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Data Storage Handhelds Hardware

Digital Packrats 385

Posted by michael from the delete-nothing dept.
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?"
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Digital Packrats More

Digital Packrats

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  • Yes. Particularly jpgs...

  • Yes (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 10, 2004 @09:42AM (#11051049)
    Yes, larger capacities will cause people to hold on to things and not realize they should still back them up.

  • What an obscure unit... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Lord_Slepnir ( 585350 ) on Friday December 10, 2004 @09:43AM (#11051063) Journal
    10 trucks of paper "weight"

    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!


    • 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!

      Ha, in my day we stored data in a shoebox full of 90 column UNIVAC cards, and God help the person who folded one or put a hole in the wrong place.

    • Bogus Units (Score:4, Insightful)

      by kzinti ( 9651 ) on Friday December 10, 2004 @10:47AM (#11051697) Homepage Journal
      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...

  • As long as you have the space (Score:5, Insightful)

    by antifoidulus ( 807088 ) on Friday December 10, 2004 @09:44AM (#11051066) Homepage Journal
    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...
    • Precisely. As long as there's some rhyme or reason to the storage, if there isn't a need to clear up space then why bother? The biggest clutter to disks seems to be long media files anyway. Without such I'm generally hard pressed to approach the limits of my disk space. Manage those well, typically burning the files to DVD, and there's no way I can run out of room for cluttered old files.

      What's the chances you'll need that old college paper about some random societal issue of the time? Not very likely, but

    • iTunes was my savior there

      What kind of miserable filesystem do you have?

  • Well, DUH... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by mark-t ( 151149 ) <markt AT nerdflat DOT com> on Friday December 10, 2004 @09:44AM (#11051068) Journal
    Of course it does!

    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?

    • 640K should be more than enough for anybody, dammit. Why, back in my day...
    • We are certainly the first species to be able to carry more information on our persons than is stored in our DNA. Indeed a list of your DNA will fit on a CD--you could put it on your ipod or even a creditcard flash memory.

      Perhaps even more interesting is that at some point we may be able to store on our persons more information that accessible capacity of our brains.

      At some point in the long future, mory cpapcities will exceed the number of cells in your brain. At this point it may become more relevant t

  • I'm a digital packrat (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Fig, formerly A.C. ( 543042 ) on Friday December 10, 2004 @09:44AM (#11051069)
    I save old downloads, images, all kinds of crap on my server. I even have DX5 updates from when I first installed them. Right now its around 250GB of crap.

    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.

    • Right now its around 250GB of crap.

      Same here except it's 240GB of duplicates of the 60 or so Gigabytes of crap on my powerbook. I don't collect crap so much because I am a packrat. I make sequential backups of my crap to pacify my sense of paranoia, I suppose I have seen to many harddisk crashes.
      • I throw stuff on the server becuase it is secure that way. RH9, Samba, 3Ware Escalade card in mirrored mode... All hooked to a P233 with 128MB of SIMM RAM.

        I don't keep anything of importance on single disk machines, it all gets backed up. I'm sure that just adds to my crap total, but at least I'm not doing sequential backups. That's bad! ;-)

  • Obviously (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 10, 2004 @09:44AM (#11051070)
    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.
    • Why do people bother going to the trouble of throwing things away when they have plenty of extra space?

      With things like closets and yards people don't even have to be organized. They can keep everything they want and find it quickly and easily.

      • With things like closets and yards people don't even have to be organized. They can keep everything they want and find it quickly and easily.

        Nowadays, your disk array isn't a closet, or even a yard. it's a fucking warehouse. Even if i never threw anything away, i'd be hard-pressed to run out of space on my lowly 60G drive. If I ever did, 160G disks are cheap.

    • A well organized file system is worth its weight in gold (probably literally true, if you run a business and the weight is the weight of the platters). Clutter is okay so long as it goes into /home//clutter. Search is not terribly fast compared to typing the command from the command prompt and suffers more from scaling than a tree structure. I'm well organized, and can access my media very quickly (15 seconds start to finish so long as it is on the HDD and not on CDR [CDR access time is about a minute, most

  • Look at data mining and p2p (Score:4, Insightful)

    by ShatteredDream ( 636520 ) on Friday December 10, 2004 @09:46AM (#11051081) Homepage
    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..."
    • I know many people who have 10-25GB of music they have downloaded illegally and don't listen to...

