- Typically I work across 3 different computers. Work, Home desktop, Home laptop. Also, from time to time, I'm asked to use other machines at work. GDocs is central and easy to get to. For this reason, I often use it for scratch stuff. For example: I recently purchased a computer. I created a spreadsheet at home with all the components + prices I wanted. Then, at work, one of my coworkers told me about a brand of product I'd probably like better. I spent a few minutes on my lunch break looking into it, agreed with him, and modified that spreadsheet. (It wouldn't have occured to me to upload that spreadsheet from home to my server since I didn't expect to want to modify it from work.)
- I can 'publish' documents, which means they basically go up on the web as HTML and people can view them. I get a kick out of this because it's like quickly putting up a web page. I can write out a doc, attach pics, etc, and just hit 'Publish', then I get a link I can send people.
- I've never personally used this, but GDocs supports collaboration. Other people can edit the documents if you enable this. You can also restrict who can look at it, and there's even mention of using RSS propogation for it. I haven't personally used that but I imagine there's some interesting uses for this.
- GDocs automatically saves every few seconds. That makes it hard to lose a lot of data if your net connection suddenly dies. It also shows you the changes/revisions you've made over the life of the document. As a matter of fact, I just checked, and all those revisions from stuff I've written last Xmas are there. (I think Word has a similar feature, but I'm not familiar with it.)
- You can Google Search through your docs. I've never really used that, but that feature is absolutely killer with email.
- If you're a fan of how GMail organizes its emails, you're in for a treat. In my opinion, it's a lot more intuitive than storing files in a folder structure. (Without losing the benefits of the file structure.) Actually, I think this is what Microsoft had in mind when they were talking about the new file system for Vista that they never got around to finishing.
Cons:
- Yeah... if the net breaks, GDocs is useless. I've bumped into that a couple of times.
- This shouldn't be a 'con' so much as just a little warning to you. I don't do a lot of formal docs with GDocs. I don't know how effective its page layout tools are. If you need to do something that's print sensitive, I cannot guarantee you that it'd satisfactorally replace Office.
- Excel's interface is definitely more repsonsive than GDoc's Spreadsheets. For simple stuff it's good, but I've ached for Excel on more than one occasion.
- I can export as XLS, DOC, etc. But I cannot guarantee you the quality of the save. Since I personally haven't tried it, I listed this as a con instead of a pro.
- If you hate how GMail stores its docs, you won't like this much.
- Microsoft's integration is a lot better. You can copy/paste from an Excel Spreadsheet to a Word Doc, and it'll retain the cells, formulas, etc. No such luck with Google Docs.
- Office's UI is just more intuitive. GDocs' isn't so bad it's unusable, but I do ache for it occasionally. Spell check, for example, is a lot friendlier in Office. It's rather basic in GDocs. Oh well.
"In my situation, I have a laptop, and I also have several servers in various locations (one little personal one that I run for myself) that I can use to store some files and pick them up from another location. As you noted, everyone's situation is different."
The only thing I'll say to that is that GDocs saves you all the synching hassle. Just open, edit, save. (As opposed to download, open, edit, save, re-upload.... open the doc later and hope you didn't forget to reupload it earlier....)
If you can take your net connection for granted (as I can, obviously...), there are interesting advantages to GDocs. If you're interested, I'd be happy to talk more about it. I'd do it now, but I'm worried about putting you in the position of thinking I'm trying to ram it down your throat. I'm not, I've just been rather pleased with it lately. Actually, my main beef with it right now is that my Treo doesn't support it. Argh.
"Offline work? Yeah, you can make it with the Google app, then download it and work on it offline...but then, why bother to use the Google app?"
This may not apply to you, but I like it because I work from several different computers throughout the day. Google Docs is a nice centralized place to work on documents. I can start something at home, go to work, work on it some more, go back home, do even more, etc. I don't have to tote the docs around on a thumb-drive or something. It's valuable to me, so much so that I don't even bother installing Office anymore. Of course, your mileage may vary.
"Please point out where it says "unlimited" in any official Comcast material. I'll wait."
You could very easily type in 'Comcast' and 'Unlimited' and find lots of cases of it. I could also point out that up until the switch to Time Warner a few months ago, I was a customer of Comcast's for years, and I was offered 'unlimited' internet through them. It may not be happening today, but it most certainly has happened a good deal. Denial of that doesn't change history, sorry friend.
