Wow, TFA is really glossing over an inherent limitation:
the "shiftability" of a Lytro image is a function of the width of the image sensor
If the goal of this is to produce useful stereo content that replicates the parallax seen by humans, then the image sensor needs to be at least as big as the average distance between two human pupils. That's roughly six centimeters. The Lytro's sensor is around six millimeters. Somehow I doubt they're going to increase their form factor by ten times in each dimension, and since the point of a Lytro is to avoid fancy lenses they can't bend the light path to compensate.
On a mobile phone 6cm would be a lot, but on a discrete camera -- let alone professional-level gear -- 6cm is nothing. Especially in filming 3D movies light-field cameras have enormous advantages over regular cameras, what with requiring less space to operate, no need to focus on anything during the filming as long as you just point in the correct direction, exceedingly easy conversion to regular 3D or 2D and so on. Heck, just being able to re-focus the image during post-processing would be enough of a selling point all by itself!
A. I freely chose to give them my money knowing that you cannot sell what you buy there
These limitations are not communicated well-enough to the general public. You and I knew perfectly-well what we were getting into, but in general people are still used to being able to loan stuff to their friends or giving away/selling their stuff when they're done with it, and Valve simply doesn't communicate these kinds of restrictions clearly. In addition to that, there are plenty of games that are sold in these usual DVD-jewel cases, but that on install inform that they require Steam to function -- you cannot skip Steam or you won't be able to play the game, and if you do install Steam the game will then forever-after be locked to your account; it's confusing for people that you set out and buy a physical object, but you can't then ever again give the object to someone else to enjoy of. It probably runs afoul of some first-sales laws here in Finland, too, but so far no one has challenged Valve's practices in court.
I personally have no stake in the matter as I have never sold my used games or given them away as I like to collect them, but this will also have ramifications for Ubisoft's UPlay and Electronic Arts's Origin and therefore I find this whole thing exceedingly interesting. The outcome will likely also affect Apple's App Store, Google's Play Market and Microsoft's Windows Store, so this could be the major consumer rights vs. corporation rights - battle of this decade.
That's what I thought, too. I want to have a hole in every room in which to throw my trash so that it is delivered to the basement and compacted. I want a delivery system that can bring me a 0.33l soda can whenever I press the button, and I want the same system to take the old, empty can back to the basement and store it. I can't really come up with anything other that I'd want automated. Maybe an automated lawn-mower, but those exist already.
and some bacon
I just tried bacon for the first time in my life a few weeks ago and jesus god damn christ was it horrible! Freakishly fatty and salty, no wonder people die to various kinds of heart diseases after eating that stuff o_o
If we go by how network security in various appliances has been applied this far a connected kitchen will be a time-bomb in the making. What if e.g. someone can turn your oven on at max while you're not at home? Or turn off your fridge, melting all your groceries there? Turn on the faucet and just let the water roll? Alas, if the recent history is any indication these things will have either no security or minimal security with hard-coded access tokens and unupgradeable firmware.
EULAs have been challenged in courts multiple times here in Finland, every single time ending up in loss for the EULA-enforcer. The simple fact is that an EULA is covered by copyright laws, and copyright law cannot remove rights given by other laws. It most certainly is NOT covered by contract laws. That means that even if the EULA e.g. specifically said that you cannot sell the item after you're done with it the clause is invalid and you are perfectly within your rights to sell it.
the copyright still exists on the work, the ruling allows antigua to disregard the copyright and distribute the work. whoever recieves it cannot make more copies unless they want to be in violation of copyright law.
You didn't quite read what I said. If it worked like that then the work in question would have TWO copyrights on it, both equally legal -- the original one, and the new one. And obviously, copyright doesn't work if there are two legal copyrights to a work with differing terms. You see, the copyright asserted in Antigua would be just as legal because the copyright law is suspended and therefore the person with the work wouldn't have to abide by the terms like e.g. that you cannot assume ownership and rights to someone else's work. This is what I would like some legal expert to clarify: how to determine how to apply copyright to works that, in essence, are covered by two, competing copyrights.
But alas, what does happen if you give an Antiguan a copy of something, then the person removes original copyright notices and replaces them with his/her own and distributes that copy to you? It's not anymore the original one, the copyright was stripped from it, you are not in the legal position to determine who the copyright really belongs to, and it could even be considered a derivative work -- does the suspension of copyright allow for a loophole that basically strips copyrights from an existing item and assigns a new one?
