Youtube video editor

I'm really excited about Chromebooks.  I think they're what netbooks were supposed to be.  $200 right now for the Acer, 4.5 hrs of battery life, 18 second boot time, instant wake up. It's awesome.

So I'm evaluating it as a daily driver and replacement of my current laptop, an e6420 ATG behemoth.  It's heavy, powerful and has mediocre battery life.  I can run all kinds of things on it. So what. I spend most of my time on the web.

After a weekend of using a Chromebook I think they're amazing machines. I can see replacing them every year with a newer model. This really depends on not wanting to install anything locally, and being in the cloud as much as possible.

Things I would miss in a Chromebook:

• Steam
• Camera Control software for my DSLRs
• Torrents

Steam would be a loss for reals.  I could push Steam to the Latitude and make it the HTPC and play games on the TV. That might be OK.  I've given up games until I have a house, so right now I wouldn't even notice it. Plus Chrome has a few games, some that overlap with Steam like Plants vs Zombies.

Camera Control would be a significant loss but a seldom one, I've only used it a few times but it's really really cool.

Torrents I could push to the server, no problem there.  It even has a web management interface.

There's a serious push from Google for Chrome and Chromebooks. Chromebooks are getting cheaper and more powerful and support isn't going away anytime soon. There's supposed to be a touchscreen model this quarter. Lenovo is piloting a ruggedized model. Some of the nicer Chromebooks get 8 hours of battery life and have 3g access for when I travel.

I'm getting tired of worrying about backups. I saw people at this conference last weekend typing their notes in Word on a Macbook Pro. $1,600 for taking notes and using the web. My anxiety level went up because I was so worried about their HDD dying, their laptop getting stolen or destroyed and them losing work. That just goes away with Google Apps.

Anyway, like I said, I'm evaluating it as a real replacement.  Last night I tried to delve into the Youtube video editor.  It's easy enough to edit together video but audio is another problem.  You can't upload straight audio tracks.  I guess that's to keep users from using copyright songs, but it's annoying.  I wish more music was Creative Commons.  Like maybe 10 years after it's released make it CC and let anyone use it.

So to get this into Youtube I have to edit it on my machine using Windows Movie Maker and then upload it. I'll still get a take down notice because of the music, even on private videos. I'm not sure how people manage to get around that.