Yawn.

GOOG tips its hand on Chrome OS.  Chrome browser on top of a highly customized Linux kernel.  Yawn.  I don’t use Chrome regularly, therefore, I’ll have no use for Chrome OS.

And only on netbooks, for the time being, and only for solid state hard drives.  It’ll be a few years before SSDs are on price/capacity parity with even the highest end traditional HDs, and quite a bit longer for SSDs to become a better value option than mainstream HDs.

I dare you to be a productive (and by “productive,” I mean as an adult in the first world) on a netbook.  I dare you to be productive in any definition in Chrome browser on any computer.  Useful extensions? Lawdy lawdy Miss Scarlett, I don’t know nuttin’ ’bout no useful extensions.  If it’s lucky, Chrome OS will succeed as the OS of choice for secondary computers, i.e. inexpensive nettops/small form factor computers that are only needed for light duty i’net use.  GOOG admits that all apps in and available for Chrome OS will be cloud only.  When your connection borks, or you’ve gone over your monthly bandwidth cap, your Chrome OS computer is a fancy glowing paperweight, not even big enough for a doorstop.

And I’ve always dreamed of putting all my personal data on the servers of a for-profit corporation.

UPDATE 11/20: Chrome OS’s /root partition will be read-only, meaning that if you fuck things up, you’ll be automagically taken back to the default install. Since all apps and data are on the cloud, you would have virtually no work to do. That’s fine for an OS so limited as Chrome, but I wouldn’t want it on a real Linux distro. It’s all moot anyway — Like I found out yesterday, only netbooks with SSDs can have Chrome OS. But it’s worse than that — not any SSD netbook — ONLY specialized “Chrome OS” netbooks; I suppose GOOG will strike deals with OEMs for that purpose.  Suck up to China indirectly, GOOG already does it directly.  That reminds me too much of Apple with Mac OS X — can only run it on iCabal hardware. Heck, I guess I should start calling GOOG the gCabal :)

Meanwhile, Ubuntu makes a real non-dumbed down netbook distro, and you can customize a Fedora install for a netbook environment with its official release .iso images. You can get any damned netbook you want and have either Ubuntu, Fedora or probably a number of other Linux distros today. Not a year from now, today.

East Coast vs West Coast

PC World has a rundown of the 25 most legendary quotes in tech history.

You know Bill Gates’s “640K RAM is enough for anyone” is here, but Number 21 interests me, when a founder of DEC (Digital Equipment Corporation) thought that there was never going to be a reason for an average person to have a computer in his or her own home.

I have a theory why he said it, it’s sorta original and sorta not on my part.

DEC was founded near Boston, because its founders grew out of MIT.

If the world were entirely controlled by East Coast companies, especially companies with three-letter acronyms, like DEC, IBM, and many others, computers would have never been developed for home users.  The reason is that they were/are all big corporations who are used to dealing with other big corporations.  Therefore, IBM only made and supported mainframe and other large computers for business and corporate use for quite a long time.  In contrast, the West Coast of America, at least until recently, had an individualist, atomistic and narcissistic mentality — the only reason we have computers in every house now is because people in Albuquerque, San Jose and other places on the West Coast and intermountain West had big enough egos to have the audacity to think that every human being deserved a computing device.

For the same reason, Olympic games tend to have the highest television ratings in western cities, and team sports do better in the old industrial Northeast and Midwest.  The reason is that most Olympic sports fit well into the individualist west coast mentality, many people there engaging in the same kinds of sports and events, because an individual human being can ski and surf, while playing football requires herding ten other human cats.  Team sports represent the lingering factory/assembly-line/union labor mentality of the industrial (or formerly industrial) cities where team sports are popular.  The narcissist in San Francisco who likes everyone having a computer and dislikes computing as an exclusive corporate province, also likes to snowboard and swim, and avoids football.  (To the extent that he does, he shows up an hour after kickoff and leaves an hour before the game ends — That’s typical California football and baseball fan for you.)  The UAW member Pittsburgh whose profession involves teamwork and cooperation to assemble automobiles, and whose union membership precludes and discourages working too well as an individual, and whose mentality wouldn’t include him owning a computer, is the perfect fan of teamwork sports like football, and finds snowboarding alien.

However, this east-west dichotomy is breaking down, mainly because of Indoamerican (aka Hispanic, aka Latino, aka Chicano, aka Mestizo) immigration in the West, and the deindustrialization in the east.

This Is What Happens When You Elect Democrats

CNS:

University of California May Hike Fees 32 Percent

Los Angeles (AP) – The University of California is preparing to ask students to pay $2,500 more over two years, a plan that has drawn protest at two major campuses.

President Mark Yudof told reporters Wednesday he couldn’t rule out raising student fees again if the state is unable to meet his request for an additional $913 million next year for the 10-campus system.

“I can’t make any … promises,” he said.

The university’s governing board is expected to approve a plan Thursday that will boost undergraduate fees, the equivalent of tuition, by 32 percent in two stages by 2010. The proposal was met with student protests across the state Wednesday that led to 14 arrests at the University of California, Los Angeles, campus.

At the University of California, Berkeley, more than 1,000 demonstrators condemned the pending fee boost and high salaries for university administrators. Protesters carried mock gravestones to represent programs that have suffered under state budget cuts and waved signs reading “Save our university.” At the University of California, Santa Cruz, police blocked roads leading into the main entrance because of a demonstration.

They have approved the increase as of late this afternoon.

