Microsoft To Begin Reducing Your Free OneDrive Cloud Storage Starting Today (betanews.com)

For those of you who forgot -- or didn't bother -- to keep the 15GB worth of OneDrive storage, starting today you will see a big change in your account. On Thursday, Microsoft will begin shrinking your 15GB OneDrive free storage to 5GB, and also cancel the 15GB storage it gave you as part of camera roll backup bonus. For its part, Microsoft did warn about the changes to people a couple of times over the past few months. It all started when Microsoft gave Office 365 subscribers unlimited OneDrive storage space. Many people abused this, uploading over 75TB worth of movies and other files in some cases. BetaNews reports: If you log into your OneDrive account and find that you still have the full storage quota available, don't be lulled into a false sense of security. The cuts are actually being spread out between July 13 and July 27. Unless you opted out of the change, you're out of luck.

Comments

Abuse?

[JaredOfEuropa]

If you offer unlimited storage and someone uploads 75TB worth of data, they are not abusing the service but taking advantage of your generous offer. If you don't want 75TB of data, set a lower limit.

Re:Abuse?

[idbeholda]

Microsoft already set a pretty low bar with Windows ME and Vista.

Re:Abuse?

[Okian Warrior]

If you offer unlimited storage and someone uploads 75TB worth of data, they are not abusing the service but taking advantage of your generous offer. If you don't want 75TB of data, set a lower limit.

Let's add to that.

Offer unlimited storage, and when people upload 75TB worth of data it's abuse.

But presenting misleading alerts to trick people into installing Windows10, that's perfectly acceptable.

What I don't understand is:

a) Why windows 10 users haven't filed a class-action suit against Microsoft, and
b) Why the FTC hasn't dropped a hammer on Microsoft over this.

The FTC seems to be the only federal agency that actually tries to benefit the people. They should be pounding Microsoft into the ground over the misleading alerts and unwanted upgrades.

Re:Abuse?

[Anonymous Coward]

Unlimited storage for Office 365 data. Not for pirated movies.

Re:Abuse?

[Kreplock]

The unwanted upgrades aren't related to the unlimited storage issue.

The FTC probably hasn't received complaints about the unlimited storage issue.

I think a lot of people would agree with your take on it, but I won't hold it against someone when something with reasonable intent becomes an onerous, unreasonable burden. Any rational person *knows* there is a point where "taking advantage of this generous offer" becomes "being a pain in the ass that breaks it for everyone" because they ruin the product's sustainability. It's just a debate about where the point lies.

Re:Abuse?

[Alumoi]

But I embbed my videos in MS Office documents!

Re:Abuse?

[Ogive17]

I guess I'm cut from a different mold, just because something is "free" or "unlimited" doesn't mean I'm going to horde resources.

When something sounds too good to be true, it probably is. I hope rational people will realize that if too many people abuse the system like this, the rules will get changed for the worse for everyone.

Maybe I'm just weird.

Re:Abuse?

[twistedcubic]

How do you know it wasn't 75 trillion copies of lorem ipsum, uncompressed?

Re:Abuse?

[Ash-Fox]

Offer unlimited storage, and when people upload 75TB worth of data it's abuse.

How many TB isn't abuse again?

Re:Abuse?

[__aaclcg7560]

Microsoft already set a pretty low bar with Windows ME and Vista.

ME was unforgiveable. But Vista worked quite well with extra hardware like a quad-core processor and 4GB or more of RAM. Since I originally built my system for Vista, I had no problems running Windows 10.

Re:Abuse?

[Anonymous Coward]

You are. It's false advertising to say it's unlimited, and then get upset when people use it in the manner which it was advertised.

If they wanted a cap of, say, 5 TB, they should have said it has a 5 TB cap. Not too hard to do.

Re:Abuse?

[Anonymous Coward]

You are not, we are just surrounded by selfish people. Its the same thing that happened with unlimited mobile data, people thought that meant it was ok to go hog wild no matter what that does to the network for others. Sure when they offered it I am sure they thought some people would push their luck with it. The problem is everyone now a days is self absorbed and fail to think about what their actions do to others.

It reminds me of high school. Every year one day the entire senior class would skip. This was a known thing, and everyone including the school expected it. In fact the school at that point even scheduled around it so their was nothing important missed out on. Then my senior year after the skip day and nothing happened to the students to punish them, a large part of the class took this to mean that they could do this more often. So they started to skip once a month. After the third time the school put out new rules forbidding the skip day permanently on threat of not graduating. So my class ruined it for all of the following years.

So basically thanks to all the aholes for ruining it for everyone.

Re:Abuse?

[Ol Olsoc]

Microsoft already set a pretty low bar with Windows ME and Vista.

ME was unforgiveable. But Vista worked quite well with extra hardware like a quad-core processor and 4GB or more of RAM. Since I originally built my system for Vista, I had no problems running Windows 10.

Tell me how well Vista worked with all of the peripherals it made instantly obsolete. I remember a group that over my loud objections, forced me to upgrade them to Vista. Then my favorite moment was announcing to them that they just bought themselves a slew of new printers and scanners.

Vista eventually worked okay after the wide path of distruction it caused and nonfunctional machines it left from Vista Basic certified were buried.

Re:Abuse?

[110010001000]

No, you have been fooled by the marketing people. They say "unlimited" because they know it sounds good. If they don't mean "unlimited" then say "5 TB max" or "20GB max". But that doesn't sound as good on an advertisement. Don't apologize for the marketers. They know what they were doing.

Re:Abuse?

[Anonymous Coward]

You are. It's false advertising to say it's unlimited, and then get upset when people use it in the manner which it was advertised.

If they wanted a cap of, say, 5 TB, they should have said it has a 5 TB cap. Not too hard to do.

And what reasonable person believes that there is such a word as 'unlimited'? Nothing is technically without limit. If I open a buffet and offer you unlimited bread for your visit you would still be limited to the the amount of bread that 1) my kitchen could provide and 2) your stomach can hold. Should I be held liable for false advertisement because my kitchen could not physically produce the bread as fast as you could physically consume it? A reasonable person understands that life has limitations and that the word unlimited is (almost) never used literally.

Re:Abuse?

[Ol Olsoc]

Let's add to that.

Offer unlimited storage, and when people upload 75TB worth of data it's abuse.

But presenting misleading alerts to trick people into installing Windows10, that's perfectly acceptable.

What I don't understand is:

a) Why windows 10 users haven't filed a class-action suit against Microsoft.

The unlimited data thing has been around for so long that the meaning of the word has changed. Just like an unlimited data plan for some mobile phone company I heard. They plainly state that the Unlimited plan means the first 6 gigs are at 4G, and everything after that is 2G. Which is to say - darn near unusable. Microsoft OneDrive gives people a lot of storage until it doesn't any more.

That first hit is always free. And the people who would use OneDrive should know that's just how it works. My cloud sits on the desk nearby. And Microsoft has no control over how much I can use.

Re:Abuse?

[Anonymous Coward]

Should I be held liable for false advertisement because my kitchen could not physically produce the bread as fast as you could physically consume it?

Yes. Why would you offer unlimited bread if you can't provide it? The fact that I know you're lying and can't actually deliver what you promised doesn't let you off the hook for lying in the first place.

Re:Abuse?

[__aaclcg7560]

Tell me how well Vista worked with all of the peripherals it made instantly obsolete.

I've never experienced that problem at home. Many of the Fortune 500 companies I've worked at in IT support ran Windows XP until Windows 7 came out. Vista in the workplace was a non-issue.

Re:Abuse?

[TheCastro1689]

As long as the restaurant is open or during their buffet hours and I'm still sitting there I want as much bread as I want.

Re:Abuse?

[TheCastro1689]

They're scumbag liars, and it should be illegal to advertise like that even with a disclaimer that is hard to read or flashed too short to read on screen.

Re:Abuse?

[Kierthos]

Well, it's in the dictionary, so yeah, it would appear to be a word.

And there is a functional difference between "we can't serve you more bread, you ate it all" and file storage. Restaurants do, you know, close. Most aren't open 24 hours. Okay, sure, things like IHOP, but even they say "All you can eat pancakes" instead of "unlimited pancakes".

And that's the difference there, isn't it? I have never seen a restaurant offer "unlimited" anything. (Not sure if "bottomless fries" counts...) More often, with buffets, it's "All you can eat", so there is a top limit. Or "free refills" on drinks.

But "unlimited" specifically means without limit. Microsoft could have avoided a lot of trouble by defining a limit. But they didn't want to. They should have known better, considering how long they've been in business, and some of their previous decisions.

Re:Abuse?

[Ol Olsoc]

You are. It's false advertising to say it's unlimited, and then get upset when people use it in the manner which it was advertised.

If they wanted a cap of, say, 5 TB, they should have said it has a 5 TB cap. Not too hard to do.

Many people who use cloud services have no idea what a byte, Giga, or Tera is. So you'd have to edumacate them before they had an idea what that means. And those folks would think that Unlimited means infinite, and as long as they could retreive their midget shemale scat porn, it's all good.

Re:Abuse?

[Wrath0fb0b]

Because we are humans and not machines and, as such, we are capable of understanding limiting principles that are fuzzy and imprecise. Moreover, in many cases we prefer such fuzzy limits because in most cases it's much less effort to rely on them than to expend the intellectual effort to precisely quantify the limits. Besides being a pain to draft, communicate and clarify, precise language creates two additional negative effects: first it displaces the existing fuzzy limits, which can actually lead to less heuristic control. Second, it encourages rules-lawyering that consumes more effort and bogs people down in nit-picking (except that pig likes wrestling in the mud).

To give a practical example, coffee shops are happy to offer "Free WiFi", often having a large sign to that effect. But if buy a small regular coffee and proceed to download/serve dozens of Linux ISOs at max bandwidth over Bittorrent (and degrade the service of everyone else in the shop), you will be asked to leave. It's implicit that "Free WiFi" here is understood in the context of things that normal people do in a coffee shop. It would be positively ridiculous for them to have to write the rules out instead of just assuming that people will be reasonable.

You can only use X MB per hour and $Z of baked goods minus A MB every time you harass the baristas. At no time can your peak bandwidth, as measured by the rolling average over the last 60 second period as computed every 10 seconds, exceed A/B Kbps download/upload. A first offense under this section shall be punishable by a discrete warning. A second offense under this section shall be punishable by a public shaming in front of the other patrons. Third and subsequent offenses shall be punished by having hot coffee poured on your laptop, phone or pants at the discretion of the barista. Offenses shall toll at the rate of 1 offense per calendar week, provided that you visit the coffee shop at least twice during said calendar week.

TLDR: Summarized succinctly in a single-pane webcomic.

Re:Abuse?

[jellomizer]

No it is abuse.
It is like going to an all you can eat restaurant stay there for the whole day and eat all your meals there.
Or just swiping all the pennies in the give a penny take a penny bin....

In general when you have a free service. You should be grateful that it is free, and use it respecting all the other users. Storage is about $0.25 a gig (Assuming redundant drives) So that 75TB is about $18,000 worth of space for your free service. So for a company who has to share for a lot of people. They expect to spend a few bucks per user. However abuse is pushing past that amount.

There really isn't a justification for being a dick

Re:Abuse?

[Anonymous Coward]

If you offer unlimited storage and someone uploads 75TB worth of data, they are not abusing the service but taking advantage of your generous offer. If you don't want 75TB of data, set a lower limit.

