Creative Commons has met their fundraising target and gone past their target with the help of Microsoft who donated $25,000
What I want to know is what mysterious anonymous person donated a million dollars
It amuses me that all the keynotes at CES in Las Vegas so far have been about is media centre PCs in the lounge or convergence in some way (Yahoo, Intel, Microsoft). Everyone seems to be on the same track.
A speculative article by the LA Times suggested that Google will “will unveil its own low-price personal computer” as soon as Friday and has been in “negotiations with Wal-Mart Stores Inc.”. First this article was picked up by Slashdot and then The Register and I believe has been blown completely out of proportion.
The original Los Angeles Times article was one of those speculative lists of what will happen in 2006 by “analysts”. The Google PC prediction sat alongside Microsoft buying Ask Jeeves, Expedia, and Ticketmaster and Steve Jobs becoming a Disney Chairman – yet the Register reports it almost as fact.
Ignoring the dubious sources for a moment here, I just don’t think Google would do this. Don’t get me wrong, I’d love it if Google branded a distribution of GNU/Linux (it would almost certainly be Linux derivative) and sold cheap PCs without the Microsoft tax, finally distributing their changes to Open Source software instead of keeping them to themselves to provide services. Google is a company full of suprises – but I don’t think it’s their style. Why bother? Their services are cross platform and independent of the OS, their main environment is the web browser. Google’s main strengths are in their clustered supercomputer as a general platform for software as a service, they have no need to provide desktop PCs to access their services because they’re already out there.
I believe Google are more interested in rendering the traditional Desktop paradigm obsolete than making their own desktop OS. If they released hardware for the home it is more likely to be a derivative of their business search appliance for multimedia or very cheap little boxes in a cluster or mesh which glue the digital home together and I doubt very much they’d call it a PC, it would be something completely different to the Personal Computers we know today.
Just for reference, I don’t believe in the whole idea of them making a web-based OpenOffice either, it’s simply too bloated. If Google were to create an office suite it would be minimalist, lightweight and completely different to its desktop counterparts with focus on ubiquitous access, collaboration and open standards.
There’s scope for Google to want to put hardware in people’s homes in the future, the main crux of the software as a service model taking over from desktop applications is that you simply can’t buy latency, and for some applications where the speed of light (fibre) just isn’t fast enough, this is going to cause problems. Putting Google hardware in peoples houses creates a great deal of new opportunities. Just not now, and not like this.
I can see where people are coming from. Google has ties with Sun and OpenOffice, they’ve released a range of desktop applications recently, they’re making aggressive moves towards Microsoft and have put desktop PCs in a London airport for usability testing. Due to 20% time projects by staff and a certain amount of freedom for the next couple of years due to being flushed with money from the IPO – they seem to be going off on all sorts of tangents leading people to believe they have a masterplan for something big. I just think that Google have a long way to go with their web services before they’re ready for a move like this.
I have to admit, part of my dismissive argument is due to the fact that if on Friday Google *do* announce that they’re selling PCs through Wal-Mart, it has a lot of implications for my Krell experiment. We’ll wait and see.
Edit: Just noticed that the BBC picked it up too.
Happy New Year everyone! I need to think up some new years resolutions…
Please see my announcement of the start of a new experiment I’m working on called Krell. Not much information at the moment but it’s very exciting 🙂
Someone on a mailing list I read has managed to put an out of office reply on the email address they use to subscribe to the list, resulting in the annoying automatic replies popping up on the list. (As an aside I’ve always wondered why these don’t reply recursively… is there something coded into mail clients to make sure that an out of office reply doesn’t reply to itself?)
Anyway, they were kind enough to leave a mobile phone number for urgent contact… oh the temptation! Someone hide my phone! Actually, better hide Google’s Click-to-Call from me too 😛
X3D + AJAX = …I wonder
Amsterdam
Amsterdam rocked. ’nuff said.
Christmas
Lots of books and Farscape DVDs. I got a maths text book for Christmas, yay me.
Bought lauperr the bestest present, ever.
In other news…
PING google.com (64.233.187.99) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from 64.233.187.99: icmp_seq=5 ttl=240 time=8655 ms
I thought wires being cold made the data go faster not slower!
Un-frelling-believeable. Taken from wiki spam I just deleted:
We leave content intact . We allow you to easily remove the additions .
We respect your pages and appologize for the spam .
We are the Ethical Spammers group .
(this is an oximoron – two terms that are put together but are opposed meaning) .
*sigh*
Back from Amsterdam, will post more soon.
Wow, don’t these guys look chummy in the picture. Hmm.
I think Mr Bittorrent must have been photoshopped in next to the dinosaur 😉
I’m suffering serious motivation problems, but I’m just about coping. What I really want to do is go out for the night in Birmingham with uni friends which I haven’t done for well over a month. I just don’t feel like I have the time, it just seems like I’m on a sprint finish until Christmas and then I have a tonne of work to do over Christmas. That and I never seem to be aware of whats on when and where everyone is going. Gah.
I keep falling asleep during the day, really need to sort out my body clock.
Bah humbug, I hate Christmas already.
I’m determined to stay positive and focussed while my life gets ever more hectic! Between full time study in a department apparently notorious for its workload, business which is becoming more than I ever imagined, committees for the Enterprise Society and Student Radio station, moving from the countryside to the city, learning to cook; clean; iron and gather food, trying to exercise, remembering my family exists, spending time with my girlfriend and taking time out for myself to relax and socialise with my diverse new friends… I have a lot on my plate.
I apologise to all the people I complain at about how much I have to do, I shouldn’t because I’ve chosen this lifestyle. I can be very protective over my time sometimes but I will stop complaining and I must make some serious changes to my attitude to organise and motivate myself to keep it up.
My head is going to explode through information overload if I don’t start turning on some mental filters so please bear with me while I tune them correctly to *not* ignore the important people, especially family and friends.
I’m trying to make the most of every second of every day, in a couple of months I won’t be a teenager any more and I kind of value my youth.
Phewf.
Microsoft hails ‘strategic shift’
Software giant Microsoft has announced a major push into online software services, in what is seen as a move to counter rivals like Google and Yahoo.
I have to admit, I didn’t see that one coming. I wonder what they’ll come up with…
Losing it
First, I show signs of obsessive behaviour and don’t leave the flat for two weeks. Then I have a bout of paranoia. No, it’s not drugs, I’m just going crazy. Either that or I’m becoming an engineer.
In other news…
As explained in #alug last night, I returned a library book at 7pm last night and seeing as it’s a 20 minute walk from my flat to campus I decided that I may as well go for a beer while I was there. I walked into Joe’s bar wanting a swift pint and by the time I walked out I had joined the BurnFM (student radio) committee and become their designated webmaster. That’ll teach me to sit around with the IndieSoc people.
