Just to be clear, I’m not talking about Chrome OS 1.0. You can build that now and (maybe) install it on your netbook, and you should be able to buy it on hardware next year. All that stuff — to borrow a word that Google loves to misuse — is a beta. A test. A trial. A first step toward a larger vision, which Google has been hinting at since they branched out from search: In the future, we will live on the internet. We’ll be able to do all the things we do on computers now, and probably more, while connected to the cloud. And it’ll be great.

Chrome OS is an explicit step towards making this happen, but the version we saw today is just an early, broad step. Google even said so! Despite early talk about how Chrome OS could be a full replacement OS one day, suitable for regular ol’ laptops and desktops, today’s pre-announcement of a version strictly for netbooks included an admission that it would only be intended as a secondary OS. So, what does Google need to see this thing through and make Chrome as capable as the OSes we’re used to using now? Lots:

The Internet Needs to Get Way, Way Faster

And I’m not just talking about higher bandwidth. Broadband connections are pretty quick nowadays, but compared to reading — and especially writing — data to a hard drive, sending bits over the internet is excruciatingly slow. And Chrome OS isn’t even really a true web OS: it’ll slurp the guts of larger web applications like Gmail and Gcal and effectively make them local, meaning that the kinds of tasks that require low latency and fast load times will run tolerably.

That kind of local storage, along with JavaScript technologies like AJAX, is a salve. We need them because communicating with a server for every event in an application would take forever, and make using them miserable. Remember how webmail used to be, before it got all AJAXy? Awful. And it still would be, if not for recent JavaScript advances and local storage.

There’s nothing fundamentally wrong with making web apps local, and Chrome OS will keep doing that forever: it’s the only way Chrome OS can work offline. But that doesn’t cover everything. What about high-bandwidth tasks like photo and video editing? To do it the way they suggest would require constant syncing between local memory and a remote server. These are basic tasks for a computer. Basic tasks that’ll be impossible on Chrome until super low latency, 100mbps+ broadband is not only commonplace, but also wireless and effectively ubiquitous. That’s quite a few years away, even by generous estimates.

Web Apps Will Need To Get Much Better

I’m sure Gmail, Google Reader and Google Calendar will be totally swell in Chrome OS. They’re some of the most feature-complete web apps in the world, and they’re good enough to replace desktop apps for most people. But what about VoIP apps? Torrent clients? Media players? Image editors? Video editors? There are web apps for almost all of these things, but collectively, they amount to a big bag of dick. Trimming videos with YouTube’s tools is nothing like editing them in Final Cut or even iMovie. Cropping a few images in an online photo editor and playing with their contrast is fine, but what about my bloated Sony RAW files? There are still some massive gaps in the web app world, hence Google’s repeated, vague pleas for developers to do better, alright?

Web Standards Will Have To Evolve, Fast

Google wants to replace regular apps with web apps by making web apps more like native apps, in concept and execution. Eventually, the hope is that they could use the new features of HTML5, like local storage, drag and drop, canvas drawing, native animation and location awareness, to have all the powers of a native app. Thing is, HTML5 is just a stepping stone; it’ll take more than a few new HTML tags to pave the way for honestly native-seeming applications.

Google’s obviously got a lot of leverage over standards bodies like the WHATWG and W3C, so they could help move new HTML capabilities along in theory. But even HTML5 is brand new, and very few people are using that. It’ll be at least another generation before developers will be able to code native-equivalent apps in web languages, and that’s assuming that standards development keeps heading in that direction. Which it might not.

Someone’s Going to Have To Solve the UI Problem

Talking about Chrome OS’s interface almost seems like a waste of breath, since your real UI is the internet, which is the very definition of inconsistent. Part of the reason email apps, Twitter apps, IM clients and the like are still so popular is because they offer services that people want in an interface that’s consistent with the rest of their system. Web apps offer no such thing.

Sure, if all you use are Google products, you’re fine: Your life is blue, white, boxy and clean. But what about when you want to jump over to Meebo? Or Aviary? This kind of inconsistency wouldn’t be acceptable in another OS, so it would feel like a compromise here. I suppose you could use tools like Greasemonkey to reformat pages on the client side, but this is hacky and, well, lots of work. We’d need some kind of framework for skins, or something, to make the experience more uniform.

People Will Have To Give Up On Owning Media, an Get Comfortable With Subscription Services

People need their music and videos, and now, most people have collections. That’s sooooooo 2009, am I right? For Chrome OS to work, people are going to have warm up to subscription services and streaming media.

Before you get mad at me, forget about online music stores, and think more about your pay TV company, your ISP or your beloved DVD rental service. These kinds of arrangements are going to have to be extended to all media. Which is possible, but also fraught, since you really won’t own your media.

The Rest of the (Browser) World Has To Be Onboard

During the announcement, Google made the point that the Chrome browser in Chrome OS won’t have any special talents that Chrome elsewhere won’t, and that at present it’s no more able — in terms of what kinds of web apps it can run — than, say, Firefox. Nobody’s going to want to write web apps just for Chrome (that would make them Chrome apps, right?), so it’s vital that other browsers support the same new HTML standards that Chrome need to succeed. Google can go all out supporting the latest, greatest web standards, but unless everyone else does too, nobody — not even Google — is going to write for them.

