Well, it seems that the folks at Google have been working really hard this Labor Day weekend, because Techcrunch spilled the beans this morning that Google will be releasing its new Chrome browser beta tomorrow for Windows.

While everyone on Digg has been following the Democratic convention, followed by the McCain/Palin excitement, Google has been putting the finishing touches on Chrome totally under the radar. The important facts are these:

• Chrome’s tabs all run as totally separate processes / threads with their own data and memory, so if one of them crashes, or hangs, it leaves the rest of the browser running.
• This means that Chrome does virtually all its own memory management, and since as a browser it has access to your files and file system, for all intents and purposes it can be thought of as a separate operating system.
• Running with Gears will allow Chrome to do quite a bit of operating even when the host computer is offline.

Which all means that Google has suddenly raised the “operating system in the cloud” question again…with the added twist of bandwidth caps coming into the mix.

Whoops, I almost forgot the official comic book.

What Your ISP Doesn’t Want You to Know

As no doubt everyone knows by now (except maybe Barack Obama, who had better things to do tonight), Comcast has announced an upcoming 250 GB/month bandwidth cap on its residential broadband cable Internet customers, all of whom have signed up for unlimited service based on Comcast’s own advertising.

Before I get to reaming them out, I’d like to state for the record that (a) I’m a Comcast customer, (b) I’m more or less a satisfied Comcast customer, (c) I’m also a captive Comcast customer, since our county commissioners saw fit to make a monopoly deal with Comcast, no doubt in exchange for lots of money promises of excellent service. So if they should happen to cut me off for what they call “excessive use” or even for writing this article, I will have nowhere to go but dialup or satellite, which is to say: hell.

First of all, let us not look at Comcast or any particular broadband ISP, but all of them. Because as American taxpayers, we’ve already paid $200 billion to upgrade our country’s Internet infrastructure to a 45 Mbps fiber optic network. And we paid this money more or less directly to the telecoms: the giant companies that run everyone’s landline telephone service. And we don’t have this system yet, in spite of the fact that we were supposed to have it running years ago.

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