Dan Williams // Name: Dan Williams
Location: Guildford, Surrey, UK
Born and raised in Somerset, I am a Computing student at Plymouth University currently on a year's placement at Allianz in Guildford. I enjoy football, technology, film and really want to go travelling next summer!!
It was the 40th anniversary of the Apollo space mission recently and it must be amazing to boast "I was the first man on the moon"
Google is jumping into Microsoft Windows territory -- and threatening to change the way personal computers work -- with its own version of a computer operating system.
Google's operating system will augment its Web browser, which is also called Chrome.
The company says the forthcoming Google Chrome OS will revolutionize how computers operate, putting more emphasis on Web functionality, making computers faster and opening them up to helpful tinkering by outside program developers.
"The operating systems that browsers run on were designed in an era where there was no web," Google said late Tuesday on its official blog. "It's our attempt to re-think what operating systems should be."
Chrome OS will be available this coming fall or winter, Google says.
But why should you care?
A trim and speedy Google operating system, which has been buzzed about online for some time, is interesting for several reasons -- even if you think it could flop out of the gate.
The first is that Chrome OS will be available as "open-source" technology. That means software developers will be able to mess with the code behind the system, allowing them to develop new applications for it.
That idea is part of what made Apple's iPhone so successful. Apple doesn't try to make every possible program for the phone. It lets third-party developers create all kinds of games and programs they think might be useful. In essence, it puts the users in control.
Hit by the economic downturn and fluctuating exchange rates, worldwide IT spending is expected to drop 6 percent this year, according to a new Gartner report.
Spending will likely settle in at $3.2 trillion for 2009, compared with $3.4 trillion in 2008. Last year, IT spending had actually surged by 6.2 percent over 2007.
Due to the ongoing recession, the projected 6 percent spending decline is greater than Gartner's original forecast of a 3.8 percent drop, which the firm made in March.
"While the global economic downturn shows signs of easing, this year IT budgets are still being cut, and consumers will need a lot more persuading before they can feel confident enough to loosen their purse strings," Richard Gordon, head of global forecasting at Gartner, said in a statement Tuesday.
This year's spending decline touches all four major IT segments tracked by Gartner--hardware, software, IT services, and telecommunications. Hardware spending will see the sharpest drop at 16.3 percent, while software spending will ease down only 1.6 percent.
For comparison, Gartner noted, a drop in all four segments did not occur during the last major downturn in 2001.
As the global economy revives, Gartner believes IT spending will shoot up 2.3 percent next year. Overall, Gartner expects IT spending to grow annually at a weak 1.9 percent rate from 2008 through 2013.
