Well, I'm a big fan of Evernote, and so I strongly recommend that you check it out, While it's not identical to Google Notebook, the searching and offline capabilities are really nice. The Evernote folks are supposedly working on a Google Notebook to Evernote migration path.
That said, if you don't like Evernote, I think the closest match to Google Notebook is Zoho Notebook, which is part of the Zoho online suite: http://notebook.zoho.com/ . It even has a Firefox plugin, although I've never used it.
Also, if you're paranoid about your personal information, Microsoft's OneNote is a decent standalone note-taking program. I don't think there's any web access, but you should be able to access the same notebook files on multiple PCs, via online storage providers like DropBox or JungleDisk.
Back in June/July, I couldn't find a usable version of either server, player, or workstation, and all I saw on the forums were complaints about the non-existence of an x64-host version. They must have since come out with one that supports an x64 host.
Google Notebook is also the wrong target. While it's useful, I think it's something of a niche feature these days, as other online services seem to be passing it by. Even Google buries it in the "even more" submenu.
If Microsoft really wanted to get noticed, they should have taken the organizational and editing features of OneNote, and combined them with the distributed synchronization and text/image/online/offline searching of Evernote. That would have been a killer product.
I used to be a Google Notebook user, but I'm now a 100% Evernote fan. I took everything that I had in GN, and dumped them into Evernote, which is something like a personal google. Nowadays, I don't use tags. I let the note text and web snippets be the defacto tags, and just do text searches. I even moved all of my del.icio.us bookmarks into Evernote. (Sharing/collaboration can be an issue, as notebooks are either 100% private or 100% public -- you can't just share to a few people.) Evernote also works on PCs, Macs, web browsers, and the iPhone.
The upcoming Firefox 3.1 (December???) will negate much of the speed differences. At that point, Chrome's only real advantage will be the separate-process-per-tab feature.
For me, having separate processes would be nice, but it's the addons that keep me in Firefox. Here, Chrome has an uphill battle: it's not enough to have the ability to have addons. I also need specific addons, like the oft-required Adblock Plus, and lesser-known addons, such as "Better Gmail 2" and "Remember the Milk for Gmail". I actually have a pretty long list, and, as long as Chrome doesn't have most of them, I'm not even going to think about switching.
Let me also state why one shouldn't use your ISP's system.
While this is often true, it doesn't apply to all ISPs.
I have a great local ISP, and they maintain their systems well, including email w/IMAP & a decent spam filter. They even have an MOTD that lists outages. I don't want to make this sound like a advertisement, and so I'll just say that they're one of the top-rated regional ISPs on broadbandreports.com.
You can change the From: address in gmail to be your work email address, so the people you talk to wont even know it's being forwarded
They often do know.
Outlook detects gmail's changed address, and displays the from address as:
user@gmail.com on behalf of Joe User [joeuser@example.com]
So, while you can change your gmail "From:" address, outlook neuters it, and makes you look rather unprofessional. Of course, this only affects people who read mail via outlook. However, if you're trying to change your email address, you're likely sending email for business purposes, and business users are likely to use outlook.
Whee.
Re:So what's the bottom line?
on
Plane Simple Truth
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
A Prius is the wrong car for a cross-country trip, if gas mileage is the criteria.
A Prius excels in areas with stop-and-go driving, like city driving (or Los Angeles freeway driving:-). It doesn't do as well in continuous, high-speed driving, like what you would find on a cross-country trip. There are better cars for that.
To everyone: Keep in mind that Firefox 3.1 will ship with TraceMonkey, which should produce performance comparable to chrome. So, the only real advantage of chrome is the process-per-tab feature.
For me, that's not a deal-breaker. However, the lack of addons is (and, in particular, the lack of certain specific addons, like Scrapbook, Evernote, Greasemonkey, etc., in addition to the usual ones such as Adblock Plus).
Also, while Chrome is nice and fast, note that a future version of Firefox (3.1?) will have tracemonkey, which speeds up javascript. This might nullify some/much of the speed improvements of Chrome. The early numbers look good, but we'll have to see how it performs on actual pages.