Well, since the submission asks: I have this plan where the monthly fee is 66 cents, I can speak up to 24 hours a day and it'll cost me max. 1 euro -- ie. if I spoke 24 hours a day for the whole month it'd still cost a maximum of 30 euros + the 66 cents in monthly fees -- and I also have an extra 3G - service with no speed or data caps whatsoever and the extra costs 13.90 euro a month. Oh, and I can drop either the 3G - service or the whole plan whenever I wish to. SMS - messages cost 6.65 cents per message, so depending on how much one uses those the bill can be really small or really big -- personally, I don't really use SMS.
Once a standard becomes good enough, people will hang on to it for a long long time. Why bother re-encoding a complete music library from mp3 even if vorbis/aac is clearly the superior codec? Apple has enough difficulties pushing aac through, and not many hardware producers are including vorbis support. I guess the same could be said for windows xp and desktop hardware.
MP3-files are small enough to be streamable perfectly well even on really slow connections, but video files ain't small. A 2-hour, 1080p video file with any kind of a remotely-acceptable quality will weigh in at 4GB+, and well, it sure ain't streamable over very slow connections. Not to mention the fact that bandwidth costs money. Ergo, any developments that result in higher quality at the same size or similar quality at a smaller size are certainly welcome, both for consumers and for content-producers.
As a thought-experiment, let's assume that this or that TV-series I was watching on Netflix weighed in at 1.5GB for a 1h episode, and I watched 15 episodes in a month. That'd be 22.5GB of data. Now, if the move to a new codec reduced filesizes by 5% we'd end up with ~21.4GB of data -- that's already one gigabyte in savings. Now, multiply this with e.g. 200 000 users, what do you see?
- Do not allow write access to any essential binaries (like sshd, ls, and so on). If you have to, make sure you have a stealthy daemon checking the hashes of all critical binaries at regular intervals to make sure they have not been tampered with.
I'm sure there are plenty of other such systems, but Tripwire ( http://www.tripwire.org/ ) is one of the more popular tools to keep a check on your system and warn you immediately if it detects tampering attempts.
- After the initial system install, make a dump of the syscalls table of your kernel. Check it regularly to make sure it has not been tampered with (kernelspace rootkits usually hijack this table).
Not every desktop environment that runs on linux works well. Some (maybe even most) are buggy. They are not all buggy and you are not forced to use the buggy ones. I see more options (even if some are bad) as a good thing.
The less-buggy ones are also the ones with less features, the ones with less appeal and promise than the others. XFCE is, for example, a quite fine DE for a geek and it sure seems stable from what little I have used it, but it's not exactly appealing in looks, it feels dated, and there's a lot of rough corners here and there. Now, take KDE in comparison: it's chock-full of features, it doesn't feel nearly as dated and it can be really pretty on the eyes. On the other hand, it's buggy as shite, I can still get whole Plasma to crash just by adjusting the panel, it's extremely confusing, and even people who have used KDE for years still have trouble figuring out where things are or how to work them -- I popped in on #KDE a while ago and I couldn't find a single person there at the time who knew how to use activities, for example.
Sure, there's a lot of DEs to choose from, but they're cannibalizing each-others on the amount of available developers and the end result is seemingly that no project has enough skilled developers and designers.
Clunky package management system? The package management systems in linux are far superior to windows. In windows you just download your own executable and install it yourself.
Yes, clunky. For one, you can't install stuff to a location of your own choosing without dropping to console. No, they'll always be installed system-wide and in the default location. If you're using a years-old distro --for stability or whatnot-- for which there are only security-updates available any longer and you want e.g. a newer version of some web-browser what do you do? You can't just download the package from the Internet as it most likely depends on newer libraries, too, that just aren't available in your repos. Secondly, there's too many incompatible systems. If you want to install something that isn't available via repositories you'll have to know which system is in use on your installation and then download the corresponding package-type. It may still not work, though, if the package wasn't specifically for your distro. Thirdly, it doesn't allow you to install only parts of the package or versions with differing features. On Windows you can e.g. download LibreOffice and choose which parts to install and which ones to omit. On Linux, well, usually you install libreoffice and just end up with everything with no customizability. And what if you want e.g. an alternate version of a package, with this or that feature that is disabled by default? Under Windows you just download the executable and install it. Under Linux... well, even the easiest route generally involves having to enable some extra repository or two.
Yes, keeping the things that are already installed up-to-date is a whole buttload easier under Linux and I do really like that. Nevertheless, I still see these package-management systems as too rigid.
