Say what? Nokia pretty much owns the european mobile market for one simple reason: they've spent the last 5 years making some of the best mobile phones on the market. They were doing pretty well until they released the 3110, 5110 and 6110 - after that, they just took over.
Their biggest selling points: ease of use and battery life. You might not remember what mobile phones were like before the Navi-Key. Most phones had one button to connect, another to disconnect, a menu button, a help button, etc. Nokia took that and broke it down to 4 buttons total. With that and their large screens, interchangable logos, etc. they took the market over. Even tough their lead isn't what it used to be, I have many friend who won't buy any other model. Nokia still has 35%+ of a very, very fractured international market.
Hell, that's why salespeople who sell non-Nokia phones get bonuses in may stores.
Actually even talking isn't (initially) that important. Women can talk endlessly about themselves and their friends, so all you have to do is to keep listening and ask something trivial once in a while to show that you're paying attention.
I use PopFile as well and am equally satisfied. I make sure to reclassify all false negatives and positivies. Accuracy is at 97.65%, I've gotten 2,802 spams for 5,432 mails I've gotten since I installed it.
When me and my friend had a site featured on Yahoo, USA Today, NYT, etc. the spam just went THROUGH THE ROOF. But, thanks to PopFile I didn't have to see any of it.
(the currency I'm working in is the Polish Zloty, 3.8zl = $1 - seeing as how I live in Poland)
It's pretty simple:
My current work machine is a dual athlon XP 1800. The MB cost mi 600 (asus 266fsb), the processors about 250 each, 512mb of RAM (I know, I know, I need another 512) about 370. The rest of the stuff I had: graphics card (Radeon 9000 Pro - 350), the case (100 + new power supply 300), 80GB HDD (350).
All in all, it cost me about 2500, of which I had to actually pony up 1500.
I go to the Apple Store in Poland and I see that the cheapest G5 costs... 10,500. Depending on how you count it that's 4-7x more expensive. Upgrading each piece of legal software (Illustrator, Photoshop, Flash) will push me up to almost 15,000.
Kontour - looks to be the best, most professional but... it was hard to get any specifics. All I could find were 'will be out soon' pages - probably due to all the name changes.
Sketch - Doesn't support TTF, poor text support in general, no boolean operations
Sodipodi - boolean? font support?
ploticus - plots data... great, if I did pie charts/graphs more than 2-3 times a year
figurine - no boolean operations, stopped looking after I couldn't find that one
(before anyone gets on me about needing boolean support, it's probably the function i've been using most in illustrator over the past week or two, other then the pen tool itself)
---
Let me say this as clearly as I can: All the packages I named - the Adobe collection (Illustrator, Photoshop), the Macromedia collection (Fireworks, Freehand), the Corel collection (Photo Paint, Draw), Paint Shop Pro, Painter - these are all professional software packages. They all offer tight control over kerning, spacing, MM font transformation, boolean transformations on shapes, masking, layers, compound paths, etc. This is all top shelf software, most professionals stick to one or two collections. (I use Adobe and Macromedia, Corel gives me the creeps)
Does *nix have a lot of non-top-shelf packages? Sure. So does Windows (Neopaint, Art Gen, Pixia, etc) Do they matter to me? Not really. As far as I can tell the GIMP is as good as it gets and that just isn't good enough. Yet.
On the other hand, there's still a bunch of applications I use at work that don't have anything close to an open source/*nix equivalent: Macromedia Flash, Director and Dreamweaver; Quark Xpress; Adobe InDesign, Pagemaker, Streamline and LiveMotion.
Switching over requires me to switch all my plugins too. While many middle-of-the-road Photoshop users scoff at plugins, I use them quite a bit (though you'd be hard pressed to notice) and for After Effects users it's all about plugins. I even remember a company featured on Adobe.com saying: we don't actually use the basic functions of AE that much, but it's plugins are second to none.
