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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, larger capacities will cause people to hold on to things and not realize they should still back them up.
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'
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.
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..."
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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.
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?
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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?
"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.
"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.
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?
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.
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.
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So they are the "morons" for not wasting irreplaceable time deleting every file the might not use again, regardless of if or not they actually need the space, and despite the low cost of storage.
But you're the "smart" one for wasting time deleting stuff, only to waste more time re-downloading it later when you realise you did need it after all?
Hmm. Not sure if I agree with you there. The only thing I will agree on is that copying something you probably won't use on to CD-R is pointless.
Seeing no real disadvantage to having an overabundance of digital baggage, I find the concept of this article ludicrous.
You're the sort of person I woud make sure to only ever speak to face-to-face.
Bad analogies are like waxing a monkey with a rainbow.
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...
It doesn't take that long.
This is actually pretty important. Imagine your lady friend stops by and you get to talking about that great old movie that she never saw. You couldn't watch it right then if you needed to spend 2 days looking for it and 3 days downloading it. It could mean the difference between happily married and single forever!
It's called random access and is at work everywhere both in technology and otherwise. You don't use a tape drive instead of a hard disk do you?
Nooo. Instead we've got students here with spindles of CD-Rs full up with anime fansubs they are never going to watch again
And then one day you have kids, and by some whim of chance they end up huge anime fans. Who do you turn to for a nice collection of anime videos?
Without collectors like him where would mere mortals like us download this stuff from? You said you could *gasp* download a movie again. Who do you think shares it, the MPAA? I bet it's some college kid with a terabyte movie collection.
My point, don't knock people like this just because they don't fit in your world view.
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...
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
They have the choice: spend time deleting unneeded files, or spend time AND money buying more storage space. Also they're students, so for them time isn't equivalent to money. Don't give me that BS about time being irreplaceable, if it was, theywouldn't be watching so many movies. So... instead of using a little bit of resources to recycle their storage space, these people use extra resources to acquire more and more data that is marginally useful.
"Moron"... can you see now who's the moron who's making a foll of themself by trying to call others names?
Not represented as sheet music!
Of course, classical music would weight more then, say, acoustic folk...
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.