Chrome is interesting, but I'm sticking with FF3 for now -- I have a boatload of FF3 addons that I just need. Also, for the web sites that I use, I don't find Chrome to be significantly faster, and I'm using a middle-of-the-road, aging desktop (Intel E6600, 2.4GHz, 4GB RAM, using 800MHz FSB instead of 1066MHz). However, perhaps I'll reevaluate it next year, once it matures a bit more.
I don't understand the fuss. Like it or not, this seems to be the normal evolution of any "startup company" that becomes a publicly-traded company. Often, when any type of economic difficulties hit, benefits can be lost or reduced, and -- surprise, surprise -- they don't often come back. One big issue is that the investors have, of course, a lot of control, and investors want profit (think Carl Icahn, people). Management doesn't look good if they can't deliver sufficient profit, and so there's incentive to not increase benefits.
I'm not even going to touch the google services issue. Let's just say that some google services appear to be stagnating (minor tweaks don't cut it), and google is opening itself up to a competitor leapfrogging them. (Yeah, with Yahoo in not-so-good shape, Microsoft is probably the only company that could do that.... Bleah.)
Oh, and Fred Saberhagen's Dracula series is good, too, as well as his Empire of the East series. "The Dracula Tape", and "An Old Friend of the Family" are two more of my favorites.
Weber and Flint are two of my favorite authors, but I'm not sure how appropriate they are for pre-teens, due to the hard military Sci-Fi topics. They're probably OK for teens, but I'm not sure if pre-teens would really be interested in them.
And, yes, I'll second and third the recommendation for the Baen Free Library. There are a lot of good books and series there. Note, however, that not all books in a series are there. For example, you really need to have read H Beam Piper's, "Lord Kalvan of Otherwhen" (which is not in the library), before reading "Great King's War", or much will probably be confusing.
I'll second Andre Norton. Forerunner Foray, Time Traders, Witch World, etc. are all excellent. The same goes for old Heinlein (his later stuff is either not as good, inappropriate for children, or both, IMHO).
Most people here are largely recommending more modern Sci-Fi (Eddings, Card, Rowling, etc.), and so I'll suggest some older or lesser-known authors:
H. Beam Piper: "Space Viking" (warning, not-PC, with sanitized violence), "Lord Kalvan of Otherwhen", "Great Kings War". Oooh, Space Viking is available from Project Gutenberg. I'm not a fan of his other works, except for maybe his Paratime series.
Firefox users can alternatively use the WOT extension (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/3456), which rates links from google, yahoo, msn, and other search page results. Note that the link rating is typically done only for selected pages (usually search results), and not all pages, but there's also an icon/button that displays the rating of the current website. The link ratings appear to be done by querying mywot.com's servers, and so there shouldn't be any unnecessary spamming (but see the privacy notice attached to the extension).
Site ratings are done (partially) via a community voting system, and so it is open to abuse. However, I've generally found them to be useful.
No registration is required, unless you want to rate sites.
I'm tempted to tinker with ZFS just for its snapshotting abilities.
If that's all you want (and since you'd have to switch OS's anyway), you might want to check out ZFS-in-FreeBSD, as FreeBSD supports more hardware than Solaris. For example, FreeBSD supports PCI IDE controllers (useful for adding old disks to ZFS). Last I heard, Solaris only supported the IDE controllers on a motherboard; PCI IDE controllers did not work.
On a related topic, the lack of "basic" hardware support was also a killer.
Take ZFS, for example. That could have been something that propelled Solaris into the forefront, by allowing old PCs and disk drives to be recycled into a really easy-to-use, fault tolerant array (killer home archive solution, years before drobo came out). Unfortunately, under Solaris, disk drives are (were?) restricted to motherboard built-in IDE interfaces or SATA interfaces. You could not use PCI IDE cards, which basically means that you can't use your old parts -- you basically had to buy new hardware (assuming that you wanted to build a real array, with more than 3-4 hard disks).
Now that FreeBSD has ZFS, there's now one less reason to use Solaris.