...but this is exactly what they did? It would be false advertising if they terminated the service of the 75TB user and continued to advertise unlimited data, but instead they're changing their entire service to accommodate the limitations. What did you expect them to do, buy an infinite number of hard disks?

Re:Abuse?

[dwillden]

As to the Windows 10 users (assuming you mean those upgraded against their will): I imagine Microsoft will point out the benefits of moving as many users as possible to an up to date single OS structure versus trying to maintain and patch multiple versions. Promises to maintain older versions are fulfilled by moving users to current version. The maintenance and support is to move them to a more modern OS.
They'll be able to point to how Apple has done with with both OSX (not always forced) and iOS (forced until the hardware can no longer handle the upgrades. As well as how that is the model most apps in the mobile environment use as well as most major browsers.

Thus they are only following industry norms, nothing to punish them for. Just because so many of us are used to the need to hold off on upgrading to a new windows version until at least SP1 does not mean they can't change the paradigm and push all users really, really hard to update and achieve a more secure OS environment not having so many varieties of Windows out there to patch.

The storage could be argued as a bait and switch.

Re:Abuse?

[spire3661]

"In general when you have a free service. You should be grateful that it is free, and use it respecting all the other users. "

That in NO WAY reflects the reality of humanity. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... You are preaching an unrealistic ideal. The biggest problem here is allowing MS to use the word 'unlimited'. That word simply should not be allowed in marketing material. If you cant offer something truly unlimited then you cant use the word in your marketing. I put the burden on on the professional marketers and lawyers that allowed this messaging to go through, not the consumers.

The only dick here is MS for using the word unlimited. Dont write checks your company cant cash.

Re:Abuse?

[thegarbz]

They should be pounding Microsoft into the ground over the misleading alerts and unwanted upgrades.

They are missing a burden of proof. Microsoft can happily show stats of people who purchased Windows 10, are running Windows 10 without issues (there's a feedback option), the trial program they have for it, and their statistics also show that people are using Windows 7 despite being part of the free Windows 10 upgrade, and that there's an option to downgrade.

With all of this in place the FTC basically don't have a chance.

Re:Abuse?

[chipschap]

In quite a few "unlimited" plans I've seen there is fine print in the user agreement that specifies "reasonable" use, which can be just as meaningless, although Skype (and others) actually put a metric on it. I recall "unlimited" being defined as something like 10 hours per day or X number of calls to N different numbers in T amount of time. (Not sure if this is still the case.)

Re:Abuse?

[Dragonslicer]

Storage is about $0.25 a gig (Assuming redundant drives) So that 75TB is about $18,000 worth of space for your free service.

You think Microsoft is paying $125 each for a bunch of 1 TB hard drives? 8 TB hard drives sell for $500-600, and I'm sure Microsoft is paying less than that when they buy hundreds of them at a time. Even if they're doing full mirroring instead of something like RAID-6, you're off by a factor of 2.

Re: Abuse?

[Anonymous Coward]

You go NOW! You been here FOUR HOUR! You eat like killa whale!

Re:Abuse?

[Ol Olsoc]

Tell me how well Vista worked with all of the peripherals it made instantly obsolete.

I've never experienced that problem at home. Many of the Fortune 500 companies I've worked at in IT support ran Windows XP until Windows 7 came out. Vista in the workplace was a non-issue.

It was interesting times. This whole debacle is a case study in idiocy. I was doing work for a non-profit in 2007, and the head of their team for updating the computers and network was a "Friend of Microsoft" member. They were interested in cutting costs as much as possible, as a nonprofit might. I reccomended for their particular purpose that late model high end used computers running XP would be their best bet. Network stuff would be pretty cut and dried.

Friend of Microsoft would have no part of such nonsense. He said they should buy new Vista Basic computers. They then tried to do an endrun around the financial rules of the group, by having individuals buy the computers, then get reimbursed. I recused myself from any purchase decisions at that point, because I knew what was coming. So, they ended up with these shitty little Toshiba laptops that didn't even fit my definition of working. So I did what I could to get them to work. This meant stripping almost everything off hte computers, and turning off all CPU and drive sucking services like indexing off. And it was around that time that the peripheral incompatibility surfaced. No drivers. Microsoft made a decision that they weren't in the driver business, so all their printers and scanners screwed the pooch.

Then they decided that what was needed was to max out the RAM on each of the computers, so they spent a lot of money on that. It helped - a little.

But a little outside of warranty, the mobos started going bad. At this point, they called me in again because I had told them they were heading down the wrong road before, and they were starting to get the inkling that I might have been correct. It was a funny meeting, capped off with them trying to figure out how that could get Toshiba to "Escalate the issue" by playing on our non-profit status.

I did note to them that that wasn't going to happen because they were all considered the computers of the individual that bought them.

Finally, they asked me if I was willing to design and implement a new system. I asked them if they wanted a system that worked. This really pissed off Friend of Microsoft guy. I told them I would do it if they would name a committe of one - me to make all the decisions - Friend of Microsoft guy was turning red. They agreed, and Friend of Microsoft guy stormed out of the room.

And three weeks later, they had a fully functional network of computers that were replaced only last year with new ones. Friend of Microsoft guy is no longer there. Only one of those computers is still around. I keep it there just to remind them that they need to pay attention to who they listen to.

Re:Abuse?

[sjames]

Or, marketers could say what they actually mean so people have at least a clearly defined boundary. Don't say unlimited if you'll squawk after 50 GB, say up to 50GB and be lenient if you want. Similarly, your school should have upon hearing rumors of a second skip day announced that unexcused absences would not be tolerated and actually made it stick (or suggest to teachers it's a good day for a test). Next year, overlook ONE skip day as usual.

Re:Abuse?

[tinkerton]

I take a different angle. It's normal that at some point you think you can offer unlimited storage because you have an estimate of what it means in practice. Then if people really start to store huge amounts of data, your estimates were wrong and you change your mind. No big deal.
I take issue though with how this is connected with the current reduction of 15GB to 5GB. 15GB is 4000 times lower than the single problematic instance. It has no relation. Also with a factor 3 you're not going to change your business model in any way. It's a simple optimization. There one would start to think that if you commit to offering 15GB, don't change it shortly after it or whenever you feel like it because then I start to think you're just doing whatever you can get away with.

Re:Abuse?

[Anonymous Coward]

What I don't understand is:

a) Why windows 10 users haven't filed a class-action suit against Microsoft,

Well, you see, when you install Windows 10 you agree that you cannot sue Microsoft, either individually or in class action, without taking the matter to the American Arbitration Association first. (seriously!)

So, in allowing Windows 10 to be installed, you gave up any rights you may or may not have had to sue them. Even if it installed on its' own, you've agreed to the EULA so there you are.

(going for + Funny....)

Re:Abuse?

[Anonymous Coward]

Offer unlimited storage, and when people upload 75TB worth of data it's abuse.

Yes, See XKCD: Arbitrage.

As I understand it, Microsoft didn't sue the people who uploaded 75TB of data, or do anything punishing of them. They saw people overusing the system in a way they didn't expect, so changed the terms of the service. Like if a restaurant goes from "free Wi-Fi" to "free Wi-Fi with purchase of a meal" to "free Wi-Fi for 2 hours with the purchase of a meal."

Surely you aren't criticizing Microsoft for that.

Re:Abuse?

[Anonymous Coward]

the amount of information required to store the complete perimeter of a fractal.

Re:Abuse?

[ultranova]

Any rational person *knows* there is a point where "taking advantage of this generous offer" becomes "being a pain in the ass that breaks it for everyone" because they ruin the product's sustainability.

A rational person has every reason to think a decades-old multibillion dollar IT company knows exactly how much disk space they can afford to offer their customers at what price.

Re:Abuse?

[AK Marc]

My story started the same, but Friend of Microsoft was my sister. If someone wanted Vista, they could buy their own computer, but not expense it. 98 SE was great for perephrials, and 2000 was great for file-shares. So we had a mix of 98/2000 until XP, then a quick move to XP. Turns out the terms of the licensing for non-profits are a lie. A "purchase" of a lifetime key is good for 1 year. The computer is legal forever, but you can't re-license anything with that key after 1 year. Unless you renew a corporate licensing contract annually with that license attached.

Microsoft licensing is so confusing that every time I've been audited, the results took months, because the MS auditors had to send the results to Redmond for the official response on the keys and such. I was never under or over licensed by much, but I'd get keys from 10 different sources to be able to get the best price on the day for the cost-conscious non-profit.

Re:Abuse?

[lgw]

Any cloud storage service worth a shit stores your data in more than one datacenter, and possibly in more than one place in each DC (though for consumer cloud storage, probably only one of those levels). Plus the meta-data takes more space than you think. Plus there are only so many drivers per server, and those servers aren't doing anything else.

So, yeah, depending on how much redundancy the back-end has, $0.25/gig could be lower than reality. (BTW, 4GB drives are still the bulk buy of choice, and the big guys don't tend to buy the cheapest consumer drives, as replacing failed drives isn't free.)

Basic rule of thumb for "stored reliably with full redundancy" is 10x the cheapest storage you can buy at Fry's, though consumer cloud storage very probably has less redundancy.

Re:Abuse?

[ultranova]

Because we are humans and not machines and, as such, we are capable of understanding limiting principles that are fuzzy and imprecise.

However, there's nothing fuzzy or imprecise about "unlimited". It means you can use as much as you want. "About 15 megabytes" would be fuzzy.

To give a practical example, coffee shops are happy to offer "Free WiFi", often having a large sign to that effect. But if buy a small regular coffee and proceed to download/serve dozens of Linux ISOs at max bandwidth over Bittorrent (and degrade the service of everyone else in the shop), you will be asked to leave. It's implicit that "Free WiFi" here is understood in the context of things that normal people do in a coffee shop.

Right. So if that coffee shop specifically advertizes "Free WiFi With Unlimited Bandwidth", and is not a coffee shop but a multibillion dollar IT company with a dedicated department of lawyers going over every detail of the deals they offer, what's the implied meaning of "Unlimited Bandwidth"?

TLDR: Summarized succinctly in a single-pane webcomic.

That guy is the one making the offer, not the one taking it.

Re: Abuse?

[Anonymous Coward]

Using Basic at a business was your first mistake.

Thinking getting new printers is a bad thing is also likely your mistake.

Re: Abuse?

[Ol Olsoc]

Using Basic at a business was your first mistake.

Thinking getting new printers is a bad thing is also likely your mistake.

You didn't read very well I see. I had to work with the computers that the "Friend of Microsoft" insisted they buy, effectively kicking me out of the loop. Paying attention to him cost them a lot of money. I just had to clean up the mess he caused. I was the guy that was called in when they had fucked up so badly their system didn't work, it was no system I'd ever spec out.

And later, when they decided maybe they should have listened to me, and I built their new system, the results were exactly as they wanted.

Re:Abuse?

[JaredOfEuropa]

That's a fair point, but brings up the question of reasonable expectations. In an all-you-can-eat restaurant, almost anyone understands that it's what you eat in one sitting, no doggy bags, take all you want but eat all you take, and be respectful of the other diners (well, unless you've ever been to an all inclusive resort with a lot of Russian guests...) For "unlimited" online backups, what is a reasonable limit? I'm not surprised that people say "great: I can dump all my movies in there"... of course I am also not surprised that MS then decides to adjust their terms of service.

Re: Abuse?

[Anonymous Coward]

Glad someone said. Or at least , *first* change the limit to 15.