I think it has less to do with budget shortfalls, and more to do with the fact that with Democrats running everything in the Federal government, they’ll give whatever it takes to a college student to afford his or her tuition.  This gives college and university boards permission to raise tuition, and all this funnels more money through academia, i.e. community organizers for the Democrat Party.  Any Democrat attempt to lower student loan rates or increase government grant programs is specifically designed to launder more money through leftist institutions of lower living, moreso than making college more affordable.  (Hint:  Why has tuition rates increased way faster than inflation for the last several decades?)

I wonder how most of these student demonstrators vote.  I bet they vote Democrat, most of them.  They only have themselves to blame.

This Is Going to Be One Debate Worth Watching

British court rules that self-flagellation devices are not deadly weapons, such that those in possession of them are criminally liable for weapons possession charges.

The case in question revolves around an adherent to the Shiite sect of Islam.  But, as fanatical as most public schools are about sex education, I’m waiting for the day that a student or teacher brings an S&M device to school that could be construed as a deadly weapon.

From “Yes We Can” to “Saving Obama’s Can”

I don’t believe John Conyers at face value.  I think he’s trying to create the impression that he and President Obama have differences, to sucker moderate Democrats to supporting various Obama agenda items. 

Bill Clinton triangulated by pretending to distance himself from the usual Democrat agenda.  John Conyers is helping the President to triangulate by demanding hard left policies and claiming the President isn’t doing enough in that stead.  The difference is that Bill Clinton wanted and Barack Obama wants to win re-election; John Conyers doesn’t have to worry about that.

Constantine — Converting Me to 64-Bit Linux

Fedora 12 is out.

Because I now have a 64-bit CPU, I took the dive into 64-bit F12.

When F11 came out, all I had to do to upgrade to it from F10, the first Fedora version that I used as my exclusive Linux distribution, was to use the command line.  But because of my new CPU, and my desire to switch to x64, I had to do a full clean re-install, you can’t do an in-place upgrade install from a 32-bit to a 64-bit OS of any kind.

And everything is working out well, especially since Adobe has a version of Flash for 64-bit Linux, but not 64-bit Windows.  Go figure, after all these years that Adobe drug their feat supporting Linux, they release their 64-bit Flash for Linux first.  Java has been out with 64-bit for a little while.

When I installed F10, I used the install and post-install guide on the website www.my-guides.net.  Since I upgraded directly from F10 to F11, I didn’t need that site.  But I needed it again because  my F12 is a new install.

It shows you how to get the 64-bit Flash, and gives you some instructions for 64-bit Java, but you’re kinda on your own.  I wish the guy who runs My Guides would give you some clear command line instructions to install 64-bit Java, but here I come to save the day.

(1)  Download Download 64-bit Java (.bin, NOT .rpm.bin) from Sun’s website.  Current version at the time of this writing is jre-6u17-linux-x64.bin — If it has been updated by the time you’re reading this, then “6u17″ will read “6u18″ or “6u19″ or “6u20″ etc.  Save it in your home directory’s download folder,i.e. /home/(yourusername)/Download

(2)  Open a terminal, log in as root (su – then your password; you can use sudo if you’ve been able to configure Fedora’s pain in the ass sudoers file).  Here’s the commands:

cd /home/(yourusername)/Download
mv jre-6u17-linux-x64.bin /opt
cd /opt
chmod a+x jre-6u17-linux-x64.bin
./jre-6u17-linux-x64.bin
yum remove java-*-openjdk-plugin
ln -s /opt/jre1.6.0_17/lib/amd64/libnpjp2.so /usr/lib64/mozilla/plugins/libnpjp2.so

Obviously, you put in your own user name, without the parentheses.  If the Java version is different, then you change “6u17″ and “jre1.6.0_17″ to whatever it is now, (without the quotes).  If no major revisions are made in Java, it’s just a matter of changing all the “17″s to “18″ or “19″ or “20″ or whatever, without the quotes.

The last line is different from what you’ll read at My Guides.  It makes a symbolic link between the browser plugin in the Java director and Mozilla’s plugin folder for 64-bit Java in 64-bit Firefox/Mozilla.  Sun changed the plug-in name and where it installs it in 64-bit Java compared to the 32-bit.  I had to find that by trial and error.

(3)  You can download Google Chrome (Chromium) 64-bit (SEE UPDATE BELOW) and Java will work out of the box.  Download 64-bit Opera as show in the My Guides tutorial, but it’ll take a bit of fiddling around to make Java work.

Open Tools > Preferences > Advanced > Content.  Enable Java (not enabled by default), open up the Java options box, then enter /opt/jre1.6.0_17/lib/amd64/ in the command box.  Opera uses the Java plugin directly, not from the Mozilla plugin folder.  Strangely enough, Opera knows to find 64-bit Flash in Mozilla’s plugin folder.

***

And there you have it.  64 bit Opera, Chrome and Firefox using 64-bit Java and Flash.

***

UPDATE 3/10/2010: GOOG has changed the way you can get Chrome browser, b/c they now have an official release, no more “Chromium” to get from an experimental repository.  First, open up a terminal, su -, password, yum remove *chromium* — That should remove only two packages.  Next, open up another browser and download it directly from Google; since you’re using 64-bit Fedora, you’ll choose a 64-bit .rpm.  Let “Package Installer” automagically do the rest after entering your root password once or twice.  The only drawback is that you’ll have to do this every time there’s an update to Chrome, just as you have to do when Opera updates.  I don’t know if GOOG maintains an official repository now.