Don't get your hopes up, people. Even if you ignore the reports that say that manufacturing bidding is still ongoing, and assume that the "production in May" report is correct, "production in May" is likely test production runs. Add some time for working out the production kinks, and for building up stock, and you're probably looking at a Q3 release date, if things go well. Given the timing, my wild-*** guess is that Apple might be shooting for a "fall, back-to-school" release (August/September, maybe very late July). However, if bidding really is still ongoing, I wouldn't expect a new iPhone before Q4 (but I'd love to be wrong). I don't see Apple making any early announcements, either, due to possible Osbourne effects.
It's not like a hardware manufacturer can press a magic button, and fill up the hundreds of Apple/AT&T stores with new iPhones overnight.
Most providers do offer it in major metropolitan areas. AT&T Wireless, the carrier for the iPhone, for instance, shows their data coverage here.
Note that AT&T's 3G coverage appears to have significantly improved since the iPhone was released. Last July, I took a look at AT&T's coverage, and it looked a lot more spotty than it is now. There are still waaaay too many holes for my liking, but the coverage is starting to look minimally acceptable (to me).
I'd guess the real reason, that the iPhone uses EDGE and not 3G, is that the chosen iPhone carrier (AT&T) didn't have sufficient 3G coverage at the iPhone release. If so, then it would have been utterly pointless to release a 3G iPhone if very few people could use it (in California, where Apple's HQ is -- don't know about the East coast or other places).
That's even more error-prone. Most people probably have lots of labels, and writing Thunderbird filters to cover all of the labels would be nasty. I'd hate to test and debug that. Of course, you could just filter into a few labels, but the whole point of using IMAP is to preserve the labels.
With Thunderbird and IMAP, it's just a matter of opening a dialog, scrolling down a list, and checking a box next to each folder (label) name. However, if you have lots of labels, that's a lot of clicking. I backup all labels, except for spam (of course).
Once everything's set up, it's just one menu pick to backup all of the selected labels.
Oh, and, since gmail's IMAP doesn't keep track of what you've downloaded/synchronized, you can use the exact same process mechanism from multiple locations. I normally backup to my desktop, but I also occasionally backup to a USB flash drive on my laptop (Portable Thunderbird, FTW!). You can't do this with gmail's pop3 interface (well, not unless you download all messages, all of the time).
I forgot to mention another issue: before you can do a proper offline synchronization, you have to mark each and every folder (label) for offline use. This is tedious, if you have a lot of labels, and also possibly error-prone, if you forget to mark new labels.
Yes, gmail-via-IMAP and Thunderbird are your friends. It's pretty trivial to backup gmail via IMAP: just do a full "offline" synchronization in Thunderbird.
The only real issue comes with restoring your mail: if you tend to use multiple labels with messages, each message will be duplicated for each label. For example: after restoring, if you previously had one message with, say, 5 labels, you'll now have 5 duplicated messages, each one with a different label out of the 5. This is a problem if you've filled your gmail account to any significant level (you may exceed your allowed space). However, if you're not using much of your gmail allocation (I'm under 5%, atm), this is a great (and free!) method.
Note that this only syncronizes gmail messages. Other things, like contacts, calendars, etc. aren't handled by this, although there are other partial and messy methods, like GCALDaemon (http://gcaldaemon.sourceforge.net).
Another slightly different approach is to use Thunderbird to download gmail via IMAP. If you configure the account to never automatically update, you can periodically do a manual offline synchronization, which downloads everything into folders matching the google labels. Once downloaded, you can backup the local account directory that contains everything (to DVD, a remote fileserver, or whatever). The beauty of this is that you don't have to setup any special filtering in Thunderbird -- it just mirrors what's on gmail. If gmail loses all your mail, you just create another IMAP account in Thunderbird, pointing to the same account, and then click-and-drag the backed-up folders, from the first account, to the new account. Thunderbird then repopulates your gmail account, and all is well.
(Well, mostly well. I suspect that messages will be duplicated. Whereas, before, for example, you had one message with two labels, you'll probably end up with two messages, each with a different label. Also, there's a simple trick -- which I've forgotten -- that you need to use to create two accounts in TB that both point to the same gmail IMAP account. Otherwise, TB will refuse to create the second account.)
