This is a good change. The stupid former "rate-based" system meant that if you stored a large file (say, 10GB), you'd have had to pay quite a bit of money if you tried to retrieve just that file. After all, you can't control the rate at which you retrieve one file.
I'm ignorant to exactly how Glacier's API works, but what's stopping you from reading bytes from the socket at any rate you want (for a single file)? e.g. what is stopping me from doing 128KB/s with this code:
byte[] buffer = new byte[128*1024];
while(socket.read(buffer) != -1) {
// do something with buffer here
Thread.sleep(1000);
}
