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Digital Packrats
meganthom writes "According to the BBC, Britons have been hoarding digital data, with many carrying the equivalent of 10 trucks of paper "weight" with them at all times. A survey by Toshiba found that 60% of Brits keep 1000-2000 music files on their portable electronic devices. Do increases in storage capacity appeal to some basic pack-rat nature?"
Yes. Particularly jpgs...
stuff
Yes, larger capacities will cause people to hold on to things and not realize they should still back them up.
I am definately a 'pakrat' and I can tell you that once I have the money and mp3 players come down in pice enogh, I WILL be getting one and putting 50x its battery life worth of music on it.
Can't they use a real unit? Like Library of Congresses? I'm getting a bit sick of all of these random units. Back in my day, my data had a densitey of 2.3 Library of Congresses per Hogs head, and that's the way we liked it!
and can organize it, why not be a pack rat? The biggest problem is of course organizing all your digital data. I used to just stick all my non-spam email in my inbox, then have to use Mail's search utility to find it, but then I discovered the joys of seperate mailboxes. Same goes with MP3s, as long as you can keep them organized on your portable device, who cares if you have a billion(IP issues aside of course). iTunes was my savior there...
Monstar L
It's a naturally evolved human characteristic to grow and expand and eventually consume every resource that is available to us. Why should data storage be any different?
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
I carry a USB stick with my financial balances on it, as well as some other stuff. Good stuff I browse at work gets saved there. Every so often, I need to dump the accumulated debris off of it. It goes right on the fileserver without even being sorted.
I'm a packrat in real life, and with me it does carry over into the digital world.
Murphy was an optimist.
Why would people bother going to the trouble of deleting things when they have plenty of extra space.
With things like Google Desktop Search and that other one (whose name I can't remember but has just announced their new version), people don't even have to be organised with their files - they can keep everything they want and find it quickly and easily.
It's just a matter of time before music is free in digital formats, I wonder when
//de ~ 9cimi
Many people have what appears to be an innate love of hoarding data. I know many people who have 10-25GB of music they have downloaded illegally and don't listen to, and that's just the music they don't really listen to much or at all! Why do they have it? They just don't know.
Of course the simplest answer may be that it is the 21st century's equivalent of collecting baseball cards. The latest way for my peers and I to trade music anyway is by syncing our iPods and sending over several thousand songs at once. Maybe it's "communism card collecting..."
Click here or a puppy gets stomped!
...I have a copy of Come on Eileen on my iPod.
I rarely delete stuff from my hard drive these days unless it's getting full. Instead, I just archive them away in various directories os they're not in the way. Is there really any point in deleting it if you don't have to?
My hoarding nature has saved me on more than one occasion. The fact that I don't delete non-spam e-mail ever has saved a friend of mine from very serious legal trouble and my boss has the annoying habit of sending me somewhere and neglecting to warn me that I'll need to take a copy of the demo system from a completely different presentation. Thankfully, I still had it, so she didn't end up unable to fulfill her promises.
I used to collect everything, mostly books and cds and videos and such. Now my packrattedness(is that a word?) has transtlated to the digital word, My 1.2 TB of space is for collecting as much digital crap as humanly possible, mostly out of some sort of obsession, I don't think I watch/listen/read 75% of what i download. I figure somewhere down the line someone will want one of the various things i have. Also its kind of like a time capsule, with a wide variety of genres, books/music/movies/tv/games.
There Can Be Only One...
It (the study) found that more than 60% kept 1,000 to 2,000 music files on their devices, making the UK "digitally fat".
...
If 1,000 to 2,000 make yous fat ( loosening belt here)
Gosh! I feel like I am going to explode!
No, it takes an extra effort to delete digital objects, rather than the "gravity destructor" and "live rot" out there in the physical world. That's why I have every email I've sent/received for decades. I always wonder at people who delete their messages - why are they working so hard to be clueless later? Is that why they're usually so dumb in the physical world, because they exert effort to "unlearn" what they've learned, among other bad habits?
--
make install -not war
Even a 45 minute tape is going to be heavy if you transcribe it to 1s and 0s and stick it on paper. Why not say 10 gigabytes?
Slashdot: News for Nerds, Stuff that matters only to them
What a strange and often meaningless article.
60% of Brits keep 1000-2000 music files on their portable electronic devices
Is that really pack-rat nature? Portable music devices are popular because they hold lots of songs, so you don't have to drag around your 500-CD collection. I'd say it's more of a convenience issue than a hoarding issue. A better example of "hoarding" would be those people who download every single NES ROM they find on KaZaA "just to have it". I've talked to regular FPS addicts who have ROMs like "Sesame Street" and "Barbie" burned to their ROM discs for no reason other than to say they have X games.
He worked out that one gigabyte (1,073,741,824 bytes) was the equivalent of a pick-up truck filled with paper.
Does this even make sense to compare music files to a truck full of paper?
With so many home improvement programmes on TV in the UK, many home owners are obsessed with tidiness and minimalism. Getting rid of those piles of VHS tapes is one thing they can do to improve the aesthetics of their living space.
So naturally any small digital appliance that can hoard all their music and TV recordings is going to popular. The only barrier to wider acceptance is the ease of use.
I really don't understand these people. There are people here at college who download music and movies and keep buying more and more drives. What the hell is the point? Download something, watch or listen to it as you will. And then, when you aren't going to listen to or watch it ever again, DELETE IT.
Nooo. Instead we've got students here with spindles of CD-Rs full up with anime fansubs they are never going to watch again. I know a guy who has every episode of MST3K ever in a giant spindle. I don't think he's ever opened it. I also heard a buy bragging the other day about his 400 gig drive with only 20 gigs free because he filled it with movies.
These people are just stupid. They feel that this data is a "posession" of "value". They have something in their brain that makes them feel that having this data does something for them even if they never use it. They need to get a life. I mean, in the worst case scenario I delete something that I do indeed plan to watch again, I can *gasp* download it again! It doesn't take that long.
But I bet the hard disk and optical media industries live on these morons. So at least they do some good.
The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
"A survey by Toshiba found that 60% of Brits keep 1000-2000 music files"
At first glance this seems to be suggesting 60% of the nation have 1000-2000 music files, which is clearly not true.
What it should say is "of the [small number]% of Brits with portable music players, 60% have 1000-2000 files", which is a completely different number altogether.
The linked article is only slightly more clear than the story blurb, but it sounds like only 60% of "gadget lovers" keep 1,000-2,000 music files on their devices. The /. story makes it sound like 60% of all Britons do...that seems a bit high.
I know several people who believe all data should be preserved always. They attempt to archive anything, and everything that they ever come across, and are always serching for better ways to store, search, and retrieve said data.
I don't think "digital packratting" is a bad thing, but I don't lose sleep over emptying my recycling bin either. That being said, I think there needs to be a major change in the way we archive all of our shiny shiny files, and perhapse in the way we treat data in general. (no I don't have any earth shattering suggestions just yet)
Isn't every moment of human existance going to be archived someday anyway?
--Not to be worried, Pitr fix.
I think the reason, I at least retain so much data is not any kind of a hoarding instinct. What I seem to do is more due to being completely disorganized and lazy.
So I'm running low on space. I could do one of the following:
a) Sort through it all and decide what's useless. (This would take forever.)
b) Add more drive space. Drives are cheap.
Only in a Slashdot fantasy can a Slackware install turn into several hours of sex . . . . .
"Do increases in storage capacity appeal to some basic pack-rat nature?"
Maybe. But I wonder how shocked some of these people will be when their 250 GB HD bites the dust. It was bad enough losing 40+ GB to a head crash but now...!
"...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."
