The general idea behind Chrome OS is that the operating system as you see it will be nothing more than a web browser with a few things plugged into it, and a massively slimmed down operating system which will load in a fraction of the average time taken with existing products.

But even as a man who looks towards the next generation, this doesn’t sit too well with me. Not only did the announcements and the coverage seem to ask more questions than give answers, but Chrome OS also seems to exclude a very important market - students.

Students won’t be able to take their laptops everywhere as they can now without access to the web. Students can’t live entirely in the cloud, which I’ve already proved once before, even though many university campuses are blanketed with a cloud of wireless signals. And even then, not all students should be able to anyway with applications which are absolutely necessary to run on desktop computers.

To start off, take a spare ten minutes and watch the videos that Jason Perlow added to his blog just before the weekend which will brief you on the latest.

Bandwidth issues

Everything is stored in the cloud is accessed through the web. Even the “applications” such as the calculator and the calendar - simple desktop applications for Windows and Mac OS X - but not for Chrome.

If you have no Internet, I have no idea how Chrome OS would even turn on. Perhaps it’s like the Chrome browser, which works offline with Google Gears enabled sites. But that’s hardly optimal. Will the Chrome OS work where the is no Internet access on the road, on a plane or train (at least in the United Kingdom anyway) or even sitting out in a park in the city. Sure you could use a wireless 3G card or your phone modem but this will cost a lot to run an entire operating system.

And what if the damned broadband goes down? This is something I seem to face quite a bit and frankly, without access to the Internet, the Chrome-specific device just becomes a very expensive paperweight.

Lack of compatibility for non-Google users

Looking over at some of the gallery pictures of the new operating system, there is clearly an effort to branch out to the most popular services, even those outside Google such as Hotmail, Hulu and Pandora.

However, even with these, those using Outlook Web Access or Exchange will suffer to get a full experience by using a non-Microsoft browser. If you decide to use another email service, or calendar - maybe a different music service. Why are you limited to these? Please at least give us the opportunity to add new ones and delete the ones there.

Provided they are there as from-install only, just to get you started, that should be fine.

What about the hardware then?

The BBC say rightfully that all of the user data and settings will be stored on Google’s servers. With this, there will be nothing on the hard drive (whether there will even be one or not), and the hardware will be basic. But there aren’t any specifics about hardware devices yet.

We all know components in computers range from hard drives, networking controllers, optical and removable media. We don’t even know yet whether these will be included. If there’s no “desktop”, how do you transfer things? Directly from removable media to the web? Has that ever been done before?

Throwing in the antitrust card (again)

Google this, Google that, throw in a bit of YouTube and it’s still Google. Yes there are a few applications in there which isn’t orientated around the search giant’s products, but the vast majority are Google related or owned. As I wrote a few months back:

“Why can’t Microsoft ship a Windows edition without including a browser (or at least come under fire from a zillion lawsuits) yet Google can? And with this, Google is entirely contradicting itself by doing something it opposed Microsoft from doing. Just because they have a smaller market share doesn’t exempt them from the practice.”

You can read the article in full here.

So…?

Here, it just seems that we’re walking into uncharted territory in that these concepts have never been done before. I knew an operating system and similar experiences would all be one day web based after speaking to the UX chief at Mozilla Labs. But now it’s here, it’s still difficult to quantify the grasp of these ideas.

Leave a comment and make my day.

Password managers help, and single sign-on solutions for an array of sites are useful, and devices like smart cards and biometric devices save us remembering a whole array of combinations. But what if you’re away from your primary computer? You still need to remember all of the sequences and mishmashes of letters and numbers whether you like it or not.

Facebook Connect has helped me out greatly. On my home computer, I never sign out because there’s just no point as nobody else lives with me (thank God), and on my office computer, I always lock my screen so again, no need to log out. With this, it means I can not only sign in straight away to supporting services but it means I can cut down on the number of user names and passwords I need.

Perhaps it is time we worked on a new system. No longer should be need to push the “forgot your password?” link, or have to look up a long list of passwords in the filing cabinet, or even have to rely on a browser to take the workload for us. There needs to be a solution.