Re:Abuse?

[Anonymous Coward]

No it is abuse.
It is like going to an all you can eat restaurant stay there for the whole day and eat all your meals there.
Or just swiping all the pennies in the give a penny take a penny bin....

In general when you have a free service. You should be grateful that it is free, and use it respecting all the other users. Storage is about $0.25 a gig (Assuming redundant drives) So that 75TB is about $18,000 worth of space for your free service. So for a company who has to share for a lot of people. They expect to spend a few bucks per user. However abuse is pushing past that amount.

There really isn't a justification for being a dick

Except that when you eat at an all you can eat restaurant they specifically state limits, such as a 2 hour time limit, and potentially an additional charge for wasted food. This is usually posted in an obvious location.

Re:Abuse?

[Anonymous Coward]

All you can eat restaurants have a time limit that's shown on the menu and elsewhere. You cannot stay there all day (well you might, but they certainly can decide to use this rule against you at some point).

What a company "expects" is very clearly laid out in the terms of service. "Unlimited" has a very clear meaning in English, yet companies continue to mislead people because they benefit from this false advertising. The dick here is Microsoft and every other company that try to redefine plain english words so they can mislead more people into signing up.

Re:Abuse?

[Wrath0fb0b]

Right. So if that coffee shop specifically advertizes "Free WiFi With Unlimited Bandwidth", and is not a coffee shop but a multibillion dollar IT company with a dedicated department of lawyers going over every detail of the deals they offer, what's the implied meaning of "Unlimited Bandwidth"?

I think in the Microsoft case, it's clear that unlimited storage on OneDrive is that it's unlimited storage for items relating to the imputed use as a collaborative tool. That would mean documents, photos, and the like. And, you know, be reasonable about it using your own internal ability to discern it.

[ Of course, now the rules lawyering begins. "Oh photos are allowed, I'm going to download every GIF on planet Earth and sync it because I'm on the spectrum and hence believe that technically-correct-is-the-best-kind-of-correct". And that might tempt me to say, "No, it's your own personal, non-commercial, photos, not the entire National Geographic archive since 1965". But I won't, because that just invites more rules-lawyering and concedes the idea that I'm supposed to enumerate every detail. ]

Oh, and for bandwidth, I would think "Unlimited Bandwidth" would imply something fuzzily-like "No numerical limit but users in the top 5% that are using more than 10-20x what the median user does should probably lay off a bit. We'll probably let them go at top speed unless the network is saturated, at which point we'll put them in the lowest priority QoS so that the other 95% of users don't experience degraded performance due to those hogs." But I'm not going to formulate that in a rules-lawyery way, because it's pretty obvious to the reasonable folks that when 5% of users are using 50% of the resource, they should a back a smidge.

Re:Abuse?

[Coren22]

My cloud sits on the desk nearby. And Microsoft has no control over how much I can use.

Out of curiosity, what do you use? I am shopping for a new storage array, and am a bit unsettled on the direction to go. Was almost thinking of a build-your-own NAS this time, but if you were to recommend a better option, it might sway me.

Re:Abuse?

[Coren22]

a) Why windows 10 users haven't filed a class-action suit against Microsoft, and

What class action lawsuit would be appropriate? The people using Windows 10 decided to use it, perhaps you mean the people who don't want to use Windows 10?

Re:Abuse?

[Ol Olsoc]

My cloud sits on the desk nearby. And Microsoft has no control over how much I can use.

Out of curiosity, what do you use? I am shopping for a new storage array, and am a bit unsettled on the direction to go. Was almost thinking of a build-your-own NAS this time, but if you were to recommend a better option, it might sway me.

I use two different systems. One is a separate Hard drive with all of my files stored on it, and the other is a Time Machine backup with all of my files plus all of thefiles on teh other drive. It's a weird sort of massive redundancy and of course mac Centric. I'm also adding another drive that will be placed in another area in the house that is likely to remain untouched if there is a fire. It's not perfect, no system is, but it's worked very well so far. And I have a botload of multiple backups.

we need a firefox revolution

[Anonymous Coward]

we dont want chrome

Re:we need a firefox revolution

[Mashiki]

Too bad firefox has done a great job of burning all that good will in the tech industry and pissing off the people that they want to use their product. Notice how much their marketshare has dropped in the last ~5 years?

Re:we need a firefox revolution

[JohnFen]

Precisely.

Fortunately, it's still possible to get and use forks of Firefox from before Mozilla started ruining it.

Abused?

[Anonymous Coward]

unlimited OneDrive storage space

Many people abused this

Perhaps many people used more storage space than they liked or intended, but abused? No.

Re:Abused?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, you can abuse something that it 'unlimited'. Unlimited in cases like this doesn't mean 'infinite', and no reasonable person would think it did.

It's like if you took a busload of people to a restaurant, bought one entree, and then tried to share your 'free unlimited breadsticks' with the other 30 people in your party because, hey, they're unlimited, right? No, that's abuse and you're a jackass.

Re:Abused?

[NatasRevol]

If you think unlimited *isn't* infinite, then what is it?

Microsoft's poor word choice is their fault, not anyone else's.

Re:Abused?

[Anonymous Coward]

Unless the people "abusing" the "unlimited" storage are sharing it with others, they're merely taking advantage of what was offered.
It would have been easy enough for stupid M$ to set a specific limit that was higher than the competition and increase it over time as Google did with Gmail.

And you're absolutely right about one thing - you're a jackass

Re:Abused?

[110010001000]

Um, no. That isn't abuse. That is an intentional marketing strategy. Do you think that Darden, Inc cares if you bring in a busload of people and only buy one entree and the rest eat breadsticks? No, they don't care because that would never happen in reality, and even if it did it would be a minuscule loss of profit. Breadsticks are cheap. What they care about is the marketing message of "free breadsticks!". It worked on you. Now everytime you pass an Olive Garden you say to your "hey they serve free breadsticks".

If someone says you have "unlimited" storage, then you can assume you have "unlimited" storage. It is marketing.

Re:Abused?

[JohnFen]

Yes, you can Unlimited in cases like this doesn't mean 'infinite', and no reasonable person would think it did.

Wait, so companies just get to lie and it's OK? "Unlimited" means unlimited. As in no limit to the amount of storage you use. To argue otherwise is odd.

No, that's abuse and you're a jackass.

If a restaurant offered "unlimited bread sticks" without the usual stipulation that it's just for people who bought food, then it's not abuse at all to bring 30 of your friends in to chow down so long as it's allowed by the terms the restaurant set. It's being a jackass, yes, but not an abuse.

Re:Abused?

[Ol Olsoc]

Yes, you can abuse something that it 'unlimited'. Unlimited in cases like this doesn't mean 'infinite', and no reasonable person would think it did.

That last part, "reasonable person" is the big clue. Too many have no idea, nor any intention of learning what it means. It was just like when my kid still lived at home, every time U upgraded my internt speed, it always seemd just as slow and even slower. . Then I started monitoring his data use. He just downloaded and torrented more. So he got a throttle on his connection in the end.

Re:Abused?

[Ol Olsoc]

If you think unlimited *isn't* infinite, then what is it?

Microsoft's poor word choice is their fault, not anyone else's.

Do you think that there is a remote possibility of storing infinite data and passing it off at infinite speeds anywhere?

Remember that your definition requires all functions to be infinite, because if you don't have infinite transmission speed and infinite processing power, it is impossible to have infinite storage. So Microsoft and all other providers are lying, and the use of the word unlimited ends up meaning nothing in any case.

If you are going to go all pedantic over a now long obsolete definition of unlimited, you gotta make all of the functions unlimited as in infinite.

Re:Abused?

[Anonymous Coward]

It is people like you why all ads have 30 disclaimers after them.

Re:Abused?

[Ol Olsoc]

Yes, you can Unlimited in cases like this doesn't mean 'infinite', and no reasonable person would think it did.

Wait, so companies just get to lie and it's OK? "Unlimited" means unlimited. As in no limit to the amount of storage you use. To argue otherwise is odd.

No, its that you are using a definition of unlimited that is not constrained by physics. Your definition is unlimited means infinite.

Unlimited by now is just more ad copy hype, and means pretty much nothing at all. The closest it ever gets to your meaning is that people don't expect to ever be told they've exceed a limit. Microsoft is powerful, but they cannot bypass the laws of physics.

Or maybe Platinum Ultra Super Unlimited will signal when we hit infinity.

Re:Abused?

[Opportunist]

Yes, unlimited means infinite. If you offer me something without setting a limit, I do (sensibly) assume that I can use as much of it as I deem fit.

Offering something like online storage space in unlimited quantity is STUPID. Because as anyone knows, data will expand to fill the available storage. Anyone who at least dabbled in anything data related knows that.

Makes me wonder why Microsoft didn't know that.

Re:Abused?

[Opportunist]

Actually, sharing the content is one of the key reasons why I would want to store something off site.

Re:Abused?

[Dragonslicer]

If a restaurant offered "unlimited bread sticks" without the usual stipulation that it's just for people who bought food, then it's not abuse at all to bring 30 of your friends in to chow down so long as it's allowed by the terms the restaurant set. It's being a jackass, yes, but not an abuse.

How is "being a jackass" different from "abuse"?

Re:Abused?

[macs4all]

No, its that you are using a definition of unlimited that is not constrained by physics. Your definition is unlimited means infinite.

"Unlimited" as a marketing term has nothing to do with physical, rational, nor societal constraints.

It merely means that the purveyor will not impose artificial, arbitrary limits upon what each user can "use".

Of course there will still be limits (total drive space MS has dedicated to the task, network speed, etc.); but those are outside of a marketing "promise" of "Unlimited".

When Olive Garden says "Unlimited Breadsticks", it is understood that they will not "artificially" decide when enough is enough. And that's exactly what MS did.

Then they clearly reneged.

Re:Abused?

[Ol Olsoc]

No, its that you are using a definition of unlimited that is not constrained by physics. Your definition is unlimited means infinite.

"Unlimited" as a marketing term has nothing to do with physical, rational, nor societal constraints.

It merely means that the purveyor will not impose artificial, arbitrary limits upon what each user can "use".

Your level of naivety is either unlimited by your definition, or infinite, by mine.

Do you remember the old Peanuts comic strip? Lucy would entice Charlie Brown into kicking a football, and every time pulling it way at the last second - he'd fall over. But he'd always fall for it.

How many times do you Charlie Browns have to fall for the same "Unlimited" hype before you realize it doesn't matter one little tiny infinitesimal bit what you think it means?

Unlimited cloud storage now means you can store stuff until they decide that they are done letting you store any more of your stuff. Now kick the football. Seriously, I won't pull it away from you, really, we've learned our lesson - come on, it'll be great - here ya go, it'll be a lot of fun. Kick it- you know you really want to. Pretty please?

Re:Abused?

[macs4all]

Unlimited cloud storage now means you can store stuff until they decide that they are done letting you store any more of your stuff.

So, you think that "Unlimited" means "Unlimited until we say you've reached our limit of Unlimited", right?

So, "Unlimited" for certain values of "Unlimited"?

I certainly agree that storing 75 TB of data in their "Unlimited" storage is supremely asshat-ish; but that doesn't mean that they violated (or even "abused") the limits of "Unlimited".

Microsoft said one thing, and have been lying to so many people for so long, that they apparently never bothered to figure out that some people would actually take them at their "word".

