I suppose. Not having used MS Office since about 2002, it doesn't affect me much:-)
Currently, I do all of my office suite work with Google Docs, and it works very well (of course, I work for Google, so I don't have to exchange MS Office files with others).
Transferring files to a computer and back?
Google Drive. All your files in all your devices, all the time. Works really well (other than I'm anxiously awaiting a Linux client). Or you could use Dropbox or similar -- which has a Linux client, actually.
Printing isn't straight-forward.
Google Cloud Print makes it very straightforward, and enables printing to printers physically far away if you want (I do that from time to time, printing stuff at home while I'm at work, etc. A few weeks ago, I even printed a document for my mom, who lives in another state, on her printer).
Coding
I wouldn't want to try that on any tablet. It'd be like programming through a porthole.
I spent a fair amount of time once with a man who was educated in the fashion you seem to think is appropriate. In his case, he'd started out working on the factory floor at an IBM manufacturing facility in Texas (30 years ago when they still made stuff in the US), and had qualified for and taken a technical math and computer science education culminating in a master's degree. IBM's "school" was accredited and his degree was a real one, but it included only technical subjects; no liberal ed at all. Prior to his IBM education he had barely graduated from high school -- and I'm not sure how he did, frankly.
He was a highly intelligent man, very articulate and perceptive. However, as soon as the discussion left technology his utter lack of education became instantly apparent. He was even ignorant of basic principles of physics -- he knew a fair amount about electronics, but in mechanics he understood less than most high school dropouts I've known. His ability to understand politics was nonexistent because he didn't know any history, or even understand basic civics. And don't even attempt to talk about literature, philosophy, etc.
Now, obviously, a big part of his ignorance was due to his own utter lack of interest in anything outside of computer science. You can't obtain a MSCS without being able to read, and anyone who can read can educate themselves. But the point was that the difference between him and the typical college graduate -- even though he was almost certainly smarter than said typical graduate -- was stark and obvious, and it wasn't in his favor. His lack of general knowledge wasn't just a problem when socializing, either, it often caused him to make dumb decisions that affected the business, and you simply could not put him in front of customers, because unless the discussion was laser-focused, he'd eventually say something that made him look like an idiot.
After my experience working with him, I decided I wholeheartedly agree with the liberal education philosophy. The worst part about it was that his deep, narrow knowledge and utter lack of knowledge outside of a single field made him believe, quite firmly, that there really wasn't much to know outside of his field. It's often said that that the primary purpose of a BA/BS is to teach the student the breadth of his own ignorance. Well, this guy never learned that.
We don't all need deep knowledge in every area, but an introductory course in each of the major areas of human knowledge really does add significant value. It makes us more rounded, teaches us some much-needed humility and, well, educates us. That education is what differentiates a university degree from a vocational certificate, and the former is more valuable than the latter.
It is also possible they did it to aggressives control the supply line for the iPad and iPhone.
Nah. AuthenTec is far from the only maker of compact, embeddable, cost-effective fingerprint scanners -- even assuming that fingerprint authentication on your phone is a good idea.
An overt revolution will fail badly. They have changed vital laws that protected us from the military crushing insurrection, so that they can now use it.
But only if the soldiers will obey orders to fire on their fellow citizens. I don't see that happening; in fact the political leanings of most of the military would put them on the other side.
Not to mention, I think we signed the UN Small Arms Treaty Friday, and your arms will be registered, which the next step is to take them.
Doesn't matter. The treaty itself has no legal force whatsoever in the United States because it wasn't (and won't be) formally ratified by 2/3 of the US Senate. Instead, the treaty is basically a promise by the US government to pass laws via the normal process that will enact its provisions. If we fail to do so we'll be in violation of the treaty, but there is no legal consequence to that, and there are huge political consequences to congressmen and senators who try to pass restrictive laws.
Besides which, those laws still have to pass constitutional muster. Indeed, even if the small arms treaty were taken through the formal senate ratification route, making it law instantly without requiring separate enacting legislation, it would still have to pass constitutional muster. The US Constitution overrides treaties, and the Supreme Court has shown itself willing in the past to rule treaty provisions unenforceable.
