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Bitmap All the Things

posted by martyb on Sunday June 28 2015, @12:55AM   Printer-friendly
from the all-your-bits-Я-belong-to-us dept.

Tyler Pitchford writes:

In May, Google made international headlines when it announced that it was going to offer free, unlimited storage for photos and videos. If you read Google's press release, you'll see that the free storage plan limits images to 16 megapixels and videos to 1080p resolution. But if digital images are simply collections of binary data and if all other files on your computer also just collections of binary data then isn't unlimited photo storage simply unlimited storage?

If only something existed that made this easy to do; you know, something that could bitmap all the things....

[ Ed's Comment: This link points to the author's own personal software solution, but I'm sure that others will come up with alternative ideas.]

Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by khchung on Sunday June 28 2015, @01:26AM

    by khchung (457) on Sunday June 28 2015, @01:26AM (#202292)

    Obviously, it is physically impossible for Google to offer real unlimited storage for any fixed price, much less free.

    So, it is just like the "unlimited internet" plans from ISPs. The real question is, when would Google throttle your upload? Or tell you that you have violated their TOS by storing "too much"?

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  • (Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 28 2015, @02:33AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 28 2015, @02:33AM (#202309)

    They'll just transcode your "images"

    • (Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Sunday June 28 2015, @08:33AM

      by maxwell demon (1608) on Sunday June 28 2015, @08:33AM (#202374) Journal

      Good point. Applying some mild lossy compression may not visibly alter most images, but it will completely destroy data "images".

      Indeed, with so many images, they may also find ways to use efficient "cross-image" compression, by finding similar images and storing only the difference to them, using lossy compression.

      --
      The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.

  • (Score: 2) by WizardFusion on Tuesday June 30 2015, @10:06AM

    by WizardFusion (498) on Tuesday June 30 2015, @10:06AM (#203259) Journal

    just like the "unlimited internet" plans from ISPs

    Maybe in the US and other third world countries, but here in the UK, I have truly unlimited internet.
    I download on average just over 300gb a month. My ISP doesn't care.

    I also have unlimited data on my mobile phone tariff. I could browse and download all day everyday over fast reliable 4G, and my mobile provider doesn't care. They even state this on their website.