I do think that many geeks have a tendency to be obsessive-compulsive. I know I do. I first noticed this way back in the Commodore 64 days, when I found a small subset of C64 owners who were obsessed with collecting as much pirated software (especially games) as they could. They were deeply into the latest cracking software, and had huge boxes full of hundreds of floppies. (And this is back when floppies cost a buck or so apiece.) They seldom traded copies with their fellow collectors, since it all seemed to be about who was the king of the crackers. They would offer pirated games to everyone else, though. I guess that was to show everyone who the Alpha Geek was. But they never actually played any of the games they collected.
I've noticed the same thing recently with my brother-in-law, who has several thousand MP3s and insists on burning CDs for everyone he knows, whether they want them or not. But I've noticed that he almost never plays any of the CDs he burns.
Once you own the hardware, there is no additional cost (stemming directly from the hardware) to storing more and more data on it. It doesn't get heavier, it doesn't get larger, it doesn't use more electricity- in most cases it doesn't even slow down or respond to the increased "cargo" in any way. All this article is showing is that it's difficult and not always useful to make too direct analogies between data and matter.
Brits are all pack rats. Jeez, carrying around a truckload of paper? I have forty gigs of capacity, but I detest carrying around the equivalent of more than about a clipboard's worth of virtual paper. So I only use a small fraction of the available space. Anyway, I hate spending a lot of time choosing which music I'm going to play. Much better to limit my options and just play the same songs over and over again.
include $sig;
1;
I doubt my parents even know what a "portable electronic device" is. I don't know anyone in my family that would have 1000 electronic tunes on a "portable device" despite the fact that half of them are music teachers or musicians... nor do I have any friends who have such a lot of music on a portable device (i.e. not their desktop).
"As a writer / novelist you might want to spellcheck your sig.
I have seven years worth of email saved and stored on varying media. Zip disks, Jaz disks, cd's, dvds. Varying formats too (PST, mbox, eudora)
I never clean out my downloads folder until it reaches 4gb in size, then I just burn it to a dvd-r and label it with the date and stick it in the folder, deleting everything from the hard drive. My My Documents folder is huge in size, almost 2gb at last count (this has also been backed up several times)
I have cd-r's full of warez dating back to 1994. I have the backup of my old BBS that I ran on my OS/2 system from 1994-1996.
Yeah, I'm a packrat in the real world and in the digital one.
...for an iPod with capacity sufficient to hold all my (100% legally obtained, bought-and-paid-for, thanks for asking) music. At 128k MP3 format, the collection weighs in at just under 80 gig.
Please, Mr. Jobs, don't make me have to choose between my Techno-Industrial-Gothic and my Tibetan Singing Bowls again this week... please!!
What good is a porn movie, one of the better ones to be sure, on a device that can't play it?
If you don't know what AltaVista is (was), get off my lawn.
...my hunter/gatherer tendencies at play here.
SNACKS ARE AWESOME
2000 songs isn't unusual.
It's got 2100 songs in my music library. They're from 174 albums I've collected over the years. This excludes any LPs and tapes I also have. All legal. And I know people with twice that many.
Not because you own two dozen legal albums that anyone having more is an automatic crook.
(Oh, and two ITMS songs... but I personoally know someone with more than 150: all in two weeks of ITMS being in Canada)
I never delete an mp3, save when replacing it with an otherwise identical mp3 of higher quality. I never delete a movie. Gaim logs every conversation I have, and before that ICQ did the same. I have every essay, paper, poem, or song I've written since my introduction to computers. I archive my email.
I used to delete games back in the DOS days, but that was only in order to install new games, and I still kept the originals.
Storage space gets cheaper and more reliable with every passing day, and the marginal costs of keeping all of those data are negligible compared to their usefulness, or moreso compared to the effort it would take to re-acquire the data.
I submit the following situations:
Idiot: "You never told me that!"
Me: "Refer to the following 3 emails I sent over two years ago"
Asshole: "I never said that!"
Me: "Refer to the following AIM and IRC logs dated last week"
Moron: "Hey! wassup? want2chat?"
Me: AIM bot scans through my years of chatting to make inane chatter with said moron, freeing me to do other things with him none the wiser.
So yes, cheap storage made me a digital packrat, and I won't turn back.
GeekNights!
Late Night Radio for Geeks!
imagine if Ipods and others were interconnectible, and transmitted their songs at school or on the bus, or at work, you hook them together and hit 'transmit' the **AA's will have to start putting schills in the field to find you.. and you could still claim (us based) fair use...
PSSST, HEY BUDDDY, WANT THE NEW BRITTNEY ALBULM?
I know there are usb keys that will transmit to other keys on demand... they have both female and male sockets.. now if they would just play music too...
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
I would not call an mp3 collection a useless possesion.. oh wait was this suppose to be an insult to us Brits?
moo
because we live there Mr. Anderson.
As long as you store a "0" and a "1", you can form any mp3, jpg, movie, pdf, or digital book. Why waste the space with all that other crap. Use your trucks for something else!
my dad has some serious obsessive compulsive tendencies and is a horrible pack-rat. we've got stacks and stacks of newspapers, bills, junk mail, tons of software boxes going back to the 80's, records, cd's, videos, boatloads of NASCAR and other auto racing memorabilia (his thing, definitely not mine), etc, etc. it's all over the house, making some rooms unusable
since i was a kid, i have been greatly bothered by this, especially seeing how much it distressed my mom. as a result, i have been very conscious of what i save and what i do with it, to the point of having a somewhat austere and minimalist aesthetic in my own place.
having digital media and a large hard drive has made it possible for me to indulge in some of his pack-rat-ism without having it take over my physical space. i've tried to get him to try it, but there's something about the physical objects that he's attached to, so there's no hope. he won't get rid of his newspaper subscription, even if he can find all the same stuff on the internet, and the DVR that time warner provides (the scientific atlanta explorer 9000HD) has no way to get video off of it (yet), so it has just become the thing he records stuff on before transferring it to VHS (soon to be DVD-R). Alas, it will never end with him, but it ends with me.
Storage is very very cheap now. There's no reason to not have, say, Jimmy Buffet's complete discography (even if you hate him). An acquaintance of mine has maxed out his download since 1998. He basically downloads stuff 24/7, all the time, as much as he can. He has a Chinese version of Windows 3.1. And he archives it! I ask him "Why?" and he says, "Because I can." This is someone who before DVD burners already had 1000 CDs of junk.
.PSD file for my friend's band?" and remember it was sometime over the summer. I've got the past 2-3 years organized that way and I don't throw out anything. Anything. For example:
/criterionco/ - Cover scans of all Criterion Collection DVDs (up to #159).
Myself, I archived and kept a lot of stuff back in college. Now I don't have the time or desire to "try out" the latest games or software, and movies and music I generally buy anyway -- you could call me a pack rat that way. I know a lot of people with 1000 CDs or 1000 DVDs or some combination thereof.
The trouble of course, comes in organizing all this data. I came up with the solution of just creating folders by month, then sticking everything but my ripped CDs in there. It's actually a lot easier than creating a database or anything else, because I can say, "Hey, when did I download that FarCry demo I haven't played?" or "Where's that
May 2004. "Call Monitoring Monthly Scorecard.xls" - A performance evaluation I downloaded from Google. Completely irrelevant to anything I do right now or back then.
December 2003. "Sofa.txt" - Descriptions of classified ads for leather sofas.
December 2002. "bustyblonde2.avi" - *ahem*
August 2002. "happens_1_big.mov" - Quicktime movie of SciFi channel's "ScfiFi Happens" commercial with the WTC.
February 2002.
All together I have about 10GB of random loose files in all these folders. But 10GB is cheap, and reliving some of the memories of what I downloaded is really fun (cue MasterCard commercial).