I wouldn't want to see us go the route of revolution, not because it would fail (assuming sufficient support), but because I have no confidence that what would come after wouldn't be worse than what we have now. Also, the system isn't so far gone that it couldn't be fixed through the political process, yet. If we as a nation had the will to rise in revolution, the same effort channeled through the political process would work better, and faster, and with much less destruction and risk of imposing greater tyranny.
My impression was that they kicked him out for submitting the app to the store (for customers to purchase), not for finding the vulnerability.
As did the guys who were testing Bouncer. They put an SMS blocker app on the Google Play Store and repeatedly updated it, adding more malicious behavior each time.
NM, I think you are talking about Julio Gonzalez and the Happy Land fire. Not the biggest single-handed murderer, though. That would be Timothy McVeigh, I think.
I applaud Googles attempt here, but they can't charge nothing, it's just not going to work.
As long as they can get enough customers buying the Gb or the Gb+TV, those will fund keeping the bits flowing. With the infrastructure in place, the cost to provide 5 Mb connections to the rest is basically nil.
QoS, for example, ensures my SSH packets are delivered on a timely basis and that it doesn't wund up waiting behind the packets of my neighbor's torrents. In theory, my neighbor still gets his bandwidth, but his packet latency will be slightly higher; which is still perfectly acceptable for that type of traffic.
This is a valid correction, but the GP's point holds regardless. Given sufficient bandwidth, QoS is as unnecessary as traffic shaping. Your SSH packet -- or, more importantly, my VOIP packet -- may end up waiting behind the neighbor's torrent packet, but since his 1500-byte torrent packet only blocks ours for 15 microseconds, who cares?
My daughter is so-so. She's starting college next month and I think a more adult environment will be easier for her to deal with. High school is hellish for a lot of normal kids and it's basically unmanageable for someone with her emotional disorder. I don't know where you got the idea my wife is disabled, she's not. At some point in the next few years she'll need a kidney transplant, but up until the time it gets bad she's not limited in any way, and even after the transplant there will be few restrictions on her activities, if any.
As for your job, I think you do hate it, even if you don't realize you do. I've had jobs where I was paid a lot for doing very little, and it gnaws at you. It's much better for your mental health and emotional state to work where you feel like your contributions are valuable, and where you respect the people you work with and for, even if it's a little more stressful.
I can't arrest someone with the same leeway given to cops
In the state whose laws I know best (Utah) the only additional arrest power given to police is the authority to use deadly force to stop a fleeing felony suspect. Other than that, it's identical.
I can't get a warrant to bust down someone's door.
Technically, you can, if you can get a judge to give you one. In fact, prior to the advent of large organized police forces, nearly all warrants were served by private citizens, and AFAIK the law hasn't changed -- though practice clearly has, and in practice it's unlikely any judge would issue you a warrant.
I can't pull a car over for speeding.
Sure you can, legally. As a practical matter you'd have a hard time doing it without red and blue flashing lights, and there are laws against putting those on your vehicle. I'd bet that if you put yellow flashing lights on, though, you could successfully convince many people to pull over. After that you couldn't issue a citation, but you could get the driver's information and take it to the relevant prosecutor and see if you can convince him to issue a court summons on the strength of the evidence you can provide (mostly, your testimony, same as a police officer).
Again, this isn't a difference in real authority, it's a difference in common practice and who's likely to actually be listened to.
I can't own certain weapons.
You can own anything a police officer can own himself. There are some weapons a police department can own that you cannot, but none that police departments commonly issue. You could, for example, own a fully-automatic M-16 (per federal law, anyway; a few states are more restrictive). It'd cost you $20K+, due to the 1986 law restricting civilian ownership of full-auto firearms to those that were already in civilian hands then (fixed supply and growing demand means the price goes up), and it would take a few months of doing paperwork and waiting, but you could do it if you're not a felon or otherwise legally disqualified due to your own record.