      I am not suprised in the least. Back in the BBS days, i knew people who accumulated just gobs and gobs of copyrighted software. Did they need a DB server, CAD program, etc? No, never used, never installed. Near as i could figure out, beyond an inate need/desire to aggregate and accumulate there were a few main reasons people wanted all that code.
      • One's social status was somewhat based on the volume of s

  • To answer your question... (Score:3, Funny)

    by PTBNL ( 686884 ) on Friday December 10, 2004 @09:46AM (#11051085) Homepage
    ...I have a copy of Come on Eileen on my iPod.

  • Perhaps... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Darren Winsper ( 136155 ) on Friday December 10, 2004 @09:46AM (#11051089)
    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.

  • Packrat mentality (Score:5, Interesting)

    by dmacleod808 ( 729707 ) on Friday December 10, 2004 @09:46AM (#11051092)
    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.

  • keep it under your hat (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Doc Ruby ( 173196 ) on Friday December 10, 2004 @09:47AM (#11051097) Homepage Journal
    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?
    • It's called quota. Some of us are users, and despite being a graduate student in the Computer Science department of a large university, I have only 250MB to work with. Lately I forward everything to gmail, but everything from 2 years ago is gone due to class projects...
      • That's tragic. Disk space has been so cheap, relative to email archive size, for so long (since the 1980s). I've got most of my archive (in .tgz) on CD & DLT, from periodic backups. I've just got to make sure to bounce them to the medium du jour to ensure I can retrieve them later, when they near obsolescence. Bit rot lurks...
      • You're lucky. My school only gives 2MB or 250 files to each student. You can get a little more if you ask, but surely not 250MB.

        For certain projects, I have to be very careful about intermediary files even when there is nothing else on the account.
    • I kept my email from 1989-1995, when I actually enjoyed email, subscribed to email lists such as risks, funky-music, and ran the so-deep house music mailing list. I had all of my (text only) email carefully sorted and organized by careful use of filters. I recently ran across these files (not that big on a megabyte scale, since attachments were rare back then) and read them over. It horrified me almost as much as googling my old usenet posts. The majority of the email that I saved was useless, only a few ar
    • Actually, I've found that "upgrade rot" has helped to control the amount of stuff I have available. I think that somewhere I still have the a couple of ST225s with "essential" stuff from the mid-80s, but usually when I upgrade machines, they come with new drives, and it's not worth the effort to copy everything over to the new drive. I just mount the old drive as a slave. But now that I have a machine with a 4G, a 6G, and two 8G drives, I'm out of power connectors in my box, so when I upgrade again, one

  • 10 trucks of paper weight = bullshit figure (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Nine Tenths of The W ( 829559 ) on Friday December 10, 2004 @09:47AM (#11051101)
    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?

    • Definitely annoying. (Score:3, Insightful)

      by nathan s ( 719490 )
      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.

  • Is it pack-rat nature? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by mopslik ( 688435 ) on Friday December 10, 2004 @09:47AM (#11051102)

    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?

    • Does this even make sense to compare music files to a truck full of paper?

      No, but if you'd kindly convert it to units of LOC, I'd appreciate.

    • 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.

      I have about a gig of MP3's on my office machine, which is a subset of the several gigs I have at home. It represents almost my entire music collection. Nowadays I buy a CD and rip it before I've even played it in most cases.

      If I ever get around to buying na iPod I'm looking forward to

    • Does this even make sense to compare music files to a truck full of paper?

      Not really. However, if you consider that each 4 minute song takes up ~4MB, you can hold about 250 songs per GB. Translated to sheet music, this could be about 4 or 5 pages (or more realistically, 2 pages filled with repeats since modern music is so repetitive, and another page for lyrics), then I'd say those same 250 songs would only take up about 1-1/2 reams of paper, which is hardly anything. The box of copy paper sitting next t
    • Nah, it's just someone trying to make a sensational comparison. If the article said "He worked out that one gigabyte (1,073,741,824 bytes) was the equivalent of slightly less than two CD-Rs" you're likely to be unimpressed. Oh, and I'd like to know how he translated some of the electronic sounds into a paper counterpart ... there are still huge arguements about how sheet music should be updated to account for modern sounds. The gigabyte-paper comparison is worthless, other than to make Joe Sixpack go "oo

  • Quality, convenience and tidiness (Score:5, Informative)

    by gilesjuk ( 604902 ) <giles.jones@nospaM.zen.co.uk> on Friday December 10, 2004 @09:47AM (#11051105)
    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.

