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The EU should force all Laptop and Desktop OEMs to provide the consumer the option to save instantly the cost of the OS at the counter and not have it pre-installed on their machine.

And any consumer purchasing a laptop or desktop with an OS pre-installed should be able to get an INSTANT rebate at the counter equivalent to the cost of the OS even if the OS is pre-installed on the computer. The reseller must provide a special software on a USB key that uninstalls automatically that OS on first bootup.

Then all Resellers must provide free or paid alternative OS choices. Chrome, Ubuntu or Linpus Linux could be available right there on a USB key available for free with any new computer purchase.

What this proposition means, is that if you enter a store and it only has Windows computer for sale, you must be able to demand Windows removed and they should give you an instant rebate between $40 and $100 depending on the actual price that they are paying to Microsoft. Many consumers will prefer to buy the computer without the Windows option either without it even being pre-installed or with a USB key function that erases Windows on first bootup. Erasing Windows can be done in the store while you wait, or if they don’t have time, you can get the “Delete Windows” USB key and delete it yourself at home the first time you boot it up.

Problem Google needs to fix is that people will use it to store DivX and Mp3 files, so Google needs to make sure corporations won’t sue Google for facilitating piracy. So it should have a focus on monetizing video and music.

Google won’t have to store more than 1 copy of each DivX and mp3 file, so storage should be free for unlimited amounts of “public” files.

Features such as sending files to friends need to filter out copyrighted stuff obviously. Unless the copyright holders agree with Google to monetize it.

Youtube stores the original uploaded video files, so one should instantly be able to re-access them on Gdrive as well as instantly publish uploaded videos to Youtube. Again Google can filter out copyrighted material automatically by doing digital and analog fingerprinting technology and by knowing and verifying users real identities.

Thanks to OLPC, we have soon 50 million netbooks in rich countries. Intel and Microsoft’s profit margins per laptop are shrinking rapidly.

Thanks to OLPC, children have soon millions of cheap lower power laptops in poor countries.

Thanks to OLPC, the PC/Laptop industry’s interpretation of Moore’s law has totally been reshaped, every 18month now PC/laptops will be half the price instead of 2x more powerful and with 2x more bloatware.

Sure, I would have been happier, and so would most other Linux geeks if OLPC had shipped 100 million laptops to poor children by now, and not just 1 million units. Reason for that not happening yet in multi-hundred million scales though are several:

1. Intel will do anything it can not to be killed off by a non-profit laptop technology revolution. Including abusing of monopolistic situations and corrupting politicians.

2. AMD is not much interested in helping OLPC succeed in lowering the cost of laptops and PCs. Lower cost also means less profits and margins for AMD, and AMD has enough problems with profits and margins as it is.

Looking forward, to reach those 100 million poor children sooner rather than later:

1. OLPC needs to find an alternative to AMD as soon as possible. VIA is planned for XO-1.5 which could hopefully ship a few millions of units in a few months time, if VIA supports this move of OLPC creating a cheaper and lower power market using their processor. XO-1.5 could reach the $150 pricepoint soon and enable dozens of commercial netbooks using the VIA processor and also copying on the way OLPC is using the VIA processor.

2. OLPC needs to implement the worlds best ARM processor based laptops for XO-2 working with Google to implement the so called Chrome OS on those. Cloud computing can work also for places without stable internet access, HTML5 supports offline web apps and offline databases. OLPC needs to push Google to make it work on WiFi Mesh networks as well. XO-2 can start at $100 when released and reach the $50 price point, when manufactured using any of half a dozen ARM processor companies chips. All of TI, Qualcomm, Marvell, Freescale, Nvidia and Samsung, all those ARM processors should fit in the XO-2 design. Competition will bring the prices down faster.

Also, to reach those 100 million children, OLPC needs to have more than just a couple dozen engineers working on the whole optimizations of hardware and software for the project.

What OLPC managed to build in XO1 and XO-1.5 with 30 employees and the little budget that they could get is absolutely amazing.

But what OLPC probably needs for XO-2 to absolutely work and sell laptops soon at $50 to revolutionize education worldwide, is thousands of engineers and the support from Barack Obama and the European Union.

So OLPC’s political agenda definitely needs to be more targeted towards the politics of education and aid of the USA and Europe and with much more ambition to make things happen in huge scale as quickly as possible.

What I am proposing is an extra layer of p2p distribution. Why can’t you for example volunteer to store a bunch of products in your garage which people can come and pick up 24 hours a day. For that you get paid, or you can limit the “opening hours” to any amount of time any time you want.

What then happens, if when people buy stuff online, they instantly can go and pick it up 24 hours a day at p2p storage facilities. For a 2AM pickup, it’d obviously cost extra for the nightly service.

