Google’s Chrome OS Takes All Your Computing To The Cloud
[ 1 Comment ]Posted on December 8, 2010 by admin in Technology
Wednesday, December 8th, 2010Awesome. But why the heck would you want to do that?
The tech industry was abuzz the last few days with talk about Google’s introduction of their Chrome OS and notebook on Tuesday. If this means nothing to you, Wired has a good in-depth look here, but in a nutshell, Google announced that they’re launching their cloud-centric operating system and web-based software store in conjunction with a lightweight laptop that has no hard disc drive, comes with a 100MB a month Verizon wireless data plan, and essentially runs all your software and stores all your files on the web. A true cloud computing experience. While I must confess to being a bit of a Goldilocks-like would-be early adopter, always pouting “this porridge is too hot” or “this porridge doesn’t have USB“, I have to say that I have absolutely NO IDEA why they’re pursuing this strategy. Well, actually I do, and suspect it’s based on some of the same trickery that Apple used to get us excited about their new device (the iPad) when what they really were selling us was a platform to buy more stuff from them. What I don’t understand is why you or I would want to follow them down this road. Or up this sky, as the case may be. The selling points that Google highlights in cute videos – like instant web, same experience everywhere, always connected – are great. But underlying all of this “don’t worry about your files and software, we’ll take care of that for you” approach is something that still troubles me. I’m sometimes accused of being a little paranoid, and forced to pull out the old William Burroughs line that “A paranoid is someone who knows a little of what’s going on“. But here’s the thing. While cloud computing makes a lot of sense for a variety of enterprise scenarios, why on GoogleEarth would you want ALL of your software running on a Google server somewhere, and more importantly, all your PERSONAL FILES? The recent US government-mandated shutdowns of WikiLeaks from providers like Amazon and PayPal should be a potent reminder that if you want to keep control of your stuff, don’t give control of it to a large corporation. And perhaps especially not one whose CEO has such interesting views on privacy. Or one that has such a curious relationship with a company like Verizon. Or that wants to take your CAPS LOCK key away. But seriously, in spite of my perpetual tech cynicism, I’m intrigued to see where Google goes with the Chrome venture, enough so that I’m signing up for their pilot program in the hopes of being a test user. See Google’s introductory clip below.
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New Google Technology Makes Humans Superfluous
[ 1 Comment ]Posted on September 14, 2010 by admin in Technology
Tuesday, September 14th, 2010Google’s search technology has become so good at predicting what you want to search that they’ll soon be doing away with you altogether.
Words could never begin to express the sense of relief I felt today when I read on the Google Blog that they’ve finally developed technology to do away with the human element altogether. After more than two years of generating original content every day, I run out of juice occasionally, and I was starting to worry that I would become one of the millions of user-generated content generators that fails to generate, and ends up apologizing for why I haven’t posted recently. By the way, if you need to filter the 111,000,000 results from that link, there’s a blog for that. And although I have some regrets that this new Google technology will render my existence unnecessary, in a way I’m looking forward to doing whatever it was that I did before the Internet came along. If only I can remember what it was without Googling it. In any case, until Google activates this new, completely human-free web, you may be interested to know that that as a user-generated content generator, you can already build an entire web site without even resorting to the content farms I was making fun of a few weeks ago. That’s right. Primal Pages lets you enter a phrase, and then assembles existing content from around the web for you. After you answer the question “What are you thinking about?”, you really don’t have to make any more conscious decisions except whether or not to click the “publish” button. As their tagline says: “If the website you need doesn’t exist, let Primal Pages build it for you in seconds.” I for one welcome this human elementless web, although I didn’t go down without a struggle. I thought that if I made a YouTube clip of a letter to Google using Google Scribe, that the Internet search deity might lend an ear. Clip below. Read the rest of this entry »
Dear Google: Please Stop Finishing My Sentences For Me
[ 1 Comment ]Posted on September 8, 2010 by admin in Technology
Wednesday, September 8th, 2010I personally find Google Instant more annoying than useful. But I have 786,240,000 seconds to kill.
