By Stephen Pate, NJN Network, Charlottetown, PEI, Canada, March 17, 2009
As part of my research I scan Google every day for stories about education, the economy, disabilities, music and computers. Each category returns lots of hits and I pick stories to cover. What I don’t get are any stories about computer innovation. There are lots of stories how this country wants to censor the internet or that university suspends a student over Facebook. There is rarely anything about hardware or software innovation. It was innovation that drove the computer industry for decades. If your computer stocks are down, it’s because the companies are not innovating. People buy exciting new products. What’s exciting about another laptop or desktop? Nothing. They do the same thing your last one did only a little faster until Microsoft slows it down with the next version of Windows.
Zachariah thomas
Look into open-source there is some innovation in design there.
It has a steady improvement path plus plans to improve things all mapped out. Specifically Linux.
From Open Source high portable frameworks, Mono an open clone to the closed .NET. Beyond many things.
Countries are begin to make their own local distribution, Linux/BSD based operating system, from Russia to France and many more places. Mainly throughout their entire government system.
Suggest taking a look at a Linux distro yourself distrowatch.com, personally recommend something like http://www.sabayonlinux.org/ , for a good LiveDVD example of linux, or linuxmint.com which is ubuntu, so it is a good general purpose desktop, but a little more customized at the start.
Linux operating systems leave the user with the choice they would like to go for with ultra lightweight components like lxde.org to snappy, fairly simple, and customizable like http://xfce.org/ then you have the larger desktops of linux http://gnome.org/ and http://kde.org/
These all are themeable in one way using toolkits which all for better resource usage and a more unified look across the desktop.
The two top toolkits are GTK+ and Qt both are cross platform to work on MacOSX, BSD, Linux and even Windows.
If you want news on linux things http://phoronix.com may provide you with some interesting articles. Such as new software technologies that provide significant advantages, like Clutter allows for an OpenGL interface meaning you can have Desktop Environment that is rendered right off your video card in the same way a game is. The list of rather interesting things goes on.