Unless you live in a cave, don't care at all about technology or have been distracted by Sarah Palin's publicity tour, you've probably heard that Google showed its Linux-based Chrome operating system to the world yesterday.
Google, a company born and bred on the Web, has a mighty challenge ahead of it getting into the PC business. Aware of this, Google does not have grand ambitions to take over PCs with Chrome. It's a browser and cloud-based OS for netbooks designed to be fast, simple and secure. Chrome will not support hard drives, only solid-state storage, and it will only run Web-based applications. There will be no desktop-type software programs allowed.

As for security, if any application is in danger of being corrupted by malware, Chrome has been designed to reboot itself, after which a clean version of the OS is downloaded. Nearly all user data will be stored in the Google's cloud computing service and will be encrypted and sychronized constantly between the netbook and the cloud.

The link for this article located at Network World is no longer available.