"Admitting that you could never accomplish even a tenth of what Robert Jordan accomplished and then asserting that you have a right to criticize his works rings sort of hollow doesn't it?"
Nope.
"So why should I listen to a disgruntled fanboy over published authors?"
He writes a book and some of his target audience doesn't like it, and you're asking why you should hear what they have to say? That's somehow NOT hollow?
"And what do you think those published authors would be saying about your criticism?"
I doubt they would say much since I haven't made any criticism of the author. All I said was I don't care for the "he was successful, therefore you should like it" mentality. George Lucas was successful with Star Wars, that doesn't evaporate away my rights to criticize the prequels.
Since books, movies, tv shows, video games, etc. are intended to entertain a general audience, nobody needs a published book to criticize the products they're being asked to pay for. Personally, I'd rather hear from somebody who's read the books and had only a mild opinion of them than some pretentious asshole using his appreciation of said books to boost his ambient intelligence. That goes for published authors or even over-zealous fan-bois that take personal offense to criticism and use worthless arguments like "The guy's successful and you're not!"
"for those of us who don't know who he is and couldn't give a flying f*ck about a third-rate writer from a country famous for its complete lack of literary skill..."
"Here's a news flash for you. Yet another year has passed and you are still not published. Robert Jordan succeeded while you continue to fail."
I've never been a big fan of this argument. Yeah yeah, he was successful. However, we wrote his books such that they be enjoyed by the people reading them. If he failed to do that, then yes, people have a right to be critical. Afterall, these books were published to be consumed by the very people you're criticizing, not to impress the writing community with their whoop-de-dooedness.
"Plus the last thing they want is people downloading exactly the limit every month. By making it vague, they ensure that people will stay significantly under the limits that would give them trouble."
It's not just that. When they say people are being 'excessive', that's different from saying "They downloaded n gigs of data even though it says unlimited in our plan".
"What the hell kind of spelling mistake is that? Come on editors, at least READ the edited summary... (Score:4, Insightful)"
What the hell kind of moderation is that? It's a silly typo, it's already been commented on, and the complaint about hte typo adds nothing to the discussion.
You found something to nitpick and a few peeps had moderation points burning a hole in their pockets. Whoop-de-fucking-doo. Let's just pause the discussion so everybody can golf-clap.
"If you say 'no comment' then they assume it sucks and write article 2. In fact, they can write article 2 before you even go to the event, and only publish it if AMD blocks you from running article 1."
Right, then you can release an article like this:
This product sucks... for reasons that haven't been made clear to me. But trust me on that, it sucks.
"Just as long as they improve the music, oh please let them improve the music. Even as a kid the english version concert episodes made me want to clap my hands to my ears and roll on the floor in agony."
Stage lights.. flashing! The feeling smashing! This is my time to be a star!!!!
"How is it "unprecedented"? Nintendo have had remarkable success before and sustained it for longer periods than a year. So have others in the industry."
There's a couple of possibilities:
1. The Wii has broken sales records.
2. The Wii is a surprise hit. Whereas the SNES was considered a shoe-in. Its success didn't surprise anybody.
"I think the reason why Nintendo was so harsh to third party developers is because they believed (probably rightly) that too much crap games on a system leads to bad sales."
There's no 'probably' about it. Atari learned that lesson very harshly and Nintendo set out to not repeat that mistake.
"I get the feeling that there are people who really fear this game. I suppose the fact that the PS3 can run a game that looks this good at 1080p and shows what a real next gen game's disc requirements are(25 gigs for Lair) make people feel their console is inferior and need to lash out."
Yeah, that'd be so much worse than somebody using a horribly reviewed game with pretty screenshots to pre-emptively lash out at the people using more popular consoles.
From TFA: "Also, the scanner function can be used to scan in a business card placed on top of the screen,..." Frankly, what for ? Have you ever received a business card with words: "Have a look, but I need it back !" ???
Nope. But I have had to carry a pile of cards home from a trade show. I've also lost business cards, having them on my computer somewhere would have been convenient. I've also passed on business cards to other people. A digital version would have made that easier. Etc.
Plenty of reasons why. Heck, I wish my cell phone could do it. It could grab barcodes, too.
"If they are lying to the customers, that is bad. But I would imagine most people do not know how to make a recovery CD, painfully easy as it may be. Also, it would be more convenient than contacting the manufacturer for one."
