Slashdot Mirror
Glitch Has Users Fuming, Google 'Frantic'
netbuzz writes "A problem with Google's Personalized Home Page feature has apparently cost a lot of users their carefully crafted doors to the Internet. And Google, which says it is frantically searching for a fix, also acknowledges that it is not sure if it will be able to recover the lost settings. 'The problem is the latest in what seems a regular stream of technical glitches and availability problems affecting Google's online services. In the past six months, Google services like Blogger, Gmail and Google Apps have all experienced significant technical issues that have left users fuming. The problems highlight one of the risks of relying on hosted applications providers, which offer to house software and its data for individuals and organizations. Google is one of the biggest cheerleaders for this software provisioning model, which many see as a viable option to the traditional approach of having users install applications on their own PCs and servers.'"
Computers break down.
News at 11.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Searching? Have they tried Google?
It's still in beta!
Personal Home Page? I knew they should've have used PHP.
... for not having to manage, install or roll-out this software. It saves time when setting up, but that time is possible then transferred to when the thing breaks. Not that in-house software breaks, but I guess at least then it's up to you to fix it, as opposed to some guys in a fancy building half-way around the world.
why storing all your data on some company's servers is a good idea?
So 3 different apps have 1 hiccup each over the course of 6 months. If only my desktop applications were so reliable. I can't even count how many paragraphs in Word I've lost due to crashes, or how many settings I've lost in Gnome from random bugs. I don't see what the fuss is, it's still a matter of "shit happens" only Google seems to be rather responsive about it all.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
That's what they said when gmail mail was disappearing. All of the mail (IIRC) was recovered.
This is just basic CYA. If they promise that the data will come back, then they're legally obligated to restore it.
Most companies just would have not issued any kind of statement until they already knew what the problem was.
This announcement is a GOOD THING(tm).
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
wasn't the first sign of skynet a loss of performance and outages in large distributed computing networks?
And don't count your chickens before they hatch.
Google has never made any binding promises about the availability of many of its services or the data that users entrust to them. If Google loses all your email, tough noogies. They are not accountable. Stop pretending that they are.
Am I part of the core demographic for Swedish Fish?
Just use netvibes...they provide a link in setting to backup or export all of your feeds etc.
Forget losing my data, I'm using the "Seasonal" theme on my Google homepage and it's still showing snow-covered hills and a snowman. It knows from my zip code that I do not live in Siberia or even Buffalo. How is this seasonal!? I think Google should drop everything else and get on this one pronto.
...following the principles of Heisenburger's Uncertain Cat...
Maybe because over the course of a few months or years, Google's uptime is a lot higher than my company's servers?
not even your email it getting your blood pressure up, you need to get some professional help.
"Thanks for all the money you paid to us. We've used it to buy off ISO among other things" -Microsoft
Jeez, what a screwup! You'd think that Google would offer to refund affected users their license and subscription fees for the service! I mean if I paid good money for something like that and they messed it up, I'd be hopping mad. I'd take my business to all those other sites that offer all those cool Ajax apps along with the biggest search engine in the world. Not like I was getting something for free or anything!
Oh wait a minute...
The problems highlight one of the risks of relying on hosted applications providers, which offer to house software and its data for individuals and organizations.
How is that a problem? Whether you rely on someone else's computer or your own, there's just as much risk -- it just happens to be in a different place. If anything I'd like to believe that Google's network of servers is much more reliable than my home PC.
Just how much do people have invested here? I haven't experienced the glitch yet, but if I did it would take me all of five minutes to set up my settings the way I want them again. It really doesn't strike me as being as big a deal as everyone says it is. I mean, all of the services Google offers are absolutely free. Does anyone really have any right to complain about something they're getting for free? Well, of course they have the right, let me rephrase that: people shouldn't complain about stuff that they get for free. :P
An object at rest cannot be stopped.
I had enough of that in high school, thanks. Egh.
