9 ms·

There was abuse of the "unlimited storage", by the data hoarder subreddit. This gives yopu an idea of how much they stretch the definition of "unlimited":https:

There was abuse of the "unlimited storage", by the data hoarder subreddit. This gives yopu an idea of how much they stretch the definition of "unlimited":https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/5s7q04/i_hit_a_bit_of_a_milestone_today/ https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/5s7q04/i_hit_a...

simlevesque 9y ago
> stretch the definition of "unlimited" You can't stretch the definition of unlimited. There is literaly no amount that would stretch it. If you advertise unlimited storage, you are bending the truth, since there is no such thing as unlimited disk space. I don't see how anyone can blame the data hoarders here. Where I live, if you advertise for something that you cannot deliver, it's called fraud and you can get sued for it. I just don't see why they feel the need to lie to customers like that.
- Steko 9y ago
  I blame them just like most of the other data hoarders are blaming them. One or two guys shit in the pool and got the whole thing canned. You can certainly qualify unlimited service for reasonable use.
  - forgottenpass 9y ago
    You can certainly qualify unlimited service for reasonable use. No, you can't. Because reasonable is a subjective moving target. There are maybe a handful of organizations outside of Microsoft that have a non-laughable chance of estimating A) cost of online storage to microsoft B) number of users C) distribution of storage used by their userbase D) cost of bandwidth E) typical bandwidth profile of users F) how much money Microsoft is willing to spend on storage as a loss leader. And then there is the un-estimateable wildcard: G) what number will "sound too big" to sysadmins and/or PMs once they see it on their metrics dashboard. "Unlimited" is a scam to avoid vocalizing the secret maximum and hoping that users have more conservative estimates of the secret maximum than it's actual value. And there is a huge incentive for users to guess conservativly at the maximum, because as soon as one person doesn't everyone else will blame them for "shitting in the pool and getting the whole thing canned"
    - Steko 9y ago
      > No, you can't. Because reasonable is a subjective moving target. I don't think that matters. > "Unlimited" is a scam Baloney, everyone knows you can't actually get a million dollars of storage for $5/month just like the people at buffets know you can't just scrape $1K of food into the trash without the buffet getting shut down. There's always reasonable use limits on "unlimited" that any customer is aware of. I have unlimited checking and it's not a scam but there are obvious limits, if I wrote a million checks for 1 cent they would either close my account or change the terms. Writing a million checks is not a reasonable use case though, that would be me shitting in the pool.
      - michaelmrose 9y ago
        Why should we accept imprecise nonsense just to provide companies with a marketing opportunity. Unlimited SOUNDS better than any given number because it says you wont have to worry about usage. If you said 5TB of usage this might have the same connotations for most users however it doesn't communicate this fact as well. However once you start playing games with language. Saying one thing in large print and the exact opposite in the fine print or depending on what different people think is reasonable it becomes harder to define what is permissible.
        bllguo 9y ago
        This strikes me as a utilitarian vs. deontological argument. The former: if everyone just played along and used things reasonably we would still be benefiting from cheap storage. The latter: stop playing games, "unlimited" is an unacceptable lie and we will push you into admitting it.
