Tim Wilson
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COW Coins
Forum Replies Created
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Since we’re talking about mail, I’ll put in another plug for Gmail. I’ve had an account for years, and stopped using it because of the overwhelming amount of spam hitting my inbox – I had never seen anything like it. Well, now, they’re the BEST at it I’ve encountered. Ditto on false filtering – I can’t remember the last time it happened.
One of the former dealbreakers for me is that you had a gmail return address – not required anymore. You can use your own domain in one of two ways. If you want a simple bounce – goes from your domain to Google’s – they still do a “sent by” goog to avoid spam filters – and again, I’ve never had an email sent this way hit a spam filter, whereas it happened now and again with my straight domain sends.
In the past few months, they’ve added a reverse bounce feature – use Google as your email client, but use your own server. That is, your gmail won’t touch Google’s outbound mail server at all – it will use the web interface to send to, and through, YOUR email server. Unless they open the header, nobody will ever know that Google is involved.
There are a ton of other advantages that fall into the “how did I ever live without this” category for me, especially once you start adding some of the goodies from the Google Labs, accessible in the upper right corner of the page.
Which is to say, yes, Gmail is out of beta, and feels like it. The Google labs stuff is all in beta, but adds immensely to my overall productivity – and enjoyment – of Gmail, with no issues so far.
Highly recommended.
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[Steve Wargo] “Has anyone ever seen an actual person who represents Google?”
Actually, there are many people working at Google here in the Cow. Several of them publicly identify themselves, so they’re not that hard to find.
It turns out that Google does a TON of in-house video production. We’ve been linking to some of it in recent threads. They also do a huge number of live events, almost all of which incorporate video in one way or another.
In other words, they come to the Cow for the same reason the rest of you do.
Minus the lamentations about how quickly the market is changing.
🙂
[Steve Wargo] “…Google might actually be the government and they just got around to 1984.”
There’s a difference. Government wants to watch everyone for social management purposes. Google wants to watch you to feed you precisely-targeted text ads. I’ll let you decide which is more sinister.
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[Brendan Coots] “I can see it being a pretty major component of future business models though.”
Okay, I’m curious – what do you have in mind?
thx,
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We’ve been talking about the Google-verse quite a bit here in the Business forum. What are you seeing that looks so cool?
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[Mark Suszko] “a lighting problem that I answered three ways, the final part of that was “but really, you solve that particular lighting problem in the script by re-writing, before you go out, because a pencil and paper costs way less”
Perfect example of the value of the Google questions, and the head-slapping simplicity of the answers. Resumes, reels and genius are a dime a dozen. You can’t bluff clear thinking. You either have it or you don’t.
In Google’s case, the questions HAVE to be kind of abstract, because none of the problems they need to solve existed when you were in school. They’ve already solved THOSE problems. And Google’s idea of a good solution is one that’s head-slappingly simple.
Not one of the questions had anything to do with higher mathematics, or science, or computers. They assume you know that stuff. Their questions are looking for the exact opposite. How much would you charge to wash every window in Seattle? “Ten bucks apiece” is a better answer than one that starts by counting windows. Here’s how I’d summarize the goal that led to that question:
Job title: Product manager.
Job description: Find small answers to big problems.My favorite was “explain a database your 8 year old nephew in 3 sentences.” Databases are pretty complicated things. They can be almost anything, almost any size. Yet the answer in the article was only TWO sentences long. Can you describe your job that well, that succinctly, to anyone?
Job title: Product Manager.
Job description: Find short descriptions to accommodate infinite variations, in a way that a child can understand.(Just for fun, compare these two web pages: Yahoo.com and Google.com. Meditate on these things.)
I also love the question, how many times per day do a clock’s hands cross, for a product manager. Product management sounds kind of glamorous, like you get to be imaginative and play with the stuff you make. Maybe 5% of the time. The rest of the time, you need to pay attention to stupid stuff. If you don’t have the wits about you to hear a question like this, then stand up and go to the whiteboard and start drawing it out, you really, truly have no prayer, and Google would be idiots to hire you.
Job title: Product manager.
Job description: Don’t bluff. Don’t be intimidated. Use a pencil if you have to.The question about the shape of manhole covers – they’re round so that they don’t fall in the hole – was for Software Engineers! It wasn’t a math question. Any engineer can do math.
Job title: Software engineer.
Job description: Solve problems that math can’t.That’s the thing. Google gets hundreds of thousands of resumes for every job. Geniuses are a dime a dozen. How do you sort them? By getting people to do what you need them to do, on the spot, because that’s how you’re going to need them to do it. Right now. No preparation other than being able to think on your feet.
Finding questions like these, and finding people who enjoy GETTING questions like these, is how you go from zero to Google in ten years. Not math. Not science. Not computers.
Kind of the opposite. THAT’s genius.
The bigger the problem, the smaller the solution. Do that, and write your own ticket.
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There’s a GREAT thread on this, and how to set up a VPN network for free on OS X in the SAN forum. Here it is.
Zelin started it – as he so often does. Hey Bob, why were you needing VPN?
tw
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[Chris Blair] “The school system decided to put their grading system onto the cloud.”