The problems highlight one of the risks of relying on hosted applications providers, which offer to house software and its data for individuals and organizations
Yeah, because we all know that if you run your own PC, you never lose data, right? Get real.
On average, people are going to be far better off relying on any on-line service than on their own PC, both in terms of reliability and in terms of security.
hmm, well i only saw 18 comments at first and thought i would be the first to chime in but i guess not..
Are these the same users who don't backup their computers at home, the same users who save their work on the local drive at work which gets wiped rather than their network drive. People who expect IT to just magically work forever without any problems ever and without any effort on their part? And in this case for free?
Sorry, but I have no sympathy for them.
Gmail is free. So is Hotmail and Yahoo. But Gmail is currently the most convenient and reliable. Google invests millions in making the system work as well as it does. Much better and reliably then most companies IT departments out there manage to do. And people still complain?
If you don't like it, why don't you run your friggin' own mail server and backup racks and see how well you manage! And try doing that on a zero budjet...
www.tribalnetworks.org - helping tribal people around the world to own their own means of high-tech communications
What many of us don't realize is the fact that depending on a large service provider such as Google for applictions provision may actually leave us quite vulnerable. What we are doing is putting all our eggs in one basket. If Google goes down, your business processes crash with it. eBay lost a lot in revenues when its servers crashed a few years ago. If there were a peer-to-peer e-commerce model, people would feel more secure and less dependent on others for commerce. Imagine storing all your information on your own hard-drive, and selling products to others WITHOUT paying ebay fees! Ultimate empowerment implies physical independence. Until that happens, we are all vulnerable.
Now here's one iPoddy site! iPod Range
From my perspective as an individual Google services are more reliable than any of my desktop apps. I think I've had about 2 times where I couldn't log in and check my email. I waited five minutes and was able to check it without any issues. From all I've read I haven't heard of outages much more than a few minutes so far. Lost data sometimes happens when working online, but that happens with desktop apps as well. I don't really see a drawback on an individual perspective. It's on a group perspective that internet apps like Google's services are really noticed. If the service goes down it isn't just affecting you, it's affecting everyone that uses it. Besides that though there really isn't a downside to using this free service beyone that. It's a wierd dualistic view that wouldn't always work from a business perspective, but for personal home use Google offers unsurpassed features per dollar.
So some random guy posts some random blog trying to stir up controversy and the people of Slashdot are supposed to pay attention?
And no one has ever lost data using a commercial desktop app before ...
Personally, I'd just create my own homepage. That way I can have it look EXACTLY like I want it to and have easily have all my favorite links on there. Not to mention, pretty much every ISP out there today gives you at least 10 megs of web hosting that you can use so you can access it anywhere. In addition, it's a good learning experience :).
Plus, they are going to end up developing a database of information about you based off what feeds you want, links you have, sites you visit. May as well not feed them anymore then you have to.
So people are "fuming" that their personalized news page and other crap, which is free, and mostly in beta, had a minor glitch and now they'll have to spend two minutes setting up their precious, precious settings again. My, what a catastrophe.
mirrorshades radio -- darkwave, industrial, futurepop, ebm.
why storing all your data on some company's servers is a good idea?
While I agree that keeping local backups will prevent the frustration felt when remote servers lose your data, there is a convenience factor of being able to access your data from anywhere. Two examples:
GMail: I like the idea of being able to access my email everywhere I have an Internet connection. It's also a nice file transfer mechanism. If I need a file at work, I email it to my gmail account and then download it at work.
QuickBooks: My stepfather has his own business. He used quickbooks and found that it met his needs, was easy enough for him to use and, most importantly, he was familiar with it. When he hired on a few managers to help out with his growing business, he realized that giving them each their own copy was not only expensive, but they would would constantly be trying to reconcile and replicate all the data entered by each of them to each of their own systems. This could become a huge hassle for the three employees he had and would only get worse as more are hired on. With QuickBooks online, everyone has access the same data at the same time from different locations and since there is only one database, no replication is required. Of course, he keeps local hard copies of everything in the event of an Intuit disaster.
