The Open Road

I've been an outspoken critic of Google over the years, admiring some of its products (Search, SMS, News, etc.) while deriding its relationship to open source and deprecating most of its products.

There appears to be, however, a new Google afoot, and it's one that I like quite a bit. Google may need to change its slogan from "Don't be evil" to "Be open," as this looks to be the direction it is going. At Google I/O today, Google announced a few things that make me feel like the future of the web is much safer in its hands than in Microsoft's (if Microsoft ever figures out the web at all).

First, as ReadWriteWeb rightly applauds, Google is dropping its name from its Gears project, a

symbolic move aimed at reinforcing Google's commitment to working with existing standards communities and helping them to define better open standards for bridging online applications and the offline world.

Indeed, Google's Gears Engineer Aaron Boodman writes that Gears "aims to bring emerging web standards to as many devices as possible, as quickly as possible."

More open, much sooner.

In Google's increasingly open world, Steve Ballmer's insistence that Vista "is not a failure and it's not a mistake" speaks to the wrong questions surrounding the much maligned operating system. What he should be protesting is that "It's not irrelevant."

The North Face Free Thinker, Foil Thermal, and Sedition II jackets are so cool looking that it almost doesn't matter how well they perform in the cold. But they do. Ah, they do.

North Face Free Thinker jacket

I will admit that when I started to do these ski technology reviews, I figured it would be hard to distinguish between the different manufacturers. A coat is a coat, right? Wrong. That's like saying Macs and PCs are the same because both use processors and hard drives. It's very easy to pick out a North Face jacket from other brands, and it has nothing to do with the logo.

We evaluated several jackets from the North Face: Free Thinker, Foil Thermal (women's), Sedition II, and Wavy Triclimate (women's). The four jackets are very different from each other, and highly distinguished from anything else we tried.

Take the North Face Free Thinker jacket, for example, which was my favorite of the bunch.

Arc'Teryx Sidewinder SV Jacket

The past three weeks The Open Road's review team has been putting Arc'Teryx's Sidewinder SV jacket and pant to the test. We've skied them in some brutally cold weather and on warmer days. In both cases, however, we were swimming through at least 18 inches of Utah powder. It was the ideal testing lab.

If you spend any time at all around ski stores (mea culpa), you will have noticed Arc'Teryx gear. It tends to be very lightweight. Arc'Teryx does make insulated jackets, but these aren't the ones that stand out to me. No, I've longed to try one of its hard shells but always assumed that they wouldn't be warm enough.

Worn over a t-shirt, that supposition might well be correct. But with proper layering (I generally wear a layer or two of Under Armour gear, depending on the conditions) both the Arc'Teryx Sidewinder SV jacket and pants came through a cold powder wash just fine. While not quite as warm as the North Face and Mountain Hardwear jackets we evaluated, the Arc'Teryx gear is also not as bulky as the apparel we reviewed from these other brands.