Google Docs To Host Any File Type 186
ezabi writes "According to a post on the official Google blog, in the coming weeks Google Docs will offer to host all file types with a limit of 250 MB, which as they say is larger than the current limit for email attachments. This will have its consequences: paid file sharing will die, more shared pirated material, newer vulnerabilities and malware distribution channels..."
What? (Score:3, Insightful)
Is the summary a troll or just an attempt at sarcasm?
There are plenty of free filesharing sites, and 250mb is pretty paltry by their standards, not to mention the fact that Google has pretty decent standards for who it lets have an account. Given the amount of information they have on everyone, it's the last site you want to know if you're doing something illegal.
Unless I guess you count .gov domains.
Think tabloid headlines (Score:3, Insightful)
The headline and summary has to attract eyeballs, more eyeballs, more posts, more activity more ads being viewed, more income.
I believe Miranda Hart's christmas special had a parody on a BBC prog, "Can twitter kill you". Reporter going around with ever more suggestive overvoice "do you know that right now your child is dying from twitter in this school", Worried Mom: "This isn't my child's school".
Simply stating that you can now store 250mb on your google account in a single file (wonder what the total li
Re:What? (Score:5, Informative)
250mb is pretty paltry by their standards
It's not 250MB total storage space. It's 250MB maximum per file. It's probably true that most e-mail clients/servers do a poor job of handling 250MB attachments. In that sense, this is probably a good thing; we've all complained about the coworker who sends out a 15MB movie of their kids playing with the dog to a mailing list, but what option do most average users have? Even if they know what FTP is, they don't own any servers. If Google is going to handhold consumers through the process of storing big files in the Web instead of sending them as attachments, I say bravo.
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Oh, and currently SkyDrive only supports files up to 50MB in size.
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Most warez comes chopped into small rar files anyway, chopping it up into 250mb chunks is not going to be hard for warez groups.
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youtube [google.com]?
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Is the summary a troll or just an attempt at sarcasm?
It's an attempt to rationalize the situation, while interpreting the facts as the "ezabi" and/or the editors see them. Nothing so heinous as a troll, or overplayed as sarcasm.
There are plenty of free filesharing sites
All of which that I've seen have some limitations. Either you pay, or your bandwidth is capped, or you're limited to $files per $timeperiod, or $megabytes per $timeperiod, etc. As ezabi and/or the editors and I see it, it's unlikely Google is going to be quite as annoying or limited as they are with this regard. It's willing to sub
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More accurately: they fought China, Viacom, et al on the issues up until the point it was going to cost them serious money before giving in.
Oh, and bowing to censorship by China is in a totally different league from complying with legitimate copyright concerns.
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Yeah, so tell us about some? They all allow you to download very little, unless you pay for it - if you don't you can download once an hour something like that. Knowing google, there won't be such limits.
This changes things? (Score:2, Interesting)
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p2p users are targeted heavily by the anti piracy groups because p2p users are comprised largly by individuals with very shallow pockets. Google could potentially even the playing field here.
Avatar grossed $1 billion dollars in less than three weeks.
Tell me again about the level playing field.
Tell me again why Google wants to become Ground Zero for every fifty megaton bomb the rights holders choose to drop.
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Wait... (Score:2, Funny)
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Great way to miss the point.
He was talking about why the industry chooses to target a particular group of infringers.
You are talking about whether they are justified in infringing or not.
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That makes no sense, did you mean deep pockets?
About split (Score:5, Insightful)
> host all file types with a limit of 250 MB,
Can we just use split to store larger files ?
split -a 5 -b 250000000 bigfile
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> Zip, Rar or some of file compression program will split files will work also.
tar -zc bigfile | split -a 5 -b 250000000 -
Re:About split (Score:5, Funny)
Here's the correct way to do it:
tar -zc bigfile | split -a 5 -b 262144000 -
Re:About split (Score:4, Insightful)
Nope, sorry, I do this on purpose to insure I never go above the actual limit. Who knows, maybe a hard drive manufacturer implemented the quota scheme ;-))
I am fully aware that my files will be slightly less than 250MB and this is exactly what I want ;-))
Nice try although...
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tar -zc bigdir | split -a 5 -b 250000000 -
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Whenever I see those used, it's generally with files that are already compressed anyways. Seems like it's just adding overhead and complication.
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Yes.
