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Unlimited is like a Ponzi Scheme

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Re: Unlimited is like a Ponzi Scheme

#61

Post by pnutjam »

ghaff wrote: post #45
gravitas wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The organization and data which is in that takeout is a complete mess of years of design changes from picasa -> photos, empty folders, duplicate date folders, hidden old crap from your Google+ account (like banner pics) which you can't see anymore to delete, just stuff everywhere inside those zip files. $0.02 if you ever have to actually deal with them, add time to first normalize what you unzip.

In all fairness, organizing old photos in general (especially scanned in pre-digital ones) is pretty much a horrid task in most cases. I'm dealing with it right now and stuff is linked to all over my hard drive, dupes in different formats at different levels of quality, limited metadata, etc. New stuff suffers from there being just so much of it--much of it repetitive--but at least it's in some semblance of order.

Afew years ago, I ran all my family photos through a script that renamed them based on the year, month, and date. I may have retained the old name in the metadata.

I'm looking for the script I used. I also have some tools that compare hashes and find duplicates.

You can google that stuff, or if you want to hire me to help, PM me.

Re: Unlimited is like a Ponzi Scheme

#62

Post by gravitas »

pnutjam wrote: post #59
gravitas wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The organization and data which is in that takeout is a complete mess of years of design changes from picasa -> photos, empty folders, duplicate date folders, hidden old crap from your Google+ account (like banner pics) which you can't see anymore to delete, just stuff everywhere inside those zip files. $0.02 if you ever have to actually deal with them, add time to first normalize what you unzip.

zip files suck for jpg, it's already compressed. If you're storing raw formats, it might help some.

Google takeout delivers the results in an archive (.tgz, .zip, etc.) you grab via URL; it's just a delivery mechanism from Google to your hands for the data drop/transfer.

Re: Unlimited is like a Ponzi Scheme

#64

Post by gravitas »

pnutjam wrote: post #61
ghaff wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In all fairness, organizing old photos in general (especially scanned in pre-digital ones) is pretty much a horrid task in most cases. I'm dealing with it right now and stuff is linked to all over my hard drive, dupes in different formats at different levels of quality, limited metadata, etc. New stuff suffers from there being just so much of it--much of it repetitive--but at least it's in some semblance of order.

Afew years ago, I ran all my family photos through a script that renamed them based on the year, month, and date. I may have retained the old name in the metadata. I'm looking for the script I used. I also have some tools that compare hashes and find duplicates. You can google that stuff, or if you want to hire me to help, PM me.

Years ago when Flickr made a big change and I needed to extract my original uploaded content (almost same exact scenario as this thread), I found this script as a starting point (it uses jhead): http://neverfear.org/blog/view/148/Rename_all_jpeg_files_by_...

Re: Unlimited is like a Ponzi Scheme

#67

Post by taeric »

asdfasgasdgasdg wrote: post #13

Missing one fundamental feature of a ponzi scheme: the transfer of value from the victims to the entity running the scheme. Folks have occasionally claimed without evidence that photos are being used to train nefarious machine learning models. But in fact the free tier of storage has simply been that: an entirely free halo product.

At least for internet bandwidth, it is more like an insurance scheme. You pay more than you probably need/use. Such that the seller gets to price in the risk for them that you will actually be a heavy user. And, like insurance, if you are actually a high cost user, you are probably SOoL. :(

Re: Unlimited is like a Ponzi Scheme

#68

Post by zeroonetwothree »

pontus wrote: post #47
imtringued wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you still want to play that game then restrict the service in other ways. You could for example throttle user upload to 10mbit/s if they have uploaded more than 500GB per month. That way no single user can practically upload more than 3.5TB per month. The 2 petabyte abuse scenario would have been avoided while still being able to brag about some users storing 50TB of data on your platform.

A side note on this: I always wondered when there'll be a lawsuit to this effect (the thing that originally prompted this thought was one of the carrier networks throttling download speed after some amount of data). In the extreme case, suppose you halve the upload speed after each chunk of size x. Then the amount of time to upload n*x amount of data will be 1+2+4+8+...+2^(n-1) units of time, which obviously diverges…

It’s still a finite time to upload for any given data size.

It’s not like uploads have infinite bandwidth in the absence of these limits.

Re: Unlimited is like a Ponzi Scheme

#69

Post by ddorian43 »

worldofmatthew wrote: post #6

Storage keeps getting cheaper. A $5/month income per user should allow at least 1TB of storage. If they use unraid (at 20% redundancy) than more like 1.7TB per user and that is not even going into them using used hardware (Not the HDDs but servers) or shunking HDD's which could allow over 3TB per user.

What is "unraid" ?

Re: Unlimited is like a Ponzi Scheme

#70

Post by bostonsre »

lou1306 wrote: post #53
oefrha wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've long suspected that r/DataHoarder is why we can't have nice things, i.e. cheap online data storage that is slightly subsidized by the average user who only stores a little. Thanks for confirming from the point of view of a major storage provider.

> r/DataHoarder To be honest, 99% of the posts there are about building your own NAS. And I don't fully agree with the "we can't have nice things" narrative in the Google Photos case. How bad was Google hurt by the actions of these few "power users"? Before that, how much did they profit by driving out competition with their "unlimited" plan? (Which, by the way, was neatly integrated and advertised into their own mob…

The uber strategy (speaking of ponzi scheme...).
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