There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.
I'm used to most articles about giant companies making mistakes which affect their users having a cynical "holier than thou" attitude - but when Google makes a mistake, they're still considered "young" enough to be forgiven with a short commentary on "fuming users" and how things usually work right for them. I'm not saying MS should be given a free pass when people can't get simple things like Quicktime movies working with certain hardware and the latest greatest version of Vista - but neither should Google.
"Computers break down - news at 11?" Where is that sort of "who cares" mentality when it comes to the other players? Google is big enough to know better than to screw up - as are Apple, MS, and pretty much every other company in the tech. world that has become a household name. MS sneezes wrong, and the Slashdotters post 800 comments about how everything in the world is better than MS. Google screws up, shutting down major services without explanation for long periods of time and they're given a pass. I'm tired of the slant. Maybe I'll go watch Bill O'Reilly for my "Fair and Balanced."
It looks like ghosts of your ancestors are in the machine.
1 4am/header_bg.jpg
http://www.google.com/ig/images/skins/teahouse/3.
kitsunetsuki!
In Soviet America, Google breaks YOU!
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Hey can we mod the summary as -1 Troll?
[17] Leary, T., White, C., Wood, P. R., Bhabha, W. D., and Wirth, N. Lambda calculus considered harmful. In Proceedings
Oh, right.
"but it's beta...."
And it's a free service too, isn't it?
Chicken fried butter sticks? Do
This has nothing to do with MS and others. But to answer your question anyway, the outrage has everything to do with track record and the fact MS abuses monopoly power while google embrasses open standards. 3 hiccups in 6 months versus a plethora of scandal, court rulings, abuses and decades of general bullshit. If you can't disconnect google from MS then I think you need to unplug a while and get some perspective. Just because a company is large does not mean it's trying to steal your soul.
man that is so retarded I hardly know where to begin.. first of all, are you that fucking lazy to the point that you can't re-add your stupid fucking applets?? it takes 10 seconds at the most.. why anyone would be "fuming" i have no idea.. my personalized homepage has been fine.. this article is ridiculous..
*plays the Apogee theme song music*
And we click on the ads, don't we ;)
Back in the day, when users were confined to terminals with access to the mainframe at the whim of the sysop, PCs with their own software were supposed to set us free from those shackles. Free to develop their own creativity. Free from timesharing computer resources. Free from someone else having access to every file, every preference, every .conf. They threw a big hammer through Big Brother's face during the Super Bowl and everything.
So what's the attraction to going backwards to putting Big Brother in charge again? Having your data on someone else's server, with its security only as good as the least honest person with access to the server? Having no choice over the software you use every day and being dependent on the choices, preference s and whims of the person running the server ("What? You preferred Emacs? Sorry, now you're using vi.")? Having to look at ads all day long so that you don't have to pay for software?
All these things that are supposed to be so much hipper like IMAP and googlapps just give your control over your data to someone else blindly on faith that they are trustworthy. What a crock!
They are called typos. They happen. If you want mod points for OT nit-picking at least say something funny. There should be a rule. I'm mean if I'm going to waste my time at work, throw me a bone.
Quack, quack.
You better put all your eggs in one basket
You better count your chickens before they hatch
You better sell some wine before its time
You better find yourself an itch to scratch
You better squeeze all the Charmin you can while Mr. Wimpole's not around
Stick your head in the microwave and get yourself a tan
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
I see too many arguments reduced to what I'm about to say, but... Google is a business, and they're in this to make money. So are Microsoft and Yahoo. These services are not charity; they may not cost money, but they are hardly "free" - any more than the advertising-supported Google search is "free".
Regardless, not charging money does not grant anyone immunity from criticism or complaint.
Neither do I understand this penchant (not yours in particular) of boasting to the world that you lack sympathy for others. That says a lot about you and nothing about them. Personally, I can spare a little for both Google and their users.