Someone explain to me why this is "insightful?" Please?
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> Someone explain to me why this is "insightful?" Please?
I do not know for sure either, maybe because some linux users did not know about split... I mean typical users are used to have this included in the archiving program (winrar, etc...) instead of having to use yet another program...
OR
mentioning that you could split files with the program of your choice to circumvent the 250MB limit...
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Yes. I doubt the file size limit is there because Google doesn't like big files, it's there because it's hard on the infrastructure to upload/download bigger files in one step.
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My gmail quota is currently 7.4 GB which is about 29 X a 250MB files.
Note that I barely use Google for anything, nobody writes to my gmail account, I use it mostly for testing when I ever use it.
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> For that matter, how would a Linux user put it together? dd?
man cat
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For that matter, how would a Linux user put it together? dd?
cat
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assuming that you are in an empty directory:
split -a 5 -b 250000000 sourcedir/bigfile
cat * > bigfile
in Windows:
type * > bigfile
Gzipped version:
tar -zc sourcedir/bigfile | split -a 5 -b 250000000 -
cat * | tar -zt 1> bigfile
P.S. I use -a 5 to backup entire disk images in 50MB files, -a 2 is usually the default. 2 will support up to 26*26 = 676 files in your archive.
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cat * | tar -zx 1> bigfile
t only list the content of the archive ;-))
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he, he ;-))
I did some cut and paste from some script I setup to backup my file systems, my mistake.
I use:
tar -X exclude -zpsSc --numeric-owner ...
to backup file systems while not mounted.
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First Question, (Score:2)
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Torrents are easier.
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=P
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Microsoft has something similar (Score:5, Informative)
Microsoft is moving into the ad-supported online hosting biz with SkyDrive [live.com]. Looking at my SkyDrive right now, it tells me I have 24.99GB available space (I'm not really using it for anything). Among other uses, once Office 2010 ships, SkyDrive will be a portal to the Office 2010 Web Apps. If you upload Office documents to your SkyDrive, you will be able to click on them and view/edit them in your browser, without owning your own copy of Office.
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Re:Microsoft has something similar (Score:4, Informative)
As the AC below said, files can be up to 50MB each (for now... I see no reason why Microsoft wouldn't up it to compete with Google).
It will work on Linux. It works fine with Firefox, and it even works on Chrome (even though Chrome is not officially supported). I think pretty much any standards-compliant browser should work (though I seem to remember I might have had a problem or two with Konqueror, even though Safari is one of the officially-supported browsers). IE users get a fancier upload tool via ActiveX, but that seems to be about it.
At present, it's sort of a "trial" in the sense that everything is pretty much still in beta. But Microsoft's stated intent is for everything to be ad-supported. I think the idea is to get initial revenue from ad sales, then hook customers into Microsoft's commercial desktop software.
On the downside, I didn't think the SkyDrive UI was all that impressive. Google Docs changes things up by presenting files as a chronological series based on what you've accessed most recently, kind of like an email inbox. SkyDrive tries to simulate the files-and-folders desktop paradigm, but it's really just for show. You don't have any of the flexibility of being able to drag and drop files, for example. It's a lot of clicking and waiting for page refreshes.
The UI for the Office Web Apps really is very slick, though, and they also seem to work fine with any modern, standards-compliant browser. (And that means not with IE6 -- it's not supported.)
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Other gotchas - not really...if you want to control access, the recipient has to have a Live ID. If you want to make it public, they don't. No trial, no cost, just free with advertisements.
To me the big gotcha is that there's no access API. I'd love to use SkyDrive as an online backup service --- with encrypted files, natch --- but there's just no way of getting stuff there other than via the web interface.
What I'd really like is one of these services to adopt rsync, but it ain't going to happen...
This will also enable terrorists (Score:5, Funny)
Before evil google did this evil thing, terrorists were forced to use rar to chunk their nefarious plans into sizes small enough for email attachments, or use horrible file sharing services like rapidshare which only makes them hate the west even more. Now their plans for global sharia will be made easier thanks to their malevolent brothers-in-arms over at google.
I hope those evil doers over at live workspace don't read this news because sharepoint is an even eviler tool for pirates and malware authors and satan himself.
docs is getting some microsoft office flaws (Score:4, Interesting)
As in "bugs or missing features that are existing now for years without being addressed."
