Google Drive Goes Live 323
lemmen writes "As widely expected, Google Drive has launched officially today. Google Drive is free for the first 5GB, while you can get an upgrade to 25GB for $2.50 a month. They say the service is available for PCs, Macs, Android devices, and soon iOS devices. According to Mercury News, '... the success of Drive will ride largely on whether Google can differentiate its offering from already established fast-growing cloud storage startups that were in the market first, such as Dropbox and Box, as well as Microsoft's SkyDrive service and big consumer media competitors like Apple's iCloud and Amazon's Cloud Drive. ... Existing Google Docs files, the centerpiece of Google's existing cloud storage offering, will move to the Google Drive service once users download apps and install the new service."
Forget this garbage (Score:4, Insightful)
Access requires a proprietary client.
Where are open, standard protocols which don't require unvetted Google software to be trusted with power over our computers?
Re:Forget this garbage (Score:4, Insightful)
Oh wait...
Re:Forget this garbage (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Forget this garbage (Score:4, Funny)
"Cloud, cloud, drive, spam, box, spam, and drive. It hasn't got much spam in it..."
I was going for a monty python reference, but I'm sure enterprising netizens will find a way to put the other kind of spam on there, too.
Re:Forget this garbage (Score:4, Funny)
I'd go for shit. Where did I leave my shit? Oh fuck, I left it in the cloud. ShitCloud (TM).
Or dump. I'ma dumpin' my shit in the cloud.
Re:Forget this garbage (Score:5, Informative)
Don't forget SkyDrive. Even MS, who knows Windows inside and out, install a special client and just sync files back and forth like everyone else does.
If you were to use a virtual filesystem driver or a filesystem filter and stream it directly, you need admin rights to install and you have a very different security profile (because the driver would need to be able to sync from multiple Live accounts across all the profiles on the workstation).
Is it possible to do direct streaming/caching as a mounted drive/directory? Absolutely. I wrote one a few years ago that would attach a WebDAV share onto the system. That's basically how all the various app streaming products work. But its a lousy model for a light-weight consumer system.
Google drive with True Crypt? (Score:3)
Thinking that would be a convenient way to use the 'free' space, yet keep it from Google's prying eyes....
Re:Google drive with True Crypt? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Try BoxCryptor. http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/encrypt-dropbox-files-boxcryptor/. Install it on each machine. It creates a Drive that acts as a front end to the cloud drive and encrypts/decrypts on the fly. I saw it here a couple of weeks ago for some other article. I would post on my other account, but I am modding too. I want to help, but not strip the modded posts. :)
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Even MS
"Even MS", as in "even MS are using a proprietary client and a non-standardized protocol"? o_O
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Re:Forget this garbage (Score:5, Insightful)
Microsoft would be sued from here to the moon and back if they included this sort of sync within Windows, bound to their servers.
Oh, and also ripped to shit on here.
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http://blogs.msdn.com/b/b8/archive/2012/02/20/connecting-your-apps_2c00_-files_2c00_-pcs-and-devices-to-the-cloud-with-skydrive-and-windows-8.aspx
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SkyDrive REST apis (Score:3, Informative)
SkyDrive has a bunch of REST apis you can use that don't require installing any client software: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/live/hh243648.aspx
Re:SkyDrive REST apis (Score:5, Informative)
So does Google Drive. https://developers.google.com/drive/v1/reference/ [google.com]
Re:Forget this garbage (Score:4, Informative)
SkyDrive is actually WebDAV, it's just not really advertized as such. But you can see it when you enable SkyDrive integration in MS Office and look at the file paths in file open/save dialogs.
Anyway, if you want a cloud disk service with open, documented protocol and the ability to mount it as a regular disk drive in pretty much any OS, that would be Jungle Disk [jungledisk.com] (they even have a FUSE provider!).
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Actually that's all pretty much wrong.. it supports a lot more then Google Docs formated files - in fact even shows thumbnails apparently of a lot of standard file types when browsing. Integration seems to be it's sweet spot.