Small potatoes make the steak look bigger.
This story makes me wonder why some people are making an issue out of digital weight. I have stacks of CDs and DVDs loaded with all sorts of stuff I'll probably never use again. So what? All my important data stays on my PC and gets backed up occasionally to a CD-RW.
I can't see whats wrong with having so much digital data. In fact I get a wee bit excited when I go throught a CD I recorded several years ago and find an old photo or video I'd forgotten all about.
Or are they trying to flog Toshiba hard drives?
I try and archive everything I can. It's getting ridiculous now though and I seriously need to find a way of sorting it all out. I have e-mails dating back years which I'll probably never need unless I want to tell someone I received a certain "hilarious" forward precisely 2 years and 5 months ago.
BIYC Records
You ain't seen hording packets till you see the boxes I have stashed full of 5 1/4" floppies. When the drought comes, I'll corner the market on antique storage media!
You need to hotkey this page. Now you'll have a way out whenever /. starts to rub you the wrong way. Expect to use it daily ;)
The stuff will expand to fill the storage.
The files will expand to fill the disks.
The clothes will expand to fill the closet.
The junk will expand to fill the basement.
The books will expand to fill the shelves.
The body will expand to fill the clothes.
The project will expand to fill the schedule/budget.
And, of course: The outgo will rise to equal or exceed the income.
This applies to music files, just as well as it applies to everything else.
I think one reason people tend to pack-rat their media so much is that it isn't generally cheap, and it's not "real". The idea that your music isn't really a physical object, and your entire library could be instantly destroyed at the whim of fate is an incentive for people to have a full copy of their audio.
The other aspect is availability... Since it's not like each additional song on your player makes it weigh more (unlike their paper comparison), why not? Having your whole music collection on there means greater availability for a whim, or to let a friend listen to something they might not have heard. It also means not having to make sure you have whichever CD or whatever handy. If you have your whole music collection, you don't have to think about it, which is nice.
~D
This sig has been enciphered with a one-time pad. It could say almost anything.
But at least I don't have to listen to Windows Explorer whine "So when are you planning on cleaning this mess up? This century would be nice."
First thing I wanted to know was if the unit is a weight or volume limited pickup truck (paper being relatively dense).
1000-2000 songs at hand? What's "packrat" about that? Storing a normal-sized music collection in a super-compact uber-convenient manner is not being a packrat, it's simply repackaging your stuff in a more convenient fasion.
I have about 150 CDs and 3000 books. This is neither unusual nor takes up an excessive amount of space. Having all of it at my fingertips in a few cubic inches of storage is convenience and efficiency born of the information age, not "packrat".
The article states "He worked out that one gigabyte (1,073,741,824 bytes) was the equivalent of a pick-up truck filled with paper." That is a preposterous comparison, as by that measure a single vinyl LP record equates to a half-truck of paper - were we thus "packrats" back in the 60's? hardly.
A movie, uncompressed full-resolution, is about 2TB. Squashing it onto a DVD does not equate to truckloads of paper, it's simply a different medium.
Cute shocking analogy. Get real. Having a normal book/music/video library in your pocket is progress, not "packratting".
Can we get a "-1 Wrong" moderation option?
I delete stuff all the time, I never regret it, if the day comes when you think i wish i had that, then i just go find something else.
I use all open source software, so any app or script i want is just and emerge or apt-get away.
I have friend who burns everything... a waste of time and a windows attitude imho.
No, but it takes time to go through files to see what you want to delete. So extra disk space saves me time, which is much more valuable.
8 of 13 people found this answer helpful. Did you?
This is some honey-trap for the RIAA, right?
Patriotism is a virtue of the vicious
Because it makes for more sensational news:-)
I smell an agenda in that story, though. Next thing you know, somebody will come out with a "study" claiming that "data obesity" causes "stress-related illness" or some such bullshit.
picpix image polls. create - share - vote. fun!
I have about a gig of MP3's on my office machine, which is a subset of the several gigs I have at home. It represents almost my entire music collection. Nowadays I buy a CD and rip it before I've even played it in most cases.
If I ever get around to buying na iPod I'm looking forward to having a huge amount of music on my person.
Nothing better than coding with a huge music collection on random.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
40 GB IPOD is 6.2 ounces.
Inversely, the weight per bit (ignoring checkbits and formatting waste) is half a nano-gram.
I choose IPOD as a reference because it is "a full media device" and not just a raw disk.
One five pound, 500-page ream of typewriter paper prints 2 megabytes both sides a 2,000 bytes per page of text. A gigabyte is 2.5 tonnes. Each bit is about a half milligram.
I really don't understand these people. There are people in the world who buy music and movies and just keep buying! What the hell is the point? Buy something, watch or listen to it as you will. And then, when you aren't going to listen to or watch it ever again, THROW IT AWAY.
Seeing no real disadvantage to having an overabundance of digital baggage, I find the concept of this article ludicrous.
I checked the other day - in all my storage, I have about 2 gigs of space left (bigger than my second hard drive) - the rest of my 120 gigs of assorted space is taken up with anime I'll probably never watch again and haven't gotten around to burning off (in addition to the 40 gigs I have burned off), game ISOs I ripped to save having to look for the discs (in addition to the DVD with KOTOR and Jedi Academy images I made for ease of storage, and the one with Simcity 4 and The Sims 2).
I have 10 gigs of music even though I pretty much listen to the same four artists all the time. I have a bunch of PDF formats of WotC rulebooks for D&D and Star Wars D20 that I use on my laptop instead of reaching for the book. I have e-mail records from one particular individual dating back over six years, and my homedirectory on my colocation has a tarball of MP3s I backed up to the server four servers ago, along with a gig of other miscellaneous data. I have a few hundred megs of images I picked up here and there and put in my web gallery (including about 300 pictures of women kissing other women, that I imported for the sake of archiving - I don't even remember where they are or how to find them anymore).
Some people are just packrats, god knows I am. I'm thinking of getting a firewire/USB2 drive enclosure and a 250g HD, so I can put all of my data on that and take it with me to have whenever I need it. There's not much I have that I couldn't fit on that, and I could carry it in my coat pocket without any effort. That's just the way it is. Your lifetime in your pocket, digitally preserved.
Must be all that Rich Content.
[% slash_sig_val.text %]
I've collected a whole lot of music over time. Recently, and I mean last night, I tallied up the collection of music. It's sitting close to 10000. However, I started 60% of this collection when it wasn't considered illeagal to download MP3's. The other 40% is completely legal. As for being a digital packrat...I guess I could be considered one of those. But only now am I really beginning to look into backing up important files and whatnot.
to hoard things. "pack rat" after all is a name derived from a purely instinctive behaviour of a rodent. The only good that might come of all these mountains of moldy information will be the benefit to those who have invested in companies selling hard drives and flash memories.
SLASHDOT: news for people who can't concentrate on work or have no life at all and got tired of yelling back at the TV.
The comparison of truck loads of printed paper is a bit silly, if it's music. My hoard of actual printable documents, since my Amiga days around 1997, is only 100Mb.
Then again, I rarely use Word, most are ascii files.
I won't tell about the amount of photos and video I have...
All legit of course
TODO: 753) write sig.
I think the need to have a bigger pile of "whatever" is in all of us, but I do find the hording of music interesting.
I have a family member who needs to have a copy of every single song. He's been building it for years and has 10s of 1000s of songs. I sat down and built a play list the other and while the songs came up and were playing he kept saying, "where'd you find that? I got that?" It was all stuff on his computer....
I personally keep a list of maybe several 100 songs, but carry on me about 50 at any time....
"All great things are simple & expressed in a single word: freedom, justice, honor, duty, mercy, hope." --Churchill
See subject.
