Weekly Meanderings

Scot,

You asked about prospects for seeing Google's Chrome OS on the Mac. Two things: firstly, I'm not sure, but suspect the Mac's system and software architecture is a lot less open and harder for third parties to develop core components for. And secondly... why on earth would someone who has invested in the beauty and simplicity of OS X want to replace it? Seriously, I don't think there'll be much overlap between the kind of people who typically buy a Mac and the kind of people who want to be able to use a lightweight, mainly cloud-based system. (That's not meant to sound elitist, by the way!)

Rob

By far the best op-ed read this week was by former Reagan speech writer Reggy Noonan, who addressed the phenomenon which is Sarah Palin as a Republican millstone. She knocked it out of the park!

http://online.wsj.com/public/article/declarations.html

On the grade-changing requests: Why am I not surprised?

I look at this phenomenon (and it's even happened at the community college I'm taking classes at in prep for my teaching degree) as a fallout of the "gold stars for everyone" mentality that's pervaded so much of our educational system. We've gone so far in the self-esteem department that we've produced an incredibly narcissistic generation that believes that if they do "most" of the work, they "deserve" a good result.

Excuse me, but I don't seem to recall that being true in any of my classes. If you only do most of the work, you only know most of the material, and it shows up on your test, when there are questions you didn't study for! Give me a break. I think with the whole idea of self-esteem curriculum, we've given ourselves enough rope with which to hang ourselves.

Just to answer the question on Chrome for the Mac: technically, you can run any operating system on a Mac. Many people have installed various Linux distributions (Ubuntu, Red Hat, etc.) onto Macs either in addition to or in replacement of OSX (though, I agree that there is never a reason to replace OSX). Chrome OS is basically a Linux distribution, though it will be a very unique one.

So yes, it will be possible, though it does require a bit of geekery to set up a computer to boot multiple operating systems. It will also be possible to virtualize it, like many people do with VMWare Fusion or Parallels to run Windows on Macs, so that the systems can access each other and switch back and forth without restarting.

Pujols is quite a hitter. Must have been fun to see him, even if it meant another loss for your Cubbies. :)