Anas Ismail Khan

Google, that started as a search engine that gained global popularity, and parallel to searching, the only thing it offered was a home page light-enough for you to test your internet connection, but that doesn’t at all mean that it wasn’t awesome enough them. A whole lot of people owe their success to it, as it helped numerous youngsters with their homework and school projects, and thus if they are successful now, Google might have contributed a whole lot into their success. According to it’s wiki article, Google started in 1998, but it has now come a long way from being just a search engine.

Then came other products. Gmail, in 2007 or 8, (and something by the name of Google Wave followed too , but it wasnt very successful,)  which soon became a rival to Hotmail and YMail. Well, OK, Hotmail isn’t the primary thing of Microsoft’s. MS was the first software company, it brought computers to the world to be consumed by normal people and we respect that. Who cares if Bing never got as popular as Google, MS isnt all about search engines either.  As for Yahoo, Okay, Google beat their search engine, but loyal ymail lovers still like it, and well their messenger is still respected more than Google’s talk.

Ah yes, Google Talk eh? Well, this one, a messenger would fall in the same category as Windows Live messenger and Yahoo’s messenger, however, once again, Not very successful. Earlier this year, It was renamed to Hangouts, and perhaps a few newer features were introduced, like using phone numbers to find friends e.t.c. The kind of thing Viber and WhatsApp are famous for, but still, consumers like me prefer sticking to the older, and original ones, i.e. the two mentioned above.

Then there’s the Google Drive. Cloud storage, and rival to Microsoft’s Skydrive. I like and respect both, and both have their pros and cons and in my opinion, both are equal on the whole, plus again, MS isn’t famous for being a provider of cloud storage. Google Docs, an online office productivity suite, the MS counterpart for which is the Office online. Both are great.

Then there’s Google+, a Social network by google, that perhaps isnt very popular as Facebook and twitter, yet the 3rd in terms of preferrence. This can be proved by the fact that most websites, for contact, or upvotes/reccommendation provide three buttons. One from Twitter, one from Facebook, and another from Google+. But still, not exactly on the top eh? Another is Picasa, which is a photosharing cloud-storage, and perhaps might be considered a rival to Yahoo’s Flickr. However, from what I know,Flickr is more popular.

Youtube, the primary place on the web to look for Videos too is owned by Google, though perhaps not started by them, but it’s improving a whole lot, and one cant say that Google didnt contribute to it.

AngularJS, a Javascript Library and framework, Google’s, and rivals a number of others that fall in the similar category and is certainly gaining popularity and quite some fan base in  the world of developers. The Google App engine provides free hosting for web apps, rather like Heroku. And that’s not all, The Google Apps are a set of productivity tools, for businesses and individuals, that help with setting up and managing websites. Then the Google Developer tools are good and the Google Analytics Tools help a lot with SEO, and keeping track of site traffic. Oh and Blogger is a great place for normal(s) to start a blog.

Google Maps, rival to iPhone’s maps, and the primary GPS service of most users nowadays, and it’s streetview is known to have captured some seriously interesting stuff. Google Earth is a similar product but it provides an interactive, fun interface where you can explore the earth. Similar products are Google Mars, Google Moon, and Google Sky.

But that’s not all, these products dont even contribute to perhaps half of Google’s fame. There’s more. In 2008, Google launched Android. A Linux based, free and open-source Operating system for Mobile devices, and the first ever android device to apppear in the market was the HTC Dream. Android gained popularity real quick, and especially with the release of the Galaxy Y and other Galaxy devices, it soon got ‘fan-ned’ by a large percentage of the world, and became a rival to iOS. Android devices are manufactured by the leading company of the present, Samsung, Sony, and HTC, and of course, Google’s own Nexus devices, one of which is launched every year. Could Android kick iOS out of the market? maybe if they play well, as they are in a position to.

The same year, they’d lauched Google Chrome. The top web-browser of the present, that soon became another alternative to internet explorer alongside Mozilla’s Firefox. Well, Internet Explorer’s had it’s day, still respected.

As Chrome got popular and computing moved closer to the cloud, Google seized the chance and launched Chrome OS. Another Linux Based OS, damn lightweight, and this time for slightly more desktop devices. The idea behind Chrome OS was something like this. Every day, millions of users boot into their computers, and once it’s fully loaded, the double-click the icon of their web-browser and start off with whatever they want to do, but dont really do much outside the browser, so they are more or less logging into their OS just to be able to use the browser, so what if your browser was your OS?
Chrome OS’s source code is publicly available, however, it isnt available for download and comes preinstalled in Chromebooks, that are laptops officially built for the OS.

A few days back, Google announced the release of a Chrome Apps launcher for MacOSX. The Chrome Apps were originally a feature offered by the browser. More like extensions perhaps, but slightly more ‘applications’. They are also well integrated into the Chrome OS of course and are the main software for Chrome-OS. The thing about them is that they are totally on the web, they dont have to be installed. All you need is a launcher, which could be either the launcher itself, or the ChromeOS (which has a similar launcher of course) or the chrome web browser.
But they released the launchers for MacOSX and Windows? And I also read that apps are being made for Android and iOS too, however i couldnt find an Android app on the playStore… not yet.

