Changes with Google Drive
 

https://apple.slashdot.org/story/17/...-down-in-march

It appears that google is making some changes...
It seems a bit confusing what they are doing..
putting google drive under "backup and sync" ...from what is said..
and that normal ordinary google drive as we know it won't work as the stand alone it has been...
That is what I get from the articles I have read thus far...

Doubtless this will affect some here..

In point of fact ..it will affect all the links to files I share here...
I will have to change all my links here and find another free online file sharing service rather than deal with this fuzzy and vague appearing answer given..

Any suggestions for a good free online file sharing service that gives enough storage?

I am leaning toward ..Mega

Re: Changes with Google Drive
 

Mega... By Kim.Com to make 10 chars.

Re: Changes with Google Drive
 

Why not Nextcloud?

Re: Changes with Google Drive
 

thanks gerbick :)

looking into it now...

Re: Changes with Google Drive
 

Yeah Nextcloud definitely. If you are considering moving away from Google, then make it an opportunity to move to open source and self-hosted and private!

Re: Changes with Google Drive
 

My guess is that if google gets to know of the frustration that comes with this..they are less likely to re-adjust and make it simplier or less complicated. I stand to be corrected. Would you agree?

Re: Changes with Google Drive
 

theory is sound...
But dealing with behemoths like google , ms, apple or facebook...
they could care less about a small segment of the pop. that is irritated, vexed, or angry,..
Such corps. "do" care though ...about public image ..and spin doctoring exploding media coverage of issues pertaining to them to be able to retain their market share.

Re: Changes with Google Drive
 

No, I do not agree.

Unfortunately Google has made plenty decisions that affect their bottom line and the few, angry masses tend to be a write-off more than anything else.

It's why FOSS is seen as a bunch of wild kids doing their own thing in a basement or garage until... whining either drops out of style, the product gets bought out and rebranded as a "new idea" or the disgruntled few fail to make a dent in educating the masses.

Often the FOSS is pushed so far down that folks just don't even know that they're running something that's open source somewhere in the stack (think: routers).

At this moment in time, I believe fully in storing and maintaining your own data and disallow all parties that want to make money from your contributions (read: your content, your posts, your emails, your words) and make money from it without including you because your consent came from a convenient service.

We do that all too often. Give away our content for ease of use.

Roll your own data storage, access it from your trusted devices, keep everybody else out.

Re: Changes with Google Drive
 

Wise Words of the week!

It used to be that people valued their private data, whatever happened to that sentiment?

Re: Changes with Google Drive
 

Lazy & cheap...

Re: Changes with Google Drive
 

convenience is the devil.
(this IS the place to post outrageously obvious statements isn't it? :D)

Re: Changes with Google Drive
 

Hand on heart, that reputation is by and large justified. The vast majority of FOSS is crap. Just look at what's on offer in the Jolla store or, worse still, in Openrepos.

A lot of factors. Convenience is the most obvious one. If you wanted to show off your holiday snaps to your aunt say 20 years ago, you had to bring along a photo album when you came for a visit. Now you just send her a link to a a cloud storage of some kind.

Not everyone has the skill or the means to run their own cloud storage, just like not everyone has the skill or means to bake their own bread. So we delegate. There is nothing wrong with that.

But there is a small difference, and therein lies another factor. Delegating your bread making means you go to the shop and buy bread made by someone else. The key word here is "buy". You pay for it. With money. Money is tangible. You generally do not pay for the data storage, at least not in money. The fact that you pay in some other way is often overlooked.

Re: Changes with Google Drive
 

Baking your own bread is FAR easier...
I don't buy a single baked good.
I bake my own breads ...
far easier and more netting a physical result than cloud storage skills

Re: Changes with Google Drive
 

I wouldn't say that Jolla apps are a good representation FOSS, in fact those that depend on Jolla's proprietary Silica components probably can't even be considered to be FOSS. If it were Debian, those apps wouldn't be allowed in free and would have be placed in contrib or nonfree repositories which aren't considered to be part of the Debian distribution.

I don't really understand your relation between FOSS and the quality of software. In my experience, it's the other way. Have you seen Google Play? The vast majority of apps there are closed/proprietary, many of which are made by non-developers, students, etc. with little experience who want to jump on the "app" bandwagon and the quality is atrocious in most cases. Other more experienced Android developers will be more than happy make their apps freemium or have them include adverts. By contrast, this never happens in FOSS, and if ever it did, someone would just rebuild it without the crap. In general, FOSS developers, those who decide to share their code, tend to have more experience and have reason to give a sh¡t about the quality of the code they will be publishing for the world to see.

As for reputation, I'd argue that FOSS doesn't have a reputation at all amongst the general public. Most people don't know what FOSS is, and those that do know what it is, generally don't have a strong opinion about it.

I'd expect nothing less of Powdered Toast Man. As for the rest of us mere mortals, well most of us are more like that iiiiiidiot Stimpy. We don't bake our own bread, we buy it. You wouldn't want to taste our bread. ;)

Re: Changes with Google Drive
 

ach....
Stimpy is a genius!
who else could survive ....Space MADNESS!!!!
I know what you want wicket...
You covet my ice cream bar!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-YMUXGqWpRc

hahaha

Re: Changes with Google Drive
 

I bake my bread (yummy) and I bake my cloud (https://github.com/pycage/pilvini).

Both have huge advantages. :) Google Drive / Dropbox / ownCloud was yesterday.

Re: Changes with Google Drive
 

which is a good indication of the validity of my assessment :) Jolla's own apps are one of the very few good ones available in the Jolla store.