Sure, it's getting better, especially for 3D artists. Still, a lot of the graphic design done with computers isn't 3D, it's plain old 2D. It's posters, flyers, books, magazines, annual reports. It's logos, stickers and wedding invitations. It's rasterizing, trapping, getting proofs ready. The largest role played by *nix in this area is as a server enviroment, and until someone starts making applications (wether it be the OS community, an upstart or one of the giants [Corel, Macromedia, Adobe]) that's the only roll it'll play.
[...] the developers need to start writing the real-world applications people need to run a business...engineering, art and design tools, that kind of stuff...They're all trying to build servers that already exist and do a whole bunch of stuff that's already out there...I think there's a lot of room to not just create an alternative to Microsoft but really take the next step and do something new.
This is the argument I always get into when my friends ask me why I don't use Linux or BSD or whatever. There is not enough non-server software out there. GIMP is pretty much the only raster graphics package out there, Win32 has Photoshop, Paint Shop Pro, Corel Photo Paint, Fireworks, Painter, etc. I can chose between Illustrator, Freehand and Corel Draw for vector graphics. Combustion, Avid, Premiere, After Effects, etc. It's all good and fine that I can write a letter, do my taxes and the like on a *nix machine, but I need to actually work now and then and the applications *still* aren't there.
Canon's 50mm f/1.8 is such an incredible lens for the money ($70) - for a lot of photographers it is their basic lens. Actually, most amature photographers would do really well to use a 35 or 50mm lens for a year and actually learn composition, learn how to move around to take a photo. Plus, the low f-stop is a real boon to all the f/3.5-5.6 users - you can finaly take clear, tight pictures without direct sunlight/studio lights.
Anyway, if someone really wants to get into SLRs I'd recommend the 50mm with a used EOS 630, which will run you something like $270 (new lens, used body) Or if you want to go digital, you can get a D30 or D60 on ebay for $800-900. A lot of people overinvest in equipment they don't need. Learn to use what you have, then expand your toolkit instead of the other way arround.
'Socialism' - GNU, Linux, FreeBSD, Dragon CPU, Socialism could actually be a Good Thing.
Hahaha... christ, this is such a troll that I can feel the hook biting at my lip. You want want a fair comparison?
Capitalism: Enron, Microsoft, SCO, **AA
Socialism: Gulag, Concentration Camps (then and now), etc
Don't so fast to dismiss capitalism, it's not a perfect system, but it beats socialism by a head. Why? Socialism goes against human nature and evolution. It supports the weakest while hurting the strongest, it assumes what everyone wants to work the same by giving them the same rewards.
The problem with capitalism isn't when it's capitalism, it's when it starts to resemble socialism. Enron happened because people lied, cheated and had their asses covered by friends in government. The **AAs function so well because they pass anticompetition laws through the house.
Microsoft functions well because it makes (and has made) a decent product. This'll probably get me modded down to the basement, but it's the truth. Why was Windows 95 so successful? It had no real competition, now it has competition and it's getting better and better.
Linux isn't about socialism, it's capitalism in it's finest form. It's people doing what they consider best for them to get ahead. For a lot of companies it's about lowering costs, for most of the home grown developers it's about working with others to advance their skills, get themselves a better tool and get bragging rights. What's socialist about that?
I can't belive that GIMP doesn't have a polygonal selection tool. Saying that, I've been working in Photoshop 3 => 7 over the last... 5 or 6 years. It is the best raster graphics package on the market.
As far as filters go... Everyone here's shouting 'profesionals don't use filters!', which is total BS. Unsharp mask, sharpen, gaussian blur, add noise, pixelize, all of these are filters that are used everyday by myself and the people I work with. Sure, we don't use just the filter, save and off we go, but it's just another tool, like smudge, dodge, burn or whatever.
Anyway, as much as I like Photoshop - and I work in it 6-12 hours a day, 5-6 days a week, it's still pretty weak in a lot of areas. There's *loads* to do as far layer management, symbols, etc. It's still too much of a tool, too little of a system.
I run... a number of non-commercial, totally free hobby sites, most of them pretty high quality. One of our sites is an online gallery, where users can submit themed photos. Anyway, we launched it a couple of months ago, the reply wasn't too hot... until we got linked on k10k, then as Yahoo's site of the day. Then USA Today, BBC2 Radio and I ended up getting interviewed for a quote in the NY Times. We got shut down (for a bit) after generating 87gb of traffic in 2 weeks.