        throwaway2048 9y ago
        There is a strongly utilitarian argument to not allowing such false statements. It devalues the products of people that aren't bullshitting you. Say with fake-unlimited the "real limit" is 4TB before they start terminating you, but a different provider provides 5TB of capacity. Because the former is allowed to outright lie, there is no way for the latter to effectively communicate that they are in fact offering a better product, instead they too have to make a bullshit "fake unlimited" claim to compete. Now because nobody has to actually back their claims with anything, they are infact massively incentivised to cut the "real storage" limits, because it will cut their costs, and they can still keep making the same claims. Its a market for lemons[1] race to the bottom, and everyone loses, producer and consumer because scamming liars cannot be reliably assessed beforehand. So consumers lose faith in the entire market segment, and providers offering actual legitimate services become unsustainable. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons
  - papaf 9y ago
    You can certainly qualify unlimited service for reasonable use. There was some UK court case where the ruling agrees with what you said. However, both then and now I disagree with it. The reason is it is absolutely wrong in terms of language: unlimited - without limits reasonable use - use limited to a reasonable amount The other problem is that reasonable is not a number. Everybody has a different reasonable. This is the same as saying a service has a secret limit which you won't be told about. Why not just say there is a 5GB limit? That would be clear, fair and not at all misleading.
    - keithpeter 9y ago
      UK: What 'reasonable' means is decided by a court when there is a case. They do take circumstances into account (e.g. domestic user or business &c) I do think that there should be segmented contracts with numerical ranges in to avoid idiots.
- CydeWeys 9y ago
  It is unlimited if they can add capacity faster than you can upload data (which is true in this instance).
  - WalterBright 9y ago
    It can also be unlimited if the host limits the upload rate, such that the more data uploaded the slower the rate. Reasonable usage won't be affected, just the outliers.
    - crottypeter 9y ago
      Doesn't sound very 'unlimited'
      - mrkrab 9y ago
        It would be. It's unlimited space, not unlimited bandwidth to put things in that space.
        glenneroo 9y ago
        I feel that's what CrashPlan does, over the last few years I've rarely gotten over 500 KB/s upstream, although with my LTE router I regularly get 4-5 MB/s.
      - WalterBright 9y ago
        As long as the integral of rate limiter tends to infinity, rather than something less, the storage is unlimited. It is not relevant how long it takes to get there.
- Shendare 9y ago
  But how literal to the definition do you go before you cease to be reasonably practical? "Unlimited" is an abstract absolute concept. Nothing in existence can ever be unlimited, looking out to, say, the heat death of the universe. In the end, it's a marketing term meaning "we don't arbitrarily set a numeric limit like 50GB", not that it can never possibly under any circumstances run into any kind of physical or practical limit.
  - revmoo 9y ago
    Then don't use the word lmao
- justin66 9y ago
  > Where I live, if you advertise for something that you cannot deliver, it's called fraud and you can get sued for it. Where do you live, and how was OneDrive advertised there? Just curious.
  - simlevesque 9y ago
    Canada. You could sue but I'm not sure you'd win since IANAL.