I'm inclined to agree. I'm not ready to wave my pitchfork at Best Buy or Circuit City over this, I'd rather have a go at the manufacturers that don't include these discs as standard operating procedure. Heck, I'm annoyed at Toshiba about it. I bought a TabletPC a few years ago. I love the machine, but part of being a 'tablet' at the time was that it didn't include an optical drive to make it slimmer. Okay. But they included a recovery DVD that's just a ghost image. Good, right? Nope. They encrypted it. It'll only decrypt if the tablet itself does the operation. Result? They think I need to buy their $250 external drive.
I've since gotten around the problem, but it still annoys me. Back in the good ol' days machines used to come with a Windows install disc. Not a recovery disc, but an actual install disc. If they had given me that, a reinstall wouldn't have been a problem.
Rhapsody actually does downloading as opposed to streaming. If you're running a playlist you've got a 1 gig cache file that stores the music you've just played. If you mainly listen to your playlist, downloading rarely occurs after the first time.
Anyway, that's not a rebuttal to your point. I'm a Rhapsody subscriber and I just felt like babbling about it.:)
Slashdot Mirror
Ah, I see. You say you'll wait, but you're as vague as Comcast is about how long. Heh. Guess 'unlimited' was never an option with you! Buahaha!
Pros:
Cons:
I hope that's interesting to you.
"In my situation, I have a laptop, and I also have several servers in various locations (one little personal one that I run for myself) that I can use to store some files and pick them up from another location. As you noted, everyone's situation is different."
The only thing I'll say to that is that GDocs saves you all the synching hassle. Just open, edit, save. (As opposed to download, open, edit, save, re-upload.... open the doc later and hope you didn't forget to reupload it earlier....)
If you can take your net connection for granted (as I can, obviously...), there are interesting advantages to GDocs. If you're interested, I'd be happy to talk more about it. I'd do it now, but I'm worried about putting you in the position of thinking I'm trying to ram it down your throat. I'm not, I've just been rather pleased with it lately. Actually, my main beef with it right now is that my Treo doesn't support it. Argh.
"Offline work? Yeah, you can make it with the Google app, then download it and work on it offline...but then, why bother to use the Google app?"
This may not apply to you, but I like it because I work from several different computers throughout the day. Google Docs is a nice centralized place to work on documents. I can start something at home, go to work, work on it some more, go back home, do even more, etc. I don't have to tote the docs around on a thumb-drive or something. It's valuable to me, so much so that I don't even bother installing Office anymore. Of course, your mileage may vary.
"So what's the big deal here?"
Nintendo + Legal Action + Copyright == Waving Pitchforks && lots of ad-views.
"Please point out where it says "unlimited" in any official Comcast material. I'll wait."
You could very easily type in 'Comcast' and 'Unlimited' and find lots of cases of it. I could also point out that up until the switch to Time Warner a few months ago, I was a customer of Comcast's for years, and I was offered 'unlimited' internet through them. It may not be happening today, but it most certainly has happened a good deal. Denial of that doesn't change history, sorry friend.
"Admitting that you could never accomplish even a tenth of what Robert Jordan accomplished and then asserting that you have a right to criticize his works rings sort of hollow doesn't it?"
Nope.
"So why should I listen to a disgruntled fanboy over published authors?"
He writes a book and some of his target audience doesn't like it, and you're asking why you should hear what they have to say? That's somehow NOT hollow?
"And what do you think those published authors would be saying about your criticism?"
I doubt they would say much since I haven't made any criticism of the author. All I said was I don't care for the "he was successful, therefore you should like it" mentality. George Lucas was successful with Star Wars, that doesn't evaporate away my rights to criticize the prequels.
Since books, movies, tv shows, video games, etc. are intended to entertain a general audience, nobody needs a published book to criticize the products they're being asked to pay for. Personally, I'd rather hear from somebody who's read the books and had only a mild opinion of them than some pretentious asshole using his appreciation of said books to boost his ambient intelligence. That goes for published authors or even over-zealous fan-bois that take personal offense to criticism and use worthless arguments like "The guy's successful and you're not!"
"for those of us who don't know who he is and couldn't give a flying f*ck about a third-rate writer from a country famous for its complete lack of literary skill..."
So.. what.. did you emigrate or something?
"Here's a news flash for you. Yet another year has passed and you are still not published. Robert Jordan succeeded while you continue to fail."
