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Imagine an app on your desktop which keeps track of the username,password, transfer protocol, etc. of any number of free disk - space services. It then presents you with a "virtual drive" of some massive amount, which is the sum total of all the space you have on all those drives. You then can upload
/ download tons of files, and let the app "manage" and keep track of the file's "real" location. Say you had files A, B , C, D. A may be stored on site X while B and C are on site Y, etc. You could even double the drive speed by halving the space since you store every file in 2 places, and when the file is fetched, on site gets it "left to right" and the other gets it "right to left" and merges the data back - but at half the time.
You could apply the same idea to having :
1) virtual free email (logs onto all your free emails and accumulates the emails)
2) virtual free webspace (site links are auto changed to the different domains - cross linking)
3) virtual free calendar (logs into all your calendar web apps and accumulates calendar events)
4) virtual free [[insert your web service here]]
Mojo Nation
http://www.mojonation.net/
Same general idea, but based on an economy of sorts. The execution isn't the greatest, though. [Lirp, Jun 23 2000]
Zden
http://www.zden.com
Zden is a digital content marketplace that offers 500MB of free online storage space to store, trade, sell and purchase files. Members make money by selling their mp3's, videos, photos, documents or any other original files. Additional MB's can be easily purchased. [SamuelSt, Jun 23 2000]
Base 9 OS
http://plan9.bell-labs.com/plan9dist/
Plan 9 OS from Bell Labs is a distributed Operating System- allowing the drives of a bunch of computers to all act as one drive. Similar to your idea but you have to install the OS. :( [charlesw, Jun 23 2000]
Leech Data Storage
http://www.halfbake...ch_20Data_20Storage
Same idea. [phoenix, May 15 2002]
Microsoft Pastry (no, it's not a joke)
http://research.mic...t.com/~antr/pastry/
"A scalable, decentralized, self-organizing and fault-tolerant substrate for peer-to-peer applications". Gotta love the name, anyway [phoenix, May 15 2002]
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This is a great idea, and I'm not just saying that because I thought of it independently. :-) I would love to see something like this as a device driver in Linux and/or other open-source operating systems. My personal name for it was the "wide-area drive," but perhaps the acronym "WAD" would ruffle the feathers of Doom/Quake fans. |
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You could use the virtual free space as *swap space*! Imagine the horror! |
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This is RAID, except over networked storage providers. The free-space providers would be horribly annoyed, of course; their whole business model is based around you using their UI and seeing ads or *something* -- hiding their service behind a RAID system ruins all that. I assume they'd do everything in their power to block you. |
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The same problem applies to most of your "virtual free [[ web service ]]" ideas. |
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(Virtual free web search -- commonly called "metasearch" -- is of course baked.) |
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Major corporations with super computers are already doing this, only there using -your- hard drive and even your proccesor as well as any other poor unsuspecting user of the net. |
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Major implementation difficulty here: you need to hack the authentication stuff for each of those backend services. Most of these backend services don't use HTTPs authentication mechanism, they use application authentication mechanism ( asp, jsp apps ). Hacking those and making it work is not feasible, unless everyone agress on something common here. |
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[SamuelSt]: The idea title specifies *free*. Your website (which you are advertising in your link) appears not to be. |
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Hm. I'd say the link is off-topic (since this is just one of the many services that could be used, which we already know exist), but signup does appear to be free as in beer (for the first 300,000, anyway), although they charge commission on trades and restrict content to the point of being near useless as general storage. |
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(Maybe the system outlined here would have to employ steganography to make sure even material deamed unspongeworthy can be stored on such services.) |
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Actually,jutta and angel, you can use the storage space for anything you like. The only thing that's checked is the content that members submit for sale into the public Zden catalogue. Of course there is a commission on trades, but the company has to make money somehow. |
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l2g's WAD could instead be called PUBWAD, or "public wide area drive". Of course, the company really does have to make money somehow. Now to make it so a similar rule applies to entities other than companies... |
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> This is RAID, except over networked storage providers. |
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Doesn't RAID stand for *Redundant* Array of Inexpensive Dis[c|k]s ? The key word here being *redundant*. It sounds like triptych is describing using this as an amalgamated source of free space, not as a sort of running backup system. |
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It does stand for that, but "RAID" is also used to describe simple striping schemes without redundancy. Besides, you'd probably want the redundancy, in case any particular free disk space provider went belly-up or couldn't be reached on any given day. |
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Redundancy is a survival strategy. Since my track record in strategy games (such as the ^#&$^*%# career game) has been a disappointment to myself, I tend to think of my quality of life as low when the role of survival strategies in the living of my life is large. What kind of life do you want your data to have? And how good are your data at games of strategy? |
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you couldn't use this for program files, reading rate would be far to slow to run any program. and program files are the ones that take up the most room, except for the rich meadia we all know and love, would you really want to have to re-d/l a song or movie clip everytime you want to watch it? other then those bugs crossaint =) |
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