Everything would be secure, you don’t get name adress information of people that can provide you the goods until you paid for it, and there is no information if that person has more or less than 1 item in stock. Not even the need to disturb that person ringing on his door bell, the Android application would ring as soon as the customer is approaching the door, thus to be a p2p storage and delivery person, you don’t need to stop everything else that you do at home to be part of that, just store a bunch of things close to your door.

No transaction of money is done ever, the money is spent online, the commission is paid online. What people would do is eventually be able to rate the p2p kiosk experience as well as the buyer. Like ebay ratings but much more relevant and real.

Now add to that a layer of actual transportation of goods. The higher quality goods need to be transported in the absolute most efficient way, to both save on costs and save on pollution. There would be large storage facilities for goods where trains, trucks, airplanes drop the goods, from there the goods are spread out to the thousands of “p2p kiosks” at totally regular people’s homes or any participating consumer storage facility.

P2p delivery can also happen by any person volunteering to pickup goods and deliver them at specific places, could be on your bicycle, in your car, using your little transport truck. Basically you just tell your in-car Android GPS device where you are going, and it will tell you if you can make a few bucks by picking something up and dropping it off on your way.

Same thing as p2p taxi where if you want to carry other people on your backseat, simply tell the Android system, and you are transformed into a p2p taxi. Which will greatly save on pollution as well, since most cars are only driven by 1 person. Putting more people on the backseats of cars is a very easy way to save 50% car pollution and improve traffic conditions greatly. And it would cost about the same as taking public transportation, thus much cheaper than real taxis.

Now Google could organize all this if you want. Or some other huge private corporation. I think though it makes much more sense that the state is regulating all this, in terms of making sure there is interoperability across the whole infrastructure, especially when you start involving normal citizen in the making of this new type of optimized p2p infrastructure. You want safety, quality, trust systems, compatibility. If you leave this new type of organisation of the infrastructure only up to private corporations, there may be collusion of interests, monopolies, illegal trade, all sorts of other things that corrupts the system.

I would link to the Masterful John C Dvorak for some very clever guessing: http://www.marketwatch.com/story/is-googles-new-os-more-than-just-a-bluff?siteid=

I do not believe John C Dvorak is 100% right in his funny column, though I do believe he is right when he says that this is all a super clever public relations trick put on by Google and that all of it is just the Google OS coming up. John C Dvorak is mostly right about most things that he says.

I believe it will be released open sourced in a couple of months, with the first ARM Cortex A8 and Tegra based laptops.

Android 2.0 and Chrome OS is the same thing. It doesn’t matter what Google says and what bloggers think. There is only one way Google is working towards:

- Making full Chrome browser work on ARM embedded laptops even better than on x86 based laptops.

Now, you might know me as the contiunous x86 basher, I kind of am. But what I believe Google wants is more competition in both hardware and software space for PCs and laptops. This is what Google OS is all about.

The reasons Google might caution Google OS on ARM fans to wait for are a few technological breakthroughs which Google might need before the worldwide availability of perfect $100 Google laptops can happen:

1. ARM Cortex A8 needs to be fast enough for a full browser. If it’s not, then Google needs to wait for broad availability of ARM Cortex A9 starting early next year.

2. Google and the whole ARM community needs to optimize browsers, flash, HTML5 features on DSP and GPU cores of laptops, especially ARM laptops, so that $100 laptops can run a FULL browser and cloud computing experience. Nvidia, Qualcomm, Freescale, Texas Instruments were promising hardware acceleration for the browser, Flash and HTML5 at Computex, but they didn’t really show it yet. I believe they can make it work as a 2003 X86 based browser (something like a 512MB RAM or less system), though that may not be enough for the full mass market to adopt the first version, thus Google might prefer to wait for full launch for it to work better than 2009 x86 browsers.

3. Google wants better connectivity. Google is strongly hoping to start implementing White Spaces worldwide as soon as possible, this will enable free unlimited wireless Internet for all (and destroy all ISPs and telcos in the process). Optimized Connected standby features for ARM devices might only really start working perfectly early next year. First generation ARM Google OS laptops might not have LED lights that turn on instantly on incoming emails, feeds, pings, IMs, VOIP calls and other such crucial presence and social networking web apps which Google needs on the Google laptops for it to really feel like revolutionary products compared to the established systems.

4. Political aspects of this might start being put into places early next year as well such as real competition on HSDPA connectivity, maximum prices of $20 per month pre-paid data-only plans for most of the world and no more contract-plans and other voice and SMS plans forced onto consumers by monopolistic telcos. Also political decision on net neutrality, white spaces, sustainable energy consumption of consumer electronics and servers and crucial for Google to succeed on this global cloud computing plan.

