very large data files

[Jason Harris]

To return to the original question:

On Jul 9, 2008, at 9:25 PM, Jason Harris wrote:
> You can guess what the real problem is: the 10 million star data file
> is going to be about 750 MB, and 100 million stars will be 7.5 GB.
> How are we going to distribute these files?  Is KDE billed per-bit for
> transfers from kde.org?
>
How big a file is acceptable to distribute via GHNS?  75MB, 750MB,  
7.5GB?  None of these?
How big a file is acceptable to host on kde.org for download?

People seem interested in a streaming solution a la OpenStreetMaps,  
but for now I want to think about distributing the entire catalog,  
because I think it would be annoying to have to wait for the stars to  
appear every time I reposition the display, and I do not want to  
require a live network connection.

It's possible that we'll eventually do a hybrid solution (e.g., the  
brightest 1 million stars are stored locally for immediate access, and  
anything fainter is streamed over the net).  But for now I just need  
to know at what point a file is too large for our standard  
distribution methods (GHNS and ftp.kde.org).

thanks,
Jason