Don't need an Apps account - works fine on regular users (although it seems to be a phased rollout - it told me that my (Canadian) account will be enabled soon.
Re:Forget this garbage (Score:4)
Actually that's all pretty much wrong.. it supports a lot more then Google Docs formated files - in fact even shows thumbnails apparently of a lot of standard file types when browsing. Integration seems to be it's sweet spot.
I go to drive.google.com with my regular, non-Apps gmail login, and it says something like: ...and there's a "Notify Me" button for when it's available. (I am in the U.S.)
"Google Docs is currently not available."
Don't need an Apps account - works fine on regular users
I go to drive.google.com with my Apps account, and it says:
"Google Drive is not yet enabled for the My Company Name domain."
So I go to my Apps admin account and enable it in the "Drive and Docs" admin area, which AFAICT, is the only place in the admin menus where it's referenced. I go to the Drive section and make sure both check boxes are checked.
I go to Google Docs, and whoopedy-doooo, I can save Docs files online (which I thought I could do before)! Fun!
Specifics? (Score:5, Interesting)
This is true in the sense that Google Docs could already store any kind of file and what Google did with drive was:
1. Rename Google Docs to "Drive"
2. Expand the free storage quota
3. Provide desktop and mobile apps and SDK
Its false in the sense that you can store files that Google Docs can't edit (and, you can use the web interface to edit files that Docs can't edit itself, since the Drive SDK allows Drive apps installed through the Chrome Web Store to register associations with file types so that "open with [app]" is available from the Drive UI (and the user can chose to set an app as the default editor for a particular file type, as well.)
I had no problem logging in with my non-apps account. In fact, if I'm logged in and navigate to docs.google.com, I actually get the Drive web UI (which is virtually identical to what the Docs UI was before Drive was introduced.)
Google Docs included both a number of file editor applications and universal (any file) cloud storage. Drive is basically an enhancement to the cloud storage part (which is now renamed) to expand the free quota, provide desktop apps which provide desktop integration, providing an SDK, etc,
How is it "much less useful than its competitors"?
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You don't have to use the "Google Docs" (even if, by that, you mean the Google Drive web UI which used to be the Google Docs file list web UI) with Drive either.
And you can drag-and-drop files to Google Drive when you have the MacOS or Windows desktop app installed, too.
I'm not sure what you mean by "Google Docs" here.
If you mean "the cloud storage space for any kind of file tha
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Now that the rest of what was Google Docs before today has been renamed "Drive", that is
Re:Forget this garbage (Score:5, Funny)
It's free, and it's Google. I would trust Google to be around for a while, to charge decent prices and provide useful tools to access the drive, and also I believe them when they say no human will see my stuff. Some other companies, such as Facebook, I don't trust nearly as much, because they seem to lack Google's commitment to be a trustworthy arbitrator of data.
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I'm increasingly unsure of that. We know they scrape the contents of your emails to decide what ads to show you. We know they keep track of your browsing history as much as they can, and aggregate it across sites.
I'm just not convinced they wouldn't be peeking inside.
Then again, the only stuff I'm going to keep in the cloud is just temporary personal with no real need to have a whole lot of privacy. Anything work related, I simply won't put
Re:Forget this garbage (Score:5, Interesting)
As a matter of fact, I do. But oddly enough, yesterday's Dilbert cartoon is apropos [dilbert.com].
If something is scraping it, it is available to be read by humans.
Now, if they tell us that under no circumstances will any entity ever peek into my data then I'd believe it to be secure. Well, even then, I'm not sure I'd "believe" that.
Otherwise, it's being opened and read and cataloged and indexed. I don't care if it's a scraper, or an intern at that point. You may see a magical difference between those, but I don't.
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Now, if they tell us that under no circumstances will any entity ever peek into my data then I'd believe it to be secure.
Sure, right up to the day when, after a lot of people are using and depending on the service, they change the TOS to allow themselves access...
