The Mandelbear's Musings

From this post by tagryn, a cautionary tale of the of relying on third-parties to store your important files and email: When Google Owns You.

One of my coworkers had an equally bad experience with Netscape Calendar: one day it was just gone. Not only had they cancelled the service, but they'd deleted all the user data. They had been careful not to tell their customers of this plan, because they "didn't want anyone to complain."

I'd been contemplating switching some of my domains over to Google for email -- Dreamhost makes it easy to set that up. Maybe not.

Yeah, almost all of my websites are third-party-hosted now. But the hosts are nothing but a mirror for the various internal working directories. And they're going to stay that way. If I can figure out how to do that with some Google's services, I may consider using a few of them.

Yesterday, Google announced that it plans to invest hundreds of millions of dollars in sources of renewable energy to help them power their vast server farms. The money, which will go to people like engineers and researchers looking into new forms of solar, geothermal and wind power, will both help the Googe save money in the long run as well as help the environment from damage due to Google's energy usage. Analysts didn't seem to get the first part of that statement, however,...

Just like all things related to Microsoft's Software-as-a-Service (SAAS) strategy, Office Live Workspace is a patched together, too little, too late offering compared to Google Docs. Question for Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer: when will Microsoft deliver a SaaS offering that the channel can take advantage of that beats Google hands down?

Google Print is finally online. There are some serious problems, and I'm not talking about the moronic legal threat from the publishers. First thing I did was to search for a poem ("The Stolen Child", by Yeats) that I know damned well is public domain -- it was first published in 1899. Back come a bunch of links to images -- not even text -- of the poem as typeset in books published between 1990 and 2002, watermarked "Copyrighted" (or something like that -- the server's down at the moment). An advanced search limiting the dates to 1800-1930 turns up nothing whatever.

Just typesetting the damned poem doesn't give you a copyright, you blithering greedy bastards! I'll wait for things to settle out, and meanwhile head back to the 16,000 public domain books at gutenberg.org.

(NOT!)

For anyone who blinked and missed it, here's the substantive part of this morning's big Sun / Google announcement -- you know, the one that's been hyped in the geek press for the last week, and was going to have Microsoft trembling with fear, and turn your browser into a Microsoft Office clone with Google as the fileserver, and all that:

Under the agreement, Sun will include the Google Toolbar as an option in its consumer downloads of the Java Runtime Environment on http://java.com . In addition, the companies have agreed to explore opportunities to promote and enhance Sun technologies, like the Java Runtime Environment and the OpenOffice.org productivity suite available at http://www.openoffice.org .

That's it. You can see the full press release here. Meanwhile, would somebody please tell me what the big pre-announcement hype was about? Inquiring minds want to know.

added 12:05 Some people seem to think that the really important thing is that Google will be promoting OpenOffice. That would be good, of course, but it's still not clear why it would be worth making a big fuss about. Others have speculated that something must have gone wrong with the deal at the last minute, so the parties rolled out their fallback announcement.