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so in the car today, i was reading this BusinessWeek article (sep 5, 2005 - Google's Grand Ambitions) and started thinking about what google is up to (again).

the article covered google's spree of acquisitions and hires related to browser/OS development, as well as their latest focus on providing free wi-fi access and getting into the mobile market. so what i now think is that they're actually doing what everybody else is only talking about (with the possible exception of sun) - using the internet as an application delivery platform. except they're doing it google-style. which means they're going to keep just about everything on their local server farm, and the user is only going to be giving commands through a thin-client type OS.

google is one of the few companies with the server capacity (and broadband fiber - see my earlier post) to be able to pull this off. it also makes a lot of sense with respect to making the world's information universally accessible. think about it - all your apps and data are stored online. you are given a universal login, which you can use on any google-OS (which i'll call GoOSe for short) anywhere. that includes your desktop, laptop (connected using google's free wi-fi access points), cellphone, friend's cellphone, or street kiosk. that's right - i fully expect google to start putting google kiosks for public use in the streets (or at least in cafes and such) once this is ready to go.

with everything centralized, virii can be squashed before they have a chance to spread, apps are constantly up-to-date, and everything is accessible anywhere. you might not be able to play doom3 on your cellphone, but that would be a limitation of the data transfer speed, not computational power. no maintenance required whatsoever - this solution is totally grandma-proof.

in fact, if they get around to actually doing this, they could probably harness spare CPU cycles the same way i described for the cell processor. that would simply add to their already ginormous supply of processing power. but that's beside the point.

so what does google get out of this? control. it's that simple - they would control everything (and more) right from the OS to the applications to the delivery mechanism. that's even more control than microsoft has now, which is probably not a good thing. anyway, more later..

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So, once more, bell canada leaves me bereft of phone and internet services. It's always the analog that lets me down. From here on out, I'm gonna try going with cable modem and voip if I possibly can.

On the bright side, i'm getting a lot of practice typing on a phone keyboard. My typing speed has improved dramatically since i started this post.

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Hell: Too Good For Some Evil Bastards - I wonder if they sell copies of that poster?

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so the w3c decided to update their HTML validator and some of my pages became invalid. i think i caught most of the problems, but if you're bored, feel free to pick random pages and run 'em through the validator. (if you're using Opera, just hit Ctrl+Alt+V).

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the tao of programming. need i say more? :)

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Jinxed computer users might be sending out a bad vibe, researchers suggest - a quick read, and it may not be as harebrained as it sounds. The research was done at princeton engineering anomalies research, the same guys behind the global conciousness project that was slashdotted back in februrary (i think this was the article that got slashdotted, actually).

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so today at work for lunch we went to east side mario's to braindump on the co-op who's going to be taking over our project next term. then, i get home and check my email... there's spam! from east side mario's! (and before you ask, no, i did not give them my email address.) it's like they're anti-psychic... they shouldn't be spamming me on the day that i go there.

also, i got this snail-mail spam today from a funeral home. unlike most snail-spam, it wasn't addressed to me, or to "the resident" or anything like that.. it wasn't addressed to anybody. figures.. if they're a funeral home they're probably hoping to get it to some bereaved person, so any attempt at addressing it ("to the relative of somebody who may or may not have died recently") could be potentially embarassing.

it's been a weird day in terms of spam.

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this sort of thing is the reason why microsoft sucks so much. if vista ever does come out, people are going to start shifting over from openGL to proprietary MS APIs, forcing everybody else to use vista in order to use those apps. it's oddly similar to what they did with the web, except of course, that's coming back to kick them in the teeth. (see this if you don't know what i'm talking about). they just don't learn, do they?

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just finished reading the baroque cycle by neal stephenson (it's a trilogy: quicksilver, the confusion, and the system of the world). it was.. lengthy. each of the three books was ~850 pages, and most of it was not as good as it could have been.

the first book was the most boring. apparently (although i only vaguely remember this) i tried reading quicksilver when i was in ottawa two terms ago and gave up. this time i managed to get through it, but only just. the second book was the best, but still not nearly at the level of cryptonomicon. the third was so-so. the ending was kinda dumb and therefore disappointing. meh. all in all, i probably wouldn't recommend it.

oh, and for those of you who have read cryptonomicon and were wondering, enoch root is in fact immortal. or rather, he knows how to resurrect people. or something along those lines. in case you weren't wondering and are now wondering why you should have been wondering, there's a part in cryptonomicon where enoch dies in (sweden?) in the WW2 part of the book, but then he shows up later playing card games with the present-day waterhouse in a jail cell.

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stolen from rfk: 10th planet possibly found.

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