The other sites we have generate maybe 1/5th of that, and there's a bunch of them. Each one of them fills a certain niche, some are pretty low traffic personal sites, some are genere specific info sites, some are targeted to the public at large (like the site I mentioned in the first paragraph). Each of them has a place on the web and each of them may be as important to someone as any other.
In Poland, a million users hang off a single server
The server mentioned is run by tlen.pl, Poland's fastest growing communicator. Tlen has taken a big chunk out of both gadu-gadu and icq, both with notoriously poorly written clients and technical problems on the server-side. Tlen's approach has been similar to MSN's - along with a IM account you automatically get an email acct, which you can check in the communicator itself. It's actually a pretty nice package, if you can ignore the banner ads and the fact that they're up to version 4 and *you still can't search the archive*.
...can have one. I was just looking through my supplier's price list yesterday, looking to set up a low-speed computer, to server as a mail server/movie player/router. A 1.1ghz duron/256mb/20GB costs a touch over $130, and that's here in Poland, where the prices are much higher than in the USA. This is for brand new equpiment, you could probably pick up something used for a bit less. Sure, there will always be families and individuals who have a hard time saving up $130, but for 99% of us it's just a matter of cutting our vices and putting away a bit each week.
People who don't have computers are people who don't want or need them, that's why growth is down . Manufacturers need to expand to other markets, that's the only place they have left to go.
I've been working on a project with the 3650 over the past 2 1/2 months and, what can I say, it's a piece of shit. If other Nokias are going to be like this, then they will fall off their pedestal - Nokia is popular as hell, but they're not a monopoly. Their total disregard for quality has pushed a lot of users, including me, to Motorola, Samsung, SonyEricsson and Siemens. The 6210 was a fiasco, bluetooth in the 6310 was buggy as hell (fixed a bit into the 6310i).
Anyway, what sucks in the 3650?
* The keypad. This is definately the *worst* element, it flies in the face of convention and not in a cool and edgy way. I've been using this phone non-stop for the last 11 weeks and I haven't gotten used to it.
* Usability. Nokia took over by offering good usability. Phones used to have a different button for everything, Nokia took that, stripped it down (in the 3110, 51x0, etc) to a single nav key. It's been worse lately - the 6310 has like 13 or 14 main menu options so you can't even use shortcuts (like menu, 2, 2, 1 to write an SMS) to control all the functions.
While it's been slowly getting worse, the 3650 is just a leap ahead. The menus are organized so poorly that it took me 10 minutes to find the clock, took me a cab ride home (25km) to figure out how to turn the keypad tones off. It's just... complicated. Plus, the software is inconsistent - you can link some elements, you can't link others - even tough they seem identical to you.
Anyway, the phone is a total pain in the ass, I hope we start doing something for a newer model but - knowing my luck - it'll be this model all the way until autumn.
The fact that the Internet can be used to massively violate intellectual property rights doesn't make it moral to do so.
I'm sure Paul doesn't remember me, but I remember Paul. When I was all of 13 (this was arround '90) Paul Kotcher and I both lived in Corvallis, OR. IO didn't know Paul, met him only once (knew his brother Scott a bit better though) but he was the geek star of Corvallis, the only teenager we even knew about who could program assembler and crack copy protection. I remember playing a 'warezed' (didn't have that word back then) version of Test Drive cracked by Paul.
Anyway, each time I see Paul's name come up in the news, it reminds me of those days and it brings a smile to my face.
Yeah... right. While files are growing, disk drive space is growing much faster. Even your example - 2-5k/document growing to a 50-100k document (show me the mythical 1 page.doc file), that's still only a 20-25 fold increase, while hard drives have grown much more than that, 100-500 fold. We got a brand new computer in '92 and it's had a huge, 200mb HDD. I was a semi-active pirate back in those days and I installed all the games I played on there and they took up... 86mb. A 24bit 300dpi B2 poster still takes up the same ammount of space.