And you agree'd that it was beta in the signup agreement, that you cannot hold them responsible for any lost sensitive materials right? Honestly... get over it. Anyone who would store sensitive (CANNOT LOSE) data on a beta service and stops using a traditional way is just idiotic...
A widely known "fact"? "Safe to say"? Linking to some bloggers is now evidence of said "fact"?? You make value judgments based on how many articles you found in technorati? No wonder you posted as AC.
I've been around long enough to remember an early version of MS-Word that had a glitch that sometimes turned all of its content into nice little asterisks. Completely unrecoverable. I had to wait several months to get a version that didn't have that particular little feature. With a webapp it would've at least been fixed and released within days of discovery FOR ALL USERS with no patches or installs required.
My company has switched some key applications from desktop to webtop and we couldn't be happier. Overall downtime is considerably less than the equivalent desktop app and it doesn't require any of my IT staff to manage.
Yeah? Well I think you're overrated too.
It seems to be a common thing on the internet to be provided with a free service (yes some of us click on the ads, some of us don't) and then bitch and moan when something goes wrong. WTF. It's free! Sure Google has some of the best minds and biggest hardware, whoopdy-doo, they provide a great searching service (which, incidentally, is their primary goal is it not) and throw in some bonuses with their mail and customisation. They're not perfect, hell, they probably had some green intern in who moved the backup tapes the wrong way...
This stuff happens. If your going to bitch about losing a free service to some form of error, go pay for it and stop dumping crap about it on the front page of slashdot.
My $0.02 AU
Me failed English...
FreeBSD over Linux. If my comments seem odd, this may explain...
I thought all of Google was still in Beta?
Horns are really just a broken halo.
First, let me say that I genuinely *do* love your work, for the most part. Your search engine has literally become a sixth sense for me, as I'm sure it has for countless other people. The simple access that I have to Google, probably even more than security issues, is the main reason why I've stuck with Firefox over IE7.
But lately, I'll admit that I'm becoming a bit worried. It seems that the company has been wanting to branch out into a *lot* of other areas besides search. While I'm aware that diversification is well-documented as smart strategy once a company hits a certain level, the reason why it worries me in the case of Google is because I assume that maintaining a search engine as useful as yours must be an enormous undertaking. In other words, although Gmail and Google Video and the other things you've diversified into might be wonderful, I fear that they might remove focus from the search engine somewhat. Although you're a large and I assume very effectively managed company, I find myself thinking that even with eight arms, if someone tries to juggle too many eggs at once, eventually a few of them are going to get dropped, and reliability problems such as this are likely to start to creep in.
I'd really hate to see that happen, because I've been an enthusiastic user of the search and YouTube (which of course you recently acquired) for years now. It is my earnest hope that the company does not overextend itself, and is able to maintain a sufficiently restrained focus that its' core services, the things that so many of us have come to rely on so greatly, can be effectively maintained into the future.
From the FTA, google say:
it's possible that changing your homepage theme might cause the problem. SO, if you still have your homepage intact, please avoid changing your theme until further notice.Simply not true. I never even knew there was themes. My personalised homepage reset itself while I was reading groklaw on another tab. One minute it was fine (Groklaw is a link on the homepage) then a minute later it was gone.
Only once I'd mucked-about trying to retrieve my settings did I realise themes existed. So it has nothing to do with themes. The settings just undid themselves, horay for ajax.
You mean like bird or flip?
Quack, quack.
It's free. You get what you pay for. Even free and with the occasional glitch, Google is pretty darn good.
Because if your Windows (or OS X) install craps out, Microsoft (or Apple) blames you, the user.
In this situation, Google has no one to blame but themselves. As such, they take a publicity beating.
The real question is MTBF (Mean Time Between Failures). Is your Google hosted app more like to fail, or XP? And, having failed, which one is easier to recover?
