Everyone makes mistakes…I read the news about Neil Armstrong’s passing today. The headline on the web page read ok. However, when I added the news item to my Facebook timeline, this is what appeared. I, I must admit, did not even notice the change. A Facebook-friend pointed it out to me.
I read about the net Netflix desktop browser interface on GigaOm. I just took a look at it running in Chrome on a Windows 7 notebook and found it does indeed look good and run smoothly. There is one feature still missing, however. I wish Netflix would add in the 30-second rewind feature found in their iPad player. This feature is really useful when watching subtitled TV shows and movies.
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Dropbox is giving 48GB of additional cloud storage space for turning on instant photo upload (it can be easily turned off without giving up the space). However, the additional space is only available for 12 months. Microsoft’s SkyDrive is still the king storage space-wise for those who used the service prior to the recent upgrade. These people can opt-in to upgrade from the new 7GB default space given back to the 25GB available before the service upgrade last week.
You can read what I wrote about the upgraded SkyDrive service in this article for BYTE: Microsoft Boosts SkyDrive Software, Storage
The upgrade from Google Docs to Google Drive made a bit of an organizational mess of my folder structure. It used to be that everything was in a folder. However, dozens of files were placed in Google Drive’s root folder after the upgrade. I’ve had to open some files to decide which folder they belong in. One of the old Document type files caused the notice seen in the screenshot above to appear.
This document will soon be upgraded to the latest version of Google documents. Upgrade Now
So, what does this mean? Google provides documentation about this upgrade here:
Upgrade a document to the new version of Google documents
This is what a Document toolbar looked like before upgrading the document.
This is what the toolbar looked like after the upgrade.
The list below is what Google considers notable about this document upgrade.
- Real-time collaboration
- Advanced formatting tools such as a ruler, margins indentation, and tab stops
- More robust revision history
- Even more fonts
- Ability to view documents and spreadsheets offline
Google Drive was finally activated today (after waiting about 24 hours) for my account. I downloaded the Google Drive for Windows software and noted the setting option seen above. A big difference between Google Drive and other cloud storage services like Dropbox and Microsoft SkyDrive is that Drive does not copy the files to your local drive by default. To do so requires turning on the option (“Enable offline viewing”). This probably explains why Drive’s initial sync appears to be instantaneous while services like Dropbox and SkyDrive takes a while to get everything from the cloud.
Of course, if you have many GB or the maximum 1TB of storage on Drive, you might not want to have everything copied from the cloud to your local hard drive or SSD.
Google+ started as an interesting alternative to Twitter and Facebook last summer. It soon started to morph into something else though and I found myself visiting it less and less frequently. Part of the reason is that following even a few hundred people in circles is difficult given Google+’s lack of navigation and summarizing tools. It became too much of a chore to scroll through pages and pages of entries to find something interesting. The service’s insistence that active posts bubble to the top also means that I often see just posts from the social elite and not so much from the people I actually know and are truly interested. Yes, I can place people I know in a circle and just view that circle. But, moving from circle to circle is too much work for something that is supposed to be fun.
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I had hoped to get in a bit of lunch hour Netflix viewing today. But, it looks like it might be more difficult than usual based on the error message seen above. I’ve noticed Netflix access issues over the past few days. But, this is the first time I’ve seen this kind of message.
A few movie and TV show thumbnails appeared a minute or two after this messages appeared. However, personalized information such as recommendations and recently viewed are not available. The search box is missing too.
[UPDATE] The service problem is limited to viewing on a PC or Mac. Service to other devices, such as the iPad, is working.
It looks like Google might be feeling a bit of competition from the Wolframalpha decision engine. Google announced today that searching for an equation like…
sqrt(x*x+y*y)+3*cos(sqrt(x*x+y*y))+5 from -20 to 20
…results in an animated manipulable 3D graphic like the snapshot here.
Why the surprise? I’m running Windows 8 on an underpowered Asus Eee PC T91MT netbook (multitouch display). How underpowered is it? It has a sluggish Atom Z520 processor paired with what is apparently the world’s slowest solid state drive (a mere 32GB). It is so underpowered that it was unable to stream YouTube or Netflix videos when running the operating system it shipped with (Windows 7 Home Premium Edition). So, I wasn’t too surprised when I could not stream video to this netbook when I installed Windows 8 Developer Preview last Fall.
So, I was very surprised to see and hear Netflix streaming reasonably well on this netbook running Windows 8 Consumer Preview.