We want law enforcement officers to have an edge over the regular civilians, because that means they'll also have an edge over criminals.
I don't agree that there's any significant "edge" we can give to officers that doesn't serve the same goals in the hands of law-abiding citizens. Granted that citizens rarely have need of them, and that it's better to let the police do their jobs wherever possible, but there are rare circumstances in which it is useful for citizens to exercise their police powers, and in general it's better for society if police don't have a special status in the eyes of the law. It's hard enough to keep them from exceeding their authority even without that.
Whether in video games or in real life, kids like shooting. It's partly about the power, partly about the skill, partly about the noise and feel, and maybe partly about other stuff, but shooting guns is great fun. I'm an NRA instructor and a Boy Scout leader, so I frequently get called upon to take kids out shooting (BSA safety rules require certified instructors be present at all shooting activities), and I have never -- ever! -- met a teenage boy who didn't find great joy in poking holes in targets with a.22 rifle. For that matter I haven't met many adults, male or female, who don't really enjoy shooting when they try it.
Of course, target shooting is very different from blowing the head off a zombie in an explosion of simulated gore, but the gun part of it is the same -- and guns are fun. It's certainly possible that neuroscience may find ways to make other kinds of games more rewarding (addictive?), but I really doubt that shooting games will ever die.
> On the other hand, when Google does mine, they'd probably wonder why I watch
> so much Dora the Explorer on my business account. (It's tied to my business cell
> phone, which I use most often to keep my daughter entertained.)
Yes, we were kind of wondering about it. Thanks for clearing that up. It's been added to your file.
Which you can see by checking the privacy dashboard linked from google.com.
Today, with great tablets, like the Nexus 7, so inexpense, why bother with proprietary, crippled, vendor-locked devices?
For a many of the people who shop Amazon.com, the Kindle fits comfortably into place --- it meets their needs ---- and they don't give a damn about the geek.
If it meets their needs, well and good. However, a Nexus 7 would also meet the same needs, and offer a great deal more should they ever want it. They would have to take the extra step of downloading the Kindle app from the Play Store.
How could stability have been affected? As I understand it, adding profiles to accounts was a necessary pre-requisite for enabling Google+, and I can easily see that Apps account handling must necessarily be different from non-Apps account handling -- and honestly it was probably more different than it needed to be. Code structure tends to grow to reflect organization structure, and we're talking about different teams.
Of course, Google's customers shouldn't really have to know or care about such things. I'm offering this by way of explanation (supposition of explanation, actually), not excuse. I agree that it was handled in a way that made Apps accounts feel like second-class citizens (I was annoyed by it!). But I can absolutely see how interactions between the different codebases could create complications, and how rushing into modifying Apps accounts to add profiles could create stability problems, and I can see why the relevant teams felt it was better to go slower and safer with the paying customers.
It's worth pointing out that Google corporate accounts (@google.com) still have not been Google+-enabled. In part that's probably to help prevent Google employees from inadvertently posting internal stuff to the public, but I think the bigger reason is that corporate accounts, while nominally in the same system, have even more special-case baggage than Apps accounts.
I appreciate your perspective, but I don't think it's accurate to say that not providing paying customers with Google+ right out the gate is an indicator that they were valued less. On the contrary, I see it as an indication that the stability and reliability of their service were valued more. I'm not on that team, nor any team related to it, but I would be willing to bet money that Apps customers are always the last to see updates precisely so that the changes can be thoroughly tested and validated (using the general user population as testers, essentially) before they're deployed.
It's reasonable to argue that the Google+ team should have gotten closer to being able to enable Apps accounts prior to launching the public service. My opinion is that they simply underestimated the complexity of the task, but I don't have any data to support that -- and I likely couldn't state the opinion if I did have data because it would probably be confidential. Anyway, I think they acted in what they thought was the best interests of paying customers, even if their perspective of your interests didn't match your true preferences.
Disclaimer: I don't speak for Google and Google doesn't speak for me. The above represents only my own opinions. If you want to get Google's official position on this issue, I suggest you contact the Apps sales team or Google public relations.