I see it as inevitable, that Google will create Google OS, a super tiny embedded Linux open source OS less than 50 Megabytes for the whole highly optimized OS, and that in a couple of months we will start seeing it ship on $150 ARM based laptops with all types of screen sizes (large screens and keyboards aren’t much more expensive than small ones, consider $50 upgrade for 15″ and full keyboard instead of 10″ and tiny netbook keyboard).

Those $150 Google laptops will be running ARM chips by half a dozen competing ARM processor manufacturers and manufactured by all the major laptop manufacturers in the world. Effectively putting out of business all of Microsoft, Intel and Apple. Together with most of Silicon Valley. That is for the better. For the first time billions more people will have access to this technology very quickly and we will all for the first time really find amazing new ways to use the technology.

As for technical details on Native versus Cloud apps. I believe natively you will have everything needed for a full computing experience. Basically it’s not just the browser, it’s not just flash support, it’s not just HTML5 including native code plugins for the browser and 3D in the browser, it’s like providing you the hypervisors, user interface APIs, clever caching and seamless interface optimizations, which will enable you to not only have a full 2009 x86 style computing experience, it will plug you into the full cloud, in fact giving you infinately more computing power for all the most processor intensive tasks that the biggest professionals would want to use. You can definitely encode videos using grid server encoding, I have been doing that for over 2 years for all my HD video encoding needs, just have a fast enough upload to upload your source files from your camcorders. Google Gears type database and web application caching not only lets you do things while offline, it can turn all web applications into feeling exactly like native applications, they respond instantly without having to wait for any online service to stream the user interfaces back at you. The user interfaces will be locally cached on the machine, only processed data is streamed from the cloud, and clever pre-loading algorithms mostly will not make you feel any difference than processing everything using a local X86 processor. In fact, things will feel much faster cause you will be able to have the power of an unlimited amount of cloud servers to render, process and encode any of your media intensive tasks.

Ryanair and Easyjet are full of Corporate World types, who just enjoy that they can save money on flight tickets. Sales of Business class tickets on any airline company are tanking. Saving money and getting smaller, better, cheaper laptops is absolutely a universal thing, not only for the mass market, also for corporate types.

You will get £100 Google OS Laptops, running 15-20 hours on a 3-cell battery, fully sunlight readable with the Pixel Qi screen, highly optimized with built-in HSDPA always-on connectivity, connected standby features (rings or blinks an alert light from full standby on incoming emails or calendar alerts), all Google OS laptops will be based on ARM Processors.

Basically Chrome OS = Android 2.0 optimized for Laptops. It will absolutely take over the world, as the absolute best OS for ARM Laptops, instantly putting Microsoft, Apple and Intel out of business.

I posted this as a comment on http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/07/15/google_chrome_os/comments/

So I’ve been posting my ideas on here and on Martin Varsavsky’s blog regularly, I’m still not sure if my ideas and suggestions have generated any significant debate or if any were regarded as good by anyone looking at FON or working from within. Here are some of my previous threads:

FON should release auto-meshing Foneras: http://boards.fon.com/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=4346

Cheapest NAS ever (special Fonera 2.0 hard drive enclosure): http://boards.fon.com/viewtopic.php?f=33&t=4842

When is Fonera 2.0 coming? Mon Jan 29, 2007 http://boards.fon.com/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=2627

Fon Liberator IDE/SATA.. Wi-Max Fon routers? Wed Sep 27, 2006 http://boards.fon.com/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=2080

So now that I read that FON is AGAIN doing something awesome in the Fonera 2.0n product, at only 79 euros coming in a couple of months. I feel the urge to post here again my latest ideas for making FON a much more tangible revolutionary product and community:

1. FON should be free WiFi. Allow Foneros to opt-in to enable free ad-supported WiFi access on their FON spots. That voluntary opt-in free WiFi access can also be throttled to only be limited at a certain bandwidth, the bandwidth can be in the category of third priority (behind Fonero owners own activity and behind Paying or Roaming Fon Aliens and Linuses).

2. FON needs to implement worldwide WiFi Roaming much more efficiently. I want to login on ALL worldwide hotspot networks using my FON username and password, and thus PAY using my current and latest FON WiFi income (taking from whatever I would have earned on my home WiFi). FON absolutely needs to implement WiFi Roaming in much more clever ways. For example, how much bandwidth do you provide at your Fonspot, gives you more or less access to roam on FON and OTHER WiFi hotspots worldwide. If I provide lots of bandwidth to Boingo, Neuf, Free, BT or other such customers, I want to be allowed to roam for free or cheaper on their networks as well.

