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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.]
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Graduate life: It's not just a job. It's an indenture.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by MrGuy on Sunday June 28 2015, @02:45AM
About 15 years ago, when e-mail providers were providing accounts to anyone who'd bother to ask, with more storage space than your average hard drive, I remember a friend of mine setting up what amounted to a file-system front-end backed by e-mail accounts. He'd just break a file up into chunks small enough to stay under attachment size limits, and e-mail them to a few accounts. New version of a file? Just store the new one and deprecate the old pointers. Sure it was slow as molasses, and involved a lot of text being sent in the clear, but it was effectively a cloud-hosted backup of all his important files, before cloud hosting became a "thing." And I'm not even giving my friend a lot of credit here - sure, there was some cleverness in the specifics of his implementation, but he's hardly the only one who had the idea to use e-mail that way. And I'm sure there's older tech than e-mail accounts that offered similar opportunities.
Using a great big storage device meant for one thing to store other things isn't a new idea. 1's and 0's.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Popeidol on Sunday June 28 2015, @03:44AM
A closely related example is when gmail launched with a whopping 1gb of storage space. At the time hotmail offered about 6mb (from memory), and the most generous free hosting you could find was around 100mb.
It did not take long before somebody wrote a program to Mount your gmail account as a drive for file storage [viksoe.dk] (with a guide for using it here [engadget.com]). A surprising number of people used it until services like dropbox filled the same niche.
(Score: 2) by Geotti on Sunday June 28 2015, @03:48AM
but it was effectively a cloud-hosted backup of all his important files, before cloud hosting became a "thing."
FTFY.
"The Cloud" (or Butt, if you prefer) is essentially just elastic grid computing [wikipedia.org]. The mail server you referred to, however, was most probably either a single machine or a small cluster [wikipedia.org].
(Just nitpicking here, but these concepts are often confused and this is Soylent, so here we go.)
(Score: 2) by Geotti on Sunday June 28 2015, @03:51AM
Pardon me please, I should have pressed preview.
There was supposed to be a link to explain Elasticity [wikipedia.org] in cloud computing.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 29 2015, @04:16PM
I've now read the original and the "fixed" text several times, and I am honestly unable to find any difference.
(Score: 2) by Geotti on Monday June 29 2015, @07:58PM
Was supposed to be:
but it was effectively a
cloud-hosted backup of all his important files, before cloud hosting became a "thing."Dunno what was the matter with me on that day ;)
(Score: 2) by isostatic on Sunday June 28 2015, @09:07AM
15 years ago?
On April 1 2004, only 11 years and 3 months ago, gmail launched. At the time, yahoo, hotmail etc offered 10 or 20MB. That wasn't exactly a lot in 1994, let alone 2004. Google announced they would give everyone 1GB for free. It was on the front page of the Evening Standard, and I remember laughing at the office about how they'd been fooled by such an april fools.
A few days later, things like gmail drive (http://www.viksoe.dk/code/gmail.htm) and fuse plugins (http://www.jacobsen.no/anders/blog/archives/2004/09/01/google_gmail_as_a_linux_file_system.html) appeared.