None of these things are impossible; in fact, most of them sort of feel inevitable, given that they’re all just extrapolations of obvious trends from the last few years. They’re just optimistic, and sit well into the future. Chrome OS can carry out Google’s LET’S ALL LIVE ON THE INTERNET vision when the conditions are right, eventually. But these are long-term bets, measured in years.

That might make sense to a room full of Google engineers. To the rest of us, though? It’s abstract. It’s strange. It seems gimped. It’s largely irrelevant, and it’s not all that exciting. Yet.

[Ars]

The story was the subject of much hyperventilation last week which revolved mostly around a few impassioned quotes:

Here it is, patent number7617530. Thanks, USPTO, for giving Microsoft, which is already a monopoly, a monopoly on something that’s been in use since 1980 and wasn’t invented by Microsoft. Here’s Wikipedia’s description of sudo, which you can meaningfully compare to Microsoft’s description of its “invention”.

This from Groklaw, a site that specialises in free and open source software legal affairs, i.e. exactly this kind of thing. But for whatever reason — zeal? clicks? — their reading of the patent, which we picked up, turned out to overblown. Says Sudo maintainer Todd Miller, via Ars:

I’ve already received a number of questions about US patent 7,617,530 that some people seem to believe might cover sudo. I don’t think that is the case,” he wrote. “Sudo simply doesn’t work this way. When a command is run via sudo the user is actively running the command as a different user. What is described in the patent is a mechanism whereby an application or the operating system detects that an action needs to be run with increased privileges and automatically prompts the user with a list of potential users that have the appropriate privilege level to perform the task.

So, if not this, then what does the Microsoft patent cover? Back to Ars:

Specifically, it describes a user interface which displays accounts that have the necessary rights to perform an action when the user is blocked from performing an action that requires higher access privileges.

These are similar, but not patent similar.

Turns out though, that there is a Linux tool called PolicyKit just like what Microsoft patented, which prompts users to switch to a higher-level user account when they hit against a permissions barrier. It was created after the patent was filed. So, Microsoft, on all counts: not guilty. [ArsTechnica]

People who own PCs and Macs, the category I fall into, got 15 per cent of the vote, which was also a little higher than I expected. Make of this what you will, but the difference between the poll compared to our OS tracking graphic pictured here should indicate why we wanted to focus on your own hardware — not the computer you use at work. At any rate, the race is really still too close to call. You have time to cast your vote and help tip the scales in your favour.

Maybe he’s just a laid back guy. Maybe the copies are pirated. Maybe it’s because there is a shitload of copies and only, like, one appears to have been sold. Actually, Microsoft tried to spoil the Japan Linux Symposium by setting up a booth across the street. Obviously, Torvalds was amused. [Picasa via Engadget]

The Else Intuition, aside from being one of the first phones to use Access’ Linux Platform v3.0 OS, is a 3.47-inch 480×854 slab of handset, with an OMAP 3430 processor, 16GB of internal memory, a 5MP camera, A-GPS, and 3.5mm headphone jack. It’s capable hardware to start with, and the Palmy (an honestly, kind of sleepy) v3.0 OS has been slapped with a completely new OpenGL-accelerated interface, co-developed by Access and Emblaze, who had promised an “ultimate holistic device”, whatever that means, late last year.

Else Intuition Gallery

It’s a lot to process, and there’s not a ton of info to run with here: There’s no hands-on to indicate if this left-field software is any good, and the companies won’t get any more specific than “[worldwide] operator evaluations are currently underway” as far as potential release dates go. That said, this looks like decent hardware, albeit seriously bricklike ,and newness counts for a lot in mobile software. Maybe this whole Access fiasco wasn’t so crazy after all? [Access via Impress]

The Hero’s kernel is the bottommost part of its software; it’s the part that manages basic functions like memory allocation, device drivers and the like. For modders to be able to access and compile this is great news for potential Hero modders, who’ll be able to drop this kernel into cooked ROMs with all manner of interfaces, app configurations, performance tweaks and the like. What this won’t do is help bring features like Sense to other handsets—though modders are doing pretty well with that on their own—because those components are distinct from the kernel.

While this might seem like a generous move on HTC’s part, it’s not: The Hero’s kernel is a modified Android kernel, which is in turn a heavily modified Linux kernel. In other words, parts of it are irreversibly open source, which means that HTC is legally required to release this code — they’re actually kinda late here. [HTC]

There’s all kinds of new hotness in Snow Leopard and Windows 7, but what’s old and busted is when stuff crashes, even on the newest OSes. This is how that happens, and why it’s thankfully happening less and less.

There are about a bajllion ways for a computer to crash, from hardware to software, so we’re going to stick to some of the most common. Let’s start from the top: Simply put, when you reach a Blue Screen of Death, you’ve hit an error that’s so bad your whole computer has no choice but to restart. A kernel panic’s the same kind of bad mojo for any Unix or BSD based system, like Mac OS X.