Perhaps even more interesting is that at some point we may be able to store on our persons more information that accessible capacity of our brains.
At some point in the long future, mory cpapcities will exceed the number of cells in your brain. At this point it may become more relevant to speak of a Homo Silicon individual walking around carrying a human pet on its person.
The final evolution is the sim human whl believes he is alive and posting to slash dot but is actually one of many simulations. Indeed given that you live today only fifty years past the first digital computer and the future holds orders of magnitude more time it is ovewhelmingly probable that you are infact a simulation. The Anthropic prinicple says that : If the human race did not go exctint before achieving this capability then its a certainty you are a simmulation or cannot prove you ar not. The corollary is that there is no point for you to play the game but should try to visit the out-of-bounds areas and try to break it. Stars are probably the avatars of real humans, and People/US magazine therefore contain the only useful information in the universe.
Of course there might be some tell tale signs. Simply modeling your brain would not be enough since you are not a closed finite state machine, It would have to have a world model also in order to be able to update the state of your model brain with external sources of information. It's this world model that one could test. Clues to its finiteness might be visible.
for example, you would likely find that the low-observable conent scenery is generated by random fractal generators. And that any time you look at it it is slightly different but looks the same mostly. For example a waterfall or tree blowing in the wind or a mirage. If you were to drill down and state at some element in the scene the you wold find at some level of resolution it would suddenly switch from a proabilistic outcome to a discrete state. But in doind so you would have to give up knowing some of its other properties since the scene generator can retain all details simultanoeus. To allow you to measure one in precise detail means it has to give up allowing another proprty to be measurable. Lets call this the quantum effect.
another property you might observe is that the scene description bandwidth is finite. This would manifest it self in not being able to observe fourier components above a certain value, lets call this value the reciprocal waveleneght. This would be the limit of resoulution. To the casaula observer, things further from you wol dbe less resolvable than things close to you as there would be seeming constant minimum angluar resolution you could achieve. Lets call this effect diffraction.
I wont go on but there are several other effects you could observe in a limited capacity world model. These would include Dispersion, finite speed of information travel (call this c), time-energy uncertainty, and an equivalence between the complexity of an object the amount of work it took to model it (call this E=mC^2)
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
i'm at ~28k songs which are auto backed up (with other important stuff) every other day (rsync/cron)
i know people with well above 30k songs
the thing is i've already deleted gigs and gigs of songs/artists i got from people that i didn't like, i've listened to everything i have at least once, and i like my collection
so it's not really being a 'pack rat' since it's not just random collections; i still have to pick and choose what artists to put on my 40gb ipod because there's not enough room
One might construct a simple mathematical model for human behavior with regard to data storage.
It would involve a constant for the amount of time and effort it takes to delete stuff (the same whether you have a terabyte-class iPod or a 2 Gb hard drive), and a factor for the percent of free space you have on the storage device.
When you have 99 percent free space, you're much less likely to think, "Do I really need this?" than you might if you had ten percent free.
Yeah, we're just walking bags of seawater, who initiate particular behaviors when specific threshholds are exceeded.
Never attribute to malice that which can be explained by mere idiocy.
No wonder - if you have cheap storage, why delete anything? Especially if it wasn't entirely easy to find (say, 5+ minutes of googling) and/or large. And if you use a modem or so-called-but-not-quite-broadband...
The implications are more interesting - this tendency to use the storage available may be quite a problem for companies dreaming of dominating the world with streaming video applications "Real Soon Now". Anyone offering the same content with ability to just download it will win. And that shifts the weight for network engineering - except VoIP and some videoconferences, realtime streaming media may never become the killer app, the traffic may still be FTP-like, whether or not high end-to-end bandwidth is available. On the other hand, expect more and more P2P.
But that was obvious, wasn't it? Streaming, multicast... it's TV-thinking.
Because storage is so cheap, why not keep everything....just in case.
My personal storage timeline:
1994 - 200MB
1996 - 1GB
1998 - 3GB
2000 - 30GB
2001 - 90GB
2002 - 170GB
2003 - 290GB
2004 - 1.01TB
I'm ashamed to admit it, but I still have a copy of the Hamster Dance. Thanks, Apple.
Maybe they figure they have to stock up now, before the DRM folk and Inland Revenue figure it out.
*whup* "Get along, little electrons. Heeyah!"
This raises the question in my mind of how much portable storage other people carry with them.
Personally I have about 40Gbytes on my person most days (mp3 player, portable hard drive, usb keys, etc.)
Is this normal or am I some kind of saddo?
It's a good thing they haven't found out they can down load tv shows and movies as well.
Technology, the cause of and solution to all of life's problems.
Apart from the standard collection of MP3s (the only ripped off stuff being old radio series like The Burkiss Way - not cos I'm precious about copyright, but cos I can't be arsed with p2p most of the time) it's all freeware. I love trying out little apps that I can d/l over the net. I collect source code - just to have a look at most of the time, but often with a view to incorporating into projects of my own.
Oh and then there's the games... HL2 needed 9Gb. The predecessor disk drive to my current one was 8Gb!!
--
USA: home of the world's largest terrorist training camp.
What light weights.
I say sell your crappy music player and buy an iPod baby.
"According to the BBC, Mankind has been hoarding digital data, with the ability to access the equivalent of 10 billion trucks of paper "weight" at any time. A survey by Toshiba found that 60% of Humans have 1000-2000 web sites in their browser's history list. Do increases in storage capacity appeal to some basic pack-rat nature?"
I don't see enough of my life to be that important as to keep with me. E-mail rarely needs to be kept, and I have about 2.5MB in storage that might be relevant.
I'm a UKanian, but I don't live near enough to rat-race London or buy gadgets with every spare penny I have to be in any kind of agreement with this study. Toshiba's storage department may have selected their sample group well to support the idea that everyone needs a portable media player with one of their drives in it...
I have copied nearly 500 songs to my work machine to listen to while working; this isn't an archive of stuff I want to keep, but a live store of music I want to listen to. The archive is on my shelves in CD format. I have DVD's but no need to move them onto a HDD or RAID array.
I agree with the earlier poster who said that it's highly unlikely that 60% of the UK population keeps 1000-2000 songs about their person.
Since I started working on PCs in the 1980s I have found that no matter how large my hard disk is, it always seems to be 99% full. There are several reasons for this:
* Evanescence of internet sites: if you see a good article on the internet, there's a good chance that it will soon vanish. So I tend to save any interesting article I find, planning to later sort these articles out and summarize them. But I never seem to get around to doing so.
* More advanced software. I now have room for much more powerful compilers (GCC) than I ever did on the old 1980s PCs. And there is a tendency for software to grow as disk space grows.
* More disk space = more things you can do on your own machine. I can now download large data files such as the Tycho-Hipparcos star database and play with them on my own machine. This eats up disk space.
--- Brian
And what the hell is "digitally obese?" Yeah, it's incredibly unhealthy that I can carry around a vast amount of accessible information on my palmtop. Does this make me informationally morbid? Oy.
Real men don't do backups... they post their stuff to public FTP sites and let the world make copies.
-- Given enough time and money, Microsoft will eventualy invent UNIX.
1Gig on the phone, (mostly 15fps converted xvid moveis, mp3's and video capture from the phone)
1Gb on the Istick USB Drive in my wallet
(DSLinux/Qemu, all my pgp keys/apps, a blowfish encrypted iso drive, lastes win SP, spyware remover, antivirus, boot disk iso's)
40GB on the ipod, (lots and lots and lots and lots of music)
Having several full length movies on the cell is just far too useful for waiting on oil changes, mva work, doctors offices.