While power-over-USB can appear to work in practice, you can (often?) violate the USB spec with USB-powered hard drives. Yes, 500mA may seem "enough", but even 2.5" laptop hard drives can draw 1A+ when spinning up. I've burned out some USB ports with cheap USB-powered 2.5" hard disk enclosures (bah, so much for overcurrent detection and protection). That sucks.;-(
I hope the power-over-SATA specs are at least 1.5A.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, I'm a big fan of Evernote, and so I strongly recommend that you check it out, While it's not identical to Google Notebook, the searching and offline capabilities are really nice. The Evernote folks are supposedly working on a Google Notebook to Evernote migration path.
That said, if you don't like Evernote, I think the closest match to Google Notebook is Zoho Notebook, which is part of the Zoho online suite: http://notebook.zoho.com/ . It even has a Firefox plugin, although I've never used it.
Also, if you're paranoid about your personal information, Microsoft's OneNote is a decent standalone note-taking program. I don't think there's any web access, but you should be able to access the same notebook files on multiple PCs, via online storage providers like DropBox or JungleDisk.
Back in June/July, I couldn't find a usable version of either server, player, or workstation, and all I saw on the forums were complaints about the non-existence of an x64-host version. They must have since come out with one that supports an x64 host.
As someone accursed with Vista x64 (native/host OS), I can say:
The citation is there, and points to the WSJ. It mentions that two of the projects with uncertain futures are Google Notebook and Google Audio search.
I agree.
Google Notebook is also the wrong target. While it's useful, I think it's something of a niche feature these days, as other online services seem to be passing it by. Even Google buries it in the "even more" submenu.
If Microsoft really wanted to get noticed, they should have taken the organizational and editing features of OneNote, and combined them with the distributed synchronization and text/image/online/offline searching of Evernote. That would have been a killer product.
I used to be a Google Notebook user, but I'm now a 100% Evernote fan. I took everything that I had in GN, and dumped them into Evernote, which is something like a personal google. Nowadays, I don't use tags. I let the note text and web snippets be the defacto tags, and just do text searches. I even moved all of my del.icio.us bookmarks into Evernote. (Sharing/collaboration can be an issue, as notebooks are either 100% private or 100% public -- you can't just share to a few people.) Evernote also works on PCs, Macs, web browsers, and the iPhone.
The upcoming Firefox 3.1 (December???) will negate much of the speed differences. At that point, Chrome's only real advantage will be the separate-process-per-tab feature.
For me, having separate processes would be nice, but it's the addons that keep me in Firefox. Here, Chrome has an uphill battle: it's not enough to have the ability to have addons. I also need specific addons, like the oft-required Adblock Plus, and lesser-known addons, such as "Better Gmail 2" and "Remember the Milk for Gmail". I actually have a pretty long list, and, as long as Chrome doesn't have most of them, I'm not even going to think about switching.
While this is often true, it doesn't apply to all ISPs.
I have a great local ISP, and they maintain their systems well, including email w/IMAP & a decent spam filter. They even have an MOTD that lists outages. I don't want to make this sound like a advertisement, and so I'll just say that they're one of the top-rated regional ISPs on broadbandreports.com.
They often do know.
Outlook detects gmail's changed address, and displays the from address as:
So, while you can change your gmail "From:" address, outlook neuters it, and makes you look rather unprofessional. Of course, this only affects people who read mail via outlook. However, if you're trying to change your email address, you're likely sending email for business purposes, and business users are likely to use outlook.
Whee.
A Prius is the wrong car for a cross-country trip, if gas mileage is the criteria.
A Prius excels in areas with stop-and-go driving, like city driving (or Los Angeles freeway driving :-). It doesn't do as well in continuous, high-speed driving, like what you would find on a cross-country trip. There are better cars for that.
Yes.
To everyone: Keep in mind that Firefox 3.1 will ship with TraceMonkey, which should produce performance comparable to chrome. So, the only real advantage of chrome is the process-per-tab feature.