So, as these launchers are out, a number of people might try these, and some, with high speed connections and normal use, might get too comfortable with their apps, that they are gonna try out when they try the launcher, and when they do, the apps would get popular and some users’ use might not extend beyond using these apps, and this is how some might consider switching to Chrome OS itself.. + chromebooks are real cheap and thus attract buyers.

Android is becoming like the primary OS for smartphones, and soon their might come a time, when, like I posted before, they might merge the two projects.
Merging would result in a whole lot of improvements in ChromeOS, and then people might actually start using it, if it has the integration that i look forward to seeing, and using.

Just look how Google is expanding. Started as a search engine and now its the leading company of the web, and with the passage of time, It’s trying on every field or bit there is to IT. Then that Google glass. They can actually monitor, and see exactly what you are doing using that thing. People use gmail as their primary email, Drive to store data, buy domains and hosting from google, walk with a pair of spec on their noses that too was developed by google and records what they see.

It’s like WE the CONSUMERS are being CONSUMED by technology, when it should be the other way round. If anything close to Skynet exists or ever will.. It’s Google.

Rather than just making the chrome apps run on iOS and android..

Not much of one. More like the very first attempt where I simply Googled something like “create a free website”, and ended up on Jigsy, which was then called ‘Viviti.’
Here, it carries naught but my name. Blame the power outage, for I was intending to add a whole lot of flash content.
I did build on it a lot afterwards but offline..

Ages ago, many of us noticed the addition of a strangely catching tab on Googles pages. Some ignored, with the presumption that it’s another new product by Google, while some investigated.
The idea, as it said on the Google Nose’s home page was that users could actually sniff stuff they search for. An example they themselves gave in a screenshot was “wet dog.” As you click on the Nose button, it’d instruct you to bring your nose close to the screen and sniff, and when you do, the screen would go all frosty at places, but you won’t even get a whiff of what a wet dog is supposed to smell like, cause the whole Google Nose thing was nothing but an April fool joke!

Chromium OS, and Android, both are light-weight, open-source OSs developed by Google, improving and getting popular, gradually, over time.

I think it’s only a matter of time before Google adds features for fully integrating one into other and soon, eradicating either of the two names and merging the two projects, into a single one, an OS available for both desktop and mobile devices.

Came across the term for the first time when I was checking out stuff on the play Store. It’s another project by Google, which in itself is naught but like a USB flash drive, but there’s more to it.
The Chromecast enables you to enjoy media content on your HDTV. Means if for example you come across a YouTube Video, while checking out your Facebook feeds, all you have to do is look for and press the chromecast button. It would prompt you with a list of available devices, selecting any of which would play the content on whatever device you chose. To do so, what you are gonna need is true chromecast USB device of course which has to be plugged into the TV.

Here, a link to the official video:
The Chromecast

Tofu, @tofu_product, is a Twitter account, that seems to have a thing for confusing tweets, and following General public.
Actually, it is supposed to be a bot. The moment you follow him, he’d follow you back, and he’d go through your tweets, make something out of them, and tweet it to you.. sounds stupid eh? But that’s more or less like what happens. A Tofu tweet normally doesnt make much sense.
Do give it a try, find him on Twitter and follow him. He’d follow you back instantly. Wait for another few minutes and he is bound to tweet something to you..

I used to think the Lubuntu was capable of running on any machine available, until I read on some blog a post where a guy was hoping to find a nice damn-light distro for his Toshiba Satellite 300CDT, that had only 4GB storage and 48mb of RAM..
Well, guy could do with slax, as the minimum memory requirements for the 32bit version inn text mode happen to be exactly 48mb…

The Singapore ministry of defense actually asked the M1 operator for camera-free iPhone devices.

Reason: This allowed the “military” to use the smartphone in areas where cameras are strictly forbidden in those areas for security reasons..

http://asia.cnet.com/hands-on-apple-iphone-4s-without-camera-62213320.htm

Two days back, I out of curiosity, fired up a terminal and typed in startx, with the hope that the UI would be reduced to naught but the original form of the X. At first it displayed an error, saying that i’m not permitted to. But then I tried again, and this time with a ‘sudo.’ The moment I entered my password, the screen went all dark, but only for a second, after which I was left with naught but a blank desktop, free from menus. Sensing failure, I opened another terminal and wrote ‘unity.’ Something similar happened, but this time, the title bar of the terminal kinda got stuck to the top of the screen. I tried the same command again, and this time, I was brought back to where i started. The terminal in which i had typed the startx command was still there, however i failed to notice that the user logged into it wasn’t my primary user account but root. I didn’t really notice anything unusual, except that the settings dropdown, present in the top-right, in the gnome bar, wasn’t showing up the options it ought to, so I restarted the computer by simply pressing the power button.

After the reboot, whenever I’d attempt a login, I’d be greeted by a dark screen, and after like a fraction of second, I’d be back on the Login Page. But the guest account seemed to work fine, so I logged into it and created another Administrator account, and on that one, I tried recreating the problem and was successful. Okay, now we might get somewhere…

Now what I did, that fixed the problem, was this:
I logged into the account, i.e the first one where i screwed everything up, via the tty1 terminal (Ctrl + Alt + F1), and ran the following commands:

sudo rm /home/anas/.Xauthority*
sudo apt-get install --reinstall xorg --fix-missing

The first one deletes the file, while the second re-installs Xorg. After this, I was able to login to the account again.