1. First and foremost, do you “get” what Google is trying do do here? Does it make sense? Is it a good idea?

2. Google OS will be available first on netbooks and ONLY on netbooks starting in a year. Do you think netbooks will even be relevant a year from now?

3. Google also mentions that the first generation of the Chrome OS will focus on secondary machines. Do you even have a need for a secondary machine, or is one computer with a traditional OS enough?

4. Google notes that web browsing is the most important function of a computer . Without it, many of us probably wouldn’t use a computer in the first place. So my question is, how much of your time spent on a computer is completely offline?

The whole thing is purely conceptual for now; it involves certain bacteria and ice nucleation and a lot of other science-y sounding words and phrases I don’t understand. What I do understand is the phrase “It will snow ice cream,” and what I wish I didn’t understand is “The technology is a long ways off.” Don’t be fooled by the existence of an actual Cloud Project van—it’s purely for illustrative purposes, and only functions as a regular ice cream truck/science information centre.

Next up: Spaghetti. With a chance of meatballs. Get it? [The Cloud Project via Likecool

Gaming Factory’s Chief Executive Officer Hans Pandeya describes the changes thusly:

Rosso describes the new Pirate Bay as a “resource-supported” model where royalty fees and other costs related to file sharing are subsidised by tying your PC’s computing power into The Pirate Bay’s network. “In short, the more computer resources the user contributes to The Pirate Bay, the more his content consumption is subsidised,” Rosso wrote. The Pirate Bay will also charge a small monthly fee to its users; however, that fee can be reduced depending on how much of your own computing resources you contribute to The Pirate Bay.

As CNET notes, this would effectively turn The Pirate Bay into a direct competitor with services like Akamai and Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). In other words, The Pirate Bay has effectively ceased to be The Pirate Bay—and there is no real way to know if content providers are going to be into this. At any rate, details on the pricing structure have not been announced, but the question is will you continue to use the site when these changes are implemented? [Yahoo Tech]

Kotaku guesses that it could be something similar to Valve’s SteamCloud service that stores your user data, save data and lets you download full games directly from their servers. But if it’s something similar to OnLive, the service that lets you play games that are entirely streamed and rendered in a machine hosted somewhere else, that could be interesting as well. [Kotaku]

In a nutshell: OnLive runs the games on their powerful servers, the output is then rendered as a video stream and then sent to your OnLive set-top box, PC or even netbook, taking expensive, loud, obsolescence-prone gaming PCs out of the picture entirely. 720p HD streams are said to be possible over a 5mbps connection, while SD gaming only calls for a 1.5mbps line.Hardware requirements are virtually nonexistent, meaning that you can play, say, Crysis, on anything from your MacBook to your Aspire One to your Dell Studio to your eMachines shitbox. If you want to hook the service up to a TV, OnLive will sell you a set-top box for “less than a Wii”, which shoulders just enough of a load to play back OnLive’s HD streams. The service itself will likely operate on a subscription model, but OnLive hasn’t given any firm details on how much that’ll cost. And before your ask, publishers are already on board, including EA, THQ, Ubisoft, and Epic. Really.

To anyone who has heard of LivePlace—the eye-popping server-rendered Second Life clone for mobile phones—this will all sound familiar, and the same concern will immediately bubble up: lag. If it’s plagued client-rendered multiplayer games for all this time, how could OnLive possibly avoid it with such dramatically increased demands on user bandwidth? Well, Kotaku got to try the service, and though it was only hosting a fraction of the users it will when it goes public, they were able to play Crysis Wars without a hitch. OnLive is set for launch later this year, and we’ll get to see how the service scales when the beta opens up in this summer, and if their unbelievable 1ms video enocoding claims hold any water.

Check Kotaku’s fantastic report for more details. [Kotaku]

Windows Mobile fans hoping that Microsoft’s My Phone over-the-air syncing service was going to be Mobile Me for WinMo can put those thoughts away. It’s basically just a fancy backup service. But it works!

Setup on a Windows Mobile 6.1 phone (AT&T Tilt) was easy. Just download and install the package from the phone and you can pretty much start syncing from there.

The good news is it syncs fairly well for the most part. Contacts, calendar and tasks are synced fine, but so are your text messages, your photos, your videos, music and documents—provided they’re all under the 200MB cap. Contacts, calendar, and tasks are two-way, meaning you can create entries right on the web page. Photos, videos, music and docs are upload-able too, which makes this an easy way to transfer files onto your device OTA. Any inconsistencies (a calendar entry created on the phone went to the web fine, but one made on the web wouldn’t sync to the phone) can most likely be attributed to this being a beta.

The downside is that this is (by default) only really useful for backing up your phone once a day. You can only schedule your phone to back up once a day or once a week or manually. It’s definitely not push and it’s definitely not meant to be. This is used for making sure your contacts and other phone data are always backed up, so you won’t lose everything in case someone swipes your com.

One good use for this would be to sync multiple phones to the same data. You can attach more than one device to an account, so if you switch between work and home devices—or if you lose a phone—you can just sync up your data again. It’s not live-updating push synchronisation into the cloud, but it is a fairly good backup solution. [My Phone]