Alexis Bauchu - On est pas des machines

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vendredi, novembre 20 2009

Google releases the Chromium OS open source project

Par Alexis Bauchu le vendredi, novembre 20 2009, 15:44 - Open Source & Free Software

This had to happen, Google has entered the OS business. Well, they're not in the Desktop OS business, their strategy is to win the market of the eBooks, those really small and cheap computers aiming at connectivity. The main idea behind this product (Chrome OS) is that people are 90% of their time on the internet. And that... ok they tell it very well themselves, just watch this video:

Done? Ok. It seems quite logical to get to this point. With all the services that we use on internet, most of our data is alreay in the cloud, so this all fits. When I saw Chrome on Windows for the first time, with its task manager, its separate processes for each tabs, its workers (similar to threads, they're part of HTML5)... I realized that the browser was really becoming the new OS. No problems of portability (well almost), your data always available all around the world... The advantage of this approach is that you can then build a really cheap and really fast computer just designed to go on the internet. Google also provided a video live demo:

So this is not the OS proper for now, just the open source project, so that devs can already dive into the code and collaborate or experiment with it. It's all there: the Chromium projects.

Note: I thought I remembered that they already had released somehow a desktop OS, called gOS, but they did not. gOS stands for "Good OS" and is a modified version of Ubuntu with an emphasis on web 2.0 apps and "in the cloud" data.

lundi, juin 29 2009

Google surfs on the Wave

Par Alexis Bauchu le lundi, juin 29 2009, 11:10

Checkout the incredible Google Wave project. This is gonna change everything. If you don't wanna go through the whole video, go visit the Google Wave Preview Page.

I'm really putting a lot of hopes in this, since I think Wave is a solution to so many issues with today's communication tools.

  • You just received an e-mail with no subject. What previous e-mail is it answering? Where's that e-mail?
  • If you start a "conversation" in an e-mail, and have several people join after a while, how can then know about the beginning of the conversation?
  • When you follow a newsgroups, forums, or worse, a mailing list using a web interface, what's the order in which people answered? What exact question are they answering?
  • Forums: which topics have I read, which have I not?
  • Instant messaging: how can store what has been said? How can I access it anywhere in the world? Why can't I see what the other is typing? What protocol should I use?
  • Blogs: why can't I post a comment by "answering" to the RSS feed?
  • What standard tool can you use to organize an event? Simply trying to know who's coming and who's not can be a nightmare unless you use some social network apps, but not everybody is in Facebook
  • Why can' t I follow my e-mail, forums, blogs, newsgroup in a single interface? (actually you can with Thunderbird!) From any computer in the world? (ok that you can't)
  • I've put a lot of efforts to sort my e-mails and my RSS feeds using tags. How can it benefit my friends?
Magically, this is all solved and unified in a Wave conversation. Sharing of files is also maid very easy, everything seems elegant and smooth. I just can't wait!