3. FON mesh networking, absolutely, this is needed. Sorry, but FON cannot wait for ISPs to start thinking this is a good idea. FON should sell cheap Fonera 1.0 meshing routers for people to buy and be allowed to install just only in an electric outlet, which expands instantly the original FONspots reach and gives that new Fonero a cheaper, free or better access to that original FONspot. Basically, for customers accessing FONspots, let them click “Buy FON mesh router now 19 euros, install it at your window to expand the reach of this FONspot and you will get _these_ advantages” (advantages which can include perhaps free, or cheaper FON access, or better bandwidth less ads if already free, all based on the performance of that mesh access point).

4. Fonera 2.0n is green colored. Now is the time to make sure it can absolutely provide following perfect features based on its announced much more powerful embedded processor:

4.1 Unlimited amount of BitTorrent and Emule downloads/seeds should be supported. Turning it immediately into a reliable pc/laptop replacement for all p2p usage.

4.2 Gigabit/s local lan speeds, it should start to be fast enough for managing Terrabytes of local personal file backups and synchronizing terrabytes of personal files with cloud backup storage as well.

4.3 Support for unlimited amount of local USB hard drive total-switch-off-over-usb (see Cheapest NAS ever), this will provide NAS local and Internet-wide storage using 1000x less power since USB hard drives should absolutely only be turned on using usb-auto-power-switching only when they are absolutely needed.

4.4 Google Chrome OS, Chrome Browser, Firefox should start getting plugins, extensions, gadgets, that handle user interaction with their Fonera 2.0 box. Any click on .torrent files within the browser (any of desktop/laptop/mobile phone browser) should automatically launch by default the torrent download on the Fonera 2.0n box. Any other downloads should right-click and download onto the Fonera 2.0n box from any http or from other types of download systems. Clicking on BitTorrent or podcast RSS feeds should add the subscription to the Fonera 2.0n box. Completed downloads should be sent from Fonera 2.0n through IM or other type of ping to the user and instant link to stream the original file (considering there should be enough upload bandwidth from the Fonera 2.0n to support it).

4.5 Fonera 2.0n should automatically become the router box to have together with the best VOD set top box systems. HD VOD BitTorrent RSS feeds should auto download to Fonera 2.0n USB hard drive, and play locally to the HDTV through local network and available $100 HD VOD set top boxes.

FON should quickly be synonymous with biggest free wifi community (for all not just Foneros), at for example max 512kbit/128kbit speeds for free with ads (show relevant location based Google ads somehow) and simply let people pay for more bandwidth.

I recently got a nabour who simply decided not to have any password on his regular WiFi access point, since then I nearly don’t get any customers anymore for my FONspot. Why would they pay or use my access point when they can get free Internet on a nabours unprotected open wifi spot.

FON = Free WiFi (when Foneros opt-in). Or activate that Free thing based on current performance of each FONspot. Simply put, if a current FONspot is very popular, earning a lot of money, do not touch it. While other less popular FONspots, you could if you want, just automatically activate FREE access now without even asking the owner for permission. Then only make it an opt-out thing for them.

6. Important opportunity for FON, advertising for high Bandwidth. FON could quickly have all the Fiber Internet providers using FON to advertise and sell their high bandwidths. Simply put something like this on Fiber-2-FONspots:

512kbit/128kbit FREE showing relevant localized Google ads regularly

1mbit/512kbit 1 euro per 1 hour
1mbit/512kbit 3 euro per day-pass
1mbit/512kbit 10 euro per week-pass

Let bandwidth be symmetrical 1mbit/1mbit when on Fiber connections.

10mbit/1mbit 1.50 euro per 1 hour
10mbit/1mbit 5 euro per day-pass
10mbit/1mbit 15 euro per week-pass

If on ADSL or Cable when upload connection can max out at 1 or 2mbit/s, then warn the user that the upload is only best effort and comes in second priority after the FONspot owners own activity, graph of current available bandwidth over the past few hours can be shown.

Let bandwidth be symmetrical 10mbit/10mbit when on Fiber connections.

100mbit/100mbit 2 euro per 1 hour
100mbit/100mbit 8 euro per day-pass
100mbit/100mbit 20 euro per week-pass

Again, bandwidth is shared among connected users, with priority given the FONspot owner.

Let Foneros modulate bandwidths that people can get based on how much bandwidth they actually have and eventually also set GB/user/time usage limits, and always making it possible for the Fonera to set it so he will ALWAYS get absolute priority on the bandwidth used when he uses it himself on his own private WiFi signal or otherwise locally.

I posted these suggestions on the FON discussion boards: http://boards.fon.com/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=5781