Let me try to paste and post the following while I have a connection…
The “free Public Access” network doesn’t seem to be working. As I type that, a guy from Google is telling us that, when he goes somewhere and can’t get web access, he gets pissed off. His point is that, five years ago, he was pleased when he could connect. Well, I’m not pleased.
He’s talking about barriers to use of cloud applications, and of course asserting that connectivity is far less of a problem. Now he’s talking about offline access. Well, I started trying to use Google Docs/Gears to write this, but that didn’t work. So here I am in the old warhorse, MS Notepad.
He also addressed security. He emphasized the dangers of data being kept on laptops, which are often stolen. Isn’t it more secure, he asked, to keep data in a cloud managed by Google?
I just found out about another network. It’s so slow that I suspect many others found out about it at the same time. I’m typing this as I wait for the WordPress Write page, having given up on my nice rich Google start page.