Obviously, this all is a learning experience for Google, because they haven't gone down this road yet. I expect Google to implement a "backup to your own system" feature for retaining most of your information locally.
WhiteWolf666 an exBush supporter. All you new-school,compassionate,save the children Republicans can rot in hell
On request, I tossed together Google Notes for my brother, who maintains it and gets all of the hate mail whenever my server happens to go down. It was a simple app to do, all in Ruby on Rails, but once upon a time the site broken for no reason at all. As it turns out, google changed something in the request string, adding a useless "&&" on... This absolutely killed something in Rails, as splitting on "&" means you can't split one of those into a key/value. I've not yet seen if Rails fixed this yet, but honestly.... This is just a silly story about an ig experience.
Blah.
Once in the days of Windows 95, I was working on a Word document while browsing the web, and 4k of HTML was somehow dumped in the middle of my .doc file. Word would no longer open it so I had to use a hex editor to extract the text and re-format it. A common FAT32 driver bug, apparently.
That's what happens when one uses MySQL, even for some applications that aren't search related ;)
The Mac OS X Mail.app ate four months of my mail once. Poof. Gone. I've never had a single app actually do so much damage before or since.
But it reinforced the lesson that any data that you don't have in at least two places is likely to disappear. Doesn't matter if it's on Google's hosted apps, or on your own machine.
Tweet, tweet.
I've never lost of any of my mail nor my settings in google/gmail. I don't rely on google docs but they have come in handy in a pinch. I think all of "nothing to see here" comments are exactly that. Maybe a $hill?
Well thank god the /. RSS feed on my personalized page was still up...else I would have never found out my page went down.
Jeez, it's only a homepage, how freakin important can it be? You can claim lost productivity hours setting it back up, but aren't you wasting time just opening it in the first place? And I think overall google is freakin awesome. I love gmail, BUT I have a local email client that downloads all of my email to my computer when I'm at work during the day just for backup purposes.
Ballmer has a reason NOT to throw a chair!
This is my opinion. To make sure you don't steal it, it's covered by the DMCA.
I use Google Apps but have not been affected by this issue.
I have a different method of organizing bookmarks.
It is based on drag & drop logo images:
VizURL.com
Anybody who depends solely on web-based anything for *anything* impoerant is a damned fool. Web-based backup, maybe. Keeping email messages on a server *and* downloaded copies on a local machine, definitely. All of your data and/or crucial apps, never.
Until the internet is 100 percent bulletproof, web based apps will never fly, period.
Ignorance is curable, stupid is forever.
I guess this would be a bad time to mention that you can sometimes find Username and Passwords in Gmail cookies.
----- You know you have ego issues when you register a domain in your name.
Going with Leafyhost for web hosting.
So, Rackspace offers "Fanatical Support". Does Google now offer "Frantic Support"?
:)
Sorry, couldn't resist.
We solved all the interview puzzles, so we must know what we're doing.
All my free shit is gone!!! ZOMG!!!
Exactly.
Almost every Google service offers some way of downloading your data locally. Calendar via iCal, Gmail via POP3, Reader via OPML, etc etc. USE THEM!
Whether your data is online on a web service or offline on your hard drive, if you're too bloody lazy to back it up, don't complain when it gets lost. (Of course this doesn't apply to shitty web services *cough*Windows*cough*Live*cough* that intentionally trap user data).
As for web services being risky, I've found that data is far more secure on Google/Yahoo/etc web services than on the average virus infected PC that most people have. Personally, I have never met a single person who has had their data lost by an online service, but I have serviced numerous computers for people where data has been lost.
"problems highlight one of the risks of relying on hosted applications providers"
:)
And one of the risks in upgrades to desktop applications, and client/server applications(locally hosted). Everything can have problems, and I know it sucks.
That being said, My Yahoo! page has been working, and the same since the 90's.
I locally back up my GMail, Flickr and Picaso photos, Google documents, my blogs, del.icio.us bookmarks - easy to do.