The biggest shortcoming I see is a lack of proper versioning. Docs will save every stupid edit you make every few seconds creating hundreds and hundreds of divergent versions. Utterly useless for tracking changes in drafts over time. The solution is fairly simple. You get a button up at the top that tells you which draft you're in. Click on it and you can spawn a new draft. So you start with your rough draft. When that's complete, you say "new draft" and here's your second draft. You can invite people to comment on a draft by draft basis. If you'd like, you could saw "I'm spawning off Joe's draft since he's going to make edits." If he's not going to edit, just comment, then you can let him have a go at the second draft. Then you can move on to your third draft, fourth, etc.
At this point in time the only solution is to manually create a new file called second draft, third draft, keep them all in the project folder and then manually compare changes. Kind of defeats the aweseomeness of docs here. Of the features I use in Word, this is the only place where Word has docs beat. Of course, nobody I know can use the comments and revisioning tools worth a damn so I'm not really getting proper mileage out of them. *sigh*
So this is like Ubuntu One? (Score:2, Informative)
Except 1/8th the size?
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Ubuntu One is 2GB total. This service is 1/8 of the size per file . Presumably, you will be able to have more than 8 files uploaded.
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
.exe (Score:2)
Does this include executables? New Malware channels INDEED. I know a whole lot of people who wouldn't know what an extension is, besides pushing back a deadline.
I can see this being useful (Score:2)
I can see this being a very useful tool in the future. We currently use an internally developed tool to allow our users to upload and share large files. Unfortunately, as with anything, we've run into a few external user issues with them running an older version of Flash or their virus scanner interfering with the file download. Of course, the external user likes to blame us in these cases. What the Google brand can do for us is provide us a standard. It's a brand that people trust, and one that we can
Skydrive (Score:2)
Guess that's Google's answer to things like Microsoft's Skydrive.
Wonder if it will be blocked from work too.. :(
applications (Score:4, Insightful)
I know very few people who use USB keychain drives for this kind of thing. I teach physics lab courses, and when students need to bring home a spreadsheets or something, they just email it to themselves. I don't think the size limit is the main reason they don't use flash drives. One reason is that they don't know in advance that they're going to need one. The other is that email is less of a hassle.
If you're getting up into the amounts of data that can't go in an email attachment, then you probably need a full-fledged file synchronization utility like unison [upenn.edu] anyway. Unison is smart about recognizing data that haven't changed, and it also takes away the hassle and confusion that people experience with trying to keep straight all the different versions of files they have when they try to use a keychain drive for this. If you don't have a decent tool like this, then mirroring large amounts of data is likely to be slow, labor-intensive, and error-prone. TFA says:
Presumably the "Premier Edition" part means you'll have to pay. So for the majority of applications where you have this much data, Google will give you convenience or zero cost, but not both.
One exception I can think of is that this could be a nice, convenient way to make off-site backups of a certain amount of personal data (that novel you've been writing, ...) in case of fire or earthquake.
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Presumably the "Premier Edition" part means you'll have to pay. So for the majority of applications where you have this much data, Google will give you convenience or zero cost, but not both.
Premier Edition is $50 USD per user per year.
Pricing info (Score:5, Informative)
It doesn't seem that anyone else commenting on the article has noticed this yet, but if you click through to the Google Docs blog it has the pricing info:
http://googledocs.blogspot.com/2010/01/upload-and-store-your-files-in-cloud.html [blogspot.com]
Instead of emailing files to yourself, which is particularly difficult with large files, you can upload to Google Docs any file up to 250 MB. You'll have 1 GB of free storage for files you don't convert into one of the Google Docs formats (i.e. Google documents, spreadsheets, and presentations), and if you need more space, you can buy additional storage for $0.25 per GB per year. This makes it easy to backup more of your key files online, from large graphics and raw photos to unedited home videos taken on your smartphone. You might even be able to replace the USB drive you reserved for those files that are too big to send over email.
Combined with shared folders, you can store, organize, and collaborate on files more easily using Google Docs. For example, if you are in a club or PTA working on large graphic files for posters or a newsletter, you can upload them to a shared folder for collaborators to view, download, and print.
Again, after the 1gb limit, that $0.25 per gb-yr. By comparison, Amazon S3 is $0.15*12=$1.80 per gb-yr [amazon.com], almost an order of magnitude more expensive.