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...which simply wouldn't be legal under EU Data Protection rules. Bait-and-switch doesn't trump privacy.
Unless you're called Facebook I suppose, but didn't Facebook just have to sign a 20 year agreement with the US FTC promising NOT to do things like that again?
Rgds
Damon
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You trust google not to access your files? Really? http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2369188,00.asp [pcmag.com]
Drive IS the new Docs (Score:3)
Well, that seems to cover the immediate issue, since "Drive" is just a new name for the heart of Docs (what used to be the Docs web UI is now called "Drive" and looks pretty much exactly the same except for the branding, the Drive web UI is the place on the web where you access the files that used to be part of Docs, and where you invoke web applications to create
Re:Forget this garbage (Score:5, Insightful)
Now, I do have to wonder why Google used a proprietary client(given their history of, for instance, OSSing their updater widget in order to calm people's fears about what it might be up to) when your data will be showing up on their servers in short order anyway, and file transfer over the internet isn't exactly an area of cutting-edge research.(Hi rysnc, how's it going?). One would think that an OSSed client would provide minimal competitive advantage to others, while helping to alleviate the 'our google overlords creep me out' response.
More generally, though, there really isn't a 'clientless'(ie. client is installed by default) option at present. The browser-based upload widgets are hacky as hell and often flake out on larger files, the java/activeX ones are incrementally more reliable but far more demanding and dodgy. FTP is horribly insecure and crotchety, SFTP causes barely a ripple outside a few geek circles. WebDAV seems to have gone nowhere for something like two decades now, some sort of NFS/SMB over VPN is ugly and wouldn't play nicely with many setups... A FUSE based FS would be nice for team linux; but arguably counts as a 'client' and doesn't help the majority of the market much...
I'd certainly trust an OSS client over a closed one; but it's hard to hold the need for a client of some kind against them at the moment.
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Re:Forget this garbage (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Forget this garbage (Score:5, Insightful)
Ah, thanks for the negative mod, there. Fine, I'll go into more detail: Google didn't just make a client, they're providing the storage, connection, maintenance, etc. It's also for business purposes, not a charity. Of course they want control over the client. If you're going to demand otherwise, you might as well just hold up a sign saying "I want the word Insightful to appear next to my post!"
Re:Forget this garbage (Score:5, Interesting)
Google could easily have provided a client built upon an open api and won a lot of favor.
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There's a nice RESTful SDK that looks pretty promising. Nothing stopping you from using it to make whatever front-end client you want. In fact, I'd bet that the official Google client is using it.
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Not everyone wants to run a local executable from a company that has demonstrated a lot of interest in prying into your privacy
Not everyone is planning on using it for shit that actually matters. For me, it's nothing but a virtual flash drive to share media without carrying a physical one around (and probably lose/forget somewhere). 5 GBs is more than enough to share photos, music, and video clips.
I totally get the privacy concerns people have, but let's not pretend that every fucking piece of data people generate has some use to Google. If they want to scrape my cookie recipes looking for something to monetize, I couldn't give
Good backup for important files (Score:4, Funny)
My resume, my tax returns, purchased books..... just in case the house burns down & eats my USB backup drive.
Re:Good backup for important files (Score:5, Insightful)
Don't forget to encrypt all this before sending it to "the cloud"
Re:Good backup for important files (Score:5, Informative)
Don't forget to encrypt all this before sending it to "the cloud"
There is a cost to doing that: Google Drive's search features won't work for you. I have thousands of files in mine (I work for Google and have been using it for a few months, with a very generous storage limit, so I've got lots in there), and although you can organize things in hierarchical directories, the search features are the way I find the stuff I want 99% of the time. What makes it really nice is that it indexes everything -- it can parse virtually any file format, and even uses the Google Goggles technology to extract textual descriptions of objects in images, and I think it also does OCR on images as well.
Of course, if you're more worried about Google extracting information from your files than about your ability to find them, then this aggressive search indexing is stronger motivation to encrypt. If you just want to be able to find your stuff easily, from anywhere, it rocks, and encrypting will break it.
