Surely 'density' is a measure of stuff per area? Does 'areal density' have an additional meaning?
Does 'areal density' means 'stuff per area _per area_'? I.e. volmetric?
Not really, the normal definition of density is mass per volume. If you mean something else (like storage capacity per area), it needs to be specified.
The bigger the scale the easier it is to support high perf on HDDs.
- Q1-2024: 18.16M
- Q2-2024: 18.22M
- Q3-2024: 18.24M
- Q4-2024: 18.22M
- Q1-2025: 18.16M
- Q2-2025: 18.13M
This doesn't look like they're bleeding users, but of course you might think differently. It looks likes a couple of big companies changed vendors, that's all.Oh maybe, what we see is the effects of the election, which is also plausible.
[0]: https://investors.dropbox.com/financial-information/earnings...
I have mail with Fastmail for similar reasons.
I guess I could be using Syncthing or the myriad of other competitors as well, but Dropbox still Just Works, and has for a long time. They've not enshittified their product as much as one might expect, so I remain a paying customer.
Due to other reasons I ended up paying for a family subscription to Office 365, and after that there was zero point in paying the same for just storage with Dropbox.
“Who gives a shit about the neighborhood?”
Never heard of this before, disgusting behaviour.
As reported at the time [1], the kids who didn't have a reservation knew there were reservations, but wanted to highlight that they didn't like the new system and the Mission was gentrifying:
> Kai told me that he had heard over the summer that pickup-soccer players were regularly being kicked off the field in the evening by adults who had paid to reserve the field through the city’s Recreation and Park Department. Having grown up playing soccer on that field, Kai decided to try to help the neighborhood kids make a stand for the existing rules. “I’ve also felt kind of exiled from the community, because of my eviction, and I didn’t want to see the same thing happening,” he said.
The Dropbox employees effectively took the blame for a Rec and Park policy that was (temporarily) changed in response [2].
So sure, they said something clumsy in a heated argument. But if they'd more politely said "The courts are reservable, why should it matter which neighborhood I'm from?" would you still be so angry at them?
[1] https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/dropbox-...
[2] https://abc7news.com/amp/tech-workers-mission-district-teens...
Last time I used Dropbox was for a project around 2011.
(I do backup my Dropbox occasionally to s3).
Google drive is okay but im not trusting my entire file history on top of my email history to Google only to find it locked up one day. It gives me calm that my files arent entrusted solely to one Google account.
One reason I stick with them over Drive, iCloud, or OneDrive is that file sync is 99% of their revenue. They have every incentive to keep it running as smoothly and reliably as possible. More incentive than companies where files are just one of several services.
It still works few times better than Google Drive and, if I could pick a safe estimate, some 100…000 times better than i-bloody-Cloud. The latter is not really a compliment. The latter is just an empirical example of a mammoth company churching out subpar software year after year to a captive fanbase (distinct from a customer base) in its infinite arrogance and non-h/w incompetence.
I did try alternatives like Mega, Tresorit (my god, this solid snappy native app sucks in functionality!) et cetera but nothing came close in reliability, smooth operation and consistency. So there I am still tolerating one of those few last remaining non-native apps on my devices. I have Syncthing but that has a different role and usecase and I reckon not just for me.
I used to use Nextcloud, but the software was very poor.
I would say though that I know some power-users such as design houses working with big 3D files still use it heavily. I assume that a dedicated tool gets to offer bigger file size support or something.
I still prefer it for automated backups off my phone (which is one reason that Google's incessant, dark-patterns-y, nagging to use Google Photos is so infuriating), before clearing them down to a NAS periodically, usually keeping the most recent couple of months available in dropbox.
Beyond that use, it's just occasional use to share files with people.
I also have iCloud for photos and Google Drive from my Gemini subscription.
iCloud sync really doesn’t work well for files. I tried using it for logseq once and it messed it up.
Google Drive I have no idea. I’ve never been motivated to use it.
Dropbox has been solid — super low latency sync and I’ve never lost data. Also like most people here I use Dropbox because it the one major sync providert that has a maintained Linux client that works well.
I actually still pay for iCloud - but mainly for the Photos storage space.
iCloud for photos and Mac backup.
Dropbox for files. iCloud is somehow not good for low latency file syncs.
Even for photos it’s not excellent. It takes a while for photos on my phone to show up on my macOS Photos app. But I’m less sensitive to photos lagging than actual files lagging.
Dropbox is instantaneous.
They seem to be "out of headlines" for some time, which of course is not necessarily a bad thing...
They do claim to be profitable though, if I read that correctly.
Their earnings were released last week. Their pre-GAAP margin is like 40%.
1. You can already build such a system yourself quite trivially
2. It doesn't actually replace a USB drive
3. It does not seem very "viral" or income-generating
Lower rack densities are also more efficient overall (down to about 6KW/Rack where they start getting more in-efficient again) as you're able to move air more slowly over the severs, it's much better for example to have two racks of 20X2U 500W servers than one rack of 40X1U 500W servers, as you can use bigger fans in the servers which are more efficient, and handle air in the room more easily.
Oxide may well have a neater 'rear' though as they sell it as a whole system so will have bus bars and similar rather than PDUs and cables I imagine.
> Anyone accustomed to a datacenter will note the missing mass of cold-aisle cabling that one typically sees at the front of a rack. But moving to the back of the rack reveals only a DC busbar and a tight, cabled backplane. This represents one of the bigger bets we made: we blindmated networking. This was mechanically tricky, but the payoff is huge: capacity can be added to the Oxide cloud computer simply by snapping in a new compute sled — nothing to be cabled whatsoever! This is a domain in which we have leapfrogged the hyperscalers, who (for their own legacy reasons) don’t do it this way. This can be jarring to veteran technologists. As one exclaimed upon seeing the rack last week, "I am both surprised and delighted!" (Or rather: a very profane variant of that sentiment.)
https://oxide.computer/blog/the-cloud-computer#_where_are_th...
poink•6mo ago
FirmwareBurner•6mo ago
epolanski•6mo ago
cedws•6mo ago
raverbashing•6mo ago
zaphirplane•6mo ago
merelysounds•5mo ago
lucyjojo•5mo ago
optimal does not have to be pleasant.
wiether•5mo ago
A service that they decided to abandon: https://help.dropbox.com/installs/dropbox-passwords-disconti...