The point of linux is not mean to be "free as in beer".
Indeed, I know it isn't. But try selling the idea of "free as in libre" to any Average Joe and see how far you get. From a purely pragmatic point of view it just doesn't really matter for most. And atleast to me it still ain't worth the aggravation on the desktop.
As soon as the games I already own and play work on Linux I will switch in a heartbeat.
Hmh, meh. I won't be switching even then. It's very, very unlikely that all of the games that I will be wanting in the future will become available for Linux. Then in addition to that Linux is still very much of a hit and miss - adventure, with inconsistent, buggy desktop environments, missing drivers, clunky package-management systems and so on. Being able to play games on a free-as-in-beer OS just ain't worth the aggravation.
Yes. I am out of the habit of thinking of lossless as "real" compression, but I seem to be in the minority.
I have to ask why do you think like that? Do you view e.g. the compression method used by RAR/WinRar as not being "real" compression, even though it can achieve quite nice compression rates? Or bz2? Or 7zip? They're all lossless, they all have lots and lots and lots of math behind them, and implementing any single one of them isn't something that you can just do yourself in an hour or two. Or is it that you only view lossless compression as not being "real" compression when it comes to multimedia, as if the content somehow mattered how "real" one or another compression method is?
If a very small percentage of people are using-up a rather large percentage of the available bandwidth, then yes, that's unfair.
But bandwidth isn't something that wears out, it's not something that you can consume all up like you can e.g. oil. Bandwidth is a measure of something, not the something itself. That means there's a few distinct differences compares to actual physical goods, like e.g. as long as 100% of the available bandwidth isn't used it doesn't matter if some users consume more than others -- it becomes unfair if these users have to pay more than the others even when it doesn't actually affect anyone else, and as such the equation should at most be about bandwidth over time when the pipes are fully-pegged. Just throwing in a static number as the cap is what's unfair.
It's NOT AN INFECTION when user willingly installs a malicious application and approves its permissions.
That's like saying that it's not an infection if you inject yourself with HIV because you knowingly do it -- obvious rubbish. OF COURSE it is an infection still. Especially when the malware - package is HIDDEN inside another one, so that when the user thinks he's installing one thing he's actually getting two things. You might have a point if the user knowingly installed a malware - package, but that's just not the case.
Learn the basics of compooters before you write something that stupid next time.
One thing that baffles me is that, well, here in Finland we just don't have data caps. Period. Since we don't have data caps whatsoever, even on most mobile broadband - connections, does that mean we're somehow being unfair? Incompetent? Both, even?
I just don't see it. We're a small country with lots and lots of rural land, only about 8 million people in the whole country and all, and yet our ISPs and cell-phone operators are just thriving without any data caps. We have only one ISP/cell-phone operator that does data caps, the rest do "speed limits," ie. the lowest of the lowest mobile broadband - packages one can get from my cell-phone operator is 512kbps up/down for 4.99€/month and on which you can simply upload and download as much as your heart is willing. 512kbps is enough to download about 158 god damn gigabytes of stuff a month and I didn't even factor in the amount of uploaded data at all -- this is also a package that you can just drop off or switch to a higher/lower tier at your own leisure, there are no 12/24 month contracts involved at all. So basically, even our lowest-tier broadband packages grant us consistent speeds, no long contracts and no sudden extra charges no matter how much you transfer. For some reason our method sounds fairer to me.
Does it even have to be a huge commercial success to be useful? No, wait, I'll answer for you: no, it doesn't. There are plenty of things in this world that may not be terribly useful for the general populace or huge commercial successes, yet they're definitely worth their weight in gold for their intended target-audience. You, clearly, are not a part of the target-audience here given your lack of insight.
OK, just fess up - it's your pr0n collection, right? 1TB of images at a gargantuan 20MB apiece is over 50000 images; at a more reasonable 5MB that increases to 200k+. "Hobby photographer" my foot.
You've clearly never heard of RAW-images. 20MB RAW-image is actually still on the smaller end of the scale.
Slashdot Mirror
Wow, TFA is really glossing over an inherent limitation:
If the goal of this is to produce useful stereo content that replicates the parallax seen by humans, then the image sensor needs to be at least as big as the average distance between two human pupils. That's roughly six centimeters. The Lytro's sensor is around six millimeters. Somehow I doubt they're going to increase their form factor by ten times in each dimension, and since the point of a Lytro is to avoid fancy lenses they can't bend the light path to compensate.
