Dennis L Hitzeman's world of science and technology
 
 

December

Posted at December 27, 2010 by

I like a lot of things about Google, especially the company’s  constant attempts to push the envelope and change how we think about using computers and the web. Unfortunately, I also dislike Google for some of the same reasons because the company’s attempts to push that envelope are single minded and, sometimes, ill-conceived.

From my point of view, the problem Google has as a company is that its heart and soul lives in Silicon Valley, where internet access is cheap and ubiquitous and where everyone is writing code for the next big web sensation. I think that the company doesn’t understand that more than half the population of the United States does not live in Silicon Valley, or even a major city, and that the solutions they preconceive will not necessarily work in, say, rural Ohio.

For example, I would love to be able to use Google Documents as a regular part of the tools I use to create, write, document, and explore. My problem is that Google Docs is only online, in the cloud, and decidedly under Google’s control. I don’t have ubiquitous web access where I live, so having documents locally resident is a must. Further, I need to know that, if something terrible happens out there on the web, I still have control of what I have created.

What Google needs to understand, then, is that there are users who would use their products if Google solved the problem in a different way. I would use Google Docs a lot more than I do if it had a locally resident interface with locally stored files that I could easily manipulate offline whenever I needed to then synchronize with the cloud when I decide to.

Google already has a version of this same technology built into its Chrome browser in the form of its bookmarks synchronization tool. All I am looking for is something that takes the same idea one step further and applies it to the rest of Google’s tools.

Until then, Google Docs, and really the rest of Google’s impressive array of tools, will continue to be a nifty form of file replication with editing capabilities for me, and I suspect, a lot of other people.

DLH

 
 

December

Posted at December 21, 2010 by

I love Google’s Chrome browser because it is, so far, the best and most stable browser out there (thanks to Netscape, Microsoft, and Mozilla blazing a path for it).

I do have a problem, though, with the fact that Chrome does not have a hard refresh option for web pages. This makes checking certain kinds of changes to web pages almost impossible without switching to another browser or by clearing Chrome’s cache. From a developer point of view, neither of those solutions lend me to using Chrome for development work, which is unfortunate given how good the browser is otherwise.

So here’s my suggestion to the good folks at the Chromium development project, if you’re bothering to listen: add a hard refresh feature to Chrome. I would even accept a utility that I have to install or a menu item I have to specifically select. But, if I am going to use your browser instead of someone else’s, it has to do all of the things I need it to do, not just some of them.

DLH

 
 

December

Posted at December 20, 2010 by

Finally, some good news out of Washington: The FCC is set to approve net neutrality rules Tuesday, according to the Washington Times via The Daily Beast.

For anyone who doesn’t know what net neutrality means, you can check out this great FAQ from Save the Internet. For those of you who don’t want to, allow me to sum up: net neutrality is the principle wherein service providers must provide open access to all content without special limitations on certain kinds of content. This means that a service provider cannot charge more for downloaded movies than it does for visiting Facebook, for example, nor can it block movie downloads or access to Facebook because it decides to.

What this means is that the same openness that helped make the internet the incredible resource it is today will remain in effect for some time to come. Of course, there will be legal challenges to this ruling, but it is a good ruling, nevertheless, for anyone who wants the internet to remain open and free from corporate interference.

DLH

 
 

December

Posted at December 9, 2010 by

Following up on yesterday’s successful launch by SpaceX, they also successfully recovered the Dragon capsule put into orbit by the Falcon 9 rocket.

I know a lot of people shrug their shoulders at this kind of news, especially because the government has been doing space launches just like this for decades. Yet, if a private company or companies gain the ability to reach space without governments, it opens the door for private space ventures for which there is no limit, and it is the potential of those ventures that could fuel the future of innovation.

DLH

 
 

December

Posted at December 8, 2010 by

The fantastic company SpaceX successfully launched one of its Falcon 9 rockets carrying its Dragon reusable capsule today. If all goes well, they will recover the capsule this afternoon in the Pacific, making SpaceX the first private company to launch and recover a capsule capable of carrying cargo or humans into space.

This event marks another milestone on the inevitable road toward commercial exploitation of space.

DLH

 
 
 
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