Drop HiFiMan HE-5xx Planarmagnetic Headphones Unboxing and First Impressions

HP Reverb G2 Unboxing and First Impressions

Valve Index Unboxing and First Impressions

Where is the next operating system revolution? Where are my options?

The market is WIDE OPEN for a really good alternative operating system out of left field. Perhaps something that pushes a database driven file system interface ala beos? perhaps something that throws away and revolutionizes the entire desktop paradigm? perhaps something that unifies the entire computing landscape from IOT devices to smart watches to mobile to desktop… I feel like operating system software companies are seriously missing out on alternate OS’s… we used to have choices like amiga OS, IRIX, NeXtstep, BeOS, etc. now days you have your choice of BSD, quite a few flavors of linux (which both do pretty much the same stuff similarly), windows, and os x. notably, they are all great at some things, are all pretty mature at this point, and are good options for doing different things, but they all fail at unification (except for maybe *n?x but there is so much fragmentation that it’s silly and very little of it is good for gui use except for android which has it’s own strengths and weaknesses that generally make it impractical for desktop use)… we’re so close to consumer VR, which is just a few steps away from the revolution that will be augmented reality and the methods we use for interacting, designing, and communicating with computers are woefully inadequate. Where are all the alternatives?

The future is going to look like something a cross between between Star Trek TNG, Iron Man, and Minority Report.  UI artists are slowly getting there, but our most popular operating system software has it’s roots in 30, 40, and 50, and in some cases 60 year old code, paradigms, protocols, and idioms for when computers were nowhere near what they are today.  I think it’s time that a few companies start from scratch, instead of trying to re-use ideas that may have been prudent when the smallest computers were multiple beige refrigerator sized boxes that required their own building and had a market of only a few thousand.  so come on Google, Oracle, Elon Musk, and you awesome computer science grad students working on your laptop in a smaller-than-a-prison-cell-sized dorm room or in your parent’s basement or garage…  I’m waiting for the future.  We’ll soon have self-driving cars, perhaps even self-driving flying cars in the near future, VR…  AR… don’t blink.

Chromebook?

I finally got a chance to play with a chromebook today!  In this case, a friend allowed me to use his Acer C720 (1.4ghz celeron, 2gb ram, 16gb ssd) for an hour or so.  I was particularly impressed with it’s speed and responsiveness.  The GUI was a bit utilitarian, but all of the controls seemed to work very smoothly and ergonomically.  There was never a moment of “how the heck do I do xyz” with the default operation of chrome os which is really just the chrome web browser and some wrappers to allow people to connect and disconnect to the networking options and directly launch chrome based apps.  Overall, this was the same chrome I know and love from every other operating system, but somehow google made it super memory efficient (even with 2gb I had at one point a very large number of tabs open to different websites and it responded quickly and was easy to manage windows and tabs and such just as i do on my pc notebook where i have 16gb ram and a quad core 3.2ghz i7).  In fact, with the same number of tabs open, the chromebook was able to hold it’s own for the most part side by side my high powered pc notebook when it comes to web browsing. Read More >>