The Mp3's play in the car and at my desk. It's not unlike carrying around a binder of CD's which a lot of people did before the mp3 days. I don't think carrying a binder of music CD's was ever considered hoarding even if you had 100 discs on you.
If you wanted to stop there, is that really hoarding? You're carring around entertainment. If so people have been hoarding for a long long time and who are we to break tracdition? Would it be any different if you were listening to the radio or watching a portable tv? It could deliver the same content you're just accessing remotely.
Now the crypt data and linux distro has a use in my daily life..ok weekly life.. but I'm willing to grant that's hoarding. But that's also well out of the scope of the article.
When it became feasable to store a few thousand characterd in a magnetic strip, Drivers licenses (some states) and credit cards jumped on the bandwagon. When smartchips appeared on the scene, the financial community was in a rush to embed them in thier credit cards. It's now feasable to carry a small harddrive and battery with you. If a couple of gigs of portable music freak these guys out, just wait till 80GB video players become mainstream.
I'm a collector. I like collecting. I can only imagine what I'd collect if I had a terabyte of storage. It's not really a matter of whether I'd use it or not, but having it just in case.
So 1 Gb = 1 truckload? I think we need a bit of context here. People do not carry around 10 Gb of text files on their personal devices. They either carry small numbers of big files (maybe some huge Excel files, or more likely .wavs) or lots of little files like .mp3s in devices that have been constructed just for that purpose.
:)
I'm a pack rat because I own an ipod mini? That's just stupid. I bought the ipod mini so I could carry around a chunk of my music collection with me - that's what it's designed for!
Anyway, I'll stop hoarding my work email when they stop sending it to me. I've tried deleting and filing email, but it takes so long that I end up getting behind in my work and all of the new mail that comes along
For me, it's more about having the music I love with me, whenever I want it. I'm a big fan of 90's alternative/indie music, and I have two of the biggest Case Logic cases crammed full of CDs. Am I going to heft those around with me all the time? No way...
But with my 'Pod, I can be listening to Mudhoney or whatever, and when it reminds me of another song/band/genre that I haven't listened to in a while, I can literally find and play it in four or five clicks. (Instead of flipping through sixty-odd pages of discs.)
with being a "digital packrat"? It's not like the physical world, where have piles of un-needed garbage all over the place. All my data is contained in a small, 3.5" drive, or in the case of some, even smaller devices. I am a completist, and enjoy having ALL of something (Roms are a great example). Sure, I won't play alot of them, but if someone is looking for that hard to find rom, you can bet they'll come to me to find it.
Do you feel silly for paying thousands of dollars for what other people get for free?
How about when you take into account that most of your money is gong to the worst kind of rich people who want nothing more than to LIMIT what you (or anyone else) can do with your music?
Hi. You're an idiot.
That out of the way, lemme tell you some good news: in a few short years, when society deems you mature enough to stray from the primly manicured paths and quadrangles of Academe, you will wake up one morning and realize "Damn! There are people in the world born before 1987 who are not my teachers! Wow!!" Once that epiphany hits, whole new vistas of inquiry will be opened to you, like: "I wonder what kind of music these older people listen to?" and "How did they obtain this music before the Internet?" and, perhaps most salient, "Why does every single one of them view me as a self-centered callow punk with a lot to learn?"
You've an exciting life ahead of you, Bucko, full of fascinating surprises! If you are truly favored by the gods, then maybe you'll find yourself trying to make a living from some artistic pursuit, during which time you can daily contemplate the irony of the prejudice and stupidity which prompted your "rich people" remark today.
I'd say hoarding is basic human behavior. It can even be altered by Brain Damage, suggesting a strong, hard-wired component.
So, this doesn't seem abnormal to me. Though it's interesting to imagine how humans will react to the ability to hoard more in the same or even less "space" as it's all information.
"The Sage treasures Unity and measures all things by it" - Lao Tzu
Deleting is virtually unknown is Accounting. They keep the original mistake and the adjusting entry.
It figures that the nation that brought us antique collecting (everybody else just filled interesting rubbish tips,) aren't able to throw anything away.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
He worked out that one gigabyte (1,073,741,824 bytes) was the equivalent of a pick-up truck filled with paper.
That conversion only makes sense for data that is "naturally" convertible to paper for printing: reports, manuals, e-books, etc., but this conversion makes NO sense for digital music files.
A typical mp3 is what - about 5 megabytes? And let's say a typical CD has 10 songs. That's 50 MB. So, for mp3s, a gigabyte "weighs" about the same as 20 compact discs. Even if you count the weight of the jewel box and liner notes in that weight, an mp3 gigabyte is a hell of a lot less than a truck full of paper.
Given the bogosity of this, hell, you might as well "weigh" data in solar masses. Or Gummi Bears. Or Mount McKinleys. Or...
It's not the case that 60% of Britons own an mp3 player or PDA.
... I was upset for a bit.
Then I realised that in the end, it was only music or videos. I was sad I hadn't burnt some of it to CD, but in the end I had lost nothing apart from a hard drive from Maxtor that crapped out after 10 months. That, and the time I had spent ripping my music, but maybe I was bored of having them in MP3 format anyway!
There are only so many things that are truly important - the things that you've created yourself, for whatever reason. Images, websites, code, music, documents, etc. These are the only things worth being anal about backing up regularly, storing in a different location, and so on.
I don't think I am a packrat. I keep project files, examples, quotes, etc. But I look at all of it again, or use it all. If I find something that has no use, it gets chucked. Of course, this behavior is probably because I have a 10gb hard drive. :-P
-- TheMadRedHatter
while(1)
{
}
Ah, the story of life.
More like an inverse relationship to ponderousness, i.e., the more gigabyte flash disks and DVD+RW I carry to my on-site tech support sites, I can deal with client issues like an underfed greyhound.
A gentleman I worked with some time ago used to save anything he'd want to delete in a directory called "BLOAT".
It worked much like the Windows recycle bin - make a directory called BLOAT, put stuff in it. Later, if you run across a BLOAT directory, look to see what's in it. If you haven't missed in in a few months, go ahead and delete it!
If disk space is getting low, you can do a simple "find / -mtime +NN | grep BLOAT" where NN is the number of days you want to keep files for to get a list of files to delete.
It's a safe, simple, logical way to delete stuff without risking anything.
PS: I am not a pack rat, but I HATE it when I really need a file I USED to have...
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
I do too, and virtually all my music, and drafts of bad things I've written, and notes to self, and a zillion other things, and it occurred to me the other day reading about the demise of JWZ's RBA mailing list and the real reason that corporate document-retention policies exist, I started to wonder what would happen if I ever got sued, and my digital stash got raided.
Basically, then, my entire life would become a public document. The good parts, the bad parts, and even the ugly parts I don't like to look at myself.
I'm not sure what I think about that.
Mike Hoye
Kewl. That would make people who watch "The Home Shopping Network" valuable as brain damage research subject. Talk about hoarding junk.
How about the entire customer list of "The Franklin Mint?"
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
I refuse to believe that 60% of Brits even have a portable gubbins. Most are old ladies whose closest computer contact is putting a bag of peas on the conveyor belt for the checkout girl to scan.
My other processor is big-endian.
It is human nature to gather information. This is just a natural extension of that. Whether 70% of that information is used at all is the real question.
I am Lord Snowbeam. Heed my call!
how far-future archeologists are going to interpret our culture based on all the stuff we hoard.
Especially if they can recover and read our "digital" artifacts.