I had a paid Google Apps account and giving them money meant you were dirt as far as they were concerned, they wouldn't let you join Google+ for months (I guess they figured they were already collecting the personal information they wanted from you through your account so strip mining your Google+ data was irrelevant)
Actually, there were technical challenges with enabling Apps accounts. I don't know what they were exactly, but I think they had to do with ensuring that nothing broke for big enterprise users of Apps.
When Google+ came out there was huge internal demand for Apps-enabling it -- I'm sure it wouldn't surprise you to know that many Google employees have their personal domains hosted on Apps -- and if it could have been done any faster, it would have. For those intervening months the question was raised in virtually every TGIF (weekly company-wide meetings during which, among other things, employees have the opportunity to question management in front of the whole company) and the Google+ team was getting really apologetic by the time it finally rolled out.
My suggestion is Tasker, but unless there's a mail parser plugin I haven't come across (or unless you write one), it won't take actions based on the content of e-mail messages. It will, however, react to SMS message content. So one way to handle your custom notifications is to write a script that runs on another always-on, always-connected machine. Have it receive and parse the e-mails and when one of them meets your criteria, have it send you a text message with relevant content, then have Tasker do whatever is appropriate when that message arrives.
To make sure your script-running server is up, use something like Ping HostMonitor. You can also use that to monitor the status of any Internet-accessible hosts.
The biggest downside of this approach is that it relies on SMS to reliably notify you. You might also want to have Tasker send an e-mail acknowledgement when you get the SMS, and have your script keep re-sending the texts periodically until it receives the ACK.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm a mathematician, not an actuary.
That's a pretty big exception
I suppose. Not having used MS Office since about 2002, it doesn't affect me much :-)
Currently, I do all of my office suite work with Google Docs, and it works very well (of course, I work for Google, so I don't have to exchange MS Office files with others).
Transferring files to a computer and back?
Google Drive. All your files in all your devices, all the time. Works really well (other than I'm anxiously awaiting a Linux client). Or you could use Dropbox or similar -- which has a Linux client, actually.
Printing isn't straight-forward.
Google Cloud Print makes it very straightforward, and enables printing to printers physically far away if you want (I do that from time to time, printing stuff at home while I'm at work, etc. A few weeks ago, I even printed a document for my mom, who lives in another state, on her printer).
Coding
I wouldn't want to try that on any tablet. It'd be like programming through a porthole.
With the exception of MS Office, I think the Asus Transformer series has exactly what you're looking for.
It's called a counterexample, and in mathematics it's a way to instantly demolish any conjecture :-)
I disagree.
I spent a fair amount of time once with a man who was educated in the fashion you seem to think is appropriate. In his case, he'd started out working on the factory floor at an IBM manufacturing facility in Texas (30 years ago when they still made stuff in the US), and had qualified for and taken a technical math and computer science education culminating in a master's degree. IBM's "school" was accredited and his degree was a real one, but it included only technical subjects; no liberal ed at all. Prior to his IBM education he had barely graduated from high school -- and I'm not sure how he did, frankly.
He was a highly intelligent man, very articulate and perceptive. However, as soon as the discussion left technology his utter lack of education became instantly apparent. He was even ignorant of basic principles of physics -- he knew a fair amount about electronics, but in mechanics he understood less than most high school dropouts I've known. His ability to understand politics was nonexistent because he didn't know any history, or even understand basic civics. And don't even attempt to talk about literature, philosophy, etc.
Now, obviously, a big part of his ignorance was due to his own utter lack of interest in anything outside of computer science. You can't obtain a MSCS without being able to read, and anyone who can read can educate themselves. But the point was that the difference between him and the typical college graduate -- even though he was almost certainly smarter than said typical graduate -- was stark and obvious, and it wasn't in his favor. His lack of general knowledge wasn't just a problem when socializing, either, it often caused him to make dumb decisions that affected the business, and you simply could not put him in front of customers, because unless the discussion was laser-focused, he'd eventually say something that made him look like an idiot.