For me, that's not a deal-breaker. However, the lack of addons is (and, in particular, the lack of certain specific addons, like Scrapbook, Evernote, Greasemonkey, etc., in addition to the usual ones such as Adblock Plus).
Also, while Chrome is nice and fast, note that a future version of Firefox (3.1?) will have tracemonkey, which speeds up javascript. This might nullify some/much of the speed improvements of Chrome. The early numbers look good, but we'll have to see how it performs on actual pages.
Chrome is interesting, but I'm sticking with FF3 for now -- I have a boatload of FF3 addons that I just need . Also, for the web sites that I use, I don't find Chrome to be significantly faster, and I'm using a middle-of-the-road, aging desktop (Intel E6600, 2.4GHz, 4GB RAM, using 800MHz FSB instead of 1066MHz). However, perhaps I'll reevaluate it next year, once it matures a bit more.
I don't understand the fuss. Like it or not, this seems to be the normal evolution of any "startup company" that becomes a publicly-traded company. Often, when any type of economic difficulties hit, benefits can be lost or reduced, and -- surprise, surprise -- they don't often come back. One big issue is that the investors have, of course, a lot of control, and investors want profit (think Carl Icahn, people). Management doesn't look good if they can't deliver sufficient profit, and so there's incentive to not increase benefits.
I'm not even going to touch the google services issue. Let's just say that some google services appear to be stagnating (minor tweaks don't cut it), and google is opening itself up to a competitor leapfrogging them. (Yeah, with Yahoo in not-so-good shape, Microsoft is probably the only company that could do that .... Bleah.)
Oh, and Fred Saberhagen's Dracula series is good, too, as well as his Empire of the East series. "The Dracula Tape", and "An Old Friend of the Family" are two more of my favorites.
Weber and Flint are two of my favorite authors, but I'm not sure how appropriate they are for pre-teens, due to the hard military Sci-Fi topics. They're probably OK for teens, but I'm not sure if pre-teens would really be interested in them.
And, yes, I'll second and third the recommendation for the Baen Free Library. There are a lot of good books and series there. Note, however, that not all books in a series are there. For example, you really need to have read H Beam Piper's, "Lord Kalvan of Otherwhen" (which is not in the library), before reading "Great King's War", or much will probably be confusing.
I'll second Andre Norton. Forerunner Foray, Time Traders, Witch World, etc. are all excellent. The same goes for old Heinlein (his later stuff is either not as good, inappropriate for children, or both, IMHO).
Most people here are largely recommending more modern Sci-Fi (Eddings, Card, Rowling, etc.), and so I'll suggest some older or lesser-known authors:
Firefox users can alternatively use the WOT extension (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/3456), which rates links from google, yahoo, msn, and other search page results. Note that the link rating is typically done only for selected pages (usually search results), and not all pages, but there's also an icon/button that displays the rating of the current website. The link ratings appear to be done by querying mywot.com's servers, and so there shouldn't be any unnecessary spamming (but see the privacy notice attached to the extension).
Site ratings are done (partially) via a community voting system, and so it is open to abuse. However, I've generally found them to be useful.
No registration is required, unless you want to rate sites.
If that's all you want (and since you'd have to switch OS's anyway), you might want to check out ZFS-in-FreeBSD, as FreeBSD supports more hardware than Solaris. For example, FreeBSD supports PCI IDE controllers (useful for adding old disks to ZFS). Last I heard, Solaris only supported the IDE controllers on a motherboard; PCI IDE controllers did not work.
On a related topic, the lack of "basic" hardware support was also a killer.
Take ZFS, for example. That could have been something that propelled Solaris into the forefront, by allowing old PCs and disk drives to be recycled into a really easy-to-use, fault tolerant array (killer home archive solution, years before drobo came out). Unfortunately, under Solaris, disk drives are (were?) restricted to motherboard built-in IDE interfaces or SATA interfaces. You could not use PCI IDE cards, which basically means that you can't use your old parts -- you basically had to buy new hardware (assuming that you wanted to build a real array, with more than 3-4 hard disks).
Now that FreeBSD has ZFS, there's now one less reason to use Solaris.
