I would personally fear doing any product that tries to integrate all your media for all your devices...especially because Apple and Samsung are spending hundreds of millions of dollars in R&D working on the exact same thing.
Plug: the brain of your devices
41–50 of 118 posts
Re: Plug: the brain of your devices
#42Best Kickstarter project I've seen so far!
Re: Plug: the brain of your devices
#43I sincerely doubt how ease and stable a local (actually home-based) service can be compared to cloud-based service.
Re: Plug: the brain of your devices
#44I would personally fear doing any product that tries to integrate all your media for all your devices...especially because Apple and Samsung are spending hundreds of millions of dollars in R&D working on the exact same thing.
Fear what? Fear if that was your product or fear adopting their technology?
Apple and others (I'm not too familiar with what Samsung is doing) are approaching this in a different way. They're going for the hosted server approach and we've seen scaling issues. Another huge issue is the walled garden.
I'm glad to see new guys like Dropbox gain a lot of traction and welcome others.
My main concerns after seeing this are the integration (can they keep it all these clients up to date and bug free or will my data be trapped behind a poor client?) and drive failure.
Re: Plug: the brain of your devices
#45Very interesting hardware specs:
Embedded Linux (OpenWRT based)
x86 compatible processor
I'm curious as to why they didn't go with an arm-linux combination. In any case, it sounds pretty well powered and I'm wondering if they'd ever allow 3rd party app development for it as it would be cool to have a tiny embedded box that takes care of the VPN aspect of connecting securely back to home. I'm thinking home automation type stuff.
Re: Plug: the brain of your devices
#46This seems like a very ambitious project, which is great. It does seem at risk of boiling the ocean. They're taking on: * NAS device with encrypted file storage and UPNP * setting up a VPN * client software for said VPN on each platform (or at least installers that can configure each platform's native VPN support) * multi-device file sync * whole -device file sync, with client software for each platform, presumably w…
And they're talking about some form of replication on multiple drives plugged in to a hub, and they're also talking about replication if you have two Plugs in different locations.
Using tonido, one can replicate 2 plugs in different locations.
Don't take us wrong. We wish them good luck. Just pointing out it is not a technology problem. The problem is to handle complexity when you try to do a lot of things.
Re: Plug: the brain of your devices
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
That would be the "Translucent File System" from Sun, patent #5,313,646 ( http://www.google.com/patents/US5313646 ). Back when Sun was building a new source code control system (code named Avocet) they wanted a way to create a 'view' of the branch which included stuff from NFS servers and stuff locally. The problem is subtly tricky in some ways (creating 'whiteout' to delete a file which exists in one layer but not t…
A similar technique is also used in IBM's Rational ClearCase suite. It uses a proprietary networked filesystem to provide a dynamic view to users. It was an interesting attempt at a solution for version control and I'm sure that its in use today. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clearcase
I have a fuzzy memory of the folks at Rational licensing the entire source code product from Sun at one point. I know some of the key engineers on it went to work for Rational (this was all pre-IBM acquisition)
Re: Plug: the brain of your devices
#48I think the real implications of Plug or a similar system are actually in the VRM vendor rights management and API's, not in the media play features.
We really need to wake up and realize that having all of our connected devices reliant on 3rd party servers will not scale.
I want to see this device have babies with another crowdfunded project BRCK http://brck.com/ for backup connectivity, power, and mesh networking.
Re: Plug: the brain of your devices
#49Hmm. Plug will apparently retail for $150. If I look at the dual band 802.11n router I have which happens to have a USB host port for NAS (which seems to be common these days?), it's $87 on Amazon, and of course if you don't want the router part you can get something for much less, or just use an existing desktop if you don't mind the power bill. Of course much of the value is in the convenience of setup and the full…
Looks like you can just download the client software for free and do the home PC/Router approach without having to use a plug: http://www.tonido.com/tonidodesktop_pricing/
Re: Plug: the brain of your devices
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
On the other hand, store things on a 3rd party cloud storage provider that will happily hand everything over to the NSA whenever they ask... If it's in your home they don't have an easy interface to it, they have to physically infiltrate your residence, which costs a lot more and, presumably, will require more than a passing interest in you to happen.
> on a 3rd party cloud storage provider that will happily hand everything over to the NSA whenever they ask That's assuming they just don't have complete access to everything anyway, as Guardian seemed to indicate today is the case with SkyDrive. Even if NSA or the FBI[1] is not interested in you specifically, they still might mine your data. 1. These leaks and especially today's Microsoft leak indicate substantial c…
I'm not understanding how these two things are different for the purposes of this discussion:
- The government asks for data on an ad hoc basis, and 3rd party providers trip over themselves in an effort to comply.
- The government gets a firehose of data for all customers of 3rd party providers.
It doesn't matter of the NSA is data-mining your SkyDrive, or the the local sheriff's office gets your SkyDrive data by just asking (i.e. without a warrant). Either way, your data is less secure when it's stored with a 3rd party provider than it is if you keep it in your own home.
When it's in your own home, law enforcement needs a warrant, and spy agencies need to physically send someone to bug your home. Either way, the bar has been raised to getting access to your data, so at the very least they will only access your data if there is a real reason to, and there will be some amount of oversight[1].
[1] Maybe not external on the spy agency side, but presumably orders to send people in to bug a home get more scrutiny, if for no other reason than the fact that it costs more.