After my experience working with him, I decided I wholeheartedly agree with the liberal education philosophy. The worst part about it was that his deep, narrow knowledge and utter lack of knowledge outside of a single field made him believe, quite firmly, that there really wasn't much to know outside of his field. It's often said that that the primary purpose of a BA/BS is to teach the student the breadth of his own ignorance. Well, this guy never learned that.
We don't all need deep knowledge in every area, but an introductory course in each of the major areas of human knowledge really does add significant value. It makes us more rounded, teaches us some much-needed humility and, well, educates us. That education is what differentiates a university degree from a vocational certificate, and the former is more valuable than the latter.
It is also possible they did it to aggressives control the supply line for the iPad and iPhone.
Nah. AuthenTec is far from the only maker of compact, embeddable, cost-effective fingerprint scanners -- even assuming that fingerprint authentication on your phone is a good idea.
An overt revolution will fail badly. They have changed vital laws that protected us from the military crushing insurrection, so that they can now use it.
But only if the soldiers will obey orders to fire on their fellow citizens. I don't see that happening; in fact the political leanings of most of the military would put them on the other side.
Not to mention, I think we signed the UN Small Arms Treaty Friday, and your arms will be registered, which the next step is to take them.
Doesn't matter. The treaty itself has no legal force whatsoever in the United States because it wasn't (and won't be) formally ratified by 2/3 of the US Senate. Instead, the treaty is basically a promise by the US government to pass laws via the normal process that will enact its provisions. If we fail to do so we'll be in violation of the treaty, but there is no legal consequence to that, and there are huge political consequences to congressmen and senators who try to pass restrictive laws.
Besides which, those laws still have to pass constitutional muster. Indeed, even if the small arms treaty were taken through the formal senate ratification route, making it law instantly without requiring separate enacting legislation, it would still have to pass constitutional muster. The US Constitution overrides treaties, and the Supreme Court has shown itself willing in the past to rule treaty provisions unenforceable.
I wouldn't want to see us go the route of revolution, not because it would fail (assuming sufficient support), but because I have no confidence that what would come after wouldn't be worse than what we have now. Also, the system isn't so far gone that it couldn't be fixed through the political process, yet. If we as a nation had the will to rise in revolution, the same effort channeled through the political process would work better, and faster, and with much less destruction and risk of imposing greater tyranny.
My impression was that they kicked him out for submitting the app to the store (for customers to purchase), not for finding the vulnerability.
As did the guys who were testing Bouncer. They put an SMS blocker app on the Google Play Store and repeatedly updated it, adding more malicious behavior each time.
NM, I think you are talking about Julio Gonzalez and the Happy Land fire. Not the biggest single-handed murderer, though. That would be Timothy McVeigh, I think.
Then again the number 1 single handed murderer in US history did it with 1 gallon of gasoline and a match.
Who was that? My google-fu has failed me.
I applaud Googles attempt here, but they can't charge nothing, it's just not going to work.
As long as they can get enough customers buying the Gb or the Gb+TV, those will fund keeping the bits flowing. With the infrastructure in place, the cost to provide 5 Mb connections to the rest is basically nil.
QoS, for example, ensures my SSH packets are delivered on a timely basis and that it doesn't wund up waiting behind the packets of my neighbor's torrents. In theory, my neighbor still gets his bandwidth, but his packet latency will be slightly higher; which is still perfectly acceptable for that type of traffic.
This is a valid correction, but the GP's point holds regardless. Given sufficient bandwidth, QoS is as unnecessary as traffic shaping. Your SSH packet -- or, more importantly, my VOIP packet -- may end up waiting behind the neighbor's torrent packet, but since his 1500-byte torrent packet only blocks ours for 15 microseconds, who cares?
My daughter is so-so. She's starting college next month and I think a more adult environment will be easier for her to deal with. High school is hellish for a lot of normal kids and it's basically unmanageable for someone with her emotional disorder. I don't know where you got the idea my wife is disabled, she's not. At some point in the next few years she'll need a kidney transplant, but up until the time it gets bad she's not limited in any way, and even after the transplant there will be few restrictions on her activities, if any.