Actually, now that I think about it, outside of your aforementioned Office documents, not much has bloated. In fact, most data formats are more and more compressed, sizes are going down. Image sizes are going down (relatively) thanks to more and more advanced algorithms. Music takes only 10-15k/s instead of 100k/s. Even DV is more efficient than MJPEG, not to mention MPEG-4, Sorensson, etc. Most of this you can attribute to the internet and it's limited bandwidth. If most of our document exchanges were still physical, I think bloat would be a smaller worry - it takes about as much time to burn a CD as to copy two 3.5" floppies.
Anyway, let's do what the big boys do and use the basket model to check our file inflation. Compare this: what kind of HDD can you get for $400 now and in 1993. How many pages of documents (Word perfect 5.1 vs Word 2000) can you keep on it? How many database records (Paradox vs Access)? How many pages laid out in a popular DTP package (Pagemaker 4.0 vs Quark Express)? How many images? How many hours of music (raw vs MP3)? How many minutes of video (MPEG-1 vs MPEG-4)? How many games?
Yes, Office is huge and it's growing faster than Ophra. But it's not most software, it's not even 'most software formats'. Disks are much larger and they hold a lot more of our data. I stuck a 20GB HDD into my mom's computer a couple of months ago and last I looked she was using less than 3GB, and 90% of that was MP3s she downloaded off of Kazaa.
EVERY SINGLE TIME I see THG on/. I think of the The Humble Guys. I stop, remind myself what I'm looking at and translate it to Tom's Whatever Somthing.
Slashdot Mirror
Say what? Nokia pretty much owns the european mobile market for one simple reason: they've spent the last 5 years making some of the best mobile phones on the market. They were doing pretty well until they released the 3110, 5110 and 6110 - after that, they just took over.
Their biggest selling points: ease of use and battery life. You might not remember what mobile phones were like before the Navi-Key. Most phones had one button to connect, another to disconnect, a menu button, a help button, etc. Nokia took that and broke it down to 4 buttons total. With that and their large screens, interchangable logos, etc. they took the market over. Even tough their lead isn't what it used to be, I have many friend who won't buy any other model. Nokia still has 35%+ of a very, very fractured international market.
Hell, that's why salespeople who sell non-Nokia phones get bonuses in may stores.
And she has the resources to hire someone to look through all of that? Amazing...
No, it's not. (link to own post from previous discussion)
Hell, I can put together a brand new dual athlon system for like $700-800, used for like $500. I'm supposed to spend $3000 on a Mac? Yeah, right.
Actually even talking isn't (initially) that important. Women can talk endlessly about themselves and their friends, so all you have to do is to keep listening and ask something trivial once in a while to show that you're paying attention.
I take it your wife doesn't read Slashdot?
I use PopFile as well and am equally satisfied. I make sure to reclassify all false negatives and positivies. Accuracy is at 97.65%, I've gotten 2,802 spams for 5,432 mails I've gotten since I installed it.
When me and my friend had a site featured on Yahoo, USA Today, NYT, etc. the spam just went THROUGH THE ROOF. But, thanks to PopFile I didn't have to see any of it.
(the currency I'm working in is the Polish Zloty, 3.8zl = $1 - seeing as how I live in Poland)
It's pretty simple:
My current work machine is a dual athlon XP 1800. The MB cost mi 600 (asus 266fsb), the processors about 250 each, 512mb of RAM (I know, I know, I need another 512) about 370. The rest of the stuff I had: graphics card (Radeon 9000 Pro - 350), the case (100 + new power supply 300), 80GB HDD (350).
All in all, it cost me about 2500, of which I had to actually pony up 1500.
I go to the Apple Store in Poland and I see that the cheapest G5 costs... 10,500. Depending on how you count it that's 4-7x more expensive. Upgrading each piece of legal software (Illustrator, Photoshop, Flash) will push me up to almost 15,000.
What exactly do I need a *nix for again?
I looked over your list:
Kontour - looks to be the best, most professional but... it was hard to get any specifics. All I could find were 'will be out soon' pages - probably due to all the name changes.