On a mobile phone 6cm would be a lot, but on a discrete camera -- let alone professional-level gear -- 6cm is nothing. Especially in filming 3D movies light-field cameras have enormous advantages over regular cameras, what with requiring less space to operate, no need to focus on anything during the filming as long as you just point in the correct direction, exceedingly easy conversion to regular 3D or 2D and so on. Heck, just being able to re-focus the image during post-processing would be enough of a selling point all by itself!
A. I freely chose to give them my money knowing that you cannot sell what you buy there
These limitations are not communicated well-enough to the general public. You and I knew perfectly-well what we were getting into, but in general people are still used to being able to loan stuff to their friends or giving away/selling their stuff when they're done with it, and Valve simply doesn't communicate these kinds of restrictions clearly. In addition to that, there are plenty of games that are sold in these usual DVD-jewel cases, but that on install inform that they require Steam to function -- you cannot skip Steam or you won't be able to play the game, and if you do install Steam the game will then forever-after be locked to your account; it's confusing for people that you set out and buy a physical object, but you can't then ever again give the object to someone else to enjoy of. It probably runs afoul of some first-sales laws here in Finland, too, but so far no one has challenged Valve's practices in court.
I personally have no stake in the matter as I have never sold my used games or given them away as I like to collect them, but this will also have ramifications for Ubisoft's UPlay and Electronic Arts's Origin and therefore I find this whole thing exceedingly interesting. The outcome will likely also affect Apple's App Store, Google's Play Market and Microsoft's Windows Store, so this could be the major consumer rights vs. corporation rights - battle of this decade.
Connectivity is great but I want automation.
That's what I thought, too. I want to have a hole in every room in which to throw my trash so that it is delivered to the basement and compacted. I want a delivery system that can bring me a 0.33l soda can whenever I press the button, and I want the same system to take the old, empty can back to the basement and store it. I can't really come up with anything other that I'd want automated. Maybe an automated lawn-mower, but those exist already.
and some bacon
I just tried bacon for the first time in my life a few weeks ago and jesus god damn christ was it horrible! Freakishly fatty and salty, no wonder people die to various kinds of heart diseases after eating that stuff o_o
If we go by how network security in various appliances has been applied this far a connected kitchen will be a time-bomb in the making. What if e.g. someone can turn your oven on at max while you're not at home? Or turn off your fridge, melting all your groceries there? Turn on the faucet and just let the water roll? Alas, if the recent history is any indication these things will have either no security or minimal security with hard-coded access tokens and unupgradeable firmware.
Suck it up. Seriously, are people today so pathetic that they can't go without playing some games?
99% of all the good games that are actually worth playing are DRM-encumbered.
EULAs have been challenged in courts multiple times here in Finland, every single time ending up in loss for the EULA-enforcer. The simple fact is that an EULA is covered by copyright laws, and copyright law cannot remove rights given by other laws. It most certainly is NOT covered by contract laws. That means that even if the EULA e.g. specifically said that you cannot sell the item after you're done with it the clause is invalid and you are perfectly within your rights to sell it.
the copyright still exists on the work, the ruling allows antigua to disregard the copyright and distribute the work. whoever recieves it cannot make more copies unless they want to be in violation of copyright law.
You didn't quite read what I said. If it worked like that then the work in question would have TWO copyrights on it, both equally legal -- the original one, and the new one. And obviously, copyright doesn't work if there are two legal copyrights to a work with differing terms. You see, the copyright asserted in Antigua would be just as legal because the copyright law is suspended and therefore the person with the work wouldn't have to abide by the terms like e.g. that you cannot assume ownership and rights to someone else's work. This is what I would like some legal expert to clarify: how to determine how to apply copyright to works that, in essence, are covered by two, competing copyrights.
But alas, what does happen if you give an Antiguan a copy of something, then the person removes original copyright notices and replaces them with his/her own and distributes that copy to you? It's not anymore the original one, the copyright was stripped from it, you are not in the legal position to determine who the copyright really belongs to, and it could even be considered a derivative work -- does the suspension of copyright allow for a loophole that basically strips copyrights from an existing item and assigns a new one?
Well, since the submission asks: I have this plan where the monthly fee is 66 cents, I can speak up to 24 hours a day and it'll cost me max. 1 euro -- ie. if I spoke 24 hours a day for the whole month it'd still cost a maximum of 30 euros + the 66 cents in monthly fees -- and I also have an extra 3G - service with no speed or data caps whatsoever and the extra costs 13.90 euro a month. Oh, and I can drop either the 3G - service or the whole plan whenever I wish to. SMS - messages cost 6.65 cents per message, so depending on how much one uses those the bill can be really small or really big -- personally, I don't really use SMS.
