Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Gmail and Drive - a new way to send files

gmailblog.blogspot.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 97 posts

Re: Gmail and Drive - a new way to send files

#61

Post by hurstdog »

munin wrote: post #14
notatoad wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Attachment size limits aren't there just to fuck with you. Sending large files around between web clients is okay, but if you send a large file to an outlook user they're going to have to sit there waiting for it to download before the rest of their email comes in. And then it's going to make their PST file exceed the maximum PST file size, which in a poorly managed system (i.e. most personal computers) is going to c…

Oh sure. However, it also puts a lot of load / strain on servers that Google doesn't want to run (SMTP, IMAP, etc). The way the post is written makes it sound like Google has figured out how to tame some natural force to allow us to have big e-mail attachments, while all along the limit was set by Google itself. I really don't think that Google cares about Outlook users (why should they). Somewhat unrelated, I think…

I'm not sure why you're getting those quota errors, but I can assure you that we're not trying to pressure people to stop using SMTP and IMAP.

If you post on the forums, some user support folks should be able to help you out and escalate to engineering if they find you're hitting a bug.

Sorry for the issues you're seeing.

Re: Gmail and Drive - a new way to send files

#62

Post by WayneDB »

zacharycohn wrote: post #25
WayneDB wrote: post #21

I never liked the idea of hosting my own files on someone else's server (Dropbox) or sending them through a middle-man. That's why i just run my own "cloud" on my own premises. If I want to give someone access to a file, I just throw it on my Synology DiskStation and the receiver can get at it via FTP or HTTP client.

That's not a "cloud," that's just a server. There's an important difference, and people need to stop using them interchangeably.

Haha, yeah that was kind of a joke and it's why I put the word "cloud" in quotes :)

(However if I own a couple/few of these boxes at different sites and they all sync up to store things redundantly then the line is blurred just a bit. The Synology devices are certainly capable of that.)

Re: Gmail and Drive - a new way to send files

#63

Post by anigbrowl »

chimeracoder wrote: post #23
guelo wrote: post #15

Totally off topic but blogspot is just awful. Why does everything have to be a complicated buggy JavaScript app? There's nothing wrong with serving up good ol HTML pages, especially for simple text and images content like a blog.

I despise this new trend, and it kills me that Google seems to be embracing it more and more. Google Groups is the worst offender for me - it completely breaks my browser's keybindings for going backwards, so every time I'm, eg. searching Googling a bug and open a mailing list archive to find an answer to a bug, I inevitably end up collapsing the thread each and every time, when what I really want is just to go back…

I totally agree. Not only does it disrupt bindings and make pages slow to load, but at least once a day Chrome now freezes when I do a Google search - the results page loads, but I can't click on anything and if I scroll down the bottom of the page hasn't been rendered at all. Nothing for it but to reboot Chrome 3 times (it dies silently the first two).

I still love Google overall (so yay on mailing big files and yay on Gmail generally), but the endless feature creep is a weakness, not a strength.

Re: Gmail and Drive - a new way to send files

#64

Post by WayneDB »

kamjam wrote: post #56
WayneDB wrote: post #21

I never liked the idea of hosting my own files on someone else's server (Dropbox) or sending them through a middle-man. That's why i just run my own "cloud" on my own premises. If I want to give someone access to a file, I just throw it on my Synology DiskStation and the receiver can get at it via FTP or HTTP client.

Sounds like an awful lot of work finding a problem which there are easier solution. What exactly do you not like about using Dropbox? A trust issue? There are certain things I do host within my own ftp server, but I just use my web host which I have 10GB of disk space but am only using maybe 10 meg for my personal site. I wouldn't go to the extent of my own server unless it was a real business requirement, I'd be fin…

The Synology was purchased primarily to store our large collection of media files. It arrived, I inserted my hard drives, plugged it into the LAN and booted it up. I don't consider this as part of the setup for sharing.

