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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.
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!
"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..."
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.
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.
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...