The future of computers

There is a trend in computing to move towards "cloud" computing. This just means programs reside online instead of being installed locally. Think of using Gmail instead of running Outlook on your computer.

The advantages of this are huge as everything then travels with you no matter what computer you are using. In addition everything is automatically backed up. It doesn't matter if your laptop dies, you can just go get a new one and all your data is safe. On vacation? No problem, just find a computer in the hotel lobby and you are good to go. There are very good solutions on line for Email, banking, instant messaging, having a calendar, document creation (word, excel, etc). And this is just a small subset of what is online today.

It seems that everything is going in this direction. Video games have always been traditional program you install and play. However there are 3D initiatives that will even move these into the cloud. One accomplishes this by allowing 3D items to be displayed right in the browser(O3D), and the other is actually drawing the game on a server somewhere, and just sending you the screenshots.

So besides making our lives easier by keeping all our information easily accessible, this also means the operating system becomes less important. If you check your email online, you don't care if you are using Windows, OS X, or Linux. As long as whatever you are using has a browser you are good to go.

So we took our first step towards this last night, and I installed Linux on our laptop. Now I have tried to use Linux before but always ran into problems. However lasts night installation went great! After I installed it, it popped up a box saying it found drivers for my wireless card, and with two clicks it was all setup and working! The interface is very nice as well as everything is very logical and easy to get to.