simlevesque 9y ago

> stretch the definition of "unlimited" You can't stretch the definition of unlimited. There is literaly no amount that would stretch it. If you advertise unlimited storage, you are bending the truth, since there is no such thing as unlimited disk space. I don't see how anyone can blame the data hoarders here. Where I live, if you advertise for something that you cannot deliver, it's called fraud and you can get sued for it. I just don't see why they feel the need to lie to customers like that.

Steko 9y ago
I blame them just like most of the other data hoarders are blaming them. One or two guys shit in the pool and got the whole thing canned. You can certainly qualify unlimited service for reasonable use.
- forgottenpass 9y ago
  You can certainly qualify unlimited service for reasonable use. No, you can't. Because reasonable is a subjective moving target. There are maybe a handful of organizations outside of Microsoft that have a non-laughable chance of estimating A) cost of online storage to microsoft B) number of users C) distribution of storage used by their userbase D) cost of bandwidth E) typical bandwidth profile of users F) how much money Microsoft is willing to spend on storage as a loss leader. And then there is the un-estimateable wildcard: G) what number will "sound too big" to sysadmins and/or PMs once they see it on their metrics dashboard. "Unlimited" is a scam to avoid vocalizing the secret maximum and hoping that users have more conservative estimates of the secret maximum than it's actual value. And there is a huge incentive for users to guess conservativly at the maximum, because as soon as one person doesn't everyone else will blame them for "shitting in the pool and getting the whole thing canned"
  - Steko 9y ago
    > No, you can't. Because reasonable is a subjective moving target. I don't think that matters. > "Unlimited" is a scam Baloney, everyone knows you can't actually get a million dollars of storage for $5/month just like the people at buffets know you can't just scrape $1K of food into the trash without the buffet getting shut down. There's always reasonable use limits on "unlimited" that any customer is aware of. I have unlimited checking and it's not a scam but there are obvious limits, if I wrote a million checks for 1 cent they would either close my account or change the terms. Writing a million checks is not a reasonable use case though, that would be me shitting in the pool.
    - michaelmrose 9y ago
      Why should we accept imprecise nonsense just to provide companies with a marketing opportunity. Unlimited SOUNDS better than any given number because it says you wont have to worry about usage. If you said 5TB of usage this might have the same connotations for most users however it doesn't communicate this fact as well. However once you start playing games with language. Saying one thing in large print and the exact opposite in the fine print or depending on what different people think is reasonable it becomes harder to define what is permissible.
      - bllguo 9y ago
        This strikes me as a utilitarian vs. deontological argument. The former: if everyone just played along and used things reasonably we would still be benefiting from cheap storage. The latter: stop playing games, "unlimited" is an unacceptable lie and we will push you into admitting it.
        throwaway2048 9y ago
        There is a strongly utilitarian argument to not allowing such false statements. It devalues the products of people that aren't bullshitting you. Say with fake-unlimited the "real limit" is 4TB before they start terminating you, but a different provider provides 5TB of capacity. Because the former is allowed to outright lie, there is no way for the latter to effectively communicate that they are in fact offering a better product, instead they too have to make a bullshit "fake unlimited" claim to compete. Now because nobody has to actually back their claims with anything, they are infact massively incentivised to cut the "real storage" limits, because it will cut their costs, and they can still keep making the same claims. Its a market for lemons[1] race to the bottom, and everyone loses, producer and consumer because scamming liars cannot be reliably assessed beforehand. So consumers lose faith in the entire market segment, and providers offering actual legitimate services become unsustainable. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons
- papaf 9y ago
  You can certainly qualify unlimited service for reasonable use. There was some UK court case where the ruling agrees with what you said. However, both then and now I disagree with it. The reason is it is absolutely wrong in terms of language: unlimited - without limits reasonable use - use limited to a reasonable amount The other problem is that reasonable is not a number. Everybody has a different reasonable. This is the same as saying a service has a secret limit which you won't be told about. Why not just say there is a 5GB limit? That would be clear, fair and not at all misleading.
  - keithpeter 9y ago
    UK: What 'reasonable' means is decided by a court when there is a case. They do take circumstances into account (e.g. domestic user or business &c) I do think that there should be segmented contracts with numerical ranges in to avoid idiots.
CydeWeys 9y ago
It is unlimited if they can add capacity faster than you can upload data (which is true in this instance).
- WalterBright 9y ago
  It can also be unlimited if the host limits the upload rate, such that the more data uploaded the slower the rate. Reasonable usage won't be affected, just the outliers.
  - crottypeter 9y ago
    Doesn't sound very 'unlimited'
    - mrkrab 9y ago
      It would be. It's unlimited space, not unlimited bandwidth to put things in that space.
      - glenneroo 9y ago
        I feel that's what CrashPlan does, over the last few years I've rarely gotten over 500 KB/s upstream, although with my LTE router I regularly get 4-5 MB/s.
    - WalterBright 9y ago
      As long as the integral of rate limiter tends to infinity, rather than something less, the storage is unlimited. It is not relevant how long it takes to get there.
Shendare 9y ago
But how literal to the definition do you go before you cease to be reasonably practical? "Unlimited" is an abstract absolute concept. Nothing in existence can ever be unlimited, looking out to, say, the heat death of the universe. In the end, it's a marketing term meaning "we don't arbitrarily set a numeric limit like 50GB", not that it can never possibly under any circumstances run into any kind of physical or practical limit.
- revmoo 9y ago
  Then don't use the word lmao
justin66 9y ago
> Where I live, if you advertise for something that you cannot deliver, it's called fraud and you can get sued for it. Where do you live, and how was OneDrive advertised there? Just curious.
- simlevesque 9y ago
  Canada. You could sue but I'm not sure you'd win since IANAL.