Monday, February 28, 2011
Sunday, February 27, 2011
Burning Chrome
Google made a few interesting announcements this week. First, Google Docs Viewer support for a sheaf of new document types, including Excel, Powerpoint, Photoshop and PostScript. Second, Chrome’s new ability to run background apps that run seamlessly and invisibly behind the browser. Third, they released Google Cloud Connect, which lets Windows users sync Office documents to Google Docs. They also announced the Android 3.0 SDK – but despite the ongoing tablet hysteria, in the long run, the first three are more important.
Little by little, iteration by iteration, the Chrome browser is quietly morphing into a full-fledged multitasking operating system in its own right. Oh, sure, technically it’s actually running on another OS, but you increasingly never need to launch anything else. View and edit documents in Google Docs, watch and listen to HTML5 video and audio, communicate via Gmail and its Google Voice plugin, use Google Docs as a file system – and the line between “Chrome OS” and “Chrome on any other OS” suddenly grows very fine.
Google’s long-term strategy seems to be to supplant Microsoft by first building the best browser, then making it easy to move your files to Google Docs … and finally, slowly but inexorably, making Windows and Office irrelevant. Obviously no one will abandon Microsoft products wholesale anytime soon; but as cloud computing grows more ubiquitous, Google steadily iterates feature after feature, and people grow accustomed to working in the browser, then one day, maybe only a couple of years from now, a whole lot of people – and businesses – will begin to think to themselves “Hey, we haven’t actually needed Windows or Office in months. Why do we even have them at all?”
The “network computer” dumb-terminal approach has failed many times before … but so did Six Degrees, Tribe.net, Friendster, and (eventually) MySpace, before Facebook came along. The original iMac was roundly criticized because it didn’t have a floppy drive, criticism that now sounds hilariously stupid. We might look back at the first Chrome OS notebook in much the same way. Of course, Chrome can’t actually compete with Windows until always-on broadband Internet access reaches the same level of reliability and ubiquity as electricity itself; but that’s only a matter of time. In the early days of electricity, every factory had its own power plant, and its managers would have been appalled by the notion of outsourcing that vital engine – but soon enough those inefficient installations were replaced by today’s electrical grid. Computing power is the new electricity, and cloud computing is the new grid.
Unlike most companies, when Google says “cloud”, they mean it. Compare Amazon’s cloud-computing service to Google’s. With the former, you essentially call up and configure one or more servers with the OS and specifications of your choice; but with Google’s App Engine, you don’t know anything about its hardware or operating system, because that no longer matters. It just runs the code you give it, and you don’t much care how. Similarly, Chrome is being built for a future where the ambient, omnipresent wireless Internet connects everything from clothes to computers to cars (which explains how their self-driving cars fits into their strategy) and it doesn’t much matter what OS any given device is running.
I’ve criticized Google pretty harshly of late, but credit where it’s due: they still think bigger and further than anyone else. The problem is that all these brilliant strategies are predicated on their continued dominance of the search space, whose users are forever just a whim away from jumping ship to an alternative, and they’ve taken their eye off that ball of late. But at least they’ve finally started cracking down on search spam. It’s a start. Maybe they haven’t grown too bureaucratic and sclerotic to make the Chrome future happen after all.
Saturday, February 26, 2011
Today on BoingBoing: Highlights from the world's largest general science con...
Last week, thousands of scientists gathered in Washington D.C. for the 2011 American Association for the Advancement of Science conference. While most science conferences are field-specific—a geology conference here, a bio-medicine symposium there—AAAS is the big, fully-loaded enchilada, featuring speakers and panels that cover just about every facet of science that you can imagine. It lasts for six days. The unabridged program is as thick as a phone book. The two times I've been to AAAS, in 2009 and 2010, I've found myself so wrapped up in rushing from one amazing presentation to the next that I would go through an 8-hour day before I remembered to stop and eat.
I wasn't able to make it to AAAS 2011, but lots of other science journalists were there, and I've been reading their work. Today, I'm going to post about some of the most fascinating stories to come out of this year's conference—A few highlights, and another post with links galore.
Want more sciency goodness? A great place to start is Science Magazine. This website is connected to the AAAS organization, who are also the publishers of the peer-reviewed journal Science. They've got all sorts of podcasts, videos, and stories from AAAS 2011, which should give you a good idea of the breadth of topics the conference covers.
Image: Some rights reserved by krossbow
Space Shuttle Discovery STS-133 on launchpad
A lovely photo by Tom Moler of NASA. Click here for the Twitpic'd full size image. The shuttle is due to launch tomorrow, Thursday February 24, at 4:50pm ET. The mission will be the 39th and final flight of Discovery, and the 133rd flight of the Space Shuttle program, which began on 12 April 1981.
(via Beth Beck, who is Space Operations Outreach Manager with NASA.)
Rare Alan Turing papers bought by Bletchley Park Trust
ELEVENTH HOUR RESCUE OF TURING COLLECTION (Thanks, Martin!)The collection of articles belonged to Professor Max Newman, Turing's friend and fellow Bletchley Park codebreaking genius. It includes offprints of sixteen of Turing's eighteen published works including his momentous paper 'On Computable Numbers' A limited number of the offprints would have been produced at the time and Turing's gifting them to Newman bears testimony to their unique relationship. The set includes articles which have been annotated by Newman, along with Max Newman's name inscribed in pencil in Turing's hand. Accompanying the set of offprints is the Newman household visitors' book with several signatures of Turing, that of Turing's mother and, of special significance to Bletchley Park, signatures of other wartime codebreaking giants.
The Turing-Newman Collaboration Collection is particularly rare, important and valuable as very few physical traces of Turing's work or personal belongings still exist. Most of the wartime records at Bletchley Park were destroyed after the war, while Turing himself kept little of his work and very few personal belongings...
Turing's close relationship with Newman was crucial to the historic contribution Turing made, starting with Newman's encouragement to investigate 'mechanical processes' and his help in securing Turing a fellowship at Princeton to continue his research. In 1952 at a time when homosexuality was illegal in the UK, Turing was convicted of having a sexual relationship with another man. Turing was sentenced to a hormone treatment that amounted to chemical castration. The conviction robbed him of his security clearance for GCHQ, for which he still worked, and made him the target for surveillance at the start of the cold war. Having made one of the most outstanding contributions of the twentieth century, he died after eating an apple laced with cyanide.
- Bletchley Park kicks so much ass - Boing Boing
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