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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?"
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.
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...
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
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!
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.
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?
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 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
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.
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.
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.
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!