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Hopefully this will embarrass online storage services such as S3 into offering more reasonable prices. I've always through they were overpriced, and this seems to confirm it.
S3 is not unreasonable (Score:2)
For the peace of mind, about 4 dollars a month (including upload/download charges) isnt bad. I find it worthwhile especially as my Nokia phone can directly access Jungledisk's online webdav server
I won't drop Jungledisk, but I'll use this too. Multiple redundancy can never be a bad thing except possibly in a marriage.
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And you're not even taking into account the bandwidth costs associated with Amazon S3. Google Docs has no bandwidth cost (yet).
Amazon S3 is an amazing service, but it's quite expensive on a $/GB-YEAR ratio, especially once transfer costs are added in. $0.25/GB-YEAR is quite reasonable.
Torrent plz? (Score:3, Interesting)
will now become "Gdoc plz?"
FUSE (Score:5, Interesting)
How long before we see a FUSE plugin that lets you treat this like an NFS server?
(or did I miss it, and one already exists?)
Duplicity! (Score:2, Interesting)
I'm waiting for the Duplicity [nongnu.org] plugin!
Encrypted backups, for half the money Amazon S3 charges...
And let us edit them? (Score:2)
It would be nice if they started building editors for various file formats, so through google docs we could collaboratively do some video editing, programming, photo editing, etc
Guess what, so does every webhoster out there. (Score:3, Interesting)
I put it on MY server, so that I own it.
I still don’t get why anyone would be so crazy to host anything important on a company’s server. Especially one that is known as the ultimate data kraken.
File sizes (Score:2)
Wait, can I send .exe files through gmail now?
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Pity uploading via browser still sucks. (Score:4, Informative)
Why are browsers so horribly unfriendly for uploads?
Perhaps Google could put some money into fixing Firefox:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=249338 [mozilla.org]
or improving it
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=243468 [mozilla.org]
Does Chrome have a decent upload UI? I can't recall ...
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I was merely noting that the problem of assigning correct permissions to uploaded files is of identical difficulty to the one of assigning correct permissions to files created in google docs.
There is no reason to be especially confident about either; but there is good reason to have equal levels of confidence, however high or low those levels be.
counterplex the idiot (Score:5, Insightful)
Boggle.
It is so sad to get these reminders of just what a bunch of ignorant people fill the Net like counterplex.
Let's just refresh everyone's memory of searchable Google Voice:
* Google implemented search for Google Voice for people who decided to make their stuff public
* Dumbasses in the media tried to spin it as some sort of privacy violation
* Articles came out stating why the idiots babbling about privacy violation were spewing garbage since the only Google Voice stuff being indexed was stuff people decided to make public
* Same dumbasses in the media came out with 'yeah, but...I still want to be mad at Google followup articles'
Idiots like counterplex obviously just read the sensational headlines and parrot them as their own 'insight' into future stories.
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All your documents are belong to us?
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Google offers e-mail, is it public? and can you search through it?
Google offers picture albums (Picasa). Are they public? Can you make them private and unlisted?
Google already offers google docs. The same thing, you can make them private or public.
Google voicemail messages were public, because users configured they settings to make them
Re:Will these be all public too? (Score:5, Informative)
They cost money because it costs money to share data. Or did you think bandwidth, servers, and storage were free?
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I'm not sure if you've noticed: rampant file sharers think EVERYTHING should be free. At least for them.
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I'm not sure if you've noticed: rampant file sharers think EVERYTHING should be free. At least for them.
Wrong. Rampant file sharers pay good money for hardware that enables them to share their free software and content.
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I'm not sure if you've noticed: rampant file sharers think EVERYTHING should be free. At least for them.
Wrong. Rampant file sharers pay good money for hardware that enables them to share their free software and content.
Ah, let me make that statement a bit more accurate...
Rampant file sharers pay good money for hardware that enables them to share their stolen software and pirated content.
The average torrent junkie doesn't buy 8TB of disk and upgraded bandwidth plans because they really like sharing Linux ISOs...Please.
Re:Will these be all public too? (Score:5, Insightful)
Rampant file sharers pay good money for hardware that enables them to share their stolen software and pirated content.
Your software was stolen? Are you sure you didn't just misplace it? Scan your drives again to make sure it's really gone.
The average torrent junkie doesn't buy 8TB of disk and upgraded bandwidth plans because they really like sharing Linux ISOs...Please.
