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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.
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.
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...
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!
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.
"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..."
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.
Exactly right. The Brits save everything. Look at that Stonehenge thing. Thousands of years old, and the bloody Brits still haven't recycled it. The land, at least, could go for a strip mall or some kind of electronics superstore. Don't know what the big rocks would be useful for, but they're clever, in a primitive sort of way; I'm sure that they could think of something.
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?
"Come on Eileen" was an '80s song by Dexy's Midnight Runners you Philistine.
Bad analogies are like waxing a monkey with a rainbow.
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.
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."
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?
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!
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.
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...
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.
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
1000-2000 songs? my powerbook starts to get heavy with just a few hundred tunes on there.
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.
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.