Well, this has been a very, very long time in the making. Google has finally unveiled its big Dropbox competitor: Google Drive. You start with 5GB for free, and you can go all the way to 1TB for $50 per month. This is a big deal for many (if you were to use rumouring as a gauge), but all I can think of is this: why on earth would you entrust your files to a company - any company - whose sole interest is extracting money from you, and who, to boot, is subject to crazy American laws?

So, we'll be getting our hands on the Windows 8 Release Preview in the first week of June. I'm interested in what they've done to improve the Metro experience for boring old mouse and keyboard users, and if they've managed to include applications that work (as opposed to buggy preview applications).

"The increase is a sign that the search engine can no longer afford to operate in a Silicon Valley vacuum. For years, Google had a reputation for indifference inside the Beltway. It took Google until May 2005 to set up a presence in Washington and even then, its headquarters consisted of a one-man lobbying shop in suburban Maryland." Do the Americans among you just accept this? Is this normal? Why aren't you guys turning to the streets when your country is quite clearly being bought left and right? I mean, I'm sure this happens everywhere, but on this scale? Gives me the creeps.

Adam Fields and Perry Metzger have been investigating the serious performance issues people are experiencing with Lion. "Frequent beachballs, general overall slowness and poor UI responsivness, specific and drastic slowdowns on every Time Machine run, high memory utilization in Safari Web Content, mds, and kernel_task processes, large numbers of page outs even with a good deal of available RAM, and high amounts of RAM marked as inactive which is not readily freed back to other applications, with page outs favored." Apparently the issue is that the "virtual memory manager is bad at managing which pages should be freed from the inactive state and which ones should be paged out to disk". I won't make myself popular with a certain part of our readership, but really, is this considered a new problem? Mac OS X has always had terrible memory management, and where Windows has continuously become better at it, Mac OS X seems to have been stagnant and even getting worse. This is what happens when the company earns 2/3s of its revenue somewhere else.

"Reports are coming in from around the Internet that the Gmail redesign, which we were previously able to stave off with 'revert to the old look temporarily', is now forcing itself upon us. I too have succumbed to the new design, and have been forced to find ways to cope. Here's what I did to make it semi-bearable." The Gmail redesign has been the biggest whine-a-thon in the history of the web ('cope'? Bearable'?). For what it's worth, the Gmail redesign has been a godsend for me - the new Gmail is beautiful, understated, and elegant. I love it. I guess the old adage still goes: the satisfied people don't take to the web.

This is getting repetitive, but girl scout, red, etc. etc. "Apple CEO Tim Cook and Valve head Gabe Newell did not actually meet last week as rumored, according to a new podcast interview with Newell." You don't say. Pattern recognition, folks.