Why will Google Chrome OS not take over Microsoft Windows?

The single most important thing an OS does is hardware abstraction. While Linux xyz and macs have mastered in many areas like security, look and feel, speed, etc, Windows still remain unchallenged when it comes to device support. And how do they do that? By not having or supporting a common standard for device drivers! Go to a computer shop and purchase your favorite gadget; be it the coolest graphics card, 64 bit sound blaster, a simple USB skype phone or any other internal/external h.w. that you can think, to the bare minimum it will run out of the box(with some installations) on your windows PC! And that's the power of Windows. Like many others, I myself periodically tried different flavors of Linux over the past decade, but every time I did that I had to compromise on some h.w. support or the other. Recently I installed the newest coolest version of SUSE on my old box connected to 16:9 format TV via DVI and supporting graphics card, only to learn that there are no available drivers for my graphics card in the linux world. After lot of hacking and several attempts, I finally gave up and switched back to Windows :(. While SUSE worked out of the box and did most of the stuff better than Windows, it didn't support the 16:9 format on my graphics card(due to lack of supporting driver).

One single thing that Google should do to successfully capture the OS market is provide out of the box support to Microsoft's Device Drivers or provide some magical way to port the device driver s.w. into its new operating system. Current day Linux flavors are at least 100 times better in almost every area of OS features(including look and feel I must say) compared to Windows. There is no doubt that Google will make a great and innovative product, but what is more important is h.w. support, adaption and market penetration. Google can persuade manufacturers of nwe h.w. to support its OS, but what about the trillions of already manufactured equipments that are powered on all over the planet? Google should learn a lesson from Linux's struggle to capture Windows user base over the past decade. Remember, most ppl no longer use Windows because they like it, but because it just works out of the box!

For non configurable machines like Mobile phones, netbooks or even laptops, google OS or even Android with some improvement would be a great fit and work for most use cases out of the box. But for desktops, I still feel, google should nail the device driver requirements first.

@Official Google Blog: Introducing the Google Chrome OS

wild card search in eclipse

While eclipse's simple search is good enough for most purpose; You can make use of wild cards to enhance your search results. For example adding dots in your search text will ignore that many characters and match rest of the string.


Example:
text: The quick brown FOX jumps over the lazy DOG
search for: f.x
will match: FOX

text: The quick brown FOX jumps over the lazy DOG
search for: b..wn
will match: brown


text: The quick brown FOX jumps over the lazy DOG
search for: q...k
will match: quick


Now say you dont know the number of characters either. In this case you can make use of start to match any number of characters.

Example:

text: The quick brown FOX jumps over the lazy DOG
search for: the.*fox
will match: The quick brown FOX


text: The quick brown FOX jumps over the lazy DOG
search for: the.*brown.*over
will match: The quick brown FOX jumps over