Don't get your hopes up, people. Even if you ignore the reports that say that manufacturing bidding is still ongoing, and assume that the "production in May" report is correct, "production in May" is likely test production runs. Add some time for working out the production kinks, and for building up stock, and you're probably looking at a Q3 release date, if things go well. Given the timing, my wild-*** guess is that Apple might be shooting for a "fall, back-to-school" release (August/September, maybe very late July). However, if bidding really is still ongoing, I wouldn't expect a new iPhone before Q4 (but I'd love to be wrong). I don't see Apple making any early announcements, either, due to possible Osbourne effects.
It's not like a hardware manufacturer can press a magic button, and fill up the hundreds of Apple/AT&T stores with new iPhones overnight.
Note that AT&T's 3G coverage appears to have significantly improved since the iPhone was released. Last July, I took a look at AT&T's coverage, and it looked a lot more spotty than it is now. There are still waaaay too many holes for my liking, but the coverage is starting to look minimally acceptable (to me).
I'd guess the real reason, that the iPhone uses EDGE and not 3G, is that the chosen iPhone carrier (AT&T) didn't have sufficient 3G coverage at the iPhone release. If so, then it would have been utterly pointless to release a 3G iPhone if very few people could use it (in California, where Apple's HQ is -- don't know about the East coast or other places).
That's even more error-prone. Most people probably have lots of labels, and writing Thunderbird filters to cover all of the labels would be nasty. I'd hate to test and debug that. Of course, you could just filter into a few labels, but the whole point of using IMAP is to preserve the labels.
With Thunderbird and IMAP, it's just a matter of opening a dialog, scrolling down a list, and checking a box next to each folder (label) name. However, if you have lots of labels, that's a lot of clicking. I backup all labels, except for spam (of course).
Once everything's set up, it's just one menu pick to backup all of the selected labels.
Oh, and, since gmail's IMAP doesn't keep track of what you've downloaded/synchronized, you can use the exact same process mechanism from multiple locations. I normally backup to my desktop, but I also occasionally backup to a USB flash drive on my laptop (Portable Thunderbird, FTW!). You can't do this with gmail's pop3 interface (well, not unless you download all messages, all of the time).
I forgot to mention another issue: before you can do a proper offline synchronization, you have to mark each and every folder (label) for offline use. This is tedious, if you have a lot of labels, and also possibly error-prone, if you forget to mark new labels.
Yes, gmail-via-IMAP and Thunderbird are your friends. It's pretty trivial to backup gmail via IMAP: just do a full "offline" synchronization in Thunderbird.
The only real issue comes with restoring your mail: if you tend to use multiple labels with messages, each message will be duplicated for each label. For example: after restoring, if you previously had one message with, say, 5 labels, you'll now have 5 duplicated messages, each one with a different label out of the 5. This is a problem if you've filled your gmail account to any significant level (you may exceed your allowed space). However, if you're not using much of your gmail allocation (I'm under 5%, atm), this is a great (and free!) method.
Note that this only syncronizes gmail messages. Other things, like contacts, calendars, etc. aren't handled by this, although there are other partial and messy methods, like GCALDaemon (http://gcaldaemon.sourceforge.net).
Another slightly different approach is to use Thunderbird to download gmail via IMAP. If you configure the account to never automatically update, you can periodically do a manual offline synchronization, which downloads everything into folders matching the google labels. Once downloaded, you can backup the local account directory that contains everything (to DVD, a remote fileserver, or whatever). The beauty of this is that you don't have to setup any special filtering in Thunderbird -- it just mirrors what's on gmail. If gmail loses all your mail, you just create another IMAP account in Thunderbird, pointing to the same account, and then click-and-drag the backed-up folders, from the first account, to the new account. Thunderbird then repopulates your gmail account, and all is well.
(Well, mostly well. I suspect that messages will be duplicated. Whereas, before, for example, you had one message with two labels, you'll probably end up with two messages, each with a different label. Also, there's a simple trick -- which I've forgotten -- that you need to use to create two accounts in TB that both point to the same gmail IMAP account. Otherwise, TB will refuse to create the second account.)
I hope the power-over-SATA specs are at least 1.5A.