OT - Google Earth Pro free licence

[Bod]

Fill the form out with a gmail account? Specify *1 user* and occupation as *other*

[PeterC]

it's 25MB (+overheads) so e-mailable(?).

[Bob Minchin]

Thanks, My browsers were not showing the outline of the fields to fill in. Now after 3 attempts the site is promising me a key.

Cheers!

[polygonum]

Why would anyone send anything that big by email?

[dennis]

Because its easy and pretty reliable. I have sent 100s of megabyte emails before now. There is no point in doing so here as the setup program asks for the key when it installs. It took me two attempts to register, the servers are overloaded.

[polygonum]

It is, generally, easy.

Reliable, I think not. Many email servers refuse to handle such large emails.

It can also be rather unfriendly. If you know sufficient details you are possibly in a position to make a reasonable decision but suddenly finding your limited 3g/4g connection downloading such a large file, to a device that can't even use it, doesn't seem a good idea. And that can very easily happen. Especially as there are so many sensible alternatives such as the near-ubiquitous Dropbox and its rivals.

[Nick Maclaren]

a) Because they don't know of another method

b) Because that's normal, at least for Powerpoint presentations by marketing departments

Way back when, when wide-area Email was starting (well before the Internet), I had an argument with our Email people about sending files via Email. They said that you should never do that, because Email was like letters, so I said "What about parcel post?" I lost, and Email didn't support sending files until many years later.

Of course, everyone With Clue knew how to encode files as plain text (hence uuencode etc.), but it took ages before attachments appeared. And now people send messages as attachments, so you can't read them without the right application, and are opening yourself up to an attack if you do ....

How technology has, er, progressed!

Regards, Nick Maclaren.

[polygonum]

A number of years ago, when I regularly got involved with Powerpoint, I couldn't believe the sizes they could become!

[dennis]

The ones I were using could handle up to 250 Mbytes and couldn't send to any others outside their restricted IP address range. Its a layer of security that you don't get on public mail servers.

It has advantages if you need to deliver a file in that you know its there when the email arrives and it can go at a low priority and not get people trying to download stuff on the corporate links during the day when they arrive at work.

That would be a user problem as if you were using a 3g/4g connection you would set the mail client to only download the minimum needed to see what to do with the email. (Or run imap.)

[JohnW]

Went to the page indicated by the link and a flash at the top now says you don't need to sign up anymore. You just download from the link given, enter your email address and key of GEPFREE and it works.

John

[thescullster]

My 2c

Corporate email systems (tend to) revolve around Exchange. In Exchange, all emails and attachments get merged into one big database file for access by the Outlook clients. Databases are great for handling and searching through lots of small packets of data. They don't fair so well when large files are included. In database design, images and the like should be included as links in a database record, rather than including the file itself. The same approach holds true for Exchange/Outlook and can clearly be seen by the (slow) speed of search when looking for a message in a folder which contains many messages with large attachments.

In addition, there are storage and backup considerations.. The user receives an email with a large attachment and saves said file out to a folder full of similar files. You now need twice the storage and twice the backup capacity.

Large files should be uploaded to cloud storage and a download link only distributed.

Phil

[Andy Burns]

Up to EX2007, there was single instance storage, so there would be one copy of the attachment shared by all recipients (or a handful of copies if the recipients are spread across multiple stores). But from exchange

2010, every recipient gets their own copy, so sending large attachments to large numbers of colleagues will make you unpopular with the exchange admins.

[polygonum]

Agreed.

Add into this the scale of storage required for Legal Hold (if used).

[Tim Streater]

Anyone used the flight simulator yet?

[PeterC]

I must get a new-PC-tuit! Looks like lots of good, time-wasting things to play with.

[Bod]

I've tried Flight Simulator on Google Earth and using just a keyboard to control the plane is pretty frustrating. I'm sure you need a joystick to fully control and enjoy the thing.

[Tim Streater]

All I've got is the mouse. What can you do on the keyboard?

[Bod]

Press and hold alt + any arrow key and you'll see.