No, he's just giving the other two the credit they deserve and says that he wasn't required, he was only helpful in polishing the jailbreak.
Isn't that term considered racist, though? Is there a P.C. replacement?
I have a feeling that I missed the joke, but there's nothing racist about the word "blacklisting" or "blacklisted."
Once a standard becomes good enough, people will hang on to it for a long long time. Why bother re-encoding a complete music library from mp3 even if vorbis/aac is clearly the superior codec? Apple has enough difficulties pushing aac through, and not many hardware producers are including vorbis support. I guess the same could be said for windows xp and desktop hardware.
MP3-files are small enough to be streamable perfectly well even on really slow connections, but video files ain't small. A 2-hour, 1080p video file with any kind of a remotely-acceptable quality will weigh in at 4GB+, and well, it sure ain't streamable over very slow connections. Not to mention the fact that bandwidth costs money. Ergo, any developments that result in higher quality at the same size or similar quality at a smaller size are certainly welcome, both for consumers and for content-producers.
As a thought-experiment, let's assume that this or that TV-series I was watching on Netflix weighed in at 1.5GB for a 1h episode, and I watched 15 episodes in a month. That'd be 22.5GB of data. Now, if the move to a new codec reduced filesizes by 5% we'd end up with ~21.4GB of data -- that's already one gigabyte in savings. Now, multiply this with e.g. 200 000 users, what do you see?
- Do not allow write access to any essential binaries (like sshd, ls, and so on). If you have to, make sure you have a stealthy daemon checking the hashes of all critical binaries at regular intervals to make sure they have not been tampered with.
I'm sure there are plenty of other such systems, but Tripwire ( http://www.tripwire.org/ ) is one of the more popular tools to keep a check on your system and warn you immediately if it detects tampering attempts.
- After the initial system install, make a dump of the syscalls table of your kernel. Check it regularly to make sure it has not been tampered with (kernelspace rootkits usually hijack this table).
AFAIK Tripwire handles this, too.
Business CEO's are Gay, 99.9%.
For some reason I get the feeling that this AC is talking out of first-hand experience here!
Google is not a business that is built around distributing FOSS.
Android.
Android isn't Google's business model, services are. Android is just a means to an end, and that is to drive people to Google's services.
Not every desktop environment that runs on linux works well. Some (maybe even most) are buggy. They are not all buggy and you are not forced to use the buggy ones. I see more options (even if some are bad) as a good thing.
The less-buggy ones are also the ones with less features, the ones with less appeal and promise than the others. XFCE is, for example, a quite fine DE for a geek and it sure seems stable from what little I have used it, but it's not exactly appealing in looks, it feels dated, and there's a lot of rough corners here and there. Now, take KDE in comparison: it's chock-full of features, it doesn't feel nearly as dated and it can be really pretty on the eyes. On the other hand, it's buggy as shite, I can still get whole Plasma to crash just by adjusting the panel, it's extremely confusing, and even people who have used KDE for years still have trouble figuring out where things are or how to work them -- I popped in on #KDE a while ago and I couldn't find a single person there at the time who knew how to use activities, for example.
Sure, there's a lot of DEs to choose from, but they're cannibalizing each-others on the amount of available developers and the end result is seemingly that no project has enough skilled developers and designers.
Clunky package management system? The package management systems in linux are far superior to windows. In windows you just download your own executable and install it yourself.
Yes, clunky. For one, you can't install stuff to a location of your own choosing without dropping to console. No, they'll always be installed system-wide and in the default location. If you're using a years-old distro --for stability or whatnot-- for which there are only security-updates available any longer and you want e.g. a newer version of some web-browser what do you do? You can't just download the package from the Internet as it most likely depends on newer libraries, too, that just aren't available in your repos. Secondly, there's too many incompatible systems. If you want to install something that isn't available via repositories you'll have to know which system is in use on your installation and then download the corresponding package-type. It may still not work, though, if the package wasn't specifically for your distro. Thirdly, it doesn't allow you to install only parts of the package or versions with differing features. On Windows you can e.g. download LibreOffice and choose which parts to install and which ones to omit. On Linux, well, usually you install libreoffice and just end up with everything with no customizability. And what if you want e.g. an alternate version of a package, with this or that feature that is disabled by default? Under Windows you just download the executable and install it. Under Linux... well, even the easiest route generally involves having to enable some extra repository or two.