OpenID has the right idea, but it works in a similar way to university federation services and doesn’t really share any unique factor. Even CBS Interactive sites like ZDNet, TechRepublic, and BNET have a good idea by sharing the same login details across sites so you don’t need to re-register. But again, this isn’t enough.

I’d like something to change but simply don’t see a system being implemented which wouldn’t cost about a zillion dollars. For now, this thirty-year solution may have to stick with the byline of “if it ain’t broken, don’t fix it”. Then again, Google thought e-mail was broken when it brought out Wave…

How would you fix it?

Outlook is without doubt the killer application. I’ve only recently dived head first into Outlook after a long, painful struggle with my email management, but am glad to have done so. Windows Live Mail is great and has done me well, but after my hard drive fried, it was just too much of a pain to set up again.

Gallery
To see a selection of changes in Outlook 2010 and other common student-based Office 2010 Beta 2 applications, head over to the screenshot gallery for a peek.

Upgrading from previous versions is just a dream. I haven’t had to change a single setting after migrating from Outlook 2007 to 2010 (but I did check, just to be sure). But there are three new features which you need to take note of:

• The Ribbon is finally here. We knew this long ago when I broke the story initially of Outlook being first seen in the wild, thanks to my leaky plumber friend at Microsoft.

• The social connector keeps you in check with the people you communicate with. If you’re running on an Exchange server, pictures and details can be shared with one another allowing you to see presence, instant message one another, see previous correspondance and check their calendars.

• Conversation views allow you to track what was said and to whom, and when. It reads email to you like a story; starting off at the bottom and working its way through, adding each reply to the very top to keep your conversations to-and-fro organised and seamless. No longer will you have to depend on replies including the original message, even though some strongly disagree.

Of course I could easily go on and on, but it’s nearly 5am where I am and my all-nighter was meant to be spent doing university work. However, I’ll be using Office 2010 not because I like to play with things before they hit the shelves, but because the improvements to the entire suite has left a positive feeling in my cold, dark, hating and stoney heart.

Have you played with it yet? Any thoughts so far?

This was exactly the case when I saw a friend’s status message on Facebook. I’m still struggling to cope with this as the sheer surprise of it actually working has taken my breath away. But what’s more peculiar is to why it is even there in the first place.

Here’s what you do.

1. Go to any Facebook page and click once in a white area just to get a blank timeline to do this with.
2. Press up arrow, up arrow, down arrow, down arrow, left arrow, right arrow, left arrow, right arrow, B, A, then the Return key.

For those who are confused, the key layout is below:

If you left-click or right-click, scroll or push any keyboard key after that, a strange shining set of circular rings will appear on your screen. To get rid of it, simply refresh the page or failing that, close the browser and start again.

Why? I have no idea. How this was even found? Perhaps this is the stranger mystery.

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With experience of hindsight, with a number of events which social networking from ordinary members of the public (”citizen journalism”) from the terrorist attacks in Mumbai, the Hudson river plane crash and the death of Michael Jackson; Twitter especially has been a key point of communication.

Mumbai was a perfect example of how Twitter dominated the intelligence gathering process, using real people and human intelligence but through an unconventional, insecure medium. Photos were being uploaded to Flickr and Twitpic, and tweets were dominating the blogosphere, and being used as part of commercial news channels as their own journalists simply couldn’t be spread thinly enough.

However in the case of Mumbai, public and very widespread intelligence could have been used to the terrorists’ advantages, also. Not so much the case of the London bombers, though.

How could it have helped London?

Twitter is instant and is accessible from anywhere with mobile signal. However the big issue with the London bombings is that the explosions were underground, some closer to Tube stations than others, but most had no signal while they were down there. Yet videos and texts were still sent to be delivered as soon as a trailing signal came into focus when they reached the surface.

Also, the 9/11 effect of so many people attempting to call and communicate with one another would cause the networks to become overloaded and flooded, meaning getting through to someone would be incredibly difficult. The Tube network would have had mobile phone signals in the deep underground levels, but has been heavily delayed citing security concerns, since mobiles can also become detonators.

