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There is lots of hype and speculation that Google are developing their own OS that will live and breath on-line and not need anyone else’s OS to work … but whilst that work is done in relative secrecy, they do continue to quietly roll out enhancements … many Google Mail users will soon be unaware that their Gmail account has automatically upgraded to version 2.0. If you see OLD VERSION as a link at the top, then you have been upgraded. Faster, leaner, more features – are the promises. I am still digging to find out exactly what that means. All I know is that I love my Google mail. Since living in the UK we have not used anything else for personal email, and it works brilliantly for us. We can get our email anywhere we are connected, both be using it at the same time in different places, chat to our kids, see who else is on-line, all within the email client – and that is just … nice.
I loved this video out by Google on how they fight spam on behalf of all sensible people.*
* people who use gmail as their primary source of email of course
Now that is an interesting question. The British think that the largest non-military IT project in the world involves the NHS – National Health Service. There is a long-term project to move completely away from paper-based records to electronic. Things like having your x-rays and scans delivered to your doctor before you can walk from the imaging room to the consultation room, or having your medication script automatically available to the pharmacy filling the prescription, and telling your bank to grab the £6 fee for meds before you have even reached for your Maestro card.
No doubt the Union of British Paper Pushers will start a go-slow when this project gets into test phases. Or perhaps they are already secretly practising their industrial action at Surgeries near you? I think they should integrate this project with the gazillions of video cameras around UK towns. Their face-recognition software could catch out the person who limps into the doctor claiming a work accident, because the doctor already has video of them skipping down the street yesterday, or walking quite happily home from the pub last night.
The Americans think they have the #1 project though, with some kind of RFID (that’s tiny little electronic tags) all the way along their common border with Mexico, to stop illegals coming over and starting up even more Taco Bells. Whilst Californians might really have this love-hate relationship with the illegals (love the lifestyle the cheap labour brings, hate the idea of a Spanish speaking Governor so much that they chose Austrian instead) the top money in the US is probably some highly secret military application. Imagine the way Africa and Eastern Europe might develop with the kind of money that the West invests in new and exciting ways to kill each other more humanely.
My money is on neither – it is on Google’s world domination plans. Rumours of a Google phone, Google operating system, Google online apps that dispense with the need for Microsoft … abound these days. Yep, somewhere in Google’s name or logo or the full names of their founders, I am sure we can ‘discover’ something, somehow, that sort of resembles 666.
Today is the official 9th birthday of Google – congratulations! It is amazing how fast and how far widespread Google Inc. has become in less than a decade. I wonder what they will do for the big birthday next year? Buy Microsoft? Launch Google OS? Start a global mobile phone company?
This is a test of posting to the blog by creating a new document in Google Docs and then publishing direct to the blog from within Google Docs. There should be a picture of an elephant here too! I searched for the photo using Google’s image search, and simply copied and pasted the photo into this post. So it does help avoid the usual having to save a photo to my desktop, and then using Blogger’s upload tool to get the picture into the post. Only one criticism – I manage several blogs under my Blogger account, and the Google Docs posting option does not let me choose which blog gets posted to.
It works, and is very easy! Well done Google. Why an elephant? Our favourite animal – we both agree that nothing is finer than sitting on a Kariba houseboat watching the ellies. Not too many of them around here in West Sussex. (Picture credit: National Geographic)
Although I am only getting to know Picasa 2, it is a great bit of software from the Google boys and girls! Especially for adding pics to blogs. If you haven’t got it, go get! Remember that version 1 must be uninstalled first or you will have two versions running and all that indexing of all your digital media content. Can I say it again, this is a great piece of software!
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