Re:Good backup for important files (Score:5, Insightful)
There is a cost to doing that: Google Drive's search features won't work for you...and although you can organize things in hierarchical directories, the search features are the way I find the stuff I want 99% of the time.
I've been seeing both Windows and Mac moving in the direction of trying to abstract me from the location where files are saved in favor of searching for them. I've never understood that use model. I don't mind that other people would find their files that way, but I've never had to search for a file in my life. I just save them in logical places and they're always where I expect them to be. It's most certainly not what I want to do 99% of the time.
It must be a result of working with a computer back when indexing every single file in your box would have been an insane waste of storage space, the indexing process would have taken an insane amount of time during which my computer would have been unusable because I'd only have a single core, and the search through the index would still be slow enough that it'd be faster to navigate to the file. In those days, we wore an onion in our belts, because that was the style at the time...
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I suspect I started using computers about as early as you did (first experience was in the late 70s, got my first computer in the early 80s, first IBM PC was in 86, first computer I bought myself was in 91, etc.) and I've always felt the same way about organization, but on both my Mac and with Google Drive I find that searching is just faster than navigating, even if I know exactly where my file is.
That's fair enough, and like I said, I don't have a problem with people who want to do that. In fact, since Google Drive is actually still allowing me to set the hierarchy, I think Google is handling it right. I just have this fear that one day operating systems will be like phone operating systems. They'll stop telling me where my stuff is, and no longer allow me to exert any control over it.
For one single file, I will even agree that searching is faster than navigating. However, typically when I navig
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or http://iosafe.com/ [iosafe.com]
It's BBQ approved!
http://www.goodgearguide.com.au/article/370119/iosafe_solopro_christmas_bbq/ [goodgearguide.com.au]
Re:Good backup for important files (Score:5, Informative)
Make sure that safe is fire safe for electronics. Most fire safes brag about keeping the interior to 350F or so for a few hours. Solder flows just above that, so electronics aren't good in them. But some safes are better; you just have to be careful.
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I have a Hall's safe [hallsafe.com] (before they ughed out their web page with animation and moved the company) but they were local. The main thing is to look for the temperature rating of the inside, not the fire. I haven't looked for one in a while and have no other recommendation.
Mixed bag compared to Dropbox (Score:5, Insightful)
Versions count against your storage, trash counts against your storage, Google Docs files do not, shared files do not.
No right-click menu in the desktop client, so no grabbing public links etc.
No ability to name the Google Drive folder, only choose its location (the same as dropbox, but a lot of people were hoping for "pick any folder anywhere").
Speed is a bit faster.
Storage prices a lot cheaper ($9.99/month for 200GB vs $9.99 for 50GB on Dropbox).
There is offline access to Google Docs stuff, not tried that yet.
The Windows client is very very very similar to an old Dropbox version - even down to "Selective Sync" within the Google Drive folder.
Android and iOS apps - no Blackberry app yet.
All in all, I haven't come to a conclusion yet - better in some aspects, worse in others. I think a lot of people were expecting a lot more from Google Drive than this offering.
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I was only hoping for SFTP access, from there I'd put a big TrueCrypt container on the drive and not worry about the other problems.
Re:Mixed bag compared to Dropbox (Score:5, Informative)
Perhaps when viewed in isolation, Drive is not that much better than DropBox, but when you add in other Google services such as music.google.com, Google wins. I have 60 gigs of music stored on music.google.com, at zero cost, and I think I can upload about 9,000 more files before I hit the free limit.
Google Picasa allows unlimited storage for images of up to 2048 x 2048 pixels and videos up to 15 minutes. I've only put a few things on Picasa as yet, but I suspect that almost all of my 254 gigs of images and video clips will qualify as free storage at Picasa.
And, of course, as you point out, Google Docs files don't count toward storage, so if you allow them to convert your Word/OO/Libre files over to Docs format, you're all set.
