Q & A: Sending Giant Files
480642
How can I send a 50-megabyte file to a friend since itâs way too big for an e-mail attachment?
417264
Supports bigger data pipes, and laptops too Packeteer is extending its WAN acceleration range this week, with new systems at each end of the spectrum. The biggest is a box capable of optimising a 622 Mbit/s OC12 link, and aimed at linking primary and backup data centres. The other extreme is a software client for a desktop or laptop PC.â¦
661783
Ian Selby, working for a startup and building a lot of code up from scratch came across a problem - the upload of pretty large files via PHP:   I have found myself in a position where I am writing scripts that may need to upload fairly large files. My scripts were timing out, and I couldn't seem to figure out why. For the unitiated, there are some standard things that you usually do to both your php.ini and in your script in this situation [...] However, it turns out there are some other php.ini config variables that you may need to look at.   The "usual suspects" list includes changing the max_upload_size value and adjusting the script timeout. The other settings he mentions, though, are things like memory_limit, post_max_size and max_input_time to help increase the default times that PHP uses on most page executions.
584869
Clever 'perpendicular recording system' boosts storage capacity
148984
Eleven days ago I wrote a blog post describing a call-in service that I'd like to use to create a podcast with my friend and fellow blogger Robert Scoble. A new service (or one that I just became aware of) comes achingly close to doing what I want. Maybe it goes all the way there, but I've not seen how to do it. First, here's how it works. 1. Call 646-495-9201 x 49763. 2. Talk. 3. Hangup. There will be a new recording here.  http://drop.io/tradesecrets  Looks good!  But there are two problems. 1. The RSS feed doesn't have an enclosure, and even if you were willing to scrape the HTML there's no pointer to an MP3 file. 2. There's no pointer to an MP3 file on the landing page, although there appears to be one if you don't look at the HTML source. Tricky. It was enough to get Mike Arrington at Techcrunch to think it was there. I have a call into Mike to discuss. A caveat, I am also in touch with the folks at BlogTalkRadio. I want this service, and we're close to having it now. drop.io doesn't go quite far enough, they clearly want to drive traffic to their site, and appear unwilling to let the MP3 out into the wild. Interesting stuff!!  Update: I did a podcast with Robert and Patrick Scoble using drop.io. I was able to download the MP3, although it pretty well hidden, and upload it to my S3 account.
371968
Tape by in large has proven to be enormously reliable, when handled properly. There are hundreds of ways backups and recoveries can fail, and it only takes one misstep to foul it up.
275384
Tycho: If you would like to increase the size of your JPEG, click here.(CW)TB
55083
One-inch Microdrive capacity will jump to up to 10GB.
565545
On Dotvoid.com, there's a new post that reminds us of two of the more "ajaxified" features of the new releases of PHP 5 (like 5.2) - the JSON extension and the functionality to track file uploads.   These features aren't competing for the heavy weight title in the release notes. Still, having these implemented in PHP makes it a lot easier to develop modern, more responsive, web based applications.   You can get more info on the JSON extension here and an example of the file upload monitor in this entry on the Bitflux blog.
458980
A recent survey of Fortune 1000 companies shows that if you're not using disk-to-disk systems to cut your backup window, you're behind the times. Here's why the technology is so hot.
193769
High Efficiency codec recommended to network, content providers
316153
Sandisk increased capacities and bandwidths of its CompactFlash product line. The cards are now available with up to eight GByte of space and twice the data transfer speed of the previous generation.
698706
I saw an ad in yesterday's NY Times that offered the complete New Yorker magazine archive, including all the cartoons and ads, going back to 1920-something for a bit more than the hard disk would cost. The ad was from J&R, the company that makes the product is Pexagon. $149. Sounds like there might be DRM. I asked for something like this from the music business. A hundred gigs of popular music for $500, all pre-installed on the disk without DRM.  Someone at the New Yorker had this idea too? It's a good one. Bulk content for collector types. Another source of revenue. I want to run my own personal radio station, so having every song of a certain genre or from a certain period makes the diff.
177234
The new card transfers at 4MB per second, with capacity to hold thousands of images.
602929
(Source: Symantec) Join this webcast to learn how you can maximize uptime of your e-mail infrastructure, dynamically manage storage growth without impacting user performance, quickly recover from data or application failure, and protect from the worst case - a complete site disaster.
753808
I've not made much of a secret of the fact that I've been working on a new product, and am getting close to offering it as a public pre-alpha thing for Mac users only.  It's fairly Flickr-centric, sucking photos down from Flickr in a variety of ways and pushing up photos in others. Like Radio 8 and Google Reader, it has the ability to maintain an output feed of stuff you want to pass on to friends and associates. As I was developing this I wished that Flickr had the ability to store simple text files, because I needed a place to put an RSS 2.0 feed with enclosures on behalf of each user. Of course I used Amazon S3, but I had to implement my own lightweight identity system so that Juan couldn't accidentally or intentionally replace Alice's feed. If only every user had a place where they could store stuff that's net accessible so that once and for all we could stop inventing new places. I was inspired to write about this when I read an Uncov review of Pownce where they reminded me that they were reselling S3 storage at a big markup. What if the users had their own S3 storage that they paid for themselves?  Then it occurred to me to ask if people thought S3 could be an end-user thing. I'd like to find out, so if some non-technical users who have Amazon accounts would like to try setting up an S3 account, I'd be interested in hearing how it goes. Here's an idea of how you get started. 1. You must already have an Amazon account. Nothing special about it, if you buy shirts or books or stereo equipment from Amazon, you use the same account for S3 storage. Already that's pretty easy, millions of people have Amazon accounts, right? 2. Visit this page on Amazon, ignore all the stuff about objects and buckets. In the right margin is a big button that says "Sign up for this web service." Click the button. A very familiar page appears, asking you to sign into your Amazon account as if you were going to buy something (you are!). 3. From there, I'm not sure what you see, because I have already enabled my account. But the end result of signing up is that you get two strings with weird names: Your Access Key ID and Your Secret Access Key. Any software that would save a document in S3-space on your behalf would need these two strange strings. In return each document would have a URL just like any other document on the web. Nothing strange about that.  4. You could also use the space to store stuff using an FTP-like app that runs in Firefox called S3 Organizer. It's about as hard to use as the Mac Finder or the Windows Explorer, i.e. it's no challenge for a moderately geeky user. The cool thing about it is that you're able to share anything you upload into S3 space with anyone else. You can even use BitTorrent to access any file to save you bandwidth bills and distribute the load round the net. It's all very easy to do, imho. As a developer who has to pay for his users' storage needs I would very much like to see users learn how to use S3 to store their stuff, so I can focus on writing software and fixing bugs instead of paying to store your stuff.
115494
Richard Thomas comments on a "funny little PHP 'virus'" that he's noticed coming to him via emails:   Got an email that claimed to be from my host, it used a generic return address and talked about security upgrades and such and how due to new policy to help keep a secure data center I was required to upload and run 1 of 2 files in a zip attachment, the first was a php file the other was an asp file.   Of course, it wasn't from the host, so he investigated a little further to find out exactly what was going on with the file. Basically, it was a modified nsTView file with some added emailing and password discovery code. The code was "hidden" though - through a base64_encode call on one side and then decoded it on the other to cause the server to execute the code. He even posts and example of what the base64ed code might look like.