The sharing features were then enabled with a few clicks on the appliance's locally hosted (ExtJS) web application. This step was much less work than going around to every PC in the home and office installing Dropbox.

Usage-wise, I find it to be less work to share something via my Synology than with Dropbox, particularly because A) I don't need any special software to share something from any computer in the world, B) most of the time my files arrive instantly and C) there are no limits to the size of files that I can share. When I was still using Dropbox, I'd hit that limit often enough to make it a PITA to use.

Re: Gmail and Drive - a new way to send files

#65

Post by pavel_lishin »

majorlazer wrote: post #20
guelo wrote: post #15

Totally off topic but blogspot is just awful. Why does everything have to be a complicated buggy JavaScript app? There's nothing wrong with serving up good ol HTML pages, especially for simple text and images content like a blog.

I actually really like it. What don't you like about it?

Completely and totally breaks instapaper.

Re: Gmail and Drive - a new way to send files

#66

Post by [deleted] »

mtgx wrote: post #55
guelo wrote: post #15

Totally off topic but blogspot is just awful. Why does everything have to be a complicated buggy JavaScript app? There's nothing wrong with serving up good ol HTML pages, especially for simple text and images content like a blog.

They would be better off using Google+ for these announcements anyway. It looks cleaner, they can get a lot of feedback in comments, and they get to further promote Google+, too, as it gets more people used to it.

[deleted]

Re: Gmail and Drive - a new way to send files

#67

Post by threedaymonk »

guelo wrote: post #15

Totally off topic but blogspot is just awful. Why does everything have to be a complicated buggy JavaScript app? There's nothing wrong with serving up good ol HTML pages, especially for simple text and images content like a blog.

In a discussion about this at work a few months back, someone suggested to me that part of Google's motivation might be to increase the cost of entry for search competitors. No longer can you just scrape a page and index it: not one of the 22 KB served at that URL actually contains the text of the page. To scrape one of those awful pages, you need to JavaScript interpreter and a DOM - a headless browser, really. Unless you're Google: they can just index the back-end directly

I'm not entirely convinced, but I've heard worse conspiracy theories that turned out to be true.

Re: Gmail and Drive - a new way to send files

#68

Post by threedaymonk »

hackmiester wrote: post #40
guelo wrote: post #15

Totally off topic but blogspot is just awful. Why does everything have to be a complicated buggy JavaScript app? There's nothing wrong with serving up good ol HTML pages, especially for simple text and images content like a blog.

I can't scroll down with the space bar. This makes me unreasonably angry.

Pff … just use your mouse to scroll!

/me moves cursor over to the scroll bar only to be intercepted by a pop-up menu containing a logo, helpfully labelled "Logo".

Oh.

Re: Gmail and Drive - a new way to send files

#69

Post by jxi »

danbarker wrote: post #12

I've been paying for Google Drive for several months because I really, really want it to work, but it's actually kinda useless as it causes constant instability and 120%+ CPU load on my 2012 Macbook Pro. This means that I frequently close the application down, so it's not actually covering me and if I lost my computer, the most recent files probably wouldn't be covered. There's been an open issue about this in the su…

Yea, the native clients suck, but then again Google was never known for making solid desktop apps (it's not really in their DNA after all). I have similar experiences as you, so I use it purely from my web browser now. The website has gotten more functional and easy to use lately.

Re: Gmail and Drive - a new way to send files

#70

Post by snogglethorpe »

hackmiester wrote: post #40
guelo wrote: post #15

Totally off topic but blogspot is just awful. Why does everything have to be a complicated buggy JavaScript app? There's nothing wrong with serving up good ol HTML pages, especially for simple text and images content like a blog.

I can't scroll down with the space bar. This makes me unreasonably angry.

hmmm, scrolling-with-space works for me...

You have to make sure the article body has the keyboard focus first though (e.g. by clicking somewhere on the text); it would be nice if they'd somehow arrange for that to happen by default...

Post reply on HN