Yes, keeping the things that are already installed up-to-date is a whole buttload easier under Linux and I do really like that. Nevertheless, I still see these package-management systems as too rigid.
The point of linux is not mean to be "free as in beer".
Indeed, I know it isn't. But try selling the idea of "free as in libre" to any Average Joe and see how far you get. From a purely pragmatic point of view it just doesn't really matter for most. And atleast to me it still ain't worth the aggravation on the desktop.
As soon as the games I already own and play work on Linux I will switch in a heartbeat.
Hmh, meh. I won't be switching even then. It's very, very unlikely that all of the games that I will be wanting in the future will become available for Linux. Then in addition to that Linux is still very much of a hit and miss - adventure, with inconsistent, buggy desktop environments, missing drivers, clunky package-management systems and so on. Being able to play games on a free-as-in-beer OS just ain't worth the aggravation.
In other words, the Party of Thieves. How admirable.
I didn't know the RIAA or the MPAA were a political party :O
but I don't have 50GB of porn to fill it...
You need to hand in your geek card. Immediately.
Yes. I am out of the habit of thinking of lossless as "real" compression, but I seem to be in the minority.
I have to ask why do you think like that? Do you view e.g. the compression method used by RAR/WinRar as not being "real" compression, even though it can achieve quite nice compression rates? Or bz2? Or 7zip? They're all lossless, they all have lots and lots and lots of math behind them, and implementing any single one of them isn't something that you can just do yourself in an hour or two. Or is it that you only view lossless compression as not being "real" compression when it comes to multimedia, as if the content somehow mattered how "real" one or another compression method is?
If a very small percentage of people are using-up a rather large percentage of the available bandwidth, then yes, that's unfair.
But bandwidth isn't something that wears out, it's not something that you can consume all up like you can e.g. oil. Bandwidth is a measure of something, not the something itself. That means there's a few distinct differences compares to actual physical goods, like e.g. as long as 100% of the available bandwidth isn't used it doesn't matter if some users consume more than others -- it becomes unfair if these users have to pay more than the others even when it doesn't actually affect anyone else, and as such the equation should at most be about bandwidth over time when the pipes are fully-pegged. Just throwing in a static number as the cap is what's unfair.
It's NOT AN INFECTION when user willingly installs a malicious application and approves its permissions.
That's like saying that it's not an infection if you inject yourself with HIV because you knowingly do it -- obvious rubbish. OF COURSE it is an infection still. Especially when the malware - package is HIDDEN inside another one, so that when the user thinks he's installing one thing he's actually getting two things. You might have a point if the user knowingly installed a malware - package, but that's just not the case.
Learn the basics of compooters before you write something that stupid next time.
Indeed, mate, indeed.
One thing that baffles me is that, well, here in Finland we just don't have data caps. Period. Since we don't have data caps whatsoever, even on most mobile broadband - connections, does that mean we're somehow being unfair? Incompetent? Both, even?
I just don't see it. We're a small country with lots and lots of rural land, only about 8 million people in the whole country and all, and yet our ISPs and cell-phone operators are just thriving without any data caps. We have only one ISP/cell-phone operator that does data caps, the rest do "speed limits," ie. the lowest of the lowest mobile broadband - packages one can get from my cell-phone operator is 512kbps up/down for 4.99€/month and on which you can simply upload and download as much as your heart is willing. 512kbps is enough to download about 158 god damn gigabytes of stuff a month and I didn't even factor in the amount of uploaded data at all -- this is also a package that you can just drop off or switch to a higher/lower tier at your own leisure, there are no 12/24 month contracts involved at all. So basically, even our lowest-tier broadband packages grant us consistent speeds, no long contracts and no sudden extra charges no matter how much you transfer. For some reason our method sounds fairer to me.
Does it even have to be a huge commercial success to be useful? No, wait, I'll answer for you: no, it doesn't. There are plenty of things in this world that may not be terribly useful for the general populace or huge commercial successes, yet they're definitely worth their weight in gold for their intended target-audience. You, clearly, are not a part of the target-audience here given your lack of insight.
OK, just fess up - it's your pr0n collection, right? 1TB of images at a gargantuan 20MB apiece is over 50000 images; at a more reasonable 5MB that increases to 200k+. "Hobby photographer" my foot.
You've clearly never heard of RAW-images. 20MB RAW-image is actually still on the smaller end of the scale.