I have to admit that I don't back up my settings for my Google home page, but I think that it would take about 90 seconds to recreate.
Online web applications are a great resource, but users should take the responsibility for their own stuff.
I use personalized home page all the time and did not notice this glitch (although I did notice that some parts got borders now) , the summary doesn't ellaborate about whether this has happened to just 50 users or 500 or 5000. In fact after forcefully reading the article it doesn't mention more than one user?
A friend of mine is having issues with his Opera install, I'll wait for an article covering how users are fuming about the Opera glitches and stuff
Also, spending "several weeks" to craft a google home page might actually mean you deserve to lost it...
This is an overstatement.Copyright infringement is "piracy" in the same way DRM is "consumer rape"
Oh yes, good ol' Microsoft, with flimsy file formats like PST and Word, that were so easily fucked up that it was unbelievable. At least with Word you could open it up in Notepad and yank out the text, but those monstrous PST files could be all but impossible to sort out once they corrupted. The wonderful Inbox Repair Wizard could be rendered utterly useless.
Microsoft has absolutely nothing to brag about.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
I believe I experienced some of this breakage personally.
Yesterday the "bookmarks" area on my Google personalized homepage appeared blank, as if I lost all my bookmarks. I was a little concerned. Today it reappeared, with all my data intact. So, for me at least, just a temporary glitch.
That's why they should be super-secure, like at a nuclear research laboratory, such as Los Alamos!
Nothing is secure.
If the same issue happened with MSN, we would see the following posts:
1. Ten posts Damning M$FT crap.
2. Twenty posts detailing reasons why you should switch to Linux-based hosting services.
3. Comparing M$FT with Mac OS X based services.
4. Stating security has never been a priority with M$FT.
5. Ten posts detailing... oh forget it. This is slashdot.
"Doing what i can, with what i have." ~ Burt Gummer
I wasn't fuming at all when this glitch happened. I hadn't had my morning coffee when I opened up my Internet browser and read that "Longhorn beta released". My reaction was "OMG! I've travelled back in time!!!". Then I had my coffee and the world was normal again.
"I had four tabs stuffed with content on my personalized homepage. Dozens of RSS feeds, half a dozen bookmark gadgets, friends blogs, all my web presences, dozens of other gadgets. I spent weeks tailoring [it] so it was just right for my very intensive Internet needs," a user wrote on a Google discussion group. "Now it's all gone."
"Very intensive Internet needs"
Ha ha!
Seems they've already fixed most of the problem. (Scroll down a little - the "they fixed mine"-messages are all at the bottom).
Any decent webapp provider knows how to protect against losing significant user data. I am sure Google knows how. So what is this noise about the lost data being non-recoverable? Or does beta mean they didn't yet put in such niceties? Google has the some of the largest pipes, compute grids and disk installation on the planet. It is surely not a matter of resources. Someone screwed up. Yeah computers break down, although very seldom at the level of hardware especially in even a minimally fault tolerant design. This isn't a hardware error. It is a software bug. Yeah these happen ofter in our industry. But they aren't an excuse for not having a workable data recovery plan. Not for uber-pros like the folks at Google are expected to be.
I checked my Google homepage when I first heard about it and found that it had reverted to defaults. Now, just as I'm reading the comments on /., I find that it's all back again :)
I have a single tab page with about a dozen gadgets on it. It's just a convenient way to see what's going on, especially as I can use it from home or work. I generally like the Google apps. I use their Reader (all the time), GTalk (well the Jabber part), Calendar (it's growing on me) and Gmail (not as my main account). Losing any of these would not be the end of the world, but I'll enjoy them whilst they are available and free.
On a more serious note, you must keep in mind that M$FT has been at this a *little* bit longer than Google.