I suspect that for a lot of people, the free 5 gigs in combination with Google's Music and Picasa services will just about cover everything.
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If you have Google+ there is no limit to images and short videos stored. Not sure if you have to upload them via Google+ though?
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No, there isn't. Not really. They make it look like there is, but there isn't.
What syncs down for these files is just a wrapper containing a URL and some metadata. Double-click on one and you're in the web interface, editing the file online.
Want to prove it to yourself? Then use command-line tools ("cat" on MacOS or "type" on Windows) to dump the contents of the file.
I'm very disappointed.
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I did. It's not.
(Unless you're using Google Chrome and have offline access to Google Docs set up, and had connected to it before syncing the file you want to look at, that is. Because in that case, it was already syncing down without the Google Docs sync client. But only read-only, not for editing.)
So: you try it, with your default browser set to anything other than Chrome. Or: quit Chrome, go to another computer, create a new Google Docs file, let the sync client pull it over, kill your internet conn
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Versions count against your storage, trash counts against your storage, Google Docs files do not, shared files do not.
So I can share my 10GB truecrypt file without it counting against any storage limit?
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1) Create sockpuppet 2nd google account.
2) ???
3) Profit!
They probably mean files you're invited to, not files you're hosting on your account; this is different from Dropbox, where if someone uploads a file and shares it with 10 people, everyone who accepts the invitation gets that file counted against their quota until they unshare.
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GDrive has an issue with complexity here - they have to map their existing Google Docs service to Windows & Mac file-systems. Dropbox doesn't have that problem so their service is likely to always be easier to use and understand.
Google is generally great at engineering but pretty bad at making things simple, consistent, and understandable, and this is no exception.
For example, about a year ago Google renamed the organizational labels of Google Docs to collections. I was surprised that they would do th
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> I think a lot of people were expecting a lot more from Google Drive than this offering.
The reason DropBox won over the existing services (there were many) was simplicity. It's a folder that syncs. That's all people want. More features, more complexity: Microsoft has tried it. Dropbox ate their lunch.
Google is offering a folder that syncs, at a lower price on an ID management platform many people already use. Seems likely to work.
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Versions count against your storage, trash counts against your storage, Google Docs files do not, shared files do not.
No right-click menu in the desktop client, so no grabbing public links etc.
I installed SkyDrive yesterday because of the recent update and the recent free 25 GB upgrade, but it also lacks the right click functionality in the desktop client so I'm on the verge of just going back to Dropbox. Based on what people such as yourself are saying about Google Drive, it looks like it's even slightly worse than SkyDrive. I wonder whether Google and MS are avoiding the right click public link feature because of a Dropbox patent or whether neither company believes it's useful.
No linux client (Score:5, Informative)
Dropbox has one, Google Drive doesn't. That's a killer for me.
Not for "Google Apps for your domain" users. (Score:5, Informative)
Yet again.
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Wrong, I have it and it works (at least the Android client and web interface, I don't use Windows or Mac), enable doc in the control panel or request it to the domain admin, it is the same Google Docs permission
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Do you have set in the domain settings "New User Features" = "Rapid Release"?. I have "Rapid Release", probably this is the reason your domain is waiting that we beta test it
Google:Let us know everything else about you (Score:2, Insightful)
Yes, I want to upload my financial information, work history, scans of legal documents, and anything else personal from my hard drive and have it spidered by Google. I'm sure they can be trusted. They've been so respectful so far of people's privacy.
Re:Google:Let us know everything else about you (Score:5, Insightful)
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you're pathetic (Score:2)
2. Why not go with Dropbox? Oh, right, they can do the same crawling through your data.
3. Finally, uhm.. Thought about encrypting with TrueCrypt and uploading the entire encrypted file?
Ahh, but why think proactively about security on a free service but useful service when it's much easier to complain and bitch.
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And if you're really that bothered - bugger off and buy a cheap VPS with loads of disk space and roll your own. It takes literally MINUTES to set up with something like FTP or WebDAV and SSH/SSL.
