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Nonsense. True, companies will encourage voluntarily uploading your stuff to their computers. Why shouldn't they? Just like they solicit your email address,

Nonsense. True, companies will encourage voluntarily uploading your stuff to their computers. Why shouldn't they? Just like they solicit your email address, track your movements, snarf your smartphone address book and other neat tricks. There's value in getting that info. That doesn't mean everyone is going to fall for it. Some will, no doubt. But GB's are getting cheaper every day. And not just for "cloud providers". How many terbaytes does one person need? You can fit your whole life's worth of data onto today's capacities of consumer digital storage. Are we to imagine a future where consumers cannot purchase storage media? What drugs are you on? The web is brittle. It's but one of many things that can be run over IP. You web-fanatics crack me up.

wavephorm 14y ago
Are we to imagine a future where consumers cannot purchase storage media? Yes that's coming. Many countries are starting to put tariffs on hard drives. And in my country, Canada, they also slow down your internet when downloading large files and it costs $1.5 per gigabyte to exceed my 85GB/mo limit. I might as well redirect my downloads to an online service and keep all my data online until I need. My bet is within 3 years we'll reach the threshold where it might as well be worth it to store files online rather download them and store them permanently on hard drives on a computer running constantly in your home.
- gloob 14y ago
  I feel like I'm missing something terribly obvious, but... How does "it is getting harder and slower to move large files over the net" lead to the conclusion "therefore we should store all our large files on the net and retrieve them whenever we want, rather than keep them on local media with negligible latency and huge storage space"?
- goodgracious 14y ago
  Solution: VPS outside Canada to do your downloads from. But what you describe is a networking problem (transit costs of your ISP passed on to you). Not a storage problem. A "cloud storage" provider is just going to keep the data you store in a datacenter near to you anyway, not halfway around the world. But it's not like keeping your physical stuff with a storage company. You can easily store the data yourself with many more advantages. The marketing teams for "cloud storage" services will no doubt try to convince people otherwise.
  - Arelius 14y ago
    That's not a solution, you still need to get the downloads to a local system to use them for that vast majority of media.
    - goodgracious 14y ago
      True, but he's admitting he doesn't access ("use") the data in the same month he downloads it. So downloading from his VPS IP address to the VPS's secondary storage, outside Canada, won't count toward his monthly Canada ISP's cap. It's only when he decides to download data from the VPS's secondary storage to his "local system" he'll begin using his monthly allowance.
      - Arelius 14y ago
        But that is a pretty atypical usage pattern. So, not the rule we should expect when we are talking about the general "future" of technology.
- Arelius 14y ago
  The problem with this is generally speaking, if you take possession of a file, either locally, or on a remote filesystem. You are likely to use it, and also likely to use it shortly after taking possession. Be it Music, Photos, Documents, or a Movie, the data that normal people take possession of needs to be downloaded and viewed to be useful. If at this point, there is no local storage, and it's stored in the cloud, you need to pay the bandwidth price every time you wish to view it, rather just on taking possession. This particular example, about Canada increasing bandwidth charges, actually works against your argument. Sure, some data won't need to make it to the client, but that's mostly only true if your a scientist, or otherwise run computation on data, but that's hardly the case for the general person.

wavephorm 14y ago

Are we to imagine a future where consumers cannot purchase storage media? Yes that's coming. Many countries are starting to put tariffs on hard drives. And in my country, Canada, they also slow down your internet when downloading large files and it costs $1.5 per gigabyte to exceed my 85GB/mo limit. I might as well redirect my downloads to an online service and keep all my data online until I need. My bet is within 3 years we'll reach the threshold where it might as well be worth it to store files online rather download them and store them permanently on hard drives on a computer running constantly in your home.

gloob 14y ago
I feel like I'm missing something terribly obvious, but... How does "it is getting harder and slower to move large files over the net" lead to the conclusion "therefore we should store all our large files on the net and retrieve them whenever we want, rather than keep them on local media with negligible latency and huge storage space"?
goodgracious 14y ago
Solution: VPS outside Canada to do your downloads from. But what you describe is a networking problem (transit costs of your ISP passed on to you). Not a storage problem. A "cloud storage" provider is just going to keep the data you store in a datacenter near to you anyway, not halfway around the world. But it's not like keeping your physical stuff with a storage company. You can easily store the data yourself with many more advantages. The marketing teams for "cloud storage" services will no doubt try to convince people otherwise.
- Arelius 14y ago
  That's not a solution, you still need to get the downloads to a local system to use them for that vast majority of media.
  - goodgracious 14y ago
    True, but he's admitting he doesn't access ("use") the data in the same month he downloads it. So downloading from his VPS IP address to the VPS's secondary storage, outside Canada, won't count toward his monthly Canada ISP's cap. It's only when he decides to download data from the VPS's secondary storage to his "local system" he'll begin using his monthly allowance.
    - Arelius 14y ago
      But that is a pretty atypical usage pattern. So, not the rule we should expect when we are talking about the general "future" of technology.
Arelius 14y ago
The problem with this is generally speaking, if you take possession of a file, either locally, or on a remote filesystem. You are likely to use it, and also likely to use it shortly after taking possession. Be it Music, Photos, Documents, or a Movie, the data that normal people take possession of needs to be downloaded and viewed to be useful. If at this point, there is no local storage, and it's stored in the cloud, you need to pay the bandwidth price every time you wish to view it, rather just on taking possession. This particular example, about Canada increasing bandwidth charges, actually works against your argument. Sure, some data won't need to make it to the client, but that's mostly only true if your a scientist, or otherwise run computation on data, but that's hardly the case for the general person.