  • Don't Understand (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Apreche ( 239272 ) on Friday December 10, 2004 @09:47AM (#11051107) Homepage Journal
    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.

    • Re:Don't Understand (Score:4, Insightful)

      by oexeo ( 816786 ) on Friday December 10, 2004 @10:04AM (#11051277)
      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.

    • Re:Don't Understand (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      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'v
    • I've got every MST3K episode on spindles too. Plus all the commercially released stuff. And I watch it all the time. OK, granted I probably won't watch the first four or five KTMA episodes (that you can get) because, well, they suck, but almost all the rest are really good for watching and great for background noise while working.

      I hope that passes muster with you.

      But when I hear the words "anime" combined with "fansubs", I gotta agree with you. I'm a digital pack rat, but I actually use what I keep a
    • As someone who is definitely one of those people, let me shed some light on your confusion.

      I have more HD storage space and stuff backed up on media than I can count. Easily terabytes of the stuff. You're perfectly right, I'm not going to sift through the huge piles of CD-R's and DVD-R's to find something, if I want to see some old anime episode it is almost always faster to simply download it again.

      However, the dream is that I one day will have all this stuff at my fingertips. My first drive cost a s

  • 60% of ALL people? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by BRSQUIRRL ( 69271 ) on Friday December 10, 2004 @09:47AM (#11051112)
    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.
  • I think the reason, I at least retain so much data is not any kind of a hoarding instinct. What I seem to do is more due to being completely disorganized and lazy.

    So I'm running low on space. I could do one of the following:
    a) Sort through it all and decide what's useless. (This would take forever.)
    b) Add more drive space. Drives are cheap.

  • Backups for big gig drives... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Chordonblue ( 585047 ) on Friday December 10, 2004 @09:49AM (#11051120) Journal
    "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...!

    • And in the world where RAID-1 is cheap thanks to SATA we don't have to worry about bad drives! For the true enthusiast we have RAID-5 and soon RAID-6. You don't even need hardware, we have LVM in the Linux world and dynamic disks under windows. It is so very cheap to keep a kerplunked disk from destroying all our data. But in my case, I'm fubar if one of my drives crashes, for now...
    • I agree. For the first time since hard drives were invented, my father actually purchased an extra USB hard drive to back up data. I was absolutely amazed. Maybe people will realize this, and start buying 2 drives at a time instead of one.
    • Rembember what Linus said: Only wimps use tape backup; real men just upload their important stuff on ftp, and let the rest of the world mirror it. Since most people are filling their 250GB drives with stuff from the massive distributed archive that is the internet, they can just go get it again. Your hard drive is just a local cache for network resources. :)

  • No cost (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Have Blue ( 616 ) on Friday December 10, 2004 @09:49AM (#11051124) Homepage
    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.
  • Brits are all pack rats. Jeez, carrying around a truckload of paper? I have forty gigs of capacity, but I detest carrying around the equivalent of more than about a clipboard's worth of virtual paper. So I only use a small fraction of the available space. Anyway, I hate spending a lot of time choosing which music I'm going to play. Much better to limit my options and just play the same songs over and over again.
    • +1, relatively subtle sarcasm.

    • Re:Only in Brits. (Score:4, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 10, 2004 @09:56AM (#11051195)
      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.
  • I doubt my parents even know what a "portable electronic device" is. I don't know anyone in my family that would have 1000 electronic tunes on a "portable device" despite the fact that half of them are music teachers or musicians... nor do I have any friends who have such a lot of music on a portable device (i.e. not their desktop).
  • I have seven years worth of email saved and stored on varying media. Zip disks, Jaz disks, cd's, dvds. Varying formats too (PST, mbox, eudora)

    I never clean out my downloads folder until it reaches 4gb in size, then I just burn it to a dvd-r and label it with the date and stick it in the folder, deleting everything from the hard drive. My My Documents folder is huge in size, almost 2gb at last count (this has also been backed up several times)

    I have cd-r's full of warez dating back to 1994. I have the
  • ...for an iPod with capacity sufficient to hold all my (100% legally obtained, bought-and-paid-for, thanks for asking) music. At 128k MP3 format, the collection weighs in at just under 80 gig.

