Boot up: Google+ -disks, Apple's patent poker, the tablet 'slowdown' and more

When you're the stronger player, the cards almost don't matter. Photograph: Alamy

A burst of 8 links for you to chew over, as picked by the Technology team.

Also - tell us how you like the slightly tweaked look. Better? Worse? (Here's how it looked on Friday.)

"Many Google+ users saw a massive amount of notification email messages from the service this afternoon, and now Google's head of social, Vic Gundotra, has an explanation. "'For about 80 minutes we ran out of disk space on the service that keeps track of notifications,' Gundotra wrote on Google+ tonight. 'Hence our system continued to try sending notifications. Over, and over again. Yikes.'"
If you needed any confirmation that this is a rushed, half-baked product launch, then this is it. Google+ may have grown massively beyond expectations, but disk space is pretty cheap down Google way. And available - if you plan for it.

Good piece looking at the play-by-play of the mobile patents battle from Nortel.

"It was a theme picked up by at least eight other news outlets, including VentureBeat ("Tablet sales slow"), The Loop ("'media tablet' market isn't as strong as previously thought") and Forbes ("Sales Dip Hints Media Tablets Won't Replace PCs Any Time Soon").
"The source for all these pessimist headlines? An IDC report that the total number of tablet computers shipped into sales channels in Q1 2011 was 7.2 million. "At first that struck me as absurd, given that Apple (AAPL) alone is expected to report next week that it sold a good deal more than 7.2 million iPads last quarter. "Then I took a second look at IDC's report. What I missed the first time -- and what these reporters failed to take into account -- is that IDC was talking about Q1 2011, which runs from January to March, not Q2 2011, which ran from April to June. Of course tablet sales dipped after the October-to-December holiday quarter. We knew that months ago. This is news?"

"IPads are currently selling better than Android tablets to Android smartphone users. So claims Canaccord Genuity analyst Mike Walkley, who expects Apple to dominate the tablet market for some time to come. "Our smartphone and handset checks indicate iPads are selling better to Android smartphone users than the current Android tablets," Walkley said in a Friday note to clients (although he provided no numbers in support of the assertion)."

"There, you've just hidden the list of people you've chosen to follow on Google+. "My question is: If this setting is one that everyone on Google seems to feel is important for their privacy, why isn't it the default for the rest of us?"

"It breaks my heart to say this, but Mac OSX Lion's interface feels like a failure. Its stated mission was to simplify the operating system, to unify it with the clean experience of iOS. That didn't happen. "If it weren't for the fast, rock-solid Unix, graphics and networking cores, Lion would be Apple's very own Vista."
Couldn't it be Apple's Vista even with the Unix, graphics and cores?

"Has anyone noticed that this week's released screenshots of the New Xbox Dashboard conspicuously omit the Zune logo? If you look at the Music experience shot, below, you'll see some generic music note graphics, but no Zune. "The Zune brand, of course, is being phased out. This is just the latest public-facing example of this slow migration."
More like a slow eradication from Microsoft's history, Soviet-style.

"Perhaps the biggest piece of news we learned from Forsythe is that in the Mac App Store, for the first time since its creation seven years ago, Growl will not be free. Devs working on the project are "still talking" about the final price, but "it most likely will be a dollar or two dollars at most," according to Forsythe. Some may turn up their noses at paying anything for the results of an open source project, but Forsythe says the reasoning behind the charge is simple: "I'm a grown adult," he says, "and my wife wonders why I spend time working on my open source project and not with my two-month old." For all the work Forsythe and his fellow devs have put into Growl, a few bucks seems little to ask."
Growl is a very fine piece of software. It's pretty hard to begrudge someone a couple of dollars.

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