Pretty stupid for a corporation with enough lawyers on staff to form a small Army, and which feels fit to require EULAs for the most trivial of software packages that have more words in them than the AT&T Divestiture Decree.

Re:Abused?

[kqs]

Did you ever wonder why products come with dozens of lines of small print, or why laws which should be two paragraphs end up being 40 pages long? It's because of you.

So sure, rather than saying "unlimited", they need to offer a large set of limitations for total space, how much the data can change per month, exactly how long the retrieval time will take, an SLA for availability, and probably eight other things which I haven't thought of, because if they don't meet your definitions you'll complain loudly that they didn't carefully limit it so you deserve it all.

Yeah, I'm being a bit over-the-top here, but only a bit. I don't know if YOU will complain, but I guarantee that someone will, probably loudly and to a blogger who prefers clicks over reasonable stories.

Also, I agree with you that MS was stupid to offer "unlimited" if they were not SURE they could handle it.

Re:Abused?

[NatasRevol]

LOL, you forgot infinite time.

But, "a now long obsolete definition of unlimited" is just plain dumbass.

MSFT never said infinitely fast, or infinite power, or whatever other shit argument you're trying to come up with. They SAID unlimited storage.

Re:Abused?

[Ol Olsoc]

Unlimited cloud storage now means you can store stuff until they decide that they are done letting you store any more of your stuff.

So, you think that "Unlimited" means "Unlimited until we say you've reached our limit of Unlimited", right?

Now you are catching on! I don't deal in pedantry, or wishful thinking. I deal in reality, and at this point, and with all of the counterexamples of industry and their "Unlimited, you can have your quasi infinte definition if you want. I consider the industries definition of unlimited to be exactly what they do, and have been doing for years.

No more no less. I can say I'm totally wrong if that salves your need to be "right". But that won't ever correspond to how things actually are. And it will mke me wrong as well.

Re:Abused?

[lgw]

Obsessive pedantic nerds use language in a different way than normal people. English is not a programming language. Most normal people understand that "unlimited" means "but don't be a dick".

Re:Abused?

[NatasRevol]

So, what's being a dick?

75TB may be a dick to an individual, but to a business, it's a few dozen VMs with snapshots. ie not very much at all.

Also, most people don't *use* unlimited because they don't have the need. That doesn't mean they wouldn't if they had a reason. (Most people don't know how to torrent movies/music/etc)

Re:Abused?

[macs4all]

Now you are catching on! I don't deal in pedantry, or wishful thinking.

Pederasty has nothing to do with it.

Microsoft lied (again), pure and simple. Some people (stupidly/greedily, IMHO) took them at their word.

So, since "Unlimited" doesn't equal "Unlimited" in your personal "User's Guide To The Real Meanings Of Common Words", what, pray tell, would you put the "limit" of "Unlimited" at? Because the accepted, common-use definition (which is what a Court would use) is (according to Merriam-Webster) :

1: lacking any controls : unrestricted

2: boundless, infinite

3: not bounded by exceptions : undefined

Definitions 1 and 2 and 3 seem to apply here. That's not being "pedantic"; it is applying accepted, mainstream common-language meanings to common, mainstream common-language words. Sorry if that doesn't fit with your meaning of how language works; but it's the one that most people would use.

And besides, how is a person to really know when they exceed "your" limit of "Unlimited"?

Re:Abused?

[Ol Olsoc]

LOL, you forgot infinite time.

But, "a now long obsolete definition of unlimited" is just plain dumbass.

MSFT never said infinitely fast, or infinite power, or whatever other shit argument you're trying to come up with. They SAID unlimited storage.

You realize that there are plenty of examples of exactly what I am referring to .

And you are arguing against the situation as it exists, denying reality.

A simple DuckDuck go search of unlimited data plans yields many results - You saying that they are actually unlimited?

Unliimted data storage - another search reveals a lot of links to unlimited plans. You saying these are really offering unlimited storage?

Seriously, I don't like calling people stupid so I won't, but your sense of unreaality is nothing short of breathtaking.

Thank you for calling me a dumbass, though. Based on what you wrote, I want you to think I'm a dumbass.

Re:Abused?

[Ol Olsoc]

Now you are catching on! I don't deal in pedantry, or wishful thinking.

Pederasty has nothing to do with it.

Brat!, made me look to see if I made an innapropriate typo - then I laughed.

Microsoft lied (again), pure and simple. Some people (stupidly/greedily, IMHO) took them at their word.

Well yeah. But then again, as I posted in another message, the word is bandied about by pretty much everyone. Simple searches for Unlimited data storage and unlimited data plan prove this out.

So, since "Unlimited" doesn't equal "Unlimited" in your personal "User's Guide To The Real Meanings Of Common Words", what, pray tell, would you put the "limit" of "Unlimited" at?

Unlimited has no real place in my lexicon, I've used it more in this topic than I ever had in my life, before this. And before that it was just referring to "Unlimited" motorcycle racing classes. Which rather than the maximum sort of unlimited, simply defines that any displacement above a certain value is an acceptable entrant in the race.

In the Data and storage world, it is a weasel word. Because as noted in your dictionary definitions, people choose number 2 - boundless, infinite.

I'm just refusing to believe that anyone is offering boundless and infinite, so Unlimited is merely part of the noise floor to me; meaningless, and an attempt to distract. As an impossibility, it has no value whatsoever. If I need to say something is boundless and infinite, those are the words I use.

And besides, how is a person to really know when they exceed "your" limit of "Unlimited"?

Pretty simple. Microsoft cuts the storage limit - and will eventualy start charging for the service. And for Data, they turn the faucet to 2G after some preset amount of data at 4G.Don't worry, they'll let you know.

My whole take on this unlimited thing is that - Great Bolshy Yarblockos - who in their right mind with a functioning brain cell buys into that stupidity?

For myself, I have my own backup and storage, under my control, and with a shitload more storage space. I don't trust Microsoft or anyone else to my data. I have a Dropbox for people who need to send me large files, but nothing is there for more than a few minutes, so not stored.

Why? Because I know exactly what Unlimited Free Cloud storage means. And despite what you or some others might think, it is neither infinite or boundless, or even a dictionary version of unlimited, and never has been. And if the pedants succeed in making everyone cease and desist using Unlimited, there are other synonyms to use before they run out - not quite unlimited though.

Re:Abused?

[Opportunist]

No need for fine print. Just say where you limit it. "Here's 50 gig of storage". Is that so hard?

Well, it sure is harder than "UNLIMITED STORAGE!!!!!!! *"

With a line below in 2pt that reads that unlimited only applies to the first 50 gig of storage and that no further storage is part of the unlimited plan. Sorry that I can't put it in proper legalese, I try to avoid using foul language.

Re:Abused?

[macs4all]

Brat!, made me look to see if I made an innapropriate typo - then I laughed.

LOL! Even Internet flame wars need some comedy relief!!! ;-)

Look, we both know what the deal is: The simple fact is, we're both "right", for differing values of "right".

- Great Bolshy Yarblockos -

Now it was MY turn to laugh!

BTW, for the record, I don't cotton to any of that "Cloud" stuff, either. Even though every single one of my Apple devices sings a siren-song of Cloud integration in numerous well designed, secure and really quite-handy ways. I am not such a Luddite that I don't see the advantages; but I am also wise enough to know that it's a slippery slope kinda thing.

Re:Abused?

[Ol Olsoc]

Look, we both know what the deal is: The simple fact is, we're both "right", for differing values of "right".

- Great Bolshy Yarblockos -

Now it was MY turn to laugh!

Ah - I tried that one on you and you passed with flying colors.

BTW, for the record, I don't cotton to any of that "Cloud" stuff, either. Even though every single one of my Apple devices sings a siren-song of Cloud integration in numerous well designed, secure and really quite-handy ways. I am not such a Luddite that I don't see the advantages; but I am also wise enough to know that it's a slippery slope kinda thing.

Funny you mention that. I've remained on iPhoto instead of Photo because Photo seems to really want me to store my photos in the cloud. But the last two times I plugged in with my phone or my camera, it opened and imported them into Photo. Apple seems to be getting a little cloud crazy as well. Gotta check that out and change it back.

Re: Abused?

[Anonymous Coward]

They weren't lying. It WAS unlimited. It's not anymore. Do with that what you will. And if you think any service provider is bound by infinite time, look at every service provider ever to be proven wrong.

Re:Abused?

[macs4all]

- Great Bolshy Yarblockos -

Now it was MY turn to laugh!

Ah - I tried that one on you and you passed with flying colors.

[macs4all: Takes a grateful bow]

I've remained on iPhoto instead of Photo because Photo seems to really want me to store my photos in the cloud.

I am the same way on my MacBook Pro. I am holding on to iPhoto like it was the last, great hope for Planet Earth. However, on my iPhone (and iPad), even though I actually have iPhoto on them, I have just given up and use Photos on those devices.

HOWEVER, I still don't use any "Photo Stream" stuff with Photos. All local storage on all Apple products. Actually, I believe there is an easy way to keep iOS and OS X/macOS from doing the Cloud-Sync stuff with Photos. Ah, here you go...

And even if you have accidently let iCloud get hold of your Photos/Videos, you can "get them back" (see the last "tip" (regarding local "backups") on this page). I would suggest doing that BEFORE you Disable iCloud Photos! ;-)

Hope this helps!

Re:Abused?

[lgw]

OneDrive is MS's consumer offering. Azure has some sort of storage offerings for business. And you should know you're being a dick if your consuming orders of magnitude more of a free service than most people do. Abusing the hospitality of your host is a poor life strategy.

In other news.

[idbeholda]

The sale of external hard drives, thumb drives, and sd cards are expected to skyrocket.

Re:In other news.

[geekmux]

The sale of external hard drives, thumb drives, and sd cards are expected to skyrocket.

Skyrocket? Yeah right.

If the process isn't happening automagically for the end user, they won't back up their data. Copying files to external sources would actually take effort. Fuck that.

Re:In other news.

[MightyYar]

I had a co-worker come over to my desk and ask me what the heck he could do with this big external drive someone gave him. I said, well, backup, and he went away disappointed.

Re:In other news.

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, it is disappointing. Take all that plastic crap off and put it in your desktop where it's useful.

Re:In other news.

[MightyYar]

What is a... desktop? :)

Re:In other news.

[CastrTroy]

At least MS lets you put external storage into your devices. Not like Apple and Google with their iPad/iPhone and Nexus devices.

Re:In other news.

[smooth wombat]

A device housing a computer which allows people to get their work done rather than fiddling with something which sits in their lap.

Re:In other news.

[TheCastro1689]

It's the thing that your lap goes under when you're at an office working.

Re:In other news.

[RoccamOccam]

I'm having trouble imagining what sort of answer he was realistically looking to get.

Re:In other news.

[MightyYar]

I think it was just a shot in the dark, hoping it was useful in some way that he had not imagined. Nope, just a giant version of a thumb drive...

To be fair, some of them are networkable and have some degree of usefulness.

Re:In other news.

[MightyYar]

Well, clearly they should call that a laptop.

Re:In other news.

[Dutch Gun]

He was hoping OP had a giant p0rn stash to share.

Re:In other news.

[Bob the Super Hamste]

I would be surprised if the Nexus devices didn't support USB On The Go as my android phone does. Out of curiosity I connected all sorts of things to it to see what works and what didn't. It didn't like my 64 GB USB flash drive but my 500 GB external USB drive it liked just fine, same with the keyboard, track ball, and 32GB USB flash drives I tried.