But major events have had a toll on the networks for a while now. The networks are recovering and can now handle more communications especially in times of crisis.

Using tweets written and published by ordinary citizens, the latest and breaking news can be relayed through hashtags and retweeting. Through this, mashups can be quickly (and they often are, such as during the snow storms in the UK earlier this year) created and projected into a web service. Through everyone contributing as they do on Twitter, this collective information can be used to direct people away from certain areas and to organise the chaos.

Sending text messages is far better for the infrastructure than to make phone calls, and to tweet holds the same value except with a more public nature. You could text everyone in your phone book to tell them you are alive, or if all of your friends and family subscribed to Twitter, this would be one message to a service instead of dozens to multiple people through one service - easing the load.

Blogs can and have been used to document evidence after a terrorist attack, by taking eyewitness accounts of many people, assessing their validity from viewpoints and merging them together to get a general consensus.

But micro-blogging and services like Twitter and the status update feature on Facebook could be utilised as a far better way of communicating with people in a time of crisis. If it were me, and it nearly was as I was in London the week between the bombings and the second round of failed bombings, I would have Facebook’d and Twitter’d to the masses, and sent only a couple of text messages to those who weren’t on either.

How could you see Twitter or citizen journalism helping during times of crisis? Leave a TalkBack.

There is nothing within Windows 7 which is particularly aimed at students or me specifically. The whole kit and kaboodle focuses on making it an all-inclusive “experience”, but after using it for so long now the experience fades into the background, like a sickly cough in a lecture theatre.

At the end of the day, all you want to do is check your emails or whop out a quick essay. You don’t particularly care about the experience and most of the time you don’t notice the surroundings. Even with Windows 7, this hasn’t changed.

Besides my computer going well and truly kaput, the way I noticed my positive experience so far is through the lack of negative experiences. I’m lucky in that I took advantage of pre-release builds and have seen Windows 7 grow from a small, insignificant Vista rip-off, into a mature, upstanding member of the technology community.

There is only one nit-picky thing that I still struggle to shrug off. The memory usage is far better than Vista but has a long way to go until it reaches levels that XP coped with. Even with a base level of applications open: Outlook 2007, Messenger, Skype and DisplayFusion to maximise my taskbar space, but it still looks like it uses more than it should. On a 4GB RAM system (in 32-bit mode, so only 3.5GB is really recognised), I’m still using 1.10GB on a dual screen system.

I understand why, as I have two screens and the Aero theme takes up quite a lot of memory usage, and doubled it naturally doubles (ish) the memory usage. But I like to keep my memory usage down as much as possible; at least that way I don’t hear my tower whirring away and going nuts.

The feedback I have had from other people, friends and colleagues, may seem somewhat cliched. But all have had a positive attitude towards it when mentioning it in passing. “Oh, Zack, by the way, Windows 7; I like”, for example. Seeing it running on my friend’s computer in a 24-inch crystal clear LCD screen combined with his justified semi-smugness about being one of the few, even still, to have the operating system on his computer, being another.

All in all, I’m extremely happy with everything as it is and how it works, what it does and when it does it. But what I say isn’t too important. How were your first 100 days?

More Windows 7 coverage:

But taking a look at a random selection, some including email services like Gmail and Hotmail (which offer very much the same thing in a different format), are they giving us too much storage? Are the cloud storage providers giving us infinite capacity?

Side note: semantics and technicality could shoot me in the foot here. When I mean “infinite”, I do not mean a never ending supply of data storage, rather the storage we currently have in the cloud will never be filled by us as individuals.

Take SkyDrive as a perfect example. Even though you have 25GB at your disposal, you can only upload 50MB at a time. There seems no logical reasoning to this, with the possible exception of not being able to abuse the storage for uploading of illegally downloadable films and videos. However, this restricts you somewhat.

If it were to be fully open, you could literally drag and drop an entire system image into your cloud and take it anywhere with you. Then again, you can create a restore image and use WinRAR or HJSplit to cut them into tiny 50MB sized pieces and upload manually.