Sketch - Doesn't support TTF, poor text support in general, no boolean operations
Sodipodi - boolean? font support?
ploticus - plots data... great, if I did pie charts/graphs more than 2-3 times a year
figurine - no boolean operations, stopped looking after I couldn't find that one
(before anyone gets on me about needing boolean support, it's probably the function i've been using most in illustrator over the past week or two, other then the pen tool itself)
---
Let me say this as clearly as I can: All the packages I named - the Adobe collection (Illustrator, Photoshop), the Macromedia collection (Fireworks, Freehand), the Corel collection (Photo Paint, Draw), Paint Shop Pro, Painter - these are all professional software packages. They all offer tight control over kerning, spacing, MM font transformation, boolean transformations on shapes, masking, layers, compound paths, etc. This is all top shelf software, most professionals stick to one or two collections. (I use Adobe and Macromedia, Corel gives me the creeps)
Does *nix have a lot of non-top-shelf packages? Sure. So does Windows (Neopaint, Art Gen, Pixia, etc) Do they matter to me? Not really. As far as I can tell the GIMP is as good as it gets and that just isn't good enough. Yet.
On the other hand, there's still a bunch of applications I use at work that don't have anything close to an open source/*nix equivalent: Macromedia Flash, Director and Dreamweaver; Quark Xpress; Adobe InDesign, Pagemaker, Streamline and LiveMotion.
Switching over requires me to switch all my plugins too. While many middle-of-the-road Photoshop users scoff at plugins, I use them quite a bit (though you'd be hard pressed to notice) and for After Effects users it's all about plugins. I even remember a company featured on Adobe.com saying: we don't actually use the basic functions of AE that much, but it's plugins are second to none.
Sure, it's getting better, especially for 3D artists. Still, a lot of the graphic design done with computers isn't 3D, it's plain old 2D. It's posters, flyers, books, magazines, annual reports. It's logos, stickers and wedding invitations. It's rasterizing, trapping, getting proofs ready. The largest role played by *nix in this area is as a server enviroment, and until someone starts making applications (wether it be the OS community, an upstart or one of the giants [Corel, Macromedia, Adobe]) that's the only roll it'll play.
[...] the developers need to start writing the real-world applications people need to run a business...engineering, art and design tools, that kind of stuff...They're all trying to build servers that already exist and do a whole bunch of stuff that's already out there...I think there's a lot of room to not just create an alternative to Microsoft but really take the next step and do something new.
This is the argument I always get into when my friends ask me why I don't use Linux or BSD or whatever. There is not enough non-server software out there. GIMP is pretty much the only raster graphics package out there, Win32 has Photoshop, Paint Shop Pro, Corel Photo Paint, Fireworks, Painter, etc. I can chose between Illustrator, Freehand and Corel Draw for vector graphics. Combustion, Avid, Premiere, After Effects, etc. It's all good and fine that I can write a letter, do my taxes and the like on a *nix machine, but I need to actually work now and then and the applications *still* aren't there.
Canon's 50mm f/1.8 is such an incredible lens for the money ($70) - for a lot of photographers it is their basic lens. Actually, most amature photographers would do really well to use a 35 or 50mm lens for a year and actually learn composition, learn how to move around to take a photo. Plus, the low f-stop is a real boon to all the f/3.5-5.6 users - you can finaly take clear, tight pictures without direct sunlight/studio lights.
Anyway, if someone really wants to get into SLRs I'd recommend the 50mm with a used EOS 630, which will run you something like $270 (new lens, used body) Or if you want to go digital, you can get a D30 or D60 on ebay for $800-900. A lot of people overinvest in equipment they don't need. Learn to use what you have, then expand your toolkit instead of the other way arround.
'Socialism' - GNU, Linux, FreeBSD, Dragon CPU, Socialism could actually be a Good Thing.
Hahaha... christ, this is such a troll that I can feel the hook biting at my lip. You want want a fair comparison?
