A friend coming back to the US from Europe this weekend snapped this photo for me on an Airbus 330 FinAir flight from Helsinki to JFK which shows the seat back monitors obviously booting Linux. It looks a lot like the RED Entertainment system which is a custom program running on top of Linux that Virgin America came out with sometime in 2007 and is discussed a bit on engadget. He’s pretty sure he saw the text “RED boot” flash by at some point. According to my friend, its a touch screen with an optional seat control module which is used to display “Movies, Documentaries, or (pre-recorded) TV programs, Games, or Audio programs on demand, serve as a Flight map and flight parameters monitor, provide Front and down cameras view, Shopping on board, and Telephone and text messaging services (with use of Credit Card terminal)”. One internet source I found suggested that “most inflight entertainment systems run Linux and have been doing so for the last 7 or so years”. Some makers include Panasonic Avionics and Thales Avionics.

Army Builder is a windows program that helps you build an army for use in playing Warhammer Fantasy Battle that conforms to the rules of the game. This simple program took all the pain out of building my little Dwarf army and got me playing much faster – I highly recommend it. As there is only a Windows version of the program, I have to run it in a virtual machine (VM), but that has turned out to be a good decision anyway as we’ll see later.
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Microsoft was right to be afraid of Linux, as Google just announced that a Google Chrome Operating System is on its way for sometime later this year and runs on top of… LInux. The new OS is being designed specifically for netbooks and Google claims will be able to power them up and get you on the web in a few seconds, but Google says it could easily power a full up computer as well. Like all Linux distributions, the OS will be open source allowing anyone in the world to review and modify the code that powers it. Many programmers think that it is open access to source code that has allowed Linux and BSD to maintain a comfortable lead as the most popular OS powering servers that run the internet. It is also anathema to Microsoft and Apple who have built empires on proprietary (closed) code with business and consumer customers respectively. Google’s stated strategy has already proven effective by Apple as their closed OSX is actually running on top of a variant of BSD (which is probably why it is so stable). Ubuntu Linux has been making some inroads on cheap and older hardware (as users replace a corrupted Windows OS on an older machine), but on new hardware, Windows still dominates. A Google OS based on Linux is exciting (if predictable).

So Microsoft finally has an ad running that makes some kind of sense. They toss “Lauren” $1,000 to buy a computer and tell her she can keep whatever is left over. At the end of the ad she says that she “got *just* what she wanted”, so then why exactly did we see her go to the Mac store first? This ad is the latest in a mess of PC vs Mac ads that finally scores some points on the PC side, because she couldn’t afford a 17″ Mac laptop but ended up getting money back on a 17″ PC laptop. Sad, but true – the 17″ Mac laptop is a lot more expensive. The thing that leaves me scratching my head is that Microsoft doesn’t make laptops! From a business perspective, how does spending $1,000 to get somebody to buy your $100 product make any sense? If they were to continue this promotion and they gave *me* a thousand bucks to buy a new computer, you know I’d buy a PC too – but then of course, I’d put Linux on it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EIS6G-HvnkU