ~7GB of mail storage with better uptime than most corporate IT departments, for free.  For $50/per user/per year, you can get the same for your company.  So why is corporate IT, buying and maintaining servers in datacenters and IT salaries for 1990s class services?

I read an article on a magazine last month that talked about the future where companies would stop providing computers and mobile phones in the same way as they stopped providing clothing expenses back in the 50s.  Basically it was saying that everyone will have a computer and a mobile phone and all they will need is a way to connect to their data.  To do this future the above are the baby steps.

Categories: Innovation, Technology

RSS for Dummies

May 6, 2007 justisengard 1 comment

I do not take credit for the wonderful video on how/why to use RSS feeds, I just want more people to learn how. Thanks to TechLifeBlogged for the initial link RSS in Plain English.


Click To Play

There are two types of Internet users, those that use RSS and those that don’t. This video is for the people who could save time using RSS, but don’t know where to start.

This video was originally shared on blip.tv by leelefever with a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs license.

Will Your Car Become a Tattle-Tale?

In my humble opinion this debate has a simple solution. Privacy should not be ignored, particularly in this country. There should be no question of whether these black boxes are a ‘good’ advancement in technology. The question of who owns the data is simple – who owns what is in the car. If the law states that John Smith owns the stereo in the car, then the data in the black box is his as well. There should not be a debate on whether to force this data to be automatically sent some where – it should be the choice of the owner of the data. The government and automakers can mandate that all cars have these black boxes, but the decision to hand this data over to other is the choice of the car owner. Therefore, there should be a mechanism in which the owner can make this decision. Just like in my truck, I can turn the passenger side air bag on and off with the key – something similar could be developed. There other thing that should be enacted is a federal law preventing auto insurance companies or any others from penalizing the owner their decision. See it is not rocket science.

justisengard dugg this:

As vehicles collect more data about the way people drive, particularly related to crashes, the debate is heating up about who owns that data and what should be done with it.

read more | digg story

Red Hat Launches Youtube Campaign

In support of Red Hat’s release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux Version 5, they’re making use of some interesting venues including youtube.

justisengard dugg this:

Proud to be a RedHat stock holder.!  Yeah, Novell – this is what a ‘real’ Linux company does…

read more | digg story

Categories: Innovation, Linux, Technology