Technology Review
It hopes the operating system will entice companies to use cloud computing technologies.
An open-source Web-based operating system called eyeOS is getting a big boost from IBM. The computer giant has begun selling high-end mainframe servers with eyeOS pre-installed, hoping the operating system will entice customers who are hesitant about using cloud computing.
Managed by a small company based in Barcelona, eyeOS lets users access a virtual desktop through a Web browser. The user can treat that virtual desktop like the desktop of a regular PC, launching and running applications within it.
Though individuals can use the operating system over the Internet through a site hosted by eyeOS, IBM makes it possible for customers to host the service themselves. With the software installed on the mainframe server, a company could offer virtual desktops to its employees, who could then access their "work computers" from any device.
Unlike projects like Google's ChromeOS, which is designed to let people access the entire world of Web applications through the browser, eyeOS is designed to access a specific set of applications "installed" on the virtual desktop. Using the system, an organization could provide employees with productivity applications, its own custom applications, and access to proprietary data. The ability to access these through a single Web-based operating system, says the project's founder, Pau Garcia-Mila, saves users from needing passwords to different Web-based services. It also allows the applications to be more compatible with each other.
Cloud computing most often means running data and applications on remote servers hosted by a company such as Amazon.com. New technologies allow the hosting company to share its processing and storage resources efficiently among all its customers, enabling it to offer low prices. Customers of cloud providers save money because the rates are low, they don't have to buy their own equipment, and they can buy just as much computing power as they need, changing the quantity as their demands fluctuate.
Information technology's next grand challenge will be to secure the cloud--and prove we can trust it.
But the local computer is still a security weakpoint .. a solution
Overcoming a cloud’s high walls is difficult, hacking a weak, personal computer to become an insider is far easier. The Software Protection Initiative (spi.dod.mil) has found that unmanaged end-nodes (e.g. the millions of users connecting from wide range of questionable devices) pose the greatest risk to the cloud, including remote desktops like eyeOS, Google Docs, VMware, or Citrix/ WindowsRemoteDesktop via VPN. SPI has developed a range of solutions; the most widely used being the free LPS-Public (http://spi.dod.mil/lipose.htm). LPS-Public creates a temporary, trusted Internet end-node from pristine media on almost any computer. Google OS on a netbook is the right 'thickness' for browser remote desktops but its still fundamentally insecure in that it has persistent memory - LPS-Public does not. For almost a decade, SPI has been the US Department of Defense’s program responsible for R&D to instill trust into common, commercially available systems.
Manufacturing in the United States is in trouble. That's bad news not just for the country's economy but for the future of innovation.
This document is part of the “How-To Guide for Most Common Measurements” centralized resource portal. This tutorial provides a detailed guide for measurement and device considerations to take temperature measurements using thermocouples. Get an introduction to thermocouples, which are inexpensive sensing devices widely used with PC-based data acquisition systems. Also review some specific thermocouple examples and learn how thermocouples work and ways to integrate them into a data acquisition measurement system.
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61 Comments
EYE os Google OS
Suddenly Google's browser based os makes sense when added to EYE os's centralized IT configuration, a large company could save a lot by using what ever hardware is around and loading a simple browser based operating system to access their corporate systems.
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