The TWAIN blog

So tonight I visited my local bookstore to pick up a book I was wanting to read and I found a treasure!! In the computer magazines, there was a full size UK mag with “Google Special” as the header. Without even flipping through it, I decided to pony up the $16 for it and take it home.

I haven’t even made it past the Table of Contents yet because it is bursting with so many goodies on just the back cover. A giant cartoon cloud on white with the word “Cloud” in it and a new logo that simply says “g OS”. And this website – http://www.thinkgos.com as its message.

The magazine is actually Linux Pro (direct link to the Special Edition on Google Tools) and it has a boot-able CD in the front jacket that allows me to run the Google Toolset without installing the entire OS on my computer. The instructions say that this new OS is “based on Ubuntu Linux 8.04″.

So is Google releasing an operating system??

Why not?! Well, I don’t think it is an operating system like what most would consider an OS. An operating system in its purest sense is one that allows the user to interact with the operations on the computer. But for Google, their operating system is housed online! The cloud is the OS! So the device doesn’t matter.

We saw this coming when they released their own browser! Chrome was the first generation of their own operating system. They extended their resources beyond a web page to the frontier of the browser itself. Now they supply the tools needed to access resources online without the limitation of the hard drive.

And yet we keep buying machines with keyboards, mice, and monitors….

The rest of the magazine contains articles on all the great Google tools out there: Documents, Calendar, Groups, Reader, Chart, Earth, Sky, Sketchup, Picasa, Purchasing, Sites, Blogger, Maps, and some of their desktop gadgets as well. It is BURSTING with resources for Cloud computing!

I highly recommend it. I don’t think this Google-thing is going away any time soon! And while the rain clouds in Kerrville turned out to be false hopes today, the Cloud remains a possibility for many applications we use day to day.

Check out the magazine. Darn! That book I purchased is now under a pile of magazine must-reads.

*Note: After reading the info on the G-OS website, I discovered that it isn’t a Google OS nor is it created by Google. The G stands for “Good” and it is a Linux-based OS that uses Google tools. Still….it is pretty cool to think about.