Yes, and the same applies to the vast majority of apps in the Jolla store or Openrepos.

I am not discussing the relative merits of FOSS versus non-FOSS. I was merely commenting on this:
to which my response was,
I stand behind that statement.

Among general public, you are probably right. I had my own share of problems stemming from someone's misunderstanding of FOSS. I had my job seeker's allowance suspended when I was registered at the Job Centre because I was contributing to FOSS and they considered it a breach of their rules.

Among the semi-informed, though, FOSS does have a reputation and it is not very good. My wife just told me how she finally got her boss to approve the purchase of some "corporation grade" video editing software that she wanted to make public presentations with. When I asked her whether she had tried Avidemux or some other free alternative, she just gave me that sort of look you may get if you asked someone who wanted to go from London to Manchester whether they had considered walking.

Re: Changes with Google Drive
 

Here we differ in opinion; I suppose it is because of what tools one uses and needs.

In my opinion there hardly is any crap in FOSS utilities, instead there is elegance, scalability, stablilty and rock-solid design principles.
(the old *nix adage, do one thing and do it well; to achieve complex results chain simple tools together...)

Even the more complex tools like compilers and runtime environments are also very rigorously tested and debugged, I would hardly call that "crap" !

Re: Changes with Google Drive
 

You have just listed the small minority of FOSS products that are good. I myself have mentioned another one - Avidemux - even though it tends to have stability issues.

You have conveniently forgotten to list the FOSS equivalents of fart apps, never ending forks of forks or various hello world applications. The fact that you and I do not use them does not make them not exist and form the 95% or more of the FOSS offerings.

An important note:
No disrespect was intended to authors of any of my listed examples. Not all of them deserve the derogatory word that I used. I even use one of them, I am not going to tell you which one. But they are all a good illustration of why FOSS does not have a good reputation. None of them are actually the masterpieces of creation that some die-hard FOSS advocates seem to believe that FOSS is.

Re: Changes with Google Drive
 

You have conveniently forgotten to list how much unusable/me-too/buggy/harmful/hostile software exists in the paid-app stores.
Now when I think about it, seems that FOSS fartapps are tiny and relatively harmless subset of all that.

I'd rather think it is the other way around; there's lot less software in OpenRepos (or whatever equivalents exist) than for example in Debian main!

Merit of any software is difficult to judge and can be appraised many ways; I myself value functioning as specified, being usable for the intended purpose and having as little bugs as possible.

Whether the piece of SW is FOSS or closed source does not affect whether it is "a masterpiece of creation" however it might have an effect on whether it can be better; You just cannot argue that it is easier to maintain closed source software.

Re: Changes with Google Drive
 

That was not the topic of the discussion. Your argument was,
The fact that crap closed source software exists does not prove that all FOSS is full of "elegance, scalability, stablilty and rock-solid design principles."

It has to be because you - maybe subconsciously - filter them out. Every time I go to Openrepos or Jolla harbour, I see about 20 fartapps for each useful app.

It took me a while to get what you meant by that. Did you mean that even if all Openrepos apps were fartapps, even then they would be just a small proportion of the entire FOSS landscape, because they would be vastly outweighed by e.g. Debian main? That is undoubtedly so, but then Debian also lists a lot of packages of questionable quality. In fact, my first disenchantment with free software came exactly from my experience with some packages offered by Debian :(

The crucial word that you seem to keep latching on is can. Yes, open source has the potential to be improved by someone other than the creator, but how often does it happen in reality?

With commercial software, you have the same thing that you have with any commercial product: accountability. The product creator has an obligation to you, the buyer. With open source, you may consider yourself lucky if you get a response like this. Or like this, if less lucky.

I am not arguing that. I am not even arguing that non-FOSS is "better" than FOSS. I said that before and I am saying it again, and I am sorry that I seem to keep failing to get that across, despite stressing it every time. All I am saying is that any bad reputation FOSS has is largely justified. So is any good reputation, but yet again, that was not the topic of the discussion.

Re: Changes with Google Drive
 

Wait... are we still arguing FOSS vs. Closed Source?

There's crap found in both camps. Fart apps? Some are open source. Some are not. Worthless attempts at being an office app? Yep, both camps havre those too. Face it, even with a governing body, some crap slips past every now and then.

But luckily enough, we have choices. And if it's open source, we can help those folks to make a better app. If it's closed and in a ecosystem that allows for comments - do so angrily yet informative enough that it's seen by a few people that might echo those sentiments before it's taken down.

Or something like that. I just know that I like having choices more than anything else.

Re: Changes with Google Drive
 

Actually, it can happen and on many cases it continuosly does.
I'm not talking about fartapps here, I mean the serious software that is used more and more to build up the world. Skilled people contribute all the time to worthy projects.

Ahh, but here you now show up the mindslip! You subconsiously assume that when SW is FOSS it means it is non-commercial, smalltime, insignificant, hobbyist-driven! :D

As it happens, I work on FOSS in a commercial company. In reality I work exclusively on open source software and have been doing that for several years now. The company makes profit, so I have heard and I suppose it is true as they afford to pay me several thousand euros every month :eek:

As for FOSS small-hobbyist-apps that I use, I make it a habit of donating to the devs for the applications I use. And I donate more than the silly few dollars usually asked for in applicaton stores.
(But I also compile the sources myself, as a case in point; I could not use closed-source applications even if I wanted... it is a matter of principle.)

Re: Changes with Google Drive
 

Anyone care to explain to me whether Spideroak and Backblaze have a difference? :rolleyes:

Re: Changes with Google Drive
 

I like these changes :)