Capitalism:
Enron, Microsoft, SCO, **AA
Socialism:
Gulag, Concentration Camps (then and now), etc
Don't so fast to dismiss capitalism, it's not a perfect system, but it beats socialism by a head. Why? Socialism goes against human nature and evolution. It supports the weakest while hurting the strongest, it assumes what everyone wants to work the same by giving them the same rewards.
The problem with capitalism isn't when it's capitalism, it's when it starts to resemble socialism. Enron happened because people lied, cheated and had their asses covered by friends in government. The **AAs function so well because they pass anticompetition laws through the house.
Microsoft functions well because it makes (and has made) a decent product. This'll probably get me modded down to the basement, but it's the truth. Why was Windows 95 so successful? It had no real competition, now it has competition and it's getting better and better.
Linux isn't about socialism, it's capitalism in it's finest form. It's people doing what they consider best for them to get ahead. For a lot of companies it's about lowering costs, for most of the home grown developers it's about working with others to advance their skills, get themselves a better tool and get bragging rights. What's socialist about that?
I can't belive that GIMP doesn't have a polygonal selection tool. Saying that, I've been working in Photoshop 3 => 7 over the last... 5 or 6 years. It is the best raster graphics package on the market.
As far as filters go... Everyone here's shouting 'profesionals don't use filters!', which is total BS. Unsharp mask, sharpen, gaussian blur, add noise, pixelize, all of these are filters that are used everyday by myself and the people I work with. Sure, we don't use just the filter, save and off we go, but it's just another tool, like smudge, dodge, burn or whatever.
Anyway, as much as I like Photoshop - and I work in it 6-12 hours a day, 5-6 days a week, it's still pretty weak in a lot of areas. There's *loads* to do as far layer management, symbols, etc. It's still too much of a tool, too little of a system.
Most even have currencies that are available in "useless" denominations, such as the penny, the pence, the cent (EU), and 1 Yen.
Useless? The cost of using a public restroom in Paris, when I visited this summer, was 41 cents.
Uh... why do you need this when you have bookmark shortcuts/keywords?
Exactly.
I run... a number of non-commercial, totally free hobby sites, most of them pretty high quality. One of our sites is an online gallery, where users can submit themed photos. Anyway, we launched it a couple of months ago, the reply wasn't too hot... until we got linked on k10k, then as Yahoo's site of the day. Then USA Today, BBC2 Radio and I ended up getting interviewed for a quote in the NY Times. We got shut down (for a bit) after generating 87gb of traffic in 2 weeks.
The other sites we have generate maybe 1/5th of that, and there's a bunch of them. Each one of them fills a certain niche, some are pretty low traffic personal sites, some are genere specific info sites, some are targeted to the public at large (like the site I mentioned in the first paragraph). Each of them has a place on the web and each of them may be as important to someone as any other.
In Poland, a million users hang off a single server
The server mentioned is run by tlen.pl, Poland's fastest growing communicator. Tlen has taken a big chunk out of both gadu-gadu and icq, both with notoriously poorly written clients and technical problems on the server-side. Tlen's approach has been similar to MSN's - along with a IM account you automatically get an email acct, which you can check in the communicator itself. It's actually a pretty nice package, if you can ignore the banner ads and the fact that they're up to version 4 and *you still can't search the archive*.
...can have one. I was just looking through my supplier's price list yesterday, looking to set up a low-speed computer, to server as a mail server/movie player/router. A 1.1ghz duron/256mb/20GB costs a touch over $130, and that's here in Poland, where the prices are much higher than in the USA. This is for brand new equpiment, you could probably pick up something used for a bit less. Sure, there will always be families and individuals who have a hard time saving up $130, but for 99% of us it's just a matter of cutting our vices and putting away a bit each week.
People who don't have computers are people who don't want or need them, that's why growth is down . Manufacturers need to expand to other markets, that's the only place they have left to go.
I've been working on a project with the 3650 over the past 2 1/2 months and, what can I say, it's a piece of shit. If other Nokias are going to be like this, then they will fall off their pedestal - Nokia is popular as hell, but they're not a monopoly. Their total disregard for quality has pushed a lot of users, including me, to Motorola, Samsung, SonyEricsson and Siemens. The 6210 was a fiasco, bluetooth in the 6310 was buggy as hell (fixed a bit into the 6310i).