I don’t think every user truly has 25GB space, though. It would make logical sense for the “drive” you have to be a dynamically expanding (virtual) hard drive. If every user used their 25GB today, the datacenters would be overfilled by tenfold no doubt.

The point is, as most online cloud services offer these vast storage quantities, you are restricted in how much you can upload in one go; this makes it ideal for documents and music files, but not for massive files like movies and large videos.

The same applies to Gmail, of which emailing something to yourself acts as pretty much the same concept. The 25MB limit is purely coincidental, but limits the user once again.

Using this time calculator, my own connection, a stopwatch on my phone and a bit of graphics editing, I’ve concluded to fill up a 25GB drive such as SkyDrive, it would take you:

… and that’s continually, without sleep, walking the dog or even going for a pee. Although, I guess maybe you could pee during the upload, but you get my point.

Still, you could always bypass the whole system and map your cloud storage to your other local computer and drag and drop that way.

Has cloud storage become unfillable?

But I only really noticed this today in comparison with other devices. The fashion at the moment seems to be “the thinner, the better”, as if we would starve our technology in vain effort to slim them down. It’s like this crazed fashion stint we have at the moment is focusing on “size zero technology”.

Why?!

Take the Motorola Razr. The phone is incredibly thin which seemed to be the “killer feature”, besides the simplicity yet expandability of the features within the operating software. The name, stemming from the phone having a similar look to a cutthroat razor. Thin, stylish and incredibly popular with over 100 million being sold.

But for some, strange reason, if I was to be given one, the first thing I would do is stress test it: I’d flip open the phone and push the screen back and see how far I could stress it before it snaps. Perhaps it’s a standard “want” to do; if something seems flimsy or so thin it could break easily, I’d be tempted to give it a go.

Ultra-thin devices like these do seem to be a trend that is spiraling forward and sees no sign of subsiding. But if you were to look at other progressions in technology:

• Mobile phones started out huge, then got smaller, then got slightly bigger and thicker - where they seem to have stayed.
• Televisions started out with small screens but huge in design, then the screens matched the size of the design, and now the bigger they are the better they are.
• Laptops were initially small but chunky, and now they’re thinner and wider.

Maybe through time, the “size zero” phase will wear off. There may be a time where consumers (and therefore manufacturers) will realise that devices need to fit quite a bit of stuff in there. With the MacBook Air, it lacked FireWire and an optical disk drive because they would have thickened out the laptop too much.

I’ve never seen anyone with a MacBook Air. Perhaps those considering buying one realised the importance of an internal optical drive.

My personal opinion? I’d say try and make devices proportionate, but don’t aim for a specific thin design. Fit everything else you can in there first, and then figure out if you can slim it down a bit.

I don’t like my partners to be stick thin. I like a bit of chunk on them, along with the vast majority of English men. Just as technology should be; you know,  something that you can actually feel in your pocket, excuse the innuendo.

So, how thin is too thin? Do you prefer skinny or chunky? Strange question, perhaps, but I hope it’s at least in context.

The argument for going paperless is stronger than ever, with learners wanting less paper and more technology, and teachers wanting less paper to manage and deal with.

But this is schoolchildren we are talking about, not university students. Students in higher education relish using paper; allowing them to spread their thoughts across multiple pages and across multiple work surfaces.

The incentives are there; every time I print something off at university, because I need to use my university username and password to print, it records when I do so. But every print-out leaves me with a pop-up guilt trip reminding me of how much of a tree I’m destroying in the process.

Forget computer science students because they are a minority at most institutions. Of course they will be using their netbooks, Androids, smartphones and iPhones to tap away at during a programming lecture. But the rest of the students on campus are more than happy with scraps of paper, Post-it notes and lined paper with scribbles on. The rest of the campus doesn’t engage with technology on an everyday basis so they are not missing out in the first place.

For this, when writing up the notes later into electronic format, we can have a sense of satisfaction about screwing up the paper and chucking it away.

