GOOGLE and cloud computing

[JohnWxy]

Whereas it used to be that when you editted a spreadsheet file, you had to save it to your HD and then upload to your web-site - Google now enables you to create, edit and save changes to spread-sheet files as well as other data sets (e.g formatted with html) and save them directly on their servers.

Also, you can upload a file with the option of converting it to Google's own Documents software. Once converted the document can be editted online.

(cf. Google documents):

Convert documents - up to 500KB per file:
Microsoft Word (.doc, .docx), OpenDocument text (.odt), StarOffice text (.sxw)
Rich text (.rtf), Plain text (.txt), HTML (.htm, .html)

Convert presentations - up to 10MB per file:
Microsoft PowerPoint (.ppt, .pps)

Convert spreadsheets - up to 1MB per file:
Microsoft Excel (.xls, .xlsx) files, OpenDocument spreadsheets (.ods).
Comma-separated values (.csv)

Convert text from PDF or image files - up to 2M per file:
Photos, scanned documents, screenshots, etc (.jpg, .gif, .png)
PDF files (.pdf)

Graphics are not converted — only text. For the best results, start with high-resolution image files

Very Nice!

[customerserviceguy]

1. I just have to wonder how they plan to discreetly mine the documents

They're not giving anything away for free, you know...

Same thing with all those social networking sites.

[Dennis Donovan]

2. Yep... my thoughts exactly...

:thumbsup:

[geckosfeet]

5. Yes. And posting on DU is so very very private.

[customerserviceguy]

6. Admittedly

We're not as anonymous as we might think we are here, but if I had to match up the motives of Google, Facebook, and DU, I guess I'd naively state that DU had the purest ones.

[geckosfeet]

7. Perhaps. But data is data. And google has bots that visit DU. So although

the owners of DU may not be sifting through server info, the bot's are. And what is more concerning, to me anyway, is that every security agency in existence is doing the same thing in a more parasitic way.

I guess that I would give Google more of a pass since they provide many many free services and open source programs. The covert data miners take and take and provide no benefit - I have less respect for that.

[wtmusic]

3. Great - let's give one corporation access to all of our personal data...

they already have photos of us from the air and the street.

I'm sure they would never misuse power like that.

[JohnWxy]

4. well, I can't speak for any others, but I don't have personal data in the files on my web-site.

Also, actually, Google can look at files you upload to your web-site just as easily as those you create in Google Docs. Where people have been putting personal data is on Facebook and the other one which I can't remember...oh yeah, MySpace.

[tt_chatter]

8. ...

interesting