I carry nearly 5,000 tracks on my Neuros player. It's full, and I have more to put on, but I can't bring myself to remove anything, even the stuff I always skip when it comes on. At this very moment, in the bag I usually have with me, I have no less than 4 linux liveCDs (Ubuntu, Knoppix, SLAX, SUSE) and one disc containing utilities for fixing up Windows. Not only that, but I've tried to make my home server as accessible as possible from everywhere, including my entire music collection (gnump3d), ftp, web, ssh (w/vnc), mail, etc. For a while, I was downloading movies and shows and saving them on CD, although I don't do that much anymore. Oh, and I also carry a few SVCDs of my baby daughter around, just in case I can convince someone to watch them, plus some analog data (a book, magazines, papers, etc.) For me, it's partly practical (i.e. things I often need), partly fun (i.e. can I make my server do X)... but now that I think about it, maybe a little pathological too.
perl -e 'foreach(values %SIG){$_="IGNORE";}while(){}'
I probably excel more than others with the whole digital packrat thing.
First, as a librarian, information truely turns me on. I love info and everything about it. There's no such thing as useless information. Sooner or later, everything becomes pertinent. That doesn't mean I save everything, but if I find it useful, it's likely to find its way to my hard drive or flash drive.
Second, as a digital artist, I'm an image junkie of the first order. If I think an image will make a useful model, backdrop, Photoshop experiment, plaything, whatever, off it goes to my hard drive.
Then there's the web designing that I do. So if I see a nifty layout, a CSS style sheet I want to utilize or learn from, a Javascript trick, creative coding, or even a website so bad it makes children cry, I'll save it. Images and all.
However, going back to the first "problem." I am a librarian. So the nifty thing about all the shit I save is that I do have it fairly well organized and, in many cases, indexed. I'm looking at building a few MySQL databases to track and access all of it, and since I'm kinda new to the whole MySQL/PHP thing, this would make a good project. But there's a downside. Since I'm new to MySQL and PHP, I've been looking at online tutorials, ideas, and the like. And yes, I've been saving those too.
My library Was dukedom large enough. -Shakespeare
A survey by Toshiba found that 60% of Brits keep 1000-2000 music files on their portable electronic devices.
Heck, I've got 1300+ music files just in one PLAYLIST. I've easily got 2000 music files on my Dell DJ. I never know what I'll want to listen to, so I carry most of my collection with me.
-jls
Techno-pagan
You can never have too much pr0n!
Why not save everything? Every computer I've owned has had more storage than all my previous computers __combined__. Here's the hard drives I've owned: 100MB, 2GB, 4GB, 20GB, 40GB (ya, I don't upgrade that often).
RAID (the kind that is actually redundant) is good protection against hardware errors. However, it is not a backup in and of itself, and therefore cannot protect against:
If your comment title says 'Re: Foo', I'm not likely to read it.
There's a difference between a collector and a pack rat.
There's a big difference between a vast library/collection and huge piles of junk.
It's whether the stuff is organized or not so that you can easily retrieve an item of choice, AND easily find out that you have various items to retrieve in the first place.
So I argue it isn't a problem as long as it's organized and you can find stuff easily when you want.
People with very good memory are able to retrieve tons of data at will. So I don't see why this sort of thing should be considered a problem. So just think of it as people being able to have the equivalent of very good "digital" memories.
Given that modern tech has people "seeing" with their tongues and playing pong/moving cursors with just their thoughts, it shouldn't be very long till people start to have auxiliary digital memories.
Get some mini video camera+stereophonic mikes, plug them to a wearable computer with tons of storage. Interface the wearable computer with human.
Voila - human can pull up arbitrary video/sound with the appropriate thought macros. Can broadcast it, or send it to others (virtual telepathy). Can control other devices just by thinking about it (virtual telekinesis).
One of the biggest problems I see is the screwed up Copyright Laws, and that they appear to be becoming even more and more screwed up.
A penny for your thoughts? I doubt the likes of RIAA, MPAA, Disney etc would settle for just a penny.
"It's a naturally evolved human characteristic to grow and expand and eventually consume every resource that is available to us."
You're American aren't you?
I've found that having more space makes me more likely to download stuff than pause and think about whether or not I want it - as well as keep it all stored as one big digital mess. I used to spend some time keeping it all organized, whereas now it's ONE HUGE LUMP.
========
77 77 77 2e 6d 65 6c 76 69 6e 73 2e 63 6f 6d
I am definately a digital pack rat. the thing is that I have this bad habit of accidentaly deleting all or parts of my hard drive (Linux + ntfs + me = data loss)
I have about 500 gb of data spread out over 4 hard drives, 3 of these have been accidentaly ereased one or more times. I keep at least two copies of my music collection, because that took forever to rip the first time. other than my music I just redownload, reinstall, or simply forget about other things.
I also have a 52x cd burner, access to a 4x dvd burner, and a half full 300 cd/dvd walllet thats a little over half full. no, I don't routinely back up my data for the sake of baking it up. (although, lately i have been emailing particularly important things to myself at one of my 2 gmail accounts)
yes, I know data recovery is avaliable. no, I dont care
Nathan Friedly
Not represented as sheet music!
Of course, classical music would weight more then, say, acoustic folk...
I find this very interesting, because it's true of myself - I am very, very fastidious about my home and work environments, and will not purchase or keep items I can't neatly store or don't have any genuine need for. My wife scolds me for constantly throwing away stuff. :-)
:P) And no pr0n/disk space jokes, please. ;)
That being said, I am almost the polar opposite with data - my Mac at home has 4 120GB storage drives in it (in addition to the 80GB main), all four of which are nearly full. Music, some of my DVD's I've ripped, a huge cache of programs and tools I use on a regular basis, and want a local archive of - I love hoarding data, even if it's not of immediate use (never know when you'll need that complete site rip of Cryptome.org, right? From a MIRROR, thank you very much -
The non-physical-space-sucking nature of data lets me indulge any packratted-ness I have (and I must have some - my mother is an atrocious pack rat!) while letting me keep my physical environment clean.
1000-2000 songs? my powerbook starts to get heavy with just a few hundred tunes on there.
I've talked to regular FPS addicts who have ROMs like "Sesame Street" and "Barbie" burned to their ROM discs for no reason other than to say they have X games.
I was an FPS addict for a very short time. I have the "Big Bird's Hide and Speak" ROM (yes I have the cartridge too, holding it in one hand and clicking Submit with the other) so that I can study how NES games handled audio compression.
Data tends to be created (or fetched and saved), have a relatively short period of activity, and then turn read-mostly (if accessed at all). So I periodically sweep my homedir and just write stuff to CD-R. I've got about a half dozen of them going back quite a ways. I suspect some day this weekend I will take them all and make a single DVD-R out of them (mostly to avoid any potential for CD-R bit rot), and then put that back on the shelf until the next time I think of it (and the state of the art for writable optical has gone up to the dozens of GB. By that time I should have a few DVD-Rs worth of cruft).
Hear, Hear! Well Said...
"Keep your knees loose and your glove well-oiled - you never know when they might call on you, kid."
Jean Shepard
Virtually every story is completely NON-NEWS! and completely UN-MATTERS!
Pretty slow friday around here...
I have several digital cameras. One takes very tiny photos, about .3 megapixel and average about 30K or less. It's fine for most pictures which are going to be printed or posted on web pages. I had to buy the media for it on eBay because it won't take Smartmedia larger than 8 meg, and the smallest you can buy Smartmedia now is 16. But on one 8 meg cartridge, 1/2 the size of a piece of chewing gum, I can save over 400 pictures before having to change the cartridge. Another camera I have takes about 2MP pictures and on a 64 MB smartmedia I can hold upwards of 200 pictures.
I wanted to increase the amount of space I had on my computer in order to back up the files I have. There was an ad for a 160 GB drive on sale for something like $99.00. Then I find that there is a 200 GB drive on sale for $89 at a different store. At these prices the cost of storing one GB of material is 50c. To read a gigabyte of text would take almost a year (at 1 page/minute), it's the equivalent of 500,000 printed pages. A gigabyte of music files would represent about 800 minutes, 200 songs or about 15 hours.