Re:In other news.

[macs4all]

Well, clearly they should call that a laptop.

Haha. That's very logical.

Re:In other news.

[MightyYar]

I'll try to get society to start calling it that, right after I'm done fixing parkway/driveway.

Re:In other news.

[macs4all]

I'll try to get society to start calling it that, right after I'm done fixing parkway/driveway.

Or "could care less". Or "flammable/inflammable" (to borrow from the late, great George Carlin).

OneDrive? OneDrive?

[Attila Dimedici]

OneDrive? OneDrive? I know I heard that somewhere, but I can't quite place it. Was that the one where Microsoft offered to store and scan your files in order to sell information about you to advertisers?

Re:OneDrive? OneDrive?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's where the kind of people who think paying $7/month to rent space on a remote server and redownload/upload their files every time they need them instead of buying a $50 hard drive and maybe a USB stick is a good idea put all their shit.

Re:OneDrive? OneDrive?

[slashdot_commentator]

A USB stick doesn't do you any good when its left at home and you're away. It also doesn't do you any good when it burns along with your house in a fire.

Re:OneDrive? OneDrive?

[Wdomburg]

It's totally awesome plugging a hard drive into your phone so you can access your whole music collection. Or manually maintaining duplicated copies on an SD card (if that's even an option) instead of using something like Google Play or Groove which will manage a cache of recently accessed content (thereby avoiding redownloading) while still retaining access to the full data set.

Re:OneDrive? OneDrive?

[PRMan]

That's why I keep it in my wallet. If **I** burn, I really don't care what happened to my data.

Re:OneDrive? OneDrive?

[lgw]

Thus far MS has been remarkably restrained about that sort of thing. Even Outlook.com does a very half-hearted sort of "ads based on your email", and they don't seem to be in the business of creepy-stalker tracking cookies like Google and Facebook. I think they have a different business model in mind.

It's really a shame MS burned all possibly goodwill with the WIn10 upgrade nonsense, as they could have been the one service you trusted not to creep into your privacy. Too bad, really, as I think that was their last chance to avoid Novell's fate

Re:OneDrive? OneDrive?

[slashdot_commentator]

You're going to carry a terabyte of USB stick storage??? Even at 128GB per stick, that's a lot of sticks to carry.

Re:OneDrive? OneDrive?

[Anonymous Coward]

It also doesn't do you any good when they department had a fire and it burns along with your data.

Cloud storage doesn't make your data safer, it makes it easier for you and others to access which is a double edge sword (for sharing or being hacked)

Re:OneDrive? OneDrive?

[slashdot_commentator]

Cloud storage doesn't make your data safer,

It does make your data safer, when you use it as offsite backup, as part of a complete backup protocol.

So it begins...

[110010001000]

...the race to the cloud is a race to extract rent payments for users. Make no mistake: that is what it is about. The strategy is to give it away for free at first to get all of us to eventually pay a monthly fee for these services so the CFO can accurately forecast their quarterly revenue. In addition, once everything is moved to the cloud, you won't need a PC anymore. You can use a "cloud" enabled. Eventually this will be a requirement, and you will only be allowed on the Internet if you use an approved "cloud" device. If you don't, you might be a terrorist, or a pirate, or a pirate terrorist.

Re:So it begins...

[Anonymous Coward]

Spot on sir ! (or Madam :)

The only question is will enough people be smart enough not to fall for the baited trap ? Sadly methinks not...

Re: So it begins...

[Anonymous Coward]

Come on, try it, you'll like it. Trust me. Tell you what, I'll give you the first 10GB for free.

Re:So it begins...

[swb]

What's so funny about this is that the short-sighted penny pinchers who are always howling about IT spending are the FIRST ones to flock to the cloud with this mistaken idea of how cheap and free the cloud is.

Worse, I work for a SMB IT consultancy and our sales people gleefully sell cloud services (managed by someone else, not us) to these same customers when it's not even cheaper TCO over 4 years and without realizing that they are selling out the bedrock of their own business. And it's not even like the pennies worth of referral and "preferred partner" value we get is worth anything or not trivial to switch out for another "preferred provider".

What is it about paying rent people find so appealing?

Re:So it begins...

[110010001000]

Financial types like to pay/receive rent because it makes it much easier on them to predict their quarterly profit/loss. They don't like unknowns, even if the unknown is a net positive to the company. That is what drives the cloud strategy.

Re:So it begins...

[TheCastro1689]

They like the monthly spread and that it seems lower since there isn't an upfront cost. Also, it means they spend less and get a bonus short term. The US and most of Europe runs on quarterly profits and short sighted gains, 2% increase in revenue every year!

Re:So it begins...

[Anonymous Coward]

>the race to the cloud is a race to extract rent payments for users. Make no mistake: that is what it is about

Here here! And remember folks, when your data is out of your hands and in in the cloud, it's under the tender loving care & responsibility of the hosting service. Who's TOS's, legal obligations, general curiosity, and just-because-we-can-thanks-to-everything-being-digital-now can allow data-scraping and knowing what you have there on their servers.

Ripped a backup copy of a movie you own? Have cute pics of your own bubble-covered kids in the bathtub? Working on a great spy thriller novel that, when sniffed by a text reader, will trigger a more thorough investigation? Just be smart and remember you rent that space now. These hosting services and ecosystems are not doing us any favours by of holding all our stuff.

Re:So it begins...

[Anonymous Coward]

race to the cloud is also a race for effective use of total hard-drive and computing capacity.

they are fundamentally providing the market service of eliminating idle hard-drive/computing capacity. if they accurately calculate customer demands vs. their own capabilities, they succeed in this space.

Re:So it begins...

[Anonymous Coward]

If you could buy or rent an Internet (World Wide Web) connected terminal for say USD125.00 (buy) or USD15.00 (monthly rent until you cease payment and return terminal, no contract), could run applications such as email client, music streaming client, photo editing client, etc.) within your web browser of choice, and stored your files remotely for a small fee of USD25.00 (monthly rent until you cease payment, no contract), then a lot of people would be happy to subscribe to this service or service bundle. Especially if the files and applications are accessible on their smartphone or tablet.

Re:So it begins...

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

A good question: What is it about paying rent people find so appealing?

Some opt to pay rent knowingly and willingly. If your job does not have steady predictable minimum income stream, you would be wise to rent a home/apartment, rather than owning. If you want to keep the option of taking a job anywhere in the country, again you would knowingly pay rent, rather than own.

Others are forced to rent knowingly and unwillingly. Usually poorer people without good credit history, they don't qualify for loans or have enough to invest. One of the startling findings about expanding solar to sub-Saharan Africa was this: They were paying lots of money for batteries, battery lamps and lighting oils but were too poor to acquire solar panels for themselves. A rack of 10 solar panels is too expensive for anyone in that village to own. The micro lending organizations stepped in and created loans for someone to buy a 10 or 20 solar panels and let people charge their phones and flash lights and lanterns for a fee. It is a very successful program. Rate of return is too small for big banks to even look at it. But some social welfare organizations solicit donations to lend money to poor villagers to buy solar panels and cell phones as micro or nano business opportunity. This is another example of people paying rent, knowing the economics but resigned to fate.

Then comes the third category that made you ask that rhetorical question. Some people are tricked into paying rents.

Re:So it begins...

[110010001000]

No it isn't. It is about making money. Give me a break.

Re:So it begins...

[Fnord666]

What is it about paying rent people find so appealing?

Some of it is related to accounting. Actual storage is capital equipment whereas cloud storage is a service and gets reported/taxed in a different bucket I believe.

Re:So it begins...

[slashdot_commentator]

Look at it this way: that service they will provide for a fee will also be more secure, because updating the cloud means not needing to patch every freaking machine you use, and not making the "community" vulnerable because of a few holdouts.

Re:So it begins...

[slashdot_commentator]

Sad to say, for 99% of the real world, IT is not a revenue generator; its an infrastructural cost. If/when cloud providers can provide a lower TCO at acceptable reliability/flexibility, there's no reason to prefer buying new hardware every few years and pay employee salaries to keep the hardware working.

Cloud computing is a godsend for upper management, who now don't need to know much about computer issues to enjoy its benefits. Its also probably the most cost-effective way to diversify security costs over many more machines than one owns.

Re:So it begins...

[110010001000]

Congrats. Now you are thinking like a CFO.

Re:So it begins...

[110010001000]

Congratulations. You are thinking like a CFO. Why pay for infrastructure? You should work for the U.S. Government.

Re:So it begins...

[110010001000]

Hahah. "more secure" because you are paying them. Nice! You had me going there for a second. I thought you were serious.

Re:So it begins...

[kqs]

I think you are oversimplifying. For many companies, building redundant capacity (maybe 30 modern servers) in two+ places separated by at least 500 miles, and having the competent staff to support the hardware and the network in each place, is terribly expensive. With the cloud, if you pick a provider wisely, you can get all that for far less than you would spend yourself. Your support staff only deals with the software and the network at your headquarters, and can therefore all be in the same room (or can be remote 80% of the time). You can get competent and reliable off-site backups for $money, and you can quickly add capacity anywhere with effectively no lead time. Hardware maintenance and upgrades is built into the cost.

If you have the right combination of talented and techs, managers who will listen to those techs, and CxOs who will listen to those managers, then you can do all of this yourself for potentially less than the cloud company can.

But I've worked at few companies where that was true. I can set up a very reliable off-site backup system, but I need to trust the other employees to maintain it and move the tapes, and I need to get management to pay for expensive tape drives and software, and because it is expensive it will be single-homed. Or, I could pay a cloud company $money/month to do it, which is more per 5 years than the expensive custom system but much less at once, and I can automate the backups on my machines so I know they are done correctly. Same logic for every other piece of the system.

Sure, the cloud company may screw up. That happens, but less often than I or a clueless co-worker screws up. AWS doesn't have 100% uptime, but it's better uptime than any single-homed system my bosses would pay for (and most will NOT pay for true redundancy).

I am paying for infrastructure. Just $x for AWS, rather than $3x (counting salaries) for less reliable local stuff.

Re:So it begins...

[Anonymous Coward]

To paraphrase - fluffy white clouds are pretty, until they turn on you, flood your neighborhood and wash away your house and dog.

Re:So it begins...

[kqs]

It's not more secure because you are paying them. But if you use a competent cloud company, it is more secure because they pay very talented people to test and roll out patches quickly, while your company grumps about downtime and won't pay weekend overtime for your staff to fix everything, plus you forgot about that server under Frank's desk that he won't let anyone touch (and he's friends with your manager so you lose).

Most smaller companies I have seen will only patch once a month or less, with inadequate testing and no good rollback method.

Cloud companies are not perfect. But neither are most sysadmins.

Re:So it begins...

[AK Marc]

The problem is the pompous idiots in IT, like yourself. Infrastructure is a revenue generator for 99% of the real world. It is the people in IT can't think of it that way. Ever notice how no company cuts off the power bill to save money? Infrastructure is a core function of the business and necessary for revenue generation, every business knows and understands that. That IT managers can't word it that way is IT fault, not CFO fault.

Re:So it begins...

[swb]

Like so many other things, though, there is a level of reliable enough that falls short of AWS-style redundancy and costs a whole lot less.

I have had exposure to several customers who moved to high end cloud environments and after paying the bills and doing the math decided they could do it on site for less money than they were paying and with less hassles and support headaches. They had more downtime exposure than the cloud, but most of them have been willing to accept the risks associated with low-percentage events like fires or tornadoes than to pay the recurring costs to insure against them with cloud infrastructure.