And you can even do full encryption on that storage if you don't even trust your host.
Or you could accept that Google are putting out a product for consumers, not hard-core-tech-geeks that want the ultimate in everything for free.
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Why would you trust ANY 3rd party host for storing this unencrypted?
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In theory, you can sync a TrueCrypt vault.
Anyone tried this yet? Works ok on Dropbox, although the initial upload is a beast (file of noise the size of your storage volume). Afterwards, I think it's only syncing the parts that change. Remote access requires downloading the whole file again.
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I would expect people posting on /. to understand that you don't upload anything to Google that you don't want the world to see.
IMO, that's too strong.
I would not suggest uploading stuff that would incriminate you, because Google does respond to subpoenas. They have to. But as for other information which you don't want people to see... Google isn't going to publish your documents, or mine them for company confidential information -- though I wouldn't upload company confidential information to any service your employer hasn't specifically authorized (Note that Google Docs has been vetted by the US government and can be used for n
Porn? (Score:3, Funny)
Does this allow the storage of porn? :)
Re:Porn? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Porn? (Score:5, Funny)
you only have 5GB of porn? damn, guess im perverted one :-P
He probably has the exact same number of files as you, but all the videos have been downconverted to postage stamp sized real media files.
I mean, haven't you ever looked at a girl and wished she was slightly more... pixelated?
They are too lazy to check browser language prefs (Score:5, Interesting)
Google as ever uses reverse IP lookup rather than browser preferences to set the language (language preferences only work once you log in and often even not when logged in). They assume people do not travel and everyone within a particular geographical area will only speak the dominant language.
Some questions (Score:3)
After reading a few articles, here's what I still want to know:
If you want to pay for the service, can you opt for a year-long contract or something? It seems like a reasonable price, but I'd rather not have yet another monthly charge.
How does the space work compared with whatever allocated space your other Google services have? Right now I've got some amount of Gmail space, some amount of Picasa space, unlimited (?) Google+ space for images and videos (which still show up in Picasa web but don't apply to the quota?), and then the Google Docs space. Will there be any consolidation of this? Do I want there to be?
Will we be able to use the GDrive app on my phone to store something like a keepass password file (encrypted) and access it from multiple devices? I can do that with Dropbox right now.
UDP file transfer? (Score:3)
Do any of the cloud storage services come with a UDP file transfer system?
Trying to move video files with TCP is silly.
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Trying to move video files with TCP is silly.
No, TCP is the protocol to use if you're moving video because you want to do an accurate transmission of the data and adding error checking to UDP is silly when there's a protocol that does it out of the box.
If you're talking on-demand playback, you might have a point, but the majority of the users out there have UDP port filtered and possibly firewalled and it's easier to just send data to TCP port 80 than deal with firewall issues.
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Yes, I found that.
What I couldn't find was a 'download' link. Anyone...?
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Well the android app is "formerly known as google docs" so I already have it installed.
Re:No thanks. (Score:5, Informative)
If we all do this, maybe then Games Workshop will realize that there's more to 40k than Space Marines and Hasbro will finally get the hint that we all hated 4th edition and think Drizzt can suck the business end of a crossbow.
Just to clarify: I like my privacy, but I understand when my privacy stops being just that; Anything I do not wish to become public I do not make as such.
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>>>Wooo... Hoo?
Hello Lennier. Enjoy being a minbari ranger?
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Because 5Gb total space for your email that sits virtually idle all the time and rarely searches back through the history of it (especially if your email client does it for you, like mine) is a very different matter to 5Gb that you intend to fill to the brim and use all the time with all your documents and share with dozens of other people.
Not only in terms of read access, but also in terms of sheer bandwidth to transmit like that (e.g. you CAN send 5Gb to 20 people on a 5Gb account whenever you like, but y
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Not only in terms of read access, but also in terms of sheer bandwidth to transmit like that (e.g. you CAN send 5Gb to 20 people on a 5Gb account whenever you like, but you can't do that with email!).