:-)
Besides, their execs look better and don't throw furniture around
Insert
My home ISP proxies port 80 which is blacklisted by google translate. Whenever I try and translate anything it warns that my request looks like automated spyware or virus requests and asks for a word to be typed. Sometimes it then allows me to translate a phrase or two but usually gives an error saying my computer is infected with viruses and spyware and can't proceed. I definitely can no longer translate entire webpages using google. Ok its a free service and you get what you pay for, or in this case don't?! Anyone ever tried contacting google about their translate service? My what non-productive fun that is. And the ISP is completely unresponsive - pretty hard to change ISPs as they are the only real option. At least babelfish doesn't think my computer is virus infected - its not, its not even windows, its not even IE, I know what processes its running, I know what network traffic it generates and it ain't doing automated google requests.
Anyone know any work arounds? Using "translate this page" is so useful that having it go away sort of sucks.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Well, it seems to be working again. At least, it is for me :-)
War is God's way of teaching Americans geography
Because thin clients (like a web browser) are easier to manage than hosting all the apps yourself and being responsible for updates, backups, etc. It's a trade off of convenience for control.
An incident like this certainly does highlight how reliant we're becoming on data hosts like Google not fucking up and losing or compromising our data (esp. gmail).
Google's personalized homepage has hardly ever worked correctly for me. More often than not, the page would load halfway and refuse to load anymore, even after multiple refreshes on several different browsers. It would do this for hours at a stretch. Most of the time, the boxes would only show one link instead of the number I had specified. The little plus icons to expand and collapse each item's description would disappear. All of this made their service a complete loss. And people are just starting to have problems with it now? I went to Netvibes and never looked back.
At least for most corners of the globe. Original settings back, too. http://www.networkworld.com/community/?q=node/1460 0
Mine is back up, all seems to be well. I had nothing to back up, it's just a lots of collected rss feeds and bookmarks. Inconvenient if it doesn't work but hardly suicidal....
Travelling forward in time at a rate of 1 second per second.
We do pay for Google. We accept marketeers ad's, effectively giving them write permissions to our brains ! Yes we here might think we're smart & that ads don't effect us but smart people spend billions per quarter on Google ads right now.
Thus as refund we ought have the offending ads extracted back out from our minds. Possibly this could be achieved by reverse advertising (say associating the company with cow-poo or George Bush). Else we'll need some neuro scanning & possible brain cell zapping.
I want my refund now !
Backing up your stuff has been part of the drill of owning a PC since the first day with an 8088, back in the mid-eighties. Then I took a 5-1/4" floppy disk full of Word Perfect and Lotus 1-2-3 files and threw it into the drawer every time. My neighbor had a computer store, and warned me to make a copy of the copy every six months or so. When I got my first hard drive, a 40-megabyte Western Digital that had to be partitioned because MS-DOS 3.0 would only address 32 megabytes, I still copied everything onto a rotating set of floppies. Here we are, twenty years later, and with DVD disks selling for less than 25 cents, there is no excuse for not having copies of everything in a zippered folder in a drawer. I have multiple internal and external hard drives, and I still make a copy of all the new MP3's, Word and Excel docs, PDF's, and photos every month! I had a total hard drive failure one time, back in 1990, but my system made it possible to be up and running again shortly after a new drive was installed! With Ghost, an entire OS, complete with settings could be waiting on an external hard drive. You have to lose your digital life one time, I guess.
Goddamned kids! Get off my lawn!
> which many see as a viable option to the traditional
> approach of having users install applications on their
> own PCs and servers.'"
Here's a post that I'm sure will be marked as Troll, but why does the whole remote application thing always seem to be big news? It seems very much like a throwback to the old "share resources on a big box" times. Wouldn't those constitute, in effect, thin clients or machines that didn't host their own applications. And was it in the mid-90s that there was another push for thin clients that would do the same. Larry Ellison made some remark about the network being the computer and that started the cycle again. The only difference now is that the application is stored on a WAN vice a LAN and only run locally on the machine via a brower. If the remote machine goes down, the application can't be run (again, like the old shared time on a box thing, where students couldn't crunch big numbets from their terminals in the big iron wasn't running.) Again, unless I'm missing something, isn't this just the cycle coming around again?