I can see it now. ACTA paragraph 666 - no person shall possess more than 640kb of storage without a license. That, after all, is enough for anybody.
Re:Will these be all public too? (Score:5, Funny)
Once I found some stolen software and downloaded it so I could burn it on a CD and return it to its owner. He wasn't interested, for some reason. I even offered to mail it to him. I don't think he had bought new software, either, so I guess he just didn't need it anymore. People are confusing when it comes to stolen software.
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Perhaps he was more concerned over the fact that his right to choose how his software is copied ("copy" + "right" = "copyright") was taken when the software was copied, and unlike the software, which can be duplicated, the right to control the copying of your created works, and other people copying it without your permission, are mutually exclusive. Just because he was left with a copy of the software, doesn't mean nothing was taken that he wasn't left with ("copyright" - "right" = "copy") I understand that
SDF (Score:3, Insightful)
I imagine when someone makes a post about "stolen" copyrighted materials, this is what shows up on your computer:
Semantic defense squad to the rescue! We have a situation we need to derail with a meaningless argument immediately.
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If someone has a pirated copy of Photoshop, they have deprived Adobe of money just as much as if they had shoplifted the dvd, and it is absurd to say that it is only the marginal cost of media, packaging, distribution, etc.
If I photocopy a book from the library, I deprive the author, publisher and so on of money.
I don't care how technical you want to get about the definition of thef
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I don't care how technical you want to get about the definition of theft, depriving someone of money is wrong.
If someone creates and sells a software that replaces Photoshop, it will also deprive Adobe of money. It is not the act of depriving someone of (potential) money that is wrong (although it may be illegal). You don't have a "natural" right to force someone to give you money, you know, although you may convince the state to grant you that benefit.
Intelectual/Imaginary Property is a fiction. It may be a useful fiction, but as with all fictions, once you try to extend it and to treat it as reality, it breaks
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You are only depriving them if you would have purchased the software in the first place. Most people who pirate photoshop are actually depriving a cheaper or free program of userbase and/or revenue.
Very few people need photoshop, most people just want it because it's well known. Most of those people have little or no need to manipulate images, and would easily be able to fulfil their needs with a whole host of free or cheap software, eg GIMP.
I know someone who uses a pirated photoshop for resizing images, y
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As you presumably know, GP was pointing out that what you called "free software" is not what would normally be meant by that phrase. There is FOSS and I suppose freeware, but copying commercial software does not mean it is free
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Dude, suggesting that somebody's future predicting powers may not be 100% accurate 100% of the time is all the pleasure some people have in their lives goddamnit, don't take that away.
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To be even more accurate; stolen = copyright infringed, pirated = selling those "stolen" goods. It isn't piracy if there is no monetary gain.
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But hardware wants to be free too!
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I get your point, but did you have to use the most annoying textual construct of the modern internet era to do so?
It would only be worse if you did one of those snarky parenthetical explanations (read: this shit.)
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They cost money because it costs money to share data. Or did you think bandwidth, servers, and storage were free?
Users pay their ISP's for the bandwidth, can install a free OSS server on just about any machine, and with 2T drives available store data at a very reasonable cost. Again, vulnerabilities and malware are really the only downsides.
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Then install an FTP server on your home connection and share away. You can even get a second connection so that you still have usable internet.
Sharing your own content is trivial and can be free (for small values of $cost). Sharing your content with the world in a useful way will be very expensive.
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Isn't that what Bittorrent is supposed to solve?
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The connection requests will be coming down, and your downstream is likely to be far higher than your upstream for a typical home connection... Sure, you can't control the rate of incoming SYN packets (new connections), but you can throttle the rate that existing connections send ACKs, and you can throttle the rate with which you send data (over your presumably slower upstream).
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I never really trusted putting any of my documents online at all.
Not unless I;
Putting documents online is putting them in a public space. You only do that if you want them to be available.
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All this technological overkill these days.
I just ate all my important documents.
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I wouldn't expect viewers, this sounds like just a file hosting service, with certain formats viewable online. It doesn't necessarily mean that any format you upload will be viewable online.
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How does a per-file limit of 250MB stop any of the mentioned things from happening?
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> Why should I have to pay somebody else money to upload a file to a friend...
You don't. Just connect to your friend's server and upload away.
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If you were using Backpack for project management, you were doing it wrong. Basecamp is designed for that.