What, exactly, stops me from sending 5GB to 1000 people via email?
--
BMO
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We have these things called computers. They can break up files into handy chunks and do this automatically.
Indeed, have you ever heard of GmailFS?
http://sr71.net/projects/gmailfs/ [sr71.net]
--
BMO
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>File attachment size limits?
How do you think DVD ISO files are posted to usenet?
--
BMO
Re:Huge price hike (Score:4, Informative)
It isn't rocket-surgery that Gmail quotas are often largely underused, and the stuff that is used is rich with delicious keywords to be mined any monetized, while bulk file storage brings out the packrat in people, and frequently ends up containing big huge lumps of 'boring-and-probably-pirated-.iso-I-might-need-again' which aren't worth much to the marketdroids...
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Ah, to have such a simple life as to fit in 28GB of space.
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I doubt it's helpful, but Apple's disk image encryption (really, the disk images one layer below the encryption) supports that. Sparsebundles automatically work that way; you can also manually create split images of a predefined size (though perhaps only on the command line).
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Free accounts can only upgrade to 25GB for a limited time, provided they have a few files on SkyDrive already. New users will only get 7GB for free.
Re:SkyDrive + Dropbox = Even better (Score:4, Informative)
Skydrive offers 7GB for Free, Google Drive offers 5GB. Sky Drive offers a max of 100GB of Paid Storage, Google Drive offers 16TB of paid storage.
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/b8/archive/2012/04/23/the-next-chapter-for-skydrive-personal-cloud-storage-for-windows-available-anywhere.aspx [msdn.com]
https://apps.live.com/skydrive [live.com]
They need to update their Google compare: http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/skydrive/compare [microsoft.com]
Make sure you keep up with the news
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SkyDrive offers 25GB (max size per file is 100MB) for free. This allows almost all of my files to be stored on the SkyDrive. All of the large files and sensitive documents go in my TC container and synced with Dropbox, which, with all the incentives, is up to 3GB of free space.
What I really wish i could find would be a program that would split a truecrypt container into multiple files of a set size. Then the whole thing would fit on the SkyDrive.
I believe the update to SkyDrive that went live this week now allows 2GB files. And still appears to work via WebDAV, plus has an offline mode.
Re:The most important question (Score:5, Informative)
No. Only Dropbox supports linux, and does it extremely well (though still proprietary).
Dropbox is the first internet company I've been excited about since Google back in 1998. They are run by a bunch of geeks, like Google used to be (MIT though, east coast style leadership vs. west coast/Stanford). Their syncing solution is elegant and just works. The day I tried Dropbox was they day my opinion of "the cloud" changed from a load of bull to actually something worthy of serious attention.
Re:The most important question (Score:4, Informative)
SpiderOak, though a slightly different syncing style, also works on Linux natively. Quite nicely, too.
Re: (Score:3)
. . .though still proprietary
Nope. [dropbox.com] The Linux Dropbox client in licensed under the GPL. Zmanda, rsync.net, jungledisk and spideroak are other services that also work with linux.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
I see dropbox still tries to mislead people into thinking their client is Free (and according to you, succeeds in it). Their website weasels around the subject but the truth is that only the small piece that integrates with the file manager is open source and the actual client is not.
Exactly. This is from the nautilus-dropbox Debian package available in non-free:
Installing this package will download the proprietary dropbox binary from dropbox.com.
That's far from being free software, unfortunately.
Re: (Score:2)
Looked into this because I thought it was a good idea.. but Webdav in windows is basically non-existant in pre-win7.. and pretty flaky in win 7. So there goes 95% of your market right there.
Re: (Score:3)
Not really. The closest thing is that apps have no access to a user's Google Drive unless the user has installed the app through the Chrome Web Store. And given the way Google uses OAuth, if you want to have an app that access the Drive API without an immediate web interface that the user is logged into, you'll need them to approve (via