Bark less. Wag more.
That said... So what's the attraction to going backwards to putting Big Brother in charge again? It boils down to an equation with resources, time, desire and effort on one side and benefit on the other.
For example, you posted a comment to
Likewise, we all may have more freedom, privacy, administrative control, access and choices if we hosted our own content servers and email servers at home, but it comes at the cost of the equipment, connectivity, time, and ease of effort. Having your data on someone else's server, with its security only as good as the least honest person with access to the server? Having no choice over the software you use every day and being dependent on the choices, preference s and whims of the person running the server ("What? You preferred Emacs? Sorry, now you're using vi.")? Having to look at ads all day long so that you don't have to pay for software? Generally, this list of woes would get subtracted from the benefit side. Security, specifically though, is not a simple to weigh as you assert here. It's true, by using someone else's service you're trusting their security. However, the security of personally hosted service is only as good as your own abilities and diligence. For many people, the least honest external admin is still the much better option. All these things that are supposed to be so much hipper like IMAP and googlapps just give your control over your data to someone else blindly on faith that they are trustworthy. What a crock! Do you trust your financial, insurance and healthcare providers to protect your data? Based on what?
Shouldn't Google be keeping "offsite" backups of the data the way they do with website cache?
Whoah whoah whoah, what's this about Gmail having some big technical glitches? Mine's been perfectly fine ever since I got one. Everyone I know who has one has never had a problem. When did this occur?
"Just a fox, a whisper."
Couldn't they just pick them out of the copies in the Google Cache?
Or perhaps at the wayback archive!
--
Thorbjørn Ravn Andersen "...and...Tubular Bells!"
Dude, you can download the entire contents of your gmail account using pop3 into any mail client. They even tell you how to do it.
However, that doesn't matter - ALL software comes with a "disclaimer for every time time something screws up". In my experience, software installations present an EULA where liability is always limited exclusively to the product itself - meaning that there are no guarantees for user data for any type of software.
That is, unless you can show me an example of commercial-grade software that does not have such disclaimers - because I can't think of any.
This is not my sig
Use netvibes instead. You can export all your feeds/tabs as an OPML file, and re-import it into netvibes or another feed reader if you want.
As in any other case, you get what you pay for. Google's providing the service aff, as far as I know they don't even have a pay service. So while it would suck to take a few minutes and re-enter your settings... you're simply getting your money's worth.
As soon as you're paying for something and not receiving it, rather than experiencing a technical glitch in a free service, you can complain.
You're reading Slashdot. Of course you like Linux and pc hardware
Glitches are the reality of Web 2.0. It's really complicated, annoying, and bug ridden, but that's what companies are paying for.
Most often than not, when I see such glitches they come from the DB side. More often MySQL, sometimes RAID -- 5 where 10 should be used, or even 0 where 5 could be used.
Granted Google shouldn't be using MySQL over RAID for its personalised pages, perhaps BigTables over GoogleFS. But does anyone know for sure?
Leandro Guimarães Faria Corcete DUTRA
DA, DBA, SysAdmin, Data Modeller
GNU Project, Debian GNU/Lin
I prefer to keep my digital data on my PC. But seeing so often of people losing data because of PC failures and having no working backups, or whatever reason. For some people I would gladly recommend them to keep everything online at some more reputable service providers (in my mind, that's), and Google is one of them (as of writing, that's).
And you can download documents from the application "suite". Bout the only thing you cant do that I can think of is save some sort of settings file for your google home page, or sync the calendar.
Big difference between vendors being bullied into "offering" a product like what MS did, and choosing to use google. Huge difference in choosing to use google of msn, or yahoo at your liesure and on demand with no real problems and being forced into using one operating system because of locked in formats of data, those previously mentioned bullied hardware vendors and so on.
Night and day.
"Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the the universe." --Albert Einstein