Google Drive And Cloud Storage

I couldn't resist writing my own something about Google Drive today. Cloud storage is hot this week, and the foreseeable future. Google didn't get it right out of the gate, most don't. But I can tell you that Google Drive will become common cloud storage for a lot of people.

Dropbox is the 800 pound gorilla in cloud storage for consumers, and doesn't have a lot to worry about at the moment. But the one thing that keeps cloud storage services like Dropbox, SugarSync and Google Drive from really getting all my content is file size. Limit me to a couple hundred MB or less and I just can't fully integrate your service. I'd even pay for the large storage service if you would up the file size.

* I know some services will allow for larger files with premium accounts. *

Several of the services allow for any size file uploads using the desktop, and that's fine, but I don't use a desktop all the time. In fact I'm using one less and less. There is still a lot of room for improvement, and I know it's coming. I hope. Security and privacy still remains an issue with most services, mainly because the terms of service or use state the service has access to your data and can do what ever they want with it. You may not like this, but don't let that deter you.

Photo courtesy of sebastiankippe

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Microsoft SkyDrive Cloud Storage Gunning For Dropbox

Microsoft released an update to their SkyDrive product, and they did its in a big way. This is a serious challenge to Dropbox, with the addition of Mac and Windows native app, and mobile apps for iOS and Windows Phone. But not Android mobile, which is a shame, because it would have been just as easy to write an Android client at the same time.

This is a big win for those who already have a SkyDrive account, you can be grandfathered into a 25GB plan, everyone else will be offered a 7GB plan. I've had my SkyDrive account for years but there hasn't been any integration with the desktop (not Mac anyway), and no mobile use until just recently.

SkyDrive is available everywhere I travel; laptop and mobile.

There are a few quirky things about the interface. The layout isn't like Windows Explorer, or Mac Finder. Files and folders are represented by big blocky icons, no detail list. And even weirder was they stuck the mechanism to change from large icons to small icons in the Pull Down process to refresh the screen.

Why do I think this is a serious player? Because aside from Android, which I'm sure is on the way, SkyDrive now integrates with all your systems, and you get more space. Microsoft says a study they did indicates most user have less than 7GB of data stored in the cloud, and that may be true, but the the big reason I don't have as much as I want in the cloud, is the file size limitation. I would push video files to the the cloud drives if most didn't limit to 100MB or less. That's a service imposed limit, not a user issue.

Limitations aside, 25GB is a lot of space, and I intend on using it, all of it. Get a SkyDrive and software here.

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Running Ubuntu 11 On The iPad 2

The last OS I'm running on the iPad 2 is Ubuntu 11 using the Parallels app. Everything went well, and loaded fast. Might use it often.

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Running Windows 8 On The iPad 2

Next experiment was running Windows 8 Community Edition on the iPad with the Parallels app. This wasn't nearly as easy as i thout it would be. All the problems had to do with Windows new Metro feature. I tried several times to figure how to turn it off (none of the examples found through Google worked.)

I can't say I'm a big fan of Windows 8, at least until I spend more time learning the new features.

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Running Windows 7 On The iPad 2

More of a novelty than really functional, I managed to get Windows 7 running in the Parallels iPad app. As you can see in this image I am running Visual Studio 2010. Very cool.

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