As for your job, I think you do hate it, even if you don't realize you do. I've had jobs where I was paid a lot for doing very little, and it gnaws at you. It's much better for your mental health and emotional state to work where you feel like your contributions are valuable, and where you respect the people you work with and for, even if it's a little more stressful.
LOL
Still hating your job, I see.
I can't arrest someone with the same leeway given to cops
In the state whose laws I know best (Utah) the only additional arrest power given to police is the authority to use deadly force to stop a fleeing felony suspect. Other than that, it's identical.
I can't get a warrant to bust down someone's door.
Technically, you can, if you can get a judge to give you one. In fact, prior to the advent of large organized police forces, nearly all warrants were served by private citizens, and AFAIK the law hasn't changed -- though practice clearly has, and in practice it's unlikely any judge would issue you a warrant.
I can't pull a car over for speeding.
Sure you can, legally. As a practical matter you'd have a hard time doing it without red and blue flashing lights, and there are laws against putting those on your vehicle. I'd bet that if you put yellow flashing lights on, though, you could successfully convince many people to pull over. After that you couldn't issue a citation, but you could get the driver's information and take it to the relevant prosecutor and see if you can convince him to issue a court summons on the strength of the evidence you can provide (mostly, your testimony, same as a police officer).
Again, this isn't a difference in real authority, it's a difference in common practice and who's likely to actually be listened to.
I can't own certain weapons.
You can own anything a police officer can own himself. There are some weapons a police department can own that you cannot, but none that police departments commonly issue. You could, for example, own a fully-automatic M-16 (per federal law, anyway; a few states are more restrictive). It'd cost you $20K+, due to the 1986 law restricting civilian ownership of full-auto firearms to those that were already in civilian hands then (fixed supply and growing demand means the price goes up), and it would take a few months of doing paperwork and waiting, but you could do it if you're not a felon or otherwise legally disqualified due to your own record.
We want law enforcement officers to have an edge over the regular civilians, because that means they'll also have an edge over criminals.
I don't agree that there's any significant "edge" we can give to officers that doesn't serve the same goals in the hands of law-abiding citizens. Granted that citizens rarely have need of them, and that it's better to let the police do their jobs wherever possible, but there are rare circumstances in which it is useful for citizens to exercise their police powers, and in general it's better for society if police don't have a special status in the eyes of the law. It's hard enough to keep them from exceeding their authority even without that.
Now output VGA, RGB, S-Video, Component Video.
Why? Have you ever actually hooked your iPhone to a component video input?
Whether in video games or in real life, kids like shooting. It's partly about the power, partly about the skill, partly about the noise and feel, and maybe partly about other stuff, but shooting guns is great fun. I'm an NRA instructor and a Boy Scout leader, so I frequently get called upon to take kids out shooting (BSA safety rules require certified instructors be present at all shooting activities), and I have never -- ever! -- met a teenage boy who didn't find great joy in poking holes in targets with a .22 rifle. For that matter I haven't met many adults, male or female, who don't really enjoy shooting when they try it.
Of course, target shooting is very different from blowing the head off a zombie in an explosion of simulated gore, but the gun part of it is the same -- and guns are fun. It's certainly possible that neuroscience may find ways to make other kinds of games more rewarding (addictive?), but I really doubt that shooting games will ever die.
> On the other hand, when Google does mine, they'd probably wonder why I watch > so much Dora the Explorer on my business account. (It's tied to my business cell > phone, which I use most often to keep my daughter entertained.)
Yes, we were kind of wondering about it. Thanks for clearing that up. It's been added to your file.
Which you can see by checking the privacy dashboard linked from google.com.
Today, with great tablets, like the Nexus 7, so inexpense, why bother with proprietary, crippled, vendor-locked devices?
For a many of the people who shop Amazon.com, the Kindle fits comfortably into place --- it meets their needs ---- and they don't give a damn about the geek.
