I'm not 100% certain and have no references to back it up but I recall reading an article which described the Apple cloud music strategy as being one where for existing identified music it merely stores a reference of some kind against your account rather than actually storing an additional copy. Presumably for the sake of sanity it would be implemented in the application where it saves the end user the cost/time of uploading as well, if for no other reason that said cost/time/cpu resource would also be a real cost to Apple directly or indirectly. Mumble-something about "even for your own music you have ripped-not-purchased, pay $nominal-annual-fee and it magically becomes a legal licensed object" (which obviously they did because then it becomes something they have one single stored copy of with references on remote accounts). Phil P On Sun, Sep 4, 2011 at 3:49 AM, Jimmy Hess <mysidia@gmail.com> wrote:
On Sat, Sep 3, 2011 at 6:20 AM, Skeeve Stevens <Skeeve@eintellego.net> wrote:
My guess is that 99% of consumer internet access is Asymmetrical (DSL, Cable, wireless, etc) and iCloud when launched will 'upload' obscene amounts of gigs of music, tv, backups, email, photos, documents/data and so on to their data centres.
What would be obscene about that is from a design POV it would be a waste of resources. "Music" and "TV" content are from a small number of sources, and there are a massive potential number of users.
What should happen is instead of transmitting large video files... block checksums should be transmitted, and only files that are completely foreign should be transferred.
Whereas everything else being "backed up" is just an assignment of account access to existing blocks that would already have been stored on the content servers.
And then also, a user storing 10GB of music would probably take only a few megabytes of their account space, once the "space used" is evenly divided by the number of users that have that block saved,
since a majority of music files backed up would be file-identical with material someone else had already backed up, and identical to material already in the iTunes store (which they could pre-seed their database with).
-- -JH
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two eyes to tease, an aargh ... an oh there's a pie in there somewhere <<<<<