There's no question that a complete system (apps, storage, processes, etc) built to be run in the cloud is better than on-premise, but many places are straddled with systems that don't translate into cloud environments easily or inexpensively and can't or won't pay to completely retool their applications, business processes, etc to make them cloud friendly or face other limitations like limited internet bandwidth.

Re:So it begins...

[slashdot_commentator]

I did not say cloud systems are more secure because they're paying them. I'm saying cloud systems are more secure because software AND architecture is homogeneous on the infrastructure level. In fact, patching is automated in cloud systems. In the civilian homesteads, patching & security is dependent on people with no clue about either. Why go through the f-ing Windoze hassle once a month, or even leave yourself at the mercy of windows10 or app update scheduling, when you pay a cheap, flat fee to fire up a firmware thin client, and have all the (scalable) computing with no management/debugging hassle? The answer is that companies providing true cloud services are still more expensive than the TCO of a subnominal local hack.

I am going to need more information

[Anonymous Coward]

Microsoft did warn about the changes to people

What changes? How do they expect to get away with changing people?

Cloud and cloud, what is cloud?

[Thud457]

Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, do these sound like the actions of a man whose had ALL he could eat?

-- kids, don't do Zoloft

Re:Cloud and cloud, what is cloud?

[TheCastro1689]

Poor Homer.

Uninstalled the app and haven't looked back

[ryanmc1]

I found about a month ago that the battery on my phone was draining really fast. Where I could usually go a day and half, it was down to just half a day. After digging around and looking at battery stats I found the culprit, onedrive, it was preventing my phone from sleeping. So I denied it the keep awake permission, but that didn't seem to help. Finally I completely uninstalled it. Honestly I have not missed it. Except for the fact that it is built into Windows I have no desire to ever use it again.

Re:Uninstalled the app and haven't looked back

[TheCastro1689]

You had a bad backup and it was trying to finish it but never could. You have to go in, delete that backup and then start over.

Windows10

[Anonymous Coward]

was the first real abuse.
Still can't get rid of that icon in my menu bar, not to speak of the many gigabytes that are still wasted by the installation I declined.

Re:Windows10

[cmiller173]

I got rid of it, by finally realizing that there isn't anything I do in Windows that I can't do in linux. All of the dev tools (java/android/git) I use are available on linux. capable office suites are available, I finally made the switch and now get no more nags from Microsoft. I also took the opportunity to upgrade the laptop with a SSD and my boot time from cold power off state is about 12 seconds!

Re:Windows10

[chipschap]

When I saw how fast my SSD equipped laptop booted Linux Mint, I added a small SSD to my desktop, set it up as the boot partition, and now get super-fast booting there too.

You're right in many cases about Linux doing anything Windows can. For me the last reason to boot Windows had been scanning and OCR. But that's pretty much been solved too, with xsane, Tesseract, and a couple of decent front ends.

I recognize that some mission-critical applications run only on Windows (and Wine is really not an answer in numerous cases), that some people have to have exact document compatibility (though I think this issue is exaggerated in the case of Word, at least). I also realize that some people want to play Windows-only games. All well and good. Do what you have to do.

But to get back on topic, if MS doesn't give me 15GB of free storage any more, well, they had no obligation in the first place. There are plenty of places where I can get lots of online storage for not very much money. I never did go for the idea of running Windows just so I can integrate all the MS products.

Re:Windows10

[beastofburdon]

Get a Brother all-in-one printer, they work great with Linux. There are some permission issues you have to setup for the scanner though. You have to add your user to the xsane and lp groups if I remember correctly.

BitTorrent Sync

[CanadianMacFan]

I installed this on my Synology NAS, my computers, my iPhone, and my iPad. Haven't had any real problems with it at all. No more problems with space. I had dumped DropBox after they took some free space away from me and said that I never had it. The great thing about Sync is that since I mostly use it at home it's faster than other options because it doesn't depend on my Internet connection. But I can still connect to it if I'm out of the house.

It is slow on the iPhone and iPad to start up and make connections. I wish it would see if there was a network connection and not try to connect to other peers if there's no network available. When I have my iPad on the bus it takes a bit for it to appear to time out and find that there's no available peers to connect to. You can still look at documents that are cached but only after it's done searching for peers.

After using Sync for months I just moved my files off of the other services that I had free storage and deleted the apps off my devices.

Worked out for me...

[Wdomburg]

I was vaguely annoyed when I heard they were dropping from 15GB to 5GB since I had taken to storing music in OneDrive since I like the Groove interface a lot better than Google Play (especially the web interface), but when I went to manage my space it offered my a free year of Office 365 with 1TB of storage. I also have a free year from the Surface bundle I bought last year, so I'm good for a while.

But even after that expires, a one year subscription is $69.95, which is cheap compared to dropbox ($99 for 1TB or $10/mo). Google also runs $9.99/mo for 1TB, though they still offer 15GB in their free tier and a 100GB plan for the same price ($1.99/mo) as Microsoft's 50GB upgrade.

So yes, this is almost certainly a way to drive users to use Office 365, but it's a good value. The pricing is even better with Office 365 Home, since that is $99 for a year or $9.99/mo but gives you 1TB of storage for each of five users.

Re:Worked out for me...

[110010001000]

What a bargain! Only $69.95 per year for 1TB? That is only 40% more than a 1TB hard drive costs. And you get to pay for it every year you say? What a great value!

Re:Worked out for me...

[CastrTroy]

Yes, because if you just buy a hard drive and put in in a drawer somewhere it will magically start working as a cloud storage service. I'm not saying if it's a fair price or not, but comparing a cloud storage service to the equivalent price of the storage they give you isn't really all that fair.

To start with, they would probably store it on at least 2 different devices to ensure that if the drive dies, that all your data isn't lost. So you're already up cheaper than the cost of the actual storage. Then they have to buy a backup power system including batteries and generators, because you don't want the service to go down when the power goes out. You have to buy actual servers to put the drives in. You have to pay for network and electricity services. You also have to pay people to develop and maintain the systems to support all this. After listing this all out, the fact that I could get 50 GB for $1.99 a month or 1 TB for $7 a month, or 5 TB split 5 ways for $10 per month on the family plan is actually pretty impressive.

Re:Worked out for me...

[TheCastro1689]

The data will still be there when my house burns down.

Re:Worked out for me...

[110010001000]

He is storing music not the Constitution. You can buy a "cloud" harddrive for $70 if you want and attach it to your own home network. OneDrive is not for backups - if you are using it for that you are doing it wrong. Paying $7 a month for storage is ridiculous. That isn't impressive at all. Cloud services go down all the time.

Re:Worked out for me...

[110010001000]

Except when the Cloud provider loses it because they have a system failure like Amazon has had happen in the past. The cloud isn't magic. If you are worried about backups then you should backup your data. Using the cloud has nothing it do with that. Just because your data is in the cloud doesn't mean it no longer needs to be backed up.

Re:Worked out for me...

[Wdomburg]

Yes, and a bare drive is exactly the same as a geo-redundant storage service which provides automatic file versioning, media file indexing and streaming (including transcoding), document collaboration, platform integration with Windows devices (including the Xbox), ifft support, etc. Oh, and a full office suite for your browser, desktop, tablet and phone. Exactly the same.

Re:Worked out for me...

[110010001000]

You are right. You would need to pay an extra $10 for the Western Digital "cloud" drive for all that. Of course you don't get the benefits of a corporation scanning all of your data though. My mistake.

Re:Worked out for me...

[Wdomburg]

Wow, Western Digitial includes geo-redundant data centers with multiple backbone links with their consumer products now? And an office suite? Awesome!

Oh, it's just a non-redundant network drive with a remote access app that allows you to browse remotely (which is useful) but without streaming for anything but audio, no indexing, no versioning, no collaboration, no transcoding, no option for encryption at rest, no IFTTT channel, etc. And of course no office suite.

Certainly a good option for sensitive information, but again - different product category.

Re:Worked out for me...

[Wdomburg]

Actually, right now I'm paying $0/mo for storage since I got two years free. And even when that runs out I will be paying $7/mo for hosted storage, related services and a full office suite. For less than the two major competitors (Google and Dropbox) charge for less features (and again, no office suite).

I have plenty of storage at home (around 10TB usable) but OneDrive provides me convenience and backup. I suppose I could go through the trouble of installing something like OwnCloud, then configuring all my devices to use it, but you know what? Not only would it still be difficult to match the feature set, I am far more likely to have power or network go out in my house than in their data centers.

Re:Worked out for me...

[Anonymous Coward]

But not when the cloud company goes out of business. Or what about when the cloud house burns down.

Re:Worked out for me...

[110010001000]

Wow. Your Surface tablet was free? Christ, now I know someone who actually bought one. I was wondering what type of person actually fell for that.

Re:Worked out for me...

[110010001000]

If you are using OneDrive as your backup you are using it wrong. But yeah, you get an "office suite". Its free, right? What a bargain.

Re:Worked out for me...

[Wdomburg]

Yeah, using off-site and off-device storage as backup is daft. What was I thinking?

Re:Worked out for me...

[slashdot_commentator]

OneDrive is awesome for backups if you're a non-technical consumer. Even if it manages to somehow manage to lose some or all of your data, its still more likely to do a better job of backup than your grandmother (unless grandma indexes all her backups and gives you an alternate copy to store where you live. That's also assuming neither party lives with their mother...).

Re:Worked out for me...

[Wdomburg]

It's was thrown in with a bundle of products I was buying anyways, so yes, my acquisition cost was zero. And my operational cost is also zero. Hence free.

We could get into a semantic argument of the meaning of the word free, and you could probably spout tanstaafl or some variant of the same argument, but let's just nip that in the bud because I was referring to the net budgetary impact.

Re:Worked out for me...

[110010001000]

I'm not sure what you were thinking. OneDrive doesn't qualify as a backup solution. It is cloud storage, not backup. You were probably thinking your $2500 Surface came with a "free" office suite too.

Re:Worked out for me...

[110010001000]

I now know the type of person who actually purchases a Surface.

Re:Worked out for me...

[Wdomburg]

And I know the kind of person who engages in smug condescension when they're too obtuse to understand the difference between hardware and services.

Re:Worked out for me...

[kqs]

Sure. Hard drives/storage racks/tapes at my site have failed far more often than cloud providers have had failures which lost my data, though. It's a trade-off, but not a terrible one.

Re:Worked out for me...

[Wdomburg]

I'm thinking that an offsite redundant copy of data on highly available hardware is an offsite redundant copy of data on highly available hardware. Whether it is "cloud" or not is largely irrelevant.

And yes, under the promotional terms of my surface, it included a one year Office 365 subscription at no cost beyond the goods I was already buying (rather, it was at a discount). Again, my acquisition and maintenance costs are zero.

Re:Worked out for me...

[Wdomburg]

Works fine for technical consumers as well, depending on their specific needs.

I have a wide variety of data types, so I use a wide variety of approaches to redundancy. Traditional block and filesystem level approaches are fine as far as they go, but are not appropriate or ideal for all

For example, my VPS has a local backup, source code gets pushed to remote git repositories and mail gets synced via IMAP. My video collection is large enough that backing up to the internet would be cumbersome, so that goes to an external drive.