    Please, Mr. Jobs, don't make me have to choose between my Techno-Industrial-Gothic and my Tibetan Singing Bowls again this week... please!!
  • I never delete an mp3, save when replacing it with an otherwise identical mp3 of higher quality. I never delete a movie. Gaim logs every conversation I have, and before that ICQ did the same. I have every essay, paper, poem, or song I've written since my introduction to computers. I archive my email.

    I used to delete games back in the DOS days, but that was only in order to install new games, and I still kept the originals.

    Storage space gets cheaper and more reliable with every passing day, and the mar
  • an MP3 player that can transfer files in a face to face meeting...

    imagine if Ipods and others were interconnectible, and transmitted their songs at school or on the bus, or at work, you hook them together and hit 'transmit' the **AA's will have to start putting schills in the field to find you.. and you could still claim (us based) fair use...

    PSSST, HEY BUDDDY, WANT THE NEW BRITTNEY ALBULM?

    I know there are usb keys that will transmit to other keys on demand... they have both female and male sock

  • my dad has some serious obsessive compulsive tendencies and is a horrible pack-rat. we've got stacks and stacks of newspapers, bills, junk mail, tons of software boxes going back to the 80's, records, cd's, videos, boatloads of NASCAR and other auto racing memorabilia (his thing, definitely not mine), etc, etc. it's all over the house, making some rooms unusable

    since i was a kid, i have been greatly bothered by this, especially seeing how much it distressed my mom. as a result, i have been very conscious o
  • Storage is very very cheap now. There's no reason to not have, say, Jimmy Buffet's complete discography (even if you hate him). An acquaintance of mine has maxed out his download since 1998. He basically downloads stuff 24/7, all the time, as much as he can. He has a Chinese version of Windows 3.1. And he archives it! I ask him "Why?" and he says, "Because I can." This is someone who before DVD burners already had 1000 CDs of junk.

    Myself, I archived and kept a lot of stuff back in college. Now I don't have

  • Why is it such an issue? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by grundie ( 220908 ) on Friday December 10, 2004 @09:57AM (#11051212)
    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?
  • You ain't seen hording packets till you see the boxes I have stashed full of 5 1/4" floppies. When the drought comes, I'll corner the market on antique storage media!

  • The Fundamental Rule of Everything (Score:3, Insightful)

    by natoochtoniket ( 763630 ) on Friday December 10, 2004 @09:59AM (#11051234)
    The Fundamental Rule of Everything:

    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.

  • I think one reason people tend to pack-rat their media so much is that it isn't generally cheap, and it's not "real". The idea that your music isn't really a physical object, and your entire library could be instantly destroyed at the whim of fate is an incentive for people to have a full copy of their audio.

    The other aspect is availability... Since it's not like each additional song on your player makes it weigh more (unlike their paper comparison), why not? Having your whole music collection on there
  • 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."

  • Same stuff, different box (Score:3, Interesting)

    by dazedNconfuzed ( 154242 ) on Friday December 10, 2004 @10:01AM (#11051249)
    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".

  • Do increases in storage capacity appeal to some basic pack-rat nature?

    No, but it takes time to go through files to see what you want to delete. So extra disk space saves me time, which is much more valuable.

  • This is some honey-trap for the RIAA, right?

  • Ipod = 230 GB a kilogram? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by peter303 ( 12292 ) on Friday December 10, 2004 @10:05AM (#11051282)
    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.
  • The article seems to suggest that digital obesity is a bad thing in the same way that being physically fat is unhealthy or being a packrat is being unnaturally compulsive. I disagree with this assertion; unlike physical portliness, digital gluttony is not damaging to the body, and unlike being a packrat, your computerized archive can be grepped or otherwise searched for important data, therefore implying that it has some structure, as opposed to the contents of most people's attics/basements/living roo
  • I checked the other day - in all my storage, I have about 2 gigs of space left (bigger than my second hard drive) - the rest of my 120 gigs of assorted space is taken up with anime I'll probably never watch again and haven't gotten around to burning off (in addition to the 40 gigs I have burned off), game ISOs I ripped to save having to look for the discs (in addition to the DVD with KOTOR and Jedi Academy images I made for ease of storage, and the one with Simcity 4 and The Sims 2).

    I have 10 gigs of music
  • to hoard things. "pack rat" after all is a name derived from a purely instinctive behaviour of a rodent. The only good that might come of all these mountains of moldy information will be the benefit to those who have invested in companies selling hard drives and flash memories.
  • 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...

  • When is it too much? (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Himring ( 646324 )
    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
  • One might construct a simple mathematical model