Well, ain’t this a kick in Microsoft’s pants?

Gizmodo proclaims thusly: Launch apps without booting windows using Phoenix Hyperspace Mini OS.

So we’ve come full-circle, back to those simpler times when OSes lived on ROM (OK, technically, Flash RAM, but it doesn’t invalidate my point.)

Except of course, we now have the Internet, and we’ve come a long way from the days when an entire OS kernel could fit in 7 KB of ROM.

What this means is that the Google PC is now a reality. All the firmware needs to run is a web browser, and you can point it to Google Office. You could have an entire chapter written by the time it would take for Vista to present you with a log-on screen.

This comes on heels of the announcement that Mozilla Prism is available for Mac OS X and Linux. What exactly is Prism? It is the current incarnation of Webrunner, described as a “site-specific browser.” To cut to the chase, this allows you sequester particular websites (such as Gmail, Facebook, or your bank’s online bill paying service) into their own processes, meaning that you can ALT-TAB (or OPTION-TAB) into them, and if Firefox or Safari (or Camino) crashes, your instance of Prism will stay up. It’s still a prototype, and I haven’t used it all too much (I’m still waiting for the feature where it will turn favicons into application icons) but I’ve had a lot of experience with an already existing site specific browser called Mailplane, which is basically Webkit (the framework upon which Safari is built) customized to work specifically with Gmail, and I dig the idea. Now one might argue that this is merely a convoluted way to use bookmarks, and there’s got to be some sort of hit using multiple instances of Prism (instead of sharing a single process), but if you can spare the RAM, it’s pretty convenient.

And finally, all of this may well be superceded all ready. Maybe five years from now, no one will ever sit in front of a CRT or LCD and use a keyboard and/or mouse to access the Internet.

Google has announced the Android Mobile OS. While Symbian, Windows Mobile, and more significantly, J2ME, are the platforms of choice mobile phones, what Android has going for it that no one else does is the Open Source Movement. Specifically, Android is based on Linux. The SDK will also be open, so anyone can develop mobile apps. (Of course, the kicker will be the trust mechanism, because only a great fool would install an app that can’t be trusted, but we all know that the world is filled with great fools.)

Android is not without its detractors. This is the very first time that Google has announced a feature that is not quite yet available, and some have already taken to calling Android OS vaporware. But it’s only a matter of time. Much like Apple’s strategy of combining a Mach kernel with a BSD subsystem, and layering the NeXT environment on top of that to create Mac OS X, Google need only package and link pre-existing parts.

Ubiquitous computing, here we come.

Meanwhile, traditional media continues to implode. The writers’ strike is well underway and Hollywood is pretty fucking doomed. Goodbye, big studios. Hope y’all had a Plan B.