I've never been a big fan of this argument. Yeah yeah, he was successful. However, we wrote his books such that they be enjoyed by the people reading them. If he failed to do that, then yes, people have a right to be critical. Afterall, these books were published to be consumed by the very people you're criticizing, not to impress the writing community with their whoop-de-dooedness.
"Plus the last thing they want is people downloading exactly the limit every month. By making it vague, they ensure that people will stay significantly under the limits that would give them trouble."
It's not just that. When they say people are being 'excessive', that's different from saying "They downloaded n gigs of data even though it says unlimited in our plan".
Useless comment that increases the number of ads served so Slashdot has reason not to toss KDawson? Check
"No furking shyte. Wish I had mod points."
Why? So you could mod up the post bitching about a frivilous typo instead of working to lower the signal-to-noise-ratio?
"What the hell kind of spelling mistake is that? Come on editors, at least READ the edited summary... (Score:4, Insightful)"
What the hell kind of moderation is that? It's a silly typo, it's already been commented on, and the complaint about hte typo adds nothing to the discussion.
You found something to nitpick and a few peeps had moderation points burning a hole in their pockets. Whoop-de-fucking-doo. Let's just pause the discussion so everybody can golf-clap.
Right, then you can release an article like this:
"Just as long as they improve the music, oh please let them improve the music. Even as a kid the english version concert episodes made me want to clap my hands to my ears and roll on the floor in agony."
Stage lights.. flashing! The feeling smashing! This is my time to be a star!!!!
"In the grandparent's example, it's easy for a 56 year old male to fake being a young female."
There's a simple test for that. Ask the lady to describe herself. If she says: "Well, I have big tits!" it's a dude.
"Hmm wonder if my wife is an Eel?"
According to my See 'n Say, she's a cow.
"Hope they're not Li-ion."
When asked if the Rover was concerned about having lion batteries, it replied: "Hakuna Matata"
"How is it "unprecedented"? Nintendo have had remarkable success before and sustained it for longer periods than a year. So have others in the industry."
There's a couple of possibilities:
1. The Wii has broken sales records.
2. The Wii is a surprise hit. Whereas the SNES was considered a shoe-in. Its success didn't surprise anybody.
"I think the reason why Nintendo was so harsh to third party developers is because they believed (probably rightly) that too much crap games on a system leads to bad sales."
There's no 'probably' about it. Atari learned that lesson very harshly and Nintendo set out to not repeat that mistake.
"I get the feeling that there are people who really fear this game. I suppose the fact that the PS3 can run a game that looks this good at 1080p and shows what a real next gen game's disc requirements are(25 gigs for Lair) make people feel their console is inferior and need to lash out."
Yeah, that'd be so much worse than somebody using a horribly reviewed game with pretty screenshots to pre-emptively lash out at the people using more popular consoles.
Nope. But I have had to carry a pile of cards home from a trade show. I've also lost business cards, having them on my computer somewhere would have been convenient. I've also passed on business cards to other people. A digital version would have made that easier. Etc.
Plenty of reasons why. Heck, I wish my cell phone could do it. It could grab barcodes, too.
"butt print photo copies"
Here on Slashdot, that'd only occur if they made a keyboard with these sensors.
"If they are lying to the customers, that is bad. But I would imagine most people do not know how to make a recovery CD, painfully easy as it may be. Also, it would be more convenient than contacting the manufacturer for one."
I'm inclined to agree. I'm not ready to wave my pitchfork at Best Buy or Circuit City over this, I'd rather have a go at the manufacturers that don't include these discs as standard operating procedure. Heck, I'm annoyed at Toshiba about it. I bought a TabletPC a few years ago. I love the machine, but part of being a 'tablet' at the time was that it didn't include an optical drive to make it slimmer. Okay. But they included a recovery DVD that's just a ghost image. Good, right? Nope. They encrypted it. It'll only decrypt if the tablet itself does the operation. Result? They think I need to buy their $250 external drive.
I've since gotten around the problem, but it still annoys me. Back in the good ol' days machines used to come with a Windows install disc. Not a recovery disc, but an actual install disc. If they had given me that, a reinstall wouldn't have been a problem.
"streaming music services (Rhapsody?)"
:)
Rhapsody actually does downloading as opposed to streaming. If you're running a playlist you've got a 1 gig cache file that stores the music you've just played. If you mainly listen to your playlist, downloading rarely occurs after the first time.
Anyway, that's not a rebuttal to your point. I'm a Rhapsody subscriber and I just felt like babbling about it.