Google’s GDrive Could Replace your Hard Disk

Taking cloud computing to a new level, Gmail is soon going to launch ‘GDrive’, a long-rumored online storage for its users.

GDrive would work as an online hard disk and could essentially work as a syncing device that will periodically update itself with the activities that take place on a computer, the Google Operating System has discovered.

Also discovered in a Google Apps CSS file is that there is reportedly an update for Google Docs on the way that would include a desktop client for syncing files with GDrive.

Since this drive will allow users to save their data online, users will be able to access their data from any computer in the world, as long as it is connected to an internet connection.

In fact, if you take Google provisions seriously, you’ve probably already shifted your photograph and document base to atleast one of the Google services that work as great archiving hubs. However, space restriction and reliability could be a user’s concern while depending on the Google servers to save their precious data.

The GDrive could also partially replace the physical hard disk that a user needs to select an operating system (OS) for usage — that is, after the initial booting. Google’s online hard drive will merge all of Google’s web based applications and make them available together.

The GDrive is expected to be launched in 2009.

 

Google maps out Chrome’s RSS support

Google has unveiled its plans to let Chrome subscribe to RSS and Atom feeds.

(Credit: Google)

My biggest day-to-day gripe about Chrome is its missing support for automatic discovery of Web pages that offer RSS or other subscription services. But Google now has published a document detailing how it plans to address that weakness, though.

“We will autodetect RSS and Atom feeds using the standard autodiscovery tags,” according to the developer document about Chrome support for RSS and Atom, a similar technology for letting people sign up for update “feeds” such as new blog postings. “When a feed is available for a page, we will display an RSS icon in the address bar.”

Firefox shows the standard orange feed icon in its address bar when it encounters a site that has offers a feed; clicking it lets a person subscribe to the feed with a Web service such as Bloglines, My Yahoo, or Google Reader. Internet Explorer lets people subscribe to the feed using itself as the feed-reading software, an approach I dislike.

 

Google’s mock-up of the Chrome page used to subscribe to RSS or Atom feeds.

(Credit: Google)

 

Though I switched to Chrome by default, I still use Firefox when I want to subscribe to a feed when there’s no explicit or obvious option to do so on the Web page itself. Sometimes I seek out a feed, but with Chrome, there’s often not even an icon to suggest I might want to even if I wasn’t planning on it.

Chrome’s subscription mechanism works as follows: when a person clicks on the feed link, Chrome will display a browser-formatted version of the content. Above the content is a “subscribe now” button with a drop-down menu that lets a person select a specific feed reader.

“A newly added feed reader becomes the default selected option the next time a feed is previewed,” the document said.

The approach looks good to me, but there’s no indication about when it will come to fruition. Google also showed a similar planning document for Chrome extensions, but version 1.0 has been released and there’s still no way to use AdBlock Plus or Roboform, the two Firefox extensions I hear the most requests for in Chrome.

Google continues with its approach of release early and iterate often, though. On Tuesday evening, it released a new developer version of Chrome, 1.0.154.39.

The new version fixes a spate of bugs, including a couple that hampered use of Microsoft’s Hotmail and the activation of the F1 function key to show Google’s Chrome help site.

 

Google launches App Engine dashboard

Google on Tuesday announced a dashboard to detail system status for the Google App Engine.

The move is the latest by a cloud provider to improve transparency in the event of an outage.

On the Google App Engine blog, the company said that it has launched the App Engine system status site and a quota dashboard to detail items like bandwidth usage and CPU. Google said it also plans a billing dashboard to preview what happens if you go beyond those quotas.

Here’s a look at the dashboard:

 

(Credit: Google)

 

Google Is Developing Artificial Intelligence

Co-founder Larry Page announced that Google is in the development stages of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and he claims the realization may not be far off.

Sci-Fi movies immediately come to mind and initial reactions may be curiosity-piqued-with-incredulity. However, some are very alarmed by this announcement calling into question the wisdom of such a move, in light of the moral and ethical questions and implications this advancement raises.

Yep, you read that right, Google is trying to build real AI. The worlds most dominant online company, with the largest conglomeration of computing power the world has ever seen, is trying to build artificial intelligence, and according to Page it isn’t that far away either. … true artificial intelligence not only has serious ethical and moral implications, self aware intelligence may also not be controllable, after all it thinks for itself and makes decisions based on that reasoning, as we all do.