Case in point, because of compression, songs can be stored at about 1 MB per minute using MP3 or OGG Vorbis, and thus a regular CD goes from holding about 10-15 songs (at 4 minutes each) to capable of holding 100-150 songs. And the equipment is now taking advantage of this: The Bose Radio is now advertised as playing regular or MP3 CDs.
Last Christmas I got a (cheap) DVD player that was advertised as being able to play MP3 CDs. So I took a bunch of MP3s, about 120, collected them to a CD and burned them from a Windows computer. Took the CD over to the DVD player, and it brought up a window listing the songs by file name, and started playing the first one. It treated each song on the CD as if it was a different track on a regular CD. This CD cost 17c and holds over 6 hours of music. The cost of any particular music file on the disc rounds so close to zero as to be almost costless.
Digital files have no weight, use no physical space and the only consideration is the capacity of the storage medium. As storage becomes more compact at lower prices the cost of storing files becomes less and less, and the amount of files one can carry increases exponentially.
The only real problem we have is the use of proprietary formats that cannot be recovered when the medium changes. I used to have 8" diskettes for stuff I had for the PDP-11; I could no longer read those now. I can no longer read 5" diskettes for the PC unless I find an old computer and buy it for the floppy drive. The 3 1/2" diskette is becoming obsolete except as a near-universal exchange medium and for use on older computers without CD drives.
The lessons of history teach us - if they teach us anything - that nobody learns the lessons that history teaches us.
packrattitude
What's the point of capturing 3.8 quabbigabillion bytes of music if you can't easily find it browse or use it?
I don't know about you but rapidly scrolling through an alphabetized list 10,000 rows deep is essentially useless to me.
I got a friend who is working on getting every single snes and nes rom. Not only is he downloading every rom he is also playing them long enough to atleast get a good screen shot.
Do me a favour and make up a fictitious NES game complete with screen-shots, and a box and cart picture that look realistic (at least when subjected to the low quality photography that you'd expect when someone took a quick photo of the box). Now put up a web page or two, and mention it in passing on Usenet (not under your own name, obviously).
He'll be searching for it for *years*!
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
Does anyone remember "Name That Tune"? Even watching a few loser minutes it was evident that the best contestants carried around many thousands of tunes in their wetware, most of which could be summoned in two and a half to four notes. What's difference does an iPod prosthesis make?
I've got 4 hard drives in my computer. Whenever I upgrade a hard drive or get a new computer, I copy all the older data to the new. I still have files from DOS days on my hard drive. I never delete games unless they're massive and I never play them. I have at least 10,000 MP3s. Tons of old-school text files from BBSs.
I have packrat tendencies in real life, but my dislike of clutter overcomes that.
Last week, a friend turned on my Dell backup computer. I don't know how it happened, but both the main and backup hard drives got wiped out. I went from a truckload of data to zero in a transient second. That folks, is the equivalent of your wife and daughter cleaning up the garage while you're away.
The 'truckloads of paper' thing isn't that useful. I mean, I assume they mean digital documents printed at 10pt with 1 letter --> 1 byte and an average distribution of values (assuming the typeface is proportionate).
Know what the problem is? Paper can hold *lots* more at an acceptably reliable level if you print *very* small using (say) a laser printer. This isn't very good for humans to read, but it's still paper, it's still valid storage, and it reduces the amount of 'space' paper takes up by a factor of 10 or 20.
And who said we had to use letters anyway? What's wrong with miniscule dot patterns?
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
except i packrat things like Linux distros and software & sourcecode...
:^)
just in case something happens and the internet dies or for some reason i can not get online to grab the latest sources i still have something archived that is close to current and fully functional, plus if my system gets hosed i dont have to download all the patches & updates all over again i can just pop in a CD-r labeled slackware-updates and upgrade a stock slackware install...
i am also making archives of gentoo and debian too
Do increases in storage capacity appeal to some basic pack-rat nature?"
Data expands to fill all available space.
Explains why I recently doubled the size of my hard drive, and filled the additional space a few months later. (although, notebook drives are always too small)
I use Macs to up my productivity, so up yours Microsoft!
I agree with a "might as well save it" approach with data that could be, but probably won't be, useful in the future. Still, if I hoard data on my 60 GB drive but I really only need 20 GB or so, wouldn't it be a pity if I ran out of space and needed to buy an extra 40 GB drive?
As another poster said, it would take too much time to sort out what's needed and what's not. "Drives are cheap, so you might as well buy one." But what a waste! As data flow increases and people hoard more, this problem will merely worsen. I can't help feeling the attitude of "the disposable society" coming upon the digial world.
The trick there is to figure out what you can afford to lose and what you can't. If you could somehow rank your files in order of importance, you could simply let new files overwrite unneeded old ones when more storage is needed, much like the way a (memory or disk) cache works. But for this to work, it must be very convenient to rank the importance of each file.
One easy metric is to see when the last time was that you've used the file. To this end, I'm glad that modern Linux filesystems store, in addition to File Creation and File Modification dates, the File Access date. Haven't accessed a file in two years? Might as well get rid of it! Exceptions can be marked in any number of ways, including something as mundane as a Never_Delete_Me directory.
I haven't done it yet, but someday I'll write a bash or Python script to sort through my stuff this way.
Just a thought.
404555974007725459910684486621289147856453481154 in hex is "You sank my Battleship?"
[GPG key in journal]
I can hardly begin to count the number of times I've had to revert back to an older version of software because the "update" didn't function properly, or had some other annoyance. It's helpful too if you have friends or family with older hardware that can't run newer stuff. I've also seen free software with useful features get turned into ad-ridden commercial software later down the line, with the old one no where to be found.
Really with storage so cheap and getting even cheaper, there's not many good reasons not to keep old software backed up somewhere. You never know when it'll be useful. Burn it to disc and forget about it!
The sending of this message pretty much inconveniences everyone involved.
One of the greatest advantages of living in a digital age is that digital storage is cheap enough that you can be a "pack rat".
If I could legally have searchable access to every book ever written, why wouldn't I want to? If I could listen to every piece of music I was aware of (and some that I wasn't) why wouldn't I want that?
What next, suggest the demolition of public libraries because they cost money and contain books that are seldom or never read?
Prosperity requires certain things should be available in abundance. Information is one of these things. (Air, water, food, education and medical care are others. But what's the bet I get called a socialist for this view.)
This kind of moronic bullshit is brought to you by same people who want us to stop using air conditioners in summer because it wastes electricity, given us abominable public transport that's backwards compared to 10 years ago and have killed our ability to play in the back yard under a garden sprinkler due to water restrictions. (I live in Australia and in Sydney you can't even hose a car or hard surface without worrying about being issued a fine). Organizations are just looking for an excuse not to provide services.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
first law of data theory:
data will expand to fill the space that it has available.
next up: "Gravity still making things heavy"
- yummy rootbeer.
Lets say that is roughly 500 hours of music.
Lets also say that the average sane person listens to one or maximum 2 hours music a day.
So most people will not repeat the same CD for the best part of a year.
If somebody can demonstrate we have any real use for massive music players I am ready to be educated.
I think a more sensible course of action is to have s relatively small player (thus cheaper) with 3 or 4 GB, buy 1 or 2 CDs a week, resell the ones one does not like, keep in the music player the ones that one likes.
Did you miss something? buy it again, second hand perhaps.
500 CD collections for normal people are an aboslute waste of space and time.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
What exactly is the point of accumulate data you are never going to use?
What is the point?