Application Crashes

Broadly speaking, the two most common causes of crashes, according to Microsoft’s Chris Flores, a director on the Windows team, are programs not following the rules, and programmers not anticipating a certain condition (so the program flips out). The most obvious example of the former is a memory error. Basically, an operating system gives a program a certain amount of memory to use, and it’s up to the program to stay inside the boundaries. If a program makes a grab for memory that doesn’t belong to it, it’s corrupting another program’s—or even the OS’s—memory. So the OS makes the program crash, to protect everything else.

In the other case, unexpected conditions can make a program crash if it wasn’t designed with good exception handling. Flores’ “oversimplified” example is this: Suppose you have a data field, like for a credit card number. A good programmer would make sure you type just numbers, or provide a way for the program to deal with you typing symbols or letters. But if the program expects one type of data and gets another, and it’s not designed to handle something it doesn’t expect, it can crash.

A completely frozen application is one that has crashed, even though it stays on your screen, staring at you. It’s just up to you to reach for the Force Quit and tell the computer to put it out of its misery. Sometimes, obviously, the computer kills it for you.

Crashes, as you probably experience almost daily, are limited to programs. Firefox probably crashes on you all the time. Or iTunes (oh God, iTunes). But with today’s operating systems, if you hit an omega-level, take-down-your-whole-system crashes, something’s likely gone funky down at the kernel level.

System Crashes

The kernel is the gooey core of the operating system. If you think of an operating system as a Tootsie pop with layers of sugary shell, it’s down at the lowest level managing the basic things that the OS needs to work, and takes more than a few licks to get to.

More than likely, your computer completely crashes out way less than it used to — or at least, way less than Windows 95. There’s a few reasons for that. A major reason, says Maximum PC Editor Maximus Will Smith, is that Apple and Microsoft have spent a lot of time moving stuff that used to run at really low level, deep in the guts of the OS, up a few layers into the user space, so an application error that would’ve crashed a whole system by borking something at the kernel level just results in an annoying program-level hang up. More simply put, OSes have been getting better as isolating and containing problems, so a bad app commits suicide, rather than suicide bombing your whole computer.

This is part of the reason drivers—the software that lets a piece of hardware, like a video card talk to your OS and other programs—are a bigger source of full-on crashes than standard apps when it comes to modern operating systems. By their nature, drivers have pretty deep access, and the kernel sits smack in the middle of that, says Flores. So if something goes wrong with a driver, it can result in some bigtime ka-blooey. Theoretically, signed (i.e. vetted) drivers help avoid some of the problems, but take graphics drivers, which were a huge problem with Vista crashes at launch: Flores says that “some of the most complex programming in the world is done by graphics device driver software writers”, and when Microsoft changed to a new driver model with Vista, it was a whole new set of rules to play by. (Obviously, stuff got screwed up.)

Another reason things crash less now is that Apple and Microsoft have metric tons of data about what causes crashes with more advanced telemetry—information the OS sends home, like system configurations, what a program was doing, the state of memory and other in-depth details about a crash—than ever. With that information, they can do more to prevent crashes, obviously, so don’t be afraid to click “send” on that error message.

In Windows 7, for instance, there’s a new fault tolerance heap—basically, a special area of memory that’s fairly low-level—which could get corrupted easily in past versions of Windows. In Windows 7, it can tell when a crash in the heap is about to happen and take steps to isolate an application from everything else.

Future Crashes

Of course, there are other reasons stuff can crash: Actual hardware problems, like a memory failure, or motherboard component failures. Hard drive issues. Hell, Will Smith tells us that a new problem with high-performance super-computing are crashes caused by cosmic rays. A few alpha particles fly through a machine and boom.

Granted, you don’t have to worry about that too much. What you might worry about in the future, says Smith, with the explosion of processor cores and multi-threaded programs trying to take advantage of them, are the classic problems of parallel processing, like race conditions, where two processes are trying to do something with the same piece of data, and the order of events gets screwed up, ending in a crash. Obviously, developers would very much prefer if the next five years of computing didn’t result the Windows 95 days, and programming techniques are always growing more sophisticated, so there’s probably not a huge danger there. But as long as humans, who make mistakes, write programs, there will be crashes, so they’re not going away, either.

Thanks to Maxim PC’s Will Smith!

The only file you can really do anything with is a .deb—that’s a Debian-based Linux installer package—meaning that Debian (and Ubuntu) users can install it with a few clicks. Note: On Ubuntu 9 I got a dependency issue when I tried to install, but it was easy to fix: I just enabled the Universe and Multiverse repositories in Synaptic, and upgraded the library it told me too.

As for the browser itself, it’s not unlike regular Chrome, barring a few telling differences. For one, the clock is on display in the titlebar, as if this browser is going to be the only app you see when using Chrome OS. There’s also a frustratingly enigmatic little Google logo in the top left corner, which looks like a menu. When you click it, it pops up with a prompt to log in with an @google.com email address. Oh well. In any case, downloads are still working from here; feel free to post more mirrors in the comments. [Living in a Google World via Techcrunch]