But stuff like music, photos, ebooks and documents (encrypted if they're sensitive) work just dandy in OneDrive. If anything, the home server acts more as a backup, since my primary point of access is through OneDrive, but I still consider the content on the file server to be the original, even if it is more sparsely accessed.

Re:Worked out for me...

[breeze95]

Actually, right now I'm paying $0/mo for storage since I got two years free. And even when that runs out I will be paying $7/mo for hosted storage, related services and a full office suite. For less than the two major competitors (Google and Dropbox) charge for less features (and again, no office suite).

I I have plenty of storage at home (around 10TB usable) but OneDrive provides me convenience and backup. I suppose I could go through the trouble of installing something like OwnCloud, then configuring all my devices to use it, but you know what? Not only would it still be difficult to match the feature set, I am far more likely to have power or network go out in my house than in their data centers.

Google has an office suit built into Google Drive. Google office suit can read the latest Microsoft office files and save files in any MS Office format plus act as a PDF Reader; also, Google office suit allows for sharing and collaborating. Google Drive can be set up to automatically back up data from all your Android mobile devices, in addition to any files or folder on your computer. To say that Google Drive is not as feature rich as Microsoft OneDrive, as far as the average user is concerned, sounds a bit like you are shill.

Re:Worked out for me...

[slashdot_commentator]

I look at OneDrive (or Google) more like a redundant backup system for access convenience, after I've made redundant physical backups.

Re: Worked out for me...

[Anonymous Coward]

And you sound like the average slashdotter where you hate MS for win 10 spying but you like google for some reason.

Re:Worked out for me...

[Wdomburg]

Not unreasonable. I'm largely comfortable with my setup. Even in the highly unlikely event of multiple failure in my local storage and in OneDrive, I still have original media or can download again from the vendor.

Re:Worked out for me...

[Wdomburg]

Googles apps compare reasonably well against the online Office apps, but Microsoft also includes the full desktop apps in the subscription cost, and includes applications that have no Google analog (like Publisher and Access).

In terms of the online features, as far as I know there is no transcoding available through Google Drive, and they partition their music and photo hosting into separate services, which I personally find annoying. And of course Microsoft has native support for all Windows devices, while Google only supports desktops. As a Windows Phone user, that makes Google something of a non-starter.

You can call me a shill, but I'm just a satisfied customer. Reluctantly, at that, since I used Linux exclusively for about twenty years.

actually, I'm OK with either...

[Thud457]

point of clarification:
Q: Is a pirate terrorist a pirate that terrorizes people or someone that terrorizes pirates?

Re:actually, I'm OK with either...

[110010001000]

It is a pirate that terrorizes people. People being Corporations of course. Corporations are people too.

What comes to mind?

[Okian Warrior]

Offer unlimited storage, and when people upload 75TB worth of data it's abuse.

How many TB isn't abuse again?

Help me out.

Before I answer, can you give me what you think the definition of "unlimited" is?

Without looking it up, or asking or anything.

When you read the word "unlimited", what comes to mind?

Re:What comes to mind?

[TheCastro1689]

No limits, unless it's like inflammable, that shit means flammable.

Re:What comes to mind?

[Ol Olsoc]

Offer unlimited storage, and when people upload 75TB worth of data it's abuse.

How many TB isn't abuse again?

Help me out.

Before I answer, can you give me what you think the definition of "unlimited" is?

Definition? Unlimited means absolutely nothing to me. It is one of those words like Ultra! Super! Grade A!, Jumbo! SuperSized! Maximum!

All just pointless undefined ad content marketing hyperbole that means absolutely nothing.

The very nature of the physics involved puta an absolute upper limit on the amount of data either by speed or storage capacity.

Without looking it up, or asking or anything.

When you read the word "unlimited", what comes to mind?

That I'm being played at best, and more likely plain lied to. I don't care because I know that people lie a lot, and believe that other people are stupid.

Which is why I don't buy into "unlimited" anything. Cloud storage has used this technique from the beginning, and if people are foolish enough to think unlimited means infinite, and that Microsoft and other cloud providers are some benevolent Santa in the sky, eliminating any future storage costs, well, then perhaps they really aren't that smart.

Re:What comes to mind?

[Anonymous Coward]

Wish I had mod points right now... Nice post!

Re:What comes to mind?

[Ash-Fox]

When you read the word "unlimited", what comes to mind?

A vast unknowable thing like space.

Re:What comes to mind?

[Threni]

> Definition? Unlimited means absolutely nothing to me. It is one of those words like Ultra! Super! Grade A!,
> Jumbo! SuperSized! Maximum!

Ok, let's not focus too much on what you personally know. You can look it up in a book, perhaps even online. Then you'll know what the word means.

Let me turn it around; when I saw you can store 10GB on my server, how many GB is that? What if I offer you 10,000GB? How about 10,000TB? 1,000,000PB? Is there some point where you give up treating it as something tangible that's part of a contract, and start treating it as something it's acceptable to lie about? Does the same principle apply to bandwidth, contract length etc? And if so, why? And do you think that it's better for consumers if companies, having stated this or that limit, were forced to stick to them, with some consequences for lying?

Re:What comes to mind?

[Ol Olsoc]

> Definition? Unlimited means absolutely nothing to me. It is one of those words like Ultra! Super! Grade A!, > Jumbo! SuperSized! Maximum!

Ok, let's not focus too much on what you personally know. You can look it up in a book, perhaps even online. Then you'll know what the word means.

Because words have static meanings, never to be changed. That's why we all speak olde English. Getrowe mn heorðgenat?

Let me turn it around; when I saw you can store 10GB on my server, how many GB is that? What if I offer you 10,000GB? How about 10,000TB? 1,000,000PB? Is there some point where you give up treating it as something tangible that's part of a contract, and start treating it as something it's acceptable to lie about? Does the same principle apply to bandwidth, contract length etc? And if so, why? And do you think that it's better for consumers if companies, having stated this or that limit, were forced to stick to them, with some consequences for lying?

What I think, and what I believe, is that many companies are not at all truthful, and since people allowed the first incorrect instances of "unlimited" to pass by some years ago, the word altered over time, to become something like Scotch tape, or Xerox copy. Something that every one refers to even though it might not be made by the companies they are referring to.

And since unlimited doesn't mean much at all when used as a maximum value beyond which you cannot go, as opposed to say motorcycle racing, where you might have a 100 CC class, a 250CC class, a 500 cc class, and an unlimited class - which means if you can figure out how to stuff a million CC displacement engine onto a bit that you can ride, you can compete in that class. Unlimited. Beyond a certain displacement, with only practical limits.

But when trying to use unlimited on devices with some serious constraints, and defining unlimited as infinite, well. perhaps we might try discussing how many angels can dance on the head os a pin.

Anyhow, I have no particular hopes of budging you from your attempts to apply a dictionary definition to marketing hyperbole. Doing that simply appears to be at odds with reality.

But for some odd reason, when they - or anyone - in the computer industry claims unlimited anything, I know sure as hell it isn't infinite, or even unlimited in teh dictionary sense. Its you will be able to store a certain amount, and afterward? nope!

So I can say that the word unlimited appears to have escaped the dictionary, and just become hype, and to all appearances is hype, but am still somehow wrong. Wow! That's ultra-mega ultimate amazing!

Re:What comes to mind?

[JeffAtl]

You can look it up in a book, perhaps even online. Then you'll know what the word means.

Words in English can have multiple & nuanced meanings. Look up the word "unlimited" and then check out the example usages. In the examples at Dictionary.com, "unlimited" really meant "vast" or "undefined" e.g. "the unlimited skies".

tragedy of the commons

[lucm]

Yeah it's like those extreme couponers at the grocery store. People laugh and applaud, but not only do those fuckers empty the shelves when stuff is on sale, forcing other customers to get a voucher and come back another time to get those products at that price, they also block a checkout lane for hours to get the clerk to scan hundreds of coupons.

It's easy to say that they're "within their rigths" and that the grocery store should have endless supplies and staff to honor loopholes, but that's just childish reasoning. If you make a trip to the store to buy a 2L of Coke so you can prepare Cuba Libres for your grandfather that visits only once a year, and you see the empty shelves and the 48 bottles in some douche carts (because of course they need 4 carts), it's not really the grocery store that is to blame.

Common sense doesn't work with some people. It sucks for people who were using this space in a reasonable manner but as always, fuckers ruin everything.

Re:tragedy of the commons

[Anonymous Coward]

Say what you mean. Do what you say.

If any company screws one of those up. They. are. wrong.

Re:tragedy of the commons

[Anonymous Coward]

Did they say unlimited for life?

No!?!

Well then. You. Are. Wrong.

Re:tragedy of the commons

[Coren22]

The unlimited is for the paid service, and it hasn't been reduced or removed. So yes, it is unlimited for as long as you pay for the service (Office 365).

Extinguish

[macs4all]

And now we come to the third "E" in Microsoft's tired formula.

Yes, I know it really has to do with technologies and acquired businesses; but "Extinguish" is what is being done to Users' personal data that they foolishly entrusted to Microsoft's pseudo-largesse.

Re:Extinguish

[slashdot_commentator]

I see it as a win-win. Microsoft somehow makes a significant increase in profit from this move, and customers learn what it means to "trust" either Microsoft or Google (or Amazon or IBM, ad nauseum...)

Re:Extinguish

[macs4all]

I see it as a win-win. Microsoft somehow makes a significant increase in profit from this move, and customers learn what it means to "trust" either Microsoft or Google (or Amazon or IBM, ad nauseum...)

True.

At least Apple is very up-front about what the limits are in iCloud storage (IIRC 5 GB free, pay for more).

Re:Extinguish

[slashdot_commentator]

Fuck Apple. They're not even in the game. Management is so wedded to consumer hardware sales, they don't even realize that everyone will eventually move to cloud, and Apple won't be able to provide the services that Google, Amazon, or Microsoft can.

Re:Extinguish

[macs4all]

Fuck Apple. They're not even in the game. Management is so wedded to consumer hardware sales, they don't even realize that everyone will eventually move to cloud, and Apple won't be able to provide the services that Google, Amazon, or Microsoft can.

No, of course not. No way they could compete...

Re:Extinguish

[slashdot_commentator]

No, they can't. It involves them going outside their mindset of their business model. They have a lot of spare cash now, but they would have to plow it into expensive bets, which they don't appear to be doing. Computing is going cloud, and they're barely interested in ramping up their iCloud capabilities. Not that it would matter, unless Apple found a way to access all that data being collected by Google, Amazon, Microsoft, etc. . Then they would have to spend lots of money to hire actual geniuses to process and research that data in a way that would allow them to leapfrog current applications of computing.

Their problem is that their highest value as a corporation is to maintain revenue and profit margins. They don't have the leadership (or shareholders) willing to jeopardize their current model in order to create new markets. Steve Jobs was the kind of CEO who could do that sort of thing, but not his replacement team. Apple is led by John Sculleys right now.

Their model involves creating a monopoly (or branding) of their intellectual property using trademarked hardware to secure the monopoly. What happens when the phone and the Macbook go the way of the iPod? Yeah, they're plowing money into a self-driving car, but lets face it, even if successful, they're not going to maintain their computing environment when no one wants to buy their products to type in queries and when it becomes "unprofitable" to compete with smartphones linked with cloud computing features. Microsoft has more of a future in the computing industry than Apple.

Re:Extinguish

[macs4all]

Computing is going cloud, and they're barely interested in ramping up their iCloud capabilities.

