Podcast 2 – August 09 - “Time Lords, Averting Backup Disaster In Business, & Google Chrome – The OS Killer?” (13m 11s)

This episode we’re talking about being a Time Lord, how backups are vitally important in businesses, plus I’m talking to Gavin Moorhouse from Lucid Computer Solutions who’s going to be talking us through the best of the bunch for backups, and Google Chrome – is it going to be the OS killer?

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Rather exciting news was announced this week, with Google taking on the challenge of creating an operating system to rival Mac OS and Windows. They’ve stated that they will release an open source version later this year for developers to modify and play with it, and potentially improve it, with a finished version set to launch next year.

It’s planned that it’ll be designed for netbooks in its early stages, with plans to move it into the desktop world as well. Now, with me being a staunch supporter of all things Mac, you wouldn’t have thought I’d particularly welcome this news. But you’d be wrong. For one I’m very pleased that there’ll be another contender to hopefully bring down some of Microsoft’s dominance in the marketplace, and have the software arena back to being as fair game as possible. Maybe it will force Microsoft to stop being so sloppy in its developing and create a piece of software that isn’t bug-ridden and crash-happy.

The other reason is portability, when it comes to netbooks. As things stand right now, I wouldn’t dream of owning a netbook with Windows on it, as I totally dislike Windows and all it stands for. I do however like the functionality that some netbooks bring, size wise. So if there was the opportunity of having a low cost mini-laptop available that can run Google Chrome OS, I’d be tempted to have one as a secondary laptop.

Which leaves me to ask the questions – do you welcome this new addition to the OS market? Will you be running it yourself on your laptop/netbook? Do you think having a new contender is a good idea, or will it just fall on it’s face as a bit of a fad?

You decide….

Apple have recently released the latest version of Safari, version 4.0, which I have downloaded very happily! It was also announced recently that Mozilla are releasing the next update in their popular FireFox browser, version 3.5. It got me thinking, (albeit slightly), because of the fact that there are so many different web browsers out there, which do you feel are the most popular, what do you use most often, what’s your personal favourite, and do you ‘have to’ use certain browsers for different functions?

For me, Safari is my browser of choice, mainly because of it’s synching capability with MobileMe, so both my iMac and MacBook Pro are fully up to date with the same bookmarks. I also favour it because it’s the sleekest browser I’ve ever used, giving you, I think, the most screen real-estate. Also, as has been tested, Safari is now officially the world’s speediest browser, giving a highly efficient browsing experience.

However, there are a couple of sites I use very regularly that aren’t optimised for Safari, disabling things like text formatting buttons on forums etc, so I have to use Firefox instead. This naturally infuriates me, as even though I don’t hate Firefox by any means, it’s actually a really good browser in my opinion, for me it’s just not as good as Safari.

So with a multitude of options out there, Safari, Firefox, Internet Explorer, Chrome, Opera and more – what do you use, and why?