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
I've lurked around emulation boards for years, and no matter how intelligent the regular people are, idiots inevitably show up looking to complete their OMG ROM COLLECTION.
When you look at the state of the world, how can you not become a radical, liberal anarchist?
Honestly, if you want to get any movie any time, well, go to Amazon and but it, hit your favorite p2p network or when the movie companies get a clue, download on demand.
It is completely pointless to archive oogles of data in the odd cnahce you will ever need one or two pieces of data.
It is absolutely insane.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Have you watched those interviews of very erudite people whose offices are cover from floor to ceiling with books?
Lets asume they have read all of them. How many are they going to ever re-read? Not many, they have to make a living and get a life.
So why do they have the books? Posturing. Showing off. There is no other reason.
Same with LP, VHS, CD or DVD grabbers. Or digital media grabbers. Simple "my collection is bigger than yours" pride. No practical use at all.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Instead of truckloads of paper, let's use a more suitable unit of measure. Beeeelions of dollars. (Raises pinky to lip.)
If each Briton stores 2000 files, that is 200 ripped off CD's, each worth $20, for a total of $4000 worth of music for each Briton. Multiply by the number of packrats, and we're talking Beeelions of dollars here! (raises pinky to lip) The British equivalent of the RIAA must be horrified.
All this money is being lost, preventing growth of the economy. If each Briton who had a portable digital device would spend that $4000 to buy their music, think of how much additional gross domestic product the British economy would have! (Nevermind where that $4000/person could come from, and where else that money would not have been spent. But remember RIAA new math "the equivalent of 400 CD burners".)
Those who would give up liberty in exchange for security and DRM should switch to Microsoft Palladium!
For anyone who thinks this is a bad thing then all I can say is remember how the BBC destroyed loads of old archive material to "make room" for some utter crap like Panorama ? The gems lost forever included loads of early Derek & Clive etc. etc.
Now just think how good it would have been for some decent quality "home taped, pack ratted" copies to have been in existence.
So I say if you've got the space and you don't need it for anything else then keep everything. After all a 120 Gb hard drive can be had for around £ 50 now (probably a lot less elsewhere) so if you fill one up just unplug it and get another (and if it's really important data make you sure you have sufficient backups - including one off site !)
After all in the bright shiny future some crazed collectors may well be willing to pay you loads of cash for your crappy collection of fansubbed tentacle rape porn !
Sky subscribers are morons. They pay to be advertised at !
I remember reading a prediction in the 80's.
If we ever are able to store data using a technique similar to DNA, then it will be possible to store all of the world's data in a device small enough to lose in the corner of a room.
Then what will the RIAA / MPAA do? Make you pay for all of that data a second time?
The price of freedom is eternal litigation.
You have 25 GB of music you have never heard "because you want to try new things".
You are tying nothing, you will never hear most of it. The same applies to movies, DVDs, CDs, etc.
Consumerist mentality. Do you really want to hear new music? Well, listen to it, don;t archive it. And once you are done, the stuff that did not touched you, trhow it away. And dump even more once or twice a year.
The amount of entertainment that you can consume is tremendously limited. Terabytes and terabytes of disk space don;t make it more available, they just make you feel better about how big your hadr one (the disk that is ) is.
Common folks, wakeup. Hoarding gigabytes and gigabytes of rubish does not make you a collectionist, they make you a rubish collector.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Digital obese? geez only 2000 songs? Nothing at all. A pack rat would have a terabyte or two of information at home and carry around with him a 250 gig external drive with the good tunes, videos and necessary files and software on it. At least that it what a true digital pack rack would do, no off the shelf mp3 players can satisfy this one.
Britons have been hoarding digital data, with many carrying the equivalent of 10 trucks of paper
Just think what it would be if it were done in clay tablet equivalents. Darn paper using data hoarders.
- Tjp
I am in wallow with my inner money grubbing capitalistic pig. ... Oink!
postmodernsideshow.com
digital media is ephemeral, it is only the fact that i have consistently
done the work of migrating data from medium to medium for more
than two decades (since 1981) that has made the data accesible.
the biggest change is that before, you could not keep all your
data in one place on a hard drive, which meant you're always managing
data in discrete physical 'chunks' -- as they happen to be distributed
across multiple removable media.
but now, we can now consoldate all that stuff into one place
with the use of massive hard drive space, and this makes
managing that data an order of magnitude easier.
migration has been:
- 1981: trs80, 70k 5.25" floppies
- 1986: rs232 serial port to macintosh plus 800k 3.5" floppies
- 1998: ethernet cable from ZIP disks to imac, and burnt to CD.
- 2004: it FINALLY all fits in one place -- from 1981 to 2004 fits
into about 20gig.
- the rest, from about 1998 - 2004 -- takes about about another 20gig,
because instead of data, it has become audio, photographs, and these
data formats consume considerably more space for what you get.
> so: twenty-three years of DATA (applications, downloads, database,
fonts, documnents, etc) fits into 20gig -- but of the newer media
types (photo, mp3, and video) has taken 20gigs in four years.
> its not a matter of trying to get as much data as possible,
but rather of having as little data as possible, but not leaving
any essential element out. thus, the data has been highly refined.
> i've found i've started organizing things by YEAR,
and by FREQUENCY of the rate at which the data-type may grow.
regards from storm's nest.
... I'm really afraid that the net/society/computing will possibly change to the worse in the future. Possibly - I'm not a tin foil hat or pessimist.
:( ) could be or the EU swpat lawyers effectively trying to kill FLOSS here...
Really, if I look at how bad DRM (I'd better be a hardware packrat, too
And if I look at the people around me and how much they agree to DRM, patents (hey, they're good for the small inventor) and even the abolishment of fundamental things like civil rights, I'm a bit 'worried'...
...somewhere about your person where a mugger likely would never want to look. Makes it a little inconvenient and embarassing to quickly retrieve it. You might also want to carry around some paper towels to wipe it off real good before plugging it into a computer.
...and seeing as humans are inextricable from nature, why are you unsure if there's a connection again?
If "beauty is in the eye of the beholder" and "it was beauty that killed the beast" then "please stop staring at me".
When handing my 40GB iPod to someone for a second I get a baud rate of about 320GB.
I, for one, welcome our new "3 boxcars per disc" Blu-Ray overlords. DVD-R made being a digital packrat practical, but 25 GB discs are going to make it downright trivial.
Of course nobody REALLY knows the lifespan of such discs, or their damage resistance, so I don't expect to be one of the early adopters. I've had pretty good results with carefully stored burned DVDs, but they aren't really suitable for careless handling. For example I'd never stick an unprotected DVD-R in my pocket and expect it to survive. I've done this many, many times with CD-R and CD-RW discs. (Incidentally, this is why I find CD-RW to be a suitable floppy disc replacement, while DVD-RW is not.)
Mal-2
How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.
Those students who are hoarding music on drive after drive, know that there is a good chance of the **AA regime winning in the courts and locking down the country's technology. It's a smart investment on their parts, to download all they can now, so they will have something to enjoy when the music is no longer available.
And hey, even aside from the evil **AA hoards taking over society, there is the fact that a given torrent only lasts so long on suprnova. Its what, just a few days? And then the torrent is gone, and you can only hope somebody re-seeds that good item you may have missed. I really hope your 400 Gb friend has the kindness to keep his stash of movies online, re-seeding torrents for people like you and me who threw ours away.
I for one applaud the hoarders, because theirs are the collections we will all have to rely on to populate the next generation of file-sharing services, after the current ones get criminalized and/ or shut down. I would do like them, except that I cannot afford the big servers or fat pipes. Me, I make do with 8Gb cast-off machines, and internet shared with neighbors.
Oh the joy of a McJobs economy!