If it meets their needs, well and good. However, a Nexus 7 would also meet the same needs, and offer a great deal more should they ever want it. They would have to take the extra step of downloading the Kindle app from the Play Store.
How could stability have been affected? As I understand it, adding profiles to accounts was a necessary pre-requisite for enabling Google+, and I can easily see that Apps account handling must necessarily be different from non-Apps account handling -- and honestly it was probably more different than it needed to be. Code structure tends to grow to reflect organization structure, and we're talking about different teams.
Of course, Google's customers shouldn't really have to know or care about such things. I'm offering this by way of explanation (supposition of explanation, actually), not excuse. I agree that it was handled in a way that made Apps accounts feel like second-class citizens (I was annoyed by it!). But I can absolutely see how interactions between the different codebases could create complications, and how rushing into modifying Apps accounts to add profiles could create stability problems, and I can see why the relevant teams felt it was better to go slower and safer with the paying customers.
It's worth pointing out that Google corporate accounts (@google.com) still have not been Google+-enabled. In part that's probably to help prevent Google employees from inadvertently posting internal stuff to the public, but I think the bigger reason is that corporate accounts, while nominally in the same system, have even more special-case baggage than Apps accounts.
I appreciate your perspective, but I don't think it's accurate to say that not providing paying customers with Google+ right out the gate is an indicator that they were valued less. On the contrary, I see it as an indication that the stability and reliability of their service were valued more. I'm not on that team, nor any team related to it, but I would be willing to bet money that Apps customers are always the last to see updates precisely so that the changes can be thoroughly tested and validated (using the general user population as testers, essentially) before they're deployed.
It's reasonable to argue that the Google+ team should have gotten closer to being able to enable Apps accounts prior to launching the public service. My opinion is that they simply underestimated the complexity of the task, but I don't have any data to support that -- and I likely couldn't state the opinion if I did have data because it would probably be confidential. Anyway, I think they acted in what they thought was the best interests of paying customers, even if their perspective of your interests didn't match your true preferences.
Disclaimer: I don't speak for Google and Google doesn't speak for me. The above represents only my own opinions. If you want to get Google's official position on this issue, I suggest you contact the Apps sales team or Google public relations.
I had a paid Google Apps account and giving them money meant you were dirt as far as they were concerned, they wouldn't let you join Google+ for months (I guess they figured they were already collecting the personal information they wanted from you through your account so strip mining your Google+ data was irrelevant)
Actually, there were technical challenges with enabling Apps accounts. I don't know what they were exactly, but I think they had to do with ensuring that nothing broke for big enterprise users of Apps.
When Google+ came out there was huge internal demand for Apps-enabling it -- I'm sure it wouldn't surprise you to know that many Google employees have their personal domains hosted on Apps -- and if it could have been done any faster, it would have. For those intervening months the question was raised in virtually every TGIF (weekly company-wide meetings during which, among other things, employees have the opportunity to question management in front of the whole company) and the Google+ team was getting really apologetic by the time it finally rolled out.
Cool. Thanks for the info.
My suggestion is Tasker, but unless there's a mail parser plugin I haven't come across (or unless you write one), it won't take actions based on the content of e-mail messages. It will, however, react to SMS message content. So one way to handle your custom notifications is to write a script that runs on another always-on, always-connected machine. Have it receive and parse the e-mails and when one of them meets your criteria, have it send you a text message with relevant content, then have Tasker do whatever is appropriate when that message arrives.
To make sure your script-running server is up, use something like Ping HostMonitor. You can also use that to monitor the status of any Internet-accessible hosts.
The biggest downside of this approach is that it relies on SMS to reliably notify you. You might also want to have Tasker send an e-mail acknowledgement when you get the SMS, and have your script keep re-sending the texts periodically until it receives the ACK.
You're right about that. We'll see if the rumors are true that Apple will introduce a cheaper iPad in the near future.
It'll also be interesting to see if it's competitive with the Nexus 7. Google has set a high bar for a low-cost tablet.