Chrome OS? what the heck?

Headline in one of India's English news paper read : "Google to challenge Microsoft with new operating system" - as I read the piece I had this strange feeling of mixed emotion that ranged from being pissed-off to starting to LMAO. First off, Chrome OS targeted for netbooks/nettops can't even be called an operating system - it is a shame to the years and years of human labor and hard work involved in developing other great OSs. It may be an operating environment. And god, it is going to be based on chrome? well, who uses chrome? how soon does google think to capture the internet browser market share from IE/Safari and Firefox? - and what is the market share of netbooks? Who even cares? it may be around 5% of the whole computer/mobile device market - I know how many people in India uses netbooks - "0" - that is how many. - Oh well, that is where Google is going to give M$ for a run for its money.
Pissed off both at the Newspaper as well as google's lack of imagination in projecting Chrome OS as the next Microsoft basher....

Downloading free software

Life in software development would have sucked without all the free/open tools available from soureforge or code.google.com or even netbeans

But at times your exciting rush to download your favorite tool is cut short by the firewall/proxy server at your work. So, here are two alternatives.

One is source forge mirror that would go under the radar(all source forge projects are indexed and served here)

• SF Mirror1

Another is netbeans FTP sites just in case your firewall prohibits download sites

• Computer Science and Information Engineering (CSIE), Providence University , Taiwan
• University of Twente

The new Netbeans look on OS X

I keep a tab on the IDE scene. So, I downloaded the latest development build of Netbeans and lo!

The UI look on OS X - is by far the best I have seen for Java IDEs

I have not used it enough so, I can not tell you about how it feels. Look-wise it rocks.

So, if you run OS X and you been complaining about the Netbeans look, it is the time to play with the development build. Go ahead