Anyway, what sucks in the 3650?
* The keypad. This is definately the *worst* element, it flies in the face of convention and not in a cool and edgy way. I've been using this phone non-stop for the last 11 weeks and I haven't gotten used to it.
* Usability. Nokia took over by offering good usability. Phones used to have a different button for everything, Nokia took that, stripped it down (in the 3110, 51x0, etc) to a single nav key. It's been worse lately - the 6310 has like 13 or 14 main menu options so you can't even use shortcuts (like menu, 2, 2, 1 to write an SMS) to control all the functions.
While it's been slowly getting worse, the 3650 is just a leap ahead. The menus are organized so poorly that it took me 10 minutes to find the clock, took me a cab ride home (25km) to figure out how to turn the keypad tones off. It's just... complicated. Plus, the software is inconsistent - you can link some elements, you can't link others - even tough they seem identical to you.
Anyway, the phone is a total pain in the ass, I hope we start doing something for a newer model but - knowing my luck - it'll be this model all the way until autumn.
Ugh.
I get messages to register, I ignore them.
See... IT'S A GAME.
If I wanted simulations I'd play AA, but since this is just a game, I want to be able to bunny hop. I want to be able run and shoot. IT'S FUN!
The fact that the Internet can be used to massively violate intellectual property rights doesn't make it moral to do so.
I'm sure Paul doesn't remember me, but I remember Paul. When I was all of 13 (this was arround '90) Paul Kotcher and I both lived in Corvallis, OR. IO didn't know Paul, met him only once (knew his brother Scott a bit better though) but he was the geek star of Corvallis, the only teenager we even knew about who could program assembler and crack copy protection. I remember playing a 'warezed' (didn't have that word back then) version of Test Drive cracked by Paul.
Anyway, each time I see Paul's name come up in the news, it reminds me of those days and it brings a smile to my face.
AIM copied ICQ, which was the first 'real' and popular IM.
Yeah... right. While files are growing, disk drive space is growing much faster. Even your example - 2-5k/document growing to a 50-100k document (show me the mythical 1 page .doc file), that's still only a 20-25 fold increase, while hard drives have grown much more than that, 100-500 fold. We got a brand new computer in '92 and it's had a huge, 200mb HDD. I was a semi-active pirate back in those days and I installed all the games I played on there and they took up... 86mb. A 24bit 300dpi B2 poster still takes up the same ammount of space.
Actually, now that I think about it, outside of your aforementioned Office documents, not much has bloated. In fact, most data formats are more and more compressed, sizes are going down. Image sizes are going down (relatively) thanks to more and more advanced algorithms. Music takes only 10-15k/s instead of 100k/s. Even DV is more efficient than MJPEG, not to mention MPEG-4, Sorensson, etc. Most of this you can attribute to the internet and it's limited bandwidth. If most of our document exchanges were still physical, I think bloat would be a smaller worry - it takes about as much time to burn a CD as to copy two 3.5" floppies.
Anyway, let's do what the big boys do and use the basket model to check our file inflation. Compare this: what kind of HDD can you get for $400 now and in 1993. How many pages of documents (Word perfect 5.1 vs Word 2000) can you keep on it? How many database records (Paradox vs Access)? How many pages laid out in a popular DTP package (Pagemaker 4.0 vs Quark Express)? How many images? How many hours of music (raw vs MP3)? How many minutes of video (MPEG-1 vs MPEG-4)? How many games?
Yes, Office is huge and it's growing faster than Ophra. But it's not most software, it's not even 'most software formats'. Disks are much larger and they hold a lot more of our data. I stuck a 20GB HDD into my mom's computer a couple of months ago and last I looked she was using less than 3GB, and 90% of that was MP3s she downloaded off of Kazaa.
The Humble Guys, THuG if you're nasty.
/. I think of the The Humble Guys. I stop, remind myself what I'm looking at and translate it to Tom's Whatever Somthing.
EVERY SINGLE TIME I see THG on
4800 baud? Damn, life in the fast lane.
I remember 300.