How would you write notes onto a PDF file? Yes, you could use a touchscreen computer, but handwriting recognition isn’t an exact science yet and a pad of paper and a Biro pen are far cheaper.

Taking books out of the library aren’t always possible. Sure, we could grab our Kindle and download the book but why should we when we are spending thousands of our respective currencies on library provisions? Some books are only available for an hour at a time, so instead of scanning them into a computer for later analysis, photocopying is a more sensible solution. Those who remember will know that I have proven this one long ago.

In realistic terms, the only computers students want to use is the one computer that they are using to write their essays on. Besides that, technology has yet to really have a major impact on the main brunt of our degree courses - the discussion seminar - where all you need is your mind and your mouth.

Me? Personally? Many can testify to this. I would be far happier with a handful of notes, scribbles and scraps than a netbook. Would you rather go paperless?

The differences between her generation and mine, even though separated by a few years, are stark and somewhat terrifying in hindsight.

1. There were nine planets in the solar system.

For years it was always nine planets and then one day, they decided it was either going to be eight, or about twenty. They chose eight. After seven years of primary education, the world I knew it was, well gone actually; they had just declassified it as a planet.

2. A BlackBerry was a fruit, and so was Apple.

I wouldn’t be too surprised if people heard either “blackberry” or “apple” and genuinely thought of the fruit. But I cannot seem to shake the association now built with my mobile device. People say, “have at least one of your five a day”, whilst I have my BlackBerry in my hand making a call. I’d say that counts, right?

3. To load up a program, you’d have to slam in a cassette tape and wait 20 minutes for it to load.

My first computer, a CPC-464. It was so heavy you could have used it as a concrete block in a mafioso novel. A ten year gap is a bit of an exaggeration but I knew people still word processing back then on green-screened computers. When the 5″ floppy disk came out, we saw that as a mini-revolution in itself.

4. You had to dial into the Internet.

You couldn’t just have the Internet flowing in and out of the computer like an out of control waterfall. No, you had to tell it to dial another computer and information would be sent to and fro through, what was essentially a computer-to-computer phone call. What’s even more weird is that it’s still available, even today.

5. A single gigabyte hard drive simply couldn’t be filled, through no will of trying.

My first computer bought for the family at Christmas 1996 (yes, it had Windows 95) had a 64MB memory and a single gigabyte of storage. My dad said, “we will never, ever fill that”.

6. Video tapes the size of Bibles would be the only way to record a television programme, and even then it’d only be able to record an hour and a half at best.

Even though I’m far too young to remember the Betamax vs. VHS war, I most certainly remember hoping to watch back an episode of The Simpsons which I’d recorded on the oldest VCR in the world, and it failing miserably with tape lodged and jammed in every bit. It was heartbreaking.

7. The only porn we could find was the shredded remains of a dirty magazine under a bush in the local park.

This generation of Internet kids has seen more porn than any other generation of children, ever. When I was a lad, one morning you’d be lucky enough to find a shred of it near where the local dirty old man sleeps in the evening. “Kids having kids… blame the parents”: no, blame the Internet.

8. There was only one computer in the house, and if there were more, only one would connect to the Internet at a time.

No such things as wireless back then. The only wireless you’d know of was the radio, and that would have been a main source of entertainment. It may sound like wartime England, 10 years ago wasn’t that far away. Windows XP hadn’t come out yet, I was still in a school uniform and the computers we used were running Windows NT.

9. There were no such things as flat screen televisions.

At least commercially, anyway. I come from a generation where our eyes are slightly closer together yet facing slightly the opposite way from being transfixed by a CRT television for all these years. And I laugh now at the “radiation warnings” from the sticker on the side of the box…

10. Twitter was called “text messaging” and the “tweet” only went to one other person.

Yes, a new phenomenon which many don’t realise that was basically text messaging. While sending a text is still far more popular than Twitter, the days where news would slowly seep its way through a friendship group (nowadays a “social network”), whereas now you can update literally anyone and everyone in the space of 160 characters.

A lot can happen in ten years.