You've obviously never seen a recent WWDC Keynote, or owned an Apple product made in the past few years.

Not that it would matter, unless Apple found a way to access all that data being collected by Google, Amazon, Microsoft, etc. . Then they would have to spend lots of money to hire actual geniuses to process and research that data in a way that would allow them to leapfrog current applications of computing.

You think there is only one reason for Cloud Computing. And you're wrong. Apple doesn't need to/want to Datamine their Customer Base to make money. They have awesome products (that happen to include some pretty innovative, secure and frankly quite-handy "Cloud" integration).

hey're not going to maintain their computing environment when no one wants to buy their products to type in queries

Again, you obviously haven't been keeping-up. You need to get your Apple news from places other than Slashdot.

when it becomes "unprofitable" to compete with smartphones linked with cloud computing features.

Man, you are so out-of-touch with the direction that Apple is going, it's actually a waste of time typing this "rebuttal".

Microsoft has more of a future in the computing industry than Apple.

That is not what their falling marketshare numbers in both Desktop and Mobile would lead a rational person to believe.

But why so small? 5GB?

[KlomDark]

So they complain about abusers uploading 75TB, but then chops everyone down to a measly 5GB? That's ludicrous. 5GB is 1/15000th of 75 TB.

And I got 15 gigs (Still measly) when I bought my Windows Phone, and they are chopping that down to 5GB as well.

I'm done with OneDrive. Pulled off all my stuff and put it on my Google Drive which still is 15GB. (Of which I'm only using 2.5 GB) I've got 10 TB on my network at home, really don't need these third party services. I'm not a typical use case, I know, but it's still really shitty of Microsoft.

Really not liking the Satya Nadella era of Microsoft.

Re:But why so small? 5GB?

[110010001000]

Because then you will pay for 10GB. The issue isn't about people storing 75TB. The financial types realized that not enough people were transitioning to their paid services. It is just a business strategy.

Re:But why so small? 5GB?

[Wdomburg]

If you've got more than 5GB stored and go to "upgrade" there will be a free year subscription to Office 365, giving you a 1TB of storage. (Even if just to ease the transition off.)

Re:But why so small? 5GB?

[Anonymous Coward]

I also moved all my stuff to Google Drive from OneDrive. I used a util called SyncDocs which converts all you Office Docs to Google Docs

Re:But why so small? 5GB?

[dj245]

Really not liking the Satya Nadella era of Microsoft.

Really not liking the fact that corporations have grown so powerful that we now refer to them using the same language used for the leaders of countries.

Re:But why so small? 5GB?

[KlomDark]

I agree! That guy looks scammy as fuck. No way anyone would vote for that fucker!

Hard drives are CHEAP, so are USB flash drives

[kheldan]

Why are so many of you bothering with 'the cloud' when this sort of crap happens over and over and over again, ad nauseam? Are too many of you incapable of learning?

Surely they won't hurt us again this time, let's try Cloud storage again!

*Bangs head against wall repeatedly*

People, you just don't get it. 'The Cloud' is a meme; it's a ruse; IT'S A TRAP. It's only two steps away from being Ransomware: 'Pay up or your data is TOAST'.

External hard drives are cheap and reliable. So are huge USB flash drives, both in nice fast USB3. Buy two for your most sensitive data and make two copies, just in case. Really, honestly, seriously, how difficult is this?

It's too big, too bulky, too confusing, why should I pay for anything?

Get a microSD card and a tiny USB adapter. Fits nicely in your wallet or purse. USB HDD's are smaller than a pack of cigarettes. Even huge, normal USB flash drives are tiny now, and they're all cheap, cheap, cheap. Meanwhile 'cloud' providers keep playing shell games with your data, losing it, getting hacked, going out of business and telling you 'tough luck', and likely snooping into your data regardless of anything they tell you to the contrary. Come on, people, why do you keep punishing yourselves this way? Did you do something bad in a previous life or something?

Please, please,, people: Stop with the 'cloud' nonsense already. You're just hurting yourselves.

Re:Hard drives are CHEAP, so are USB flash drives

[Anonymous Coward]

But those people hurting themselves provide entertainment to the rest of us...

Re:Hard drives are CHEAP, so are USB flash drives

[110010001000]

Look at the replies to this story. You will see people stupid enough to fall for it. One guy paid top dollar for a Surface laptop and is happy because he gets A YEAR of "free" storage! LOL.

Re:Hard drives are CHEAP, so are USB flash drives

[Anonymous Coward]

They are paving the way for dependence.
  When the ecosystem is presented as an integral part of unifying facebook photos, office 365 online, flickr photos, etc. then people feel the cloud is their savior. Heck, so many photos and vids on mobile nowadays that they defy storage capability... so off to the cloud they go. Flickr even now prevents uploading from PC (it will for a fee), but uploads from mobile for free.

It needn't be this way of course, but the ecosystems is being groomed to only support huge offline storage and tiny local storage. I hate it.

Re:Hard drives are CHEAP, so are USB flash drives

[swillden]

*Bangs head against wall repeatedly*

Dude, calm down. You're going to hurt yourself.

There's nothing inherently wrong with cloud storage services, as long as you understand that you get what you pay for. If you're getting free storage, well, you have to understand that at some point the provider may decide it doesn't make business sense to keep offering that same sweet deal. If it's a reputable provider, though, that's not so bad because they'll give you time to move it when they decide to shut down.

In addition, your little rant fails to recognize that local storage is far from failure-proof, and that while keeping your data safely backed up across multiple devices may (though I'm skeptical) be reasonably easy for the average slashdotter, it's not so simple for the average slashdotter's grandmother. There is huge value in online storage that automatically replicates the local copy of your data, with zero effort or maintenance. In addition, the fact is that unless the provider actively decides to delete your data, it's far, far safer replicated across two or three professionally-managed data centers than it is on your phone, or your laptop. Get your device smashed to bits? Still in the cloud. House burns down? Still in the cloud.

Personally, my most important data lives in four places: On my desktop hard drive, on my laptop's SSD, on my wife's laptop's SSD, and in Google Drive. All three of the computers automatically synchronize their storage with Drive, and the desktop has a cron job which creates periodic copy-on-write snapshots of the Drive-synced volume, so just in case Drive decides to delete all my stuff and syncs the deletions to my other machines, I still have those snapshots. Particularly sensitive files are password-encrypted with GnuPG.

I'll grant that the copy-on-write snapshotting bit of my solution isn't grandma-appropriate, but the rest of it is. There's actually a simple workaround to not having it: have Drive sync set up on two machines, but keep it turned off on one of them. Every few weeks, flip it off on one, check that everything looks like it's there and maybe check to see if there are news reports of Drive blowing away lots of peoples' data, then turn it on on the other. This also protects against user error; if you accidentally delete a bunch of stuff off of the machine that's syncing, it's still on the other one where sync is disabled. In all honesty, though, I think the odds of grandma's device dying are a lot higher than the cloud service provider losing the data, and while she's not going to have two machines and do the sync-flipping thingy, she's still going to be better off if it's in the cloud as well as on her device.

While I use Google Drive for this, it would work just as well with Dropbox, One Drive or any other cloud storage service.

And not only does using a cloud solution like this give me an always-up-to-date off-site copy of my data, it also gives me access to that data from anywhere, on any (trustworthy) device, as long as I can get Internet access.

Could I get most of this with USB drives and manual replication? Yes. But it would be a lot more work and the replication a lot more error-prone. I also wouldn't have access on as wide a range of devices. Most importantly, though, if I have to manually manage the replication, I won't. My backup copies will always be stale. The cloud solution is better.

Re:Hard drives are CHEAP, so are USB flash drives

[Anonymous Coward]

Advantages of cloud storage are that it can be used with multiple devices in a variety of locations, and is typically robust to forms of failure that your own physical media is not (e.g. house burning down, RAID controller failure, many disks having a manufacturing fault and dying together). It's not immune to failure, of course. You can choose to back up cloud files to other media, including physical, or even other clouds, although silent corruption is an issue, so if it's data you want to keep long term you need to verify, whatever medium it is. You could always use OwnCloud or similar products and put it on a hosted server and get some of the convenience, if you are confident with doing that. It's about making the right choice and knowing what choice you are making

Soup Nazi

[Anonymous Coward]

No soup for you.

Unlimited != Unlimited

[Anonymous Coward]

Funny to have the summary say . It all started when Microsoft gave Office 365 subscribers unlimited OneDrive storage space. Many people abused this, uploading over 75TB worth of movies and other files in some cases. ..... since when is 75TB more than unlimited? Companies should stop shoveling shit out through their marketing dept and say what they actually mean... and by many, how many exactly uploaded those amounts of data.... sigh....

Linux

[Anonymous Coward]

I can't remember when I stopped using Windows

My answer

[Okian Warrior]

Offer unlimited storage, and when people upload 75TB worth of data it's abuse.

How many TB isn't abuse again?

Okay, here's my answer.

It's Microsoft's blame-throwing that annoys me.

If they came out and said "we can't support unlimited as planned, we have to switch to fixed limits", then everyone would understand. A well-meaning policy turned out to be unworkable, no biggie.

Instead, they say "we do this because of user abuse", then they're putting the blame on the users, and shows contempt.

Re:My answer

[beastofburdon]

Micro$oft has nothing but contempt for their users.

Rooting at the cutting edge of tech 50gb of cloud

[Anonymous Coward]

That's 1/3 cup of Starbucks coffee. Pay up

files.

[Anonymous Coward]

And what happens to any data that you have stored in the drive when they cut you back,mine has 15gb of space,it has about 13.8 gb of data,so I suddenly lose loads of files ?
Of course now that I have heard this I will transfer every bit of data out of it and then te-fill it with 5 gb of junk just to cost them a cent every 20 years.
But what happens to folk who do not follow tech sites daily if at all,very rarely use their drive,they are just going to find at some time in the future that possibly irreplaceable data has vanished ?
Good old MS,keeping it's wonder products and services at the same awful level they have alwsys been..

DIY Cloud

[Anonymous Coward]

1 x Raspberry Pi Model 3 : $35.00
1 x 1TB USB Hard Drive : $59.00
1 x Power Adapter 5V @ 2A : $5.00
1 x Ethernet Cable : Free
1 x 8Gb SD Card: $8.00

There, I just built myself a 1TB cloud enabled storage appliance, but I own the data, the hardware, and the software.

It's upgradable, can operate on the WAN, LAN, and is fully portable. Hell, I built 5 of them, and I now have secure, off-site backup.

It Supports SAMBA, NFS, SFTP, SCP, Time Machine, heck, any protocol under the sun.

I can even add another 1TB disk, and have RAID for data protection.

Since the cloud is slow, I don't think my 25Mbps internet connection is going to tax the Pi all that much. Heck, it's got 4 cores, and uses only 5W under full cpu load.

I can get my data anytime, anywhere. If I have a full system crash, I don't have to pay to upload my data, then pay again to download my data.

Nobody wants to use it unless they are stupid.

[Anonymous Coward]

Microsoft is a US government spy shop, hence the relentless Windows 10/8.1/8/7 surveillance. It is what it is.

DUH!

[Anonymous Coward]

"It all started when Microsoft gave Office 365 subscribers unlimited OneDrive storage space. Many people abused this, uploading over 75TB worth of movies and other files in some cases. BetaNews reports:"

That is the problem, Unlimited is Unlimited. Using 75TB of storage on an unlimited data plan is not abuse, it is use...