The world is changin’, and I’m sure this trend will continue. I can even see some sort of engine-product revenue sharing model pop up with these free versions (think royalty-based sharing with products built using a free engine). My only question at this point is, “Who’s next?”

Google Chrome OS is an open source, lightweight operating system that will initially be targeted at netbooks. Later this year we will open-source its code, and netbooks running Google Chrome OS will be available for consumers in the second half of 2010.

Okay, cool. And now Michael Arrington is masturbating over himself:

It’s hard to type a blog post when one hand is being used to pat myself on the back.Last year I wrote a post about the just launched Chrome browser titled Meet Chrome, Google’s Windows Killer.

Congrats, Michael. I guess.

Google OS is in fact an operating system. It runs hardware management off the Linux kernel and its application platform is the browser (Google Chrome). For Windows the application layer is the desktop, with the browser as another application offering but not the platform that all other applications are built off.

That difference is why I don’t think Google OS is going to be the Microsoft killer of Arrington’s fantasies, at least in the short- to medium-term, and by the long-term Microsoft will have an answer. Certainly, it will open up other opportunities for online computer usage, and it may open up “the cloud” to a more mainstream audience. But online and “the cloud” is only part of what computers are used for. What about games, business applications, embedded applications, simulations, and so on?

One issue I see is that web technology is not yet equal to desktop technology. It’s headed that direction, and great strides have been made in all verticals of web tech in the last decade, but web-based application development presents its own unique challenges that desktop application development has long since resolved. If you strip away the application platform of today and replace it with a browser so that you’re forced to work within a web-based framework, then you’re reintroducing challenges application developers have to now re-address.

For example, Google Apps, which Arrington addresses:

Don’t worry about those desktop apps you think you need. Office? Meh. You’ve got Zoho and Google Apps. You won’t miss office. Chrome plus Gears plus Google Wave plus HTML 5 and web platforms like Flash and Silverlight all combine into a single wonderful computing device. The Internet Is Everything. All the OS has to do is boot the damn computer, get me to a browser as fast as possible and then stay the hell out of the way.

How many people actually use Google Apps for their productivity applications instead of Microsoft Office (or an open source alternative)? It would be nice to see that stat, but nobody I personally know uses Google Apps for their regular document editing needs. Why not? Because it sucks. Response is slow, features are limited, and it’s in a browser.

Even if the browser is the operating system, Google Apps is not at the level of Microsoft Office. For example, I always have issues with Google Apps when formatting my document. I don’t actually know how it really looks until I make it a PDF, since there’s always a variation between the edit view of the document and the printed view. I don’t have that problem with Office.

Don’t get me wrong: Google OS is an exciting announcement that will open up another vertical in the OS market, but it isn’t a replacement for the traditional desktop OS platform. There are issues with a browser-based OS that desktop OS’s simply provide better solutions for, and for that reason Google OS will not be for everyone. ReadWriteWeb posted 10 Things We’re Dying to Know about Chrome OS that is an example of some of the challenges a browser-based OS faces. Like I said, some of these things the desktop OS is simply better at performing.

But of course with announcements like these people like Michael Arrington have to do the masturbatory dance. It keeps their egos (and paychecks) growing. I just advise against being sucked into the hype.

They have a beta out that you can sign up for, and you can watch videos created by CamSpace users at http://www.camspace.com/ugc/.

Edit: The embedded video wasn't playing nice with the site's formatting.

Yet even when I get a negative response about Vista, it turns out most people haven't checked it out for themselves and are only going on what they hear and read from others. I'll ask what they heard, and they'll give me a list of problems they've heard about. I'll respond saying it's funny because I never have any problems, and they'll use that word "heard" again.

Someone in Microsoft's PR department ought to be in trouble with the Vista marketing campaign, or lack thereof. Between Apple commercials, Bill Gates-haters, and Linux fanboys making sure Vista had a tough rollout, all the public may have needed to adopt Vista is something like The "Mojave Experiment".

This is a great move by Microsoft, finally, to help salvage Vista's reputation. In the "experiment", users were asked to give their rating of Vista before sitting down to use the next OS from Microsoft, codenamed Mojave. Then they were asked to give a rating of Mojave. The results are interesting.

Users averaged a 4.4 rating for Vista based on their preconceived notions (they had never used it, only "heard" about it). Users averaged an 8.5 for "Mojave".

Turns out, Mojave is actually Vista. And the people love Vista. The lesson? PR is important. And if you've never tried it, Vista is better than you've heard.

The videos are fun to watch. Microsoft needs to form them into a commercial and get it on TV.

Check out the "You can't please everyone" link. Classic.

So now I'm curious what the other industry players are going to counter with, if anything. Larrabee technology probably won't be available for several more years, so there's plenty of opportunity for the others to stake their territory. In some ways I think the Larrabee details release may be a little premature, particularly with the long wait until its ready for primetime, but then that's how Intel has worked in the past – why change now?

NVIDIA seems to be in the best position to offer a counter the near-term, or at least an alternative technology. They seem to have their act together more than AMD, who may be dying a slow, painful death. The ATI acquisition didn't help much either – I bet AMD didn't know they were gaining so many more WoW players than graphics engineers when they purchased ATI.

Some food for thought from WALL-E director Andrew Stanton:

Life is nothing but imperfection and the computer likes perfection, so we spent probably 90% of our time putting in all of the imperfections, whether it’s in the design of something or just the unconscious stuff. How the camera lens works in [a real] housing is never perfect, and we tried to put those imperfections [into the virtual camera] so that everything looks like you’re in familiar [live-action] territory.

Tip: kottke.org

Embedding non-image data inside an image isn’t a new trick, but some reddit commenters are finding that data for a Spore creature is uniquely embedded in the .PNG file that can be downloaded from the creature’s Sporepedia entry.

While some commenters originally discovered data embedded in the alpha channel of the image, they now believe the data is embedded in the RGB channels as well, possibly giving up to 8k of extra data storage in some estimates.

Again, storing data in an image is nothing new, but as Troy Gilbert points out, “it’s a very clever, modern, web way of handling it. It allows for trivial sharing by the user through whatever means they’re accustomed to because sharing an image is an almost universal feature of any collaborative software. So, user’s can attach the thumbs to their e-mail, or post them to their Flickr account, or put them on Facebook or their MySpace page, or send them in an IM.” Then when a friend opens the image inside the game, they’ll get the creature.

It’s definitely an inspiration for some work I’m doing, and you can bet I’ll be considering ways to incorporate this into some of my solutions. It also kind of gives a new meaning to file sharing.

Take notes in class and can't read your handwriting? Livescribe can play back the audio at the precise time of your messy handwriting. Want to communicate handwritten notes from your business meeting to the rest of your team? Livescribe will allow you to share the notes electronically with audio.

The only drawback I see at the moment is that you have to buy their paper, which has some sort of a micro-dot technology that allows the pen to know where it's at. Otherwise, this is some cool technology.

Disclaimer: I don't have one, and I'm not affiliated with this company. I just think this technology is a step in the right direction for mobile computing.