Not all clouds are created equal! The ultimate responsibility for the safety of the data was an IT whiz in the local district (not being sarcastic), and the drives they could afford.
My recommendation: let go and let Google.
Although, it turns out that Google falls offline now and again, especially Gmail — not that I’ve ever heard stories of anything being lost.
But have you EVER seen Amazon offline, for even a second? One of the services I didn’t mention is Amazon’s, called Jungle Disk. It is oriented toward automatic sync and backup, and is quite cheap – 15 cents per gig per month, with the first 5 gigs free. If you go in through Rackhost, there’s not even a charge for bandwyidth. Amazon’s direct price includes small charges for uploads, downloads and requests, but still well within the reach of most individuals and any small businesses.
The more I think about it, the more I think of “the cloud” referring to the scale of the infrastructure as much as it does its networked nature. If one guy you know is managing it, it’s not a cloud. It’s a network, subject to human frailty in ways that Google, Amazon and Microsoft are not.
For school records, I’m liking the look of Msft Office, where not only the spreadsheet, but the actual Excel document lives online, with all changes tracked, comments added, etc. Maybe it’s a database, but the idea is the same – don’t manage the network yourself.
[Chris Blair] “Consumers would have to first understand it, and second believe there are real benefits either through convenience or time and money saved”
I think that customers are way, WAY ahead of business on this one…not that business isn’t catching up fast. Blackberries have been more important than laptops for years, and getting more so. When you hear “netbook” for consumers, though, think iPhone and other smart phones (of which iPhone still has only around 10% market share….for now…) – the range of things people do there is amazing. They all offer sync with desktops – and my experience was that, after I loaded music from desktop on to my phone, ALL the rest of the sync was from the juicy stuff I gathered on my phone, pushing it to the desktop where I could deal with it later…and often dealt with it on my phone anyway.
The trick is to explain as little as possible. “There’s an app for that” isn’t just slick – it’s actually more helpful than trying to explain whether the “phone” is a mac or a pc – it’s a phone and it has apps.
No review and approval system is self-explanatory. I think the idea of “intuitive” computing is delusional, a craven, cynical lie. I promise that nobody would have figured out the multi-touch pad without a couple of explanations, and a couple of wobbly tries — and I guarantee that nobody you know was asking for a laptop touch pad that let them use three fingers to click. I don’t even remember what happens when I click with three fingers – but I sure as heck remember that there are now little movies in the Mac System Preference panel for the touchpad to explain ONCE AGAIN how to use it. But once you get the hang of it, it’s mondo slick.
We are all paying the price for early adoption now…but we always do, don’t we? 🙂
tw
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Nice article about this in PC Week: “Underwhelmed by Chrome OS? That’s Kinda The Point.”
One big difference from dumb terminals is that they’re portable. They’re also not dumb – they have processing power and local storage, and custom-designed workflows that combine offline and online. For example, Google Gears caches offline versions of Mail, Calender, and Contacts, and syncs them when online.Apple does something similar with MobileMe. Microsoft Live Office allows collaboration even among machines that don’t have Office installed, but if you DO have it installed, allows you to work more quickly with a local copy, then sync to the shared version in the 2GB of free storage that comes with each project.
Not to say that there’s no “terminal” aspect to a local client. But it’s the difference between a single node on a local network, and an (approaching) infinite number of nodes, clients AND networks, AND locations.
As the article in PC Week notes, “For Chrome OS, ‘unimpressive’ is practically a compliment.”
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Tim Wilson
Creative Cow Magazine!My Blog: “Is this thing on? Oh it’s on!”
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The app I mention in my first post, SimplifyMedia isn’t free anymore – now $6. And while it has a desktop client, its main use is as a very cool way to connect to your desktop iTunes library via your iPhone/iPod. Worth the dough if that’s what you want it to do.
However, there’s a free alternative, using Winamp, called Winamp Remote. Mac users may well not know WinAmp – check it out. There’s a pro version that includes some features that iTunes includes for free, but has a bunch of free features that iTunes doesn’t including thousands of plug-ins, some quite wonderful.
One of the cool free features is the aforementioned Winamp Remote. It sets up incredibly fast – in less time than it will take you to read this sentence, it installed, scanned my entire drive for music, and made it available from any browser, anywhere. Seriously, you won’t believe how well and how quickly this works.
Now, the thing is, this is more about the network than the cloud. There are a number of free, cloud-based services for streaming your own media – my current favorite is at Lala.com – but you have to upload your music to it! A good idea, but not for a huge library. Still, not a bad way to load up what you really NEED to have in the cloud.
I’m rambling, but the point is that I’m keeping less and less EVERYTHING locally, or solely locally, and loving it.
tw
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[Ron Lindeboom] “Good post, Tim. As ever, I am proud to be your friend.”
Likewise, my man.
The peeps should know that Ron has been talking to me about the cloud for a long time, and I’ve been dragging my feet. The more I think about it, though, and the more I start to explore there, the more I find myself being swept away. Very provocative stuff.