When a friend of mine’s two year old son doesn’t like something, he uses an expression which I find handy. He says “I can’t like it“. That’s my reaction to Google Instant. As googletastically amazing as I’m obliged to say that it is – for fear of being perceived as a Luddite – it mostly just gets on my nerves. There are a number of reasons I’ll probably keep the feature disabled, but primary amongst them is the fact that it mimics one of my few pet peeves, which is when people try to finish my sentences for me. My thinking is far too erratic most of the time for people to ever get it right. I mean, it wouldn’t bother me if they did get it right, but they almost never do. And since Google’s results have become so blogjammed anyway, I feel like I’m just getting often mediocre results faster. Which I don’t find all that gratifying. One of Google’s biggest sell points is that since they’ve determined that it saves you 2-5 seconds per search, they can make the cute claim that “If everyone uses Google Instant globally, we estimate this will save more than 3.5 billion seconds a day. That’s 11 hours saved every second“. Personally, I have the time to waste. If I live to the age of 75, I have about 786,240,000 seconds left. And if I did 50 searches a day for the rest of my life, that would only be about 456,250 searches, which – with the cantankerously slow “old school” method, clocking in at around 9 seconds per search – would only take me about 4 million seconds. I’ll wait. For the record, I have other objections that have to do with tools that control us rather than the other way around. A few of them are summarized nicely in this piece, which points out not only how much control the feature gives Google over word usage, but how the new feature affects how ads are displayed. I think Google Instant is more about creating Buzz than a good user experience. What about you? By the way. Thanks for not interrupting. Read the rest of this entry »
Confused By All The Google/Verizon Network Neutrality Talk?
[ 2 Comments ]Posted on August 10, 2010 by admin in Technology
Tuesday, August 10th, 2010Don’t be. It’s simple. What Google and Verizon are trying to do is comparable to Henry Ford and Harvey Firestone supporting free and open competition of horseless carriages while guaranteeing themselves protected monopolies to make cars.
Confused by all the talk from Google and Verizon about their plans for protecting net neutrality? Don’t be. All the jargon, press releases, and proposals thrown around by both companies are classic strategies. Confuse the public with a flurry of conflicting hints, public statements and denials while doing your best to control the actions of the agency that might regulate you. The nutshell version of what these two companies are trying to do with the internet and wireless broadband access could be likened to Henry Ford and Harvey Firestone supporting free and open competition of horseless carriages while giving themselves protected monopolies of the yet-to-be defined automobile market. It’s dirty. But would you expect anything else from either company during economic times like this? And don’t get me going on the Google “don’t be evil” thing. We joked back in 2008 that Google’s got you covered top to bottom . And the irony of the words you’re about to read being surrounded by Google ads is not lost on me. But here’s the scary truth: if Facebook’s deceiptful privacy practices and attitude have caused you to be angry or concerned, Google’s attitude should trouble you exponentially more. Most recently, Google’s Eric Schmidt was quoted in this article as saying (in reference to the massive amounts of data compiled about you) that “The only way to manage this is true transparency and no anonymity. In a world of asynchronous threats, it is too dangerous for there not to be some way to identify you. We need a verified name service for people. Governments will demand it ” (emphasis mine). This is in line with his December 2009 remark that “If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.” Which may be true. But do you want a company like Google or Verizon to be the ones making these decisions? If this cavalier attitude doesn’t trouble you, and if – like many people – you have a Gmail account and use any of Google’s many free tools, try the following, if you haven’t already. Go to your Google Dashboard and see what they’ve been tracking. If you’re a light user of Gmail who just logs in and out to check mail, you’ll see little of interest here. But if you stay logged into your Google accounts all the time, you might be a little disturbed by how much information about you is compiled in one place. And now Google not only wants to know what you HAVE done, they think they can predict what you WILL do. By the way, if they’re so good at predicting the future, this begs the question: how did they not know that Facebook would kick their ass so bad on social networking? Read the rest of this entry »
Google And The CIA Invest In “Temporal Analytics Engine”
[ Add A Comment ]Posted on July 31, 2010 by admin in Technology
Saturday, July 31st, 2010Google and the CIA may sound like strange bedfellows, but not in an era in which the ad industry is building “databases of intentions” based on your surfing habits. Learn how “harmless” sites like Dictionary.com are tracking where you surf, and what you type while you’re there. And how to prevent it.
Love it or hate it (and in spite of occasionally hilarious results) the Google auto-complete feature can be uncannily accurate when guessing the rest of what you’ll type. So wouldn’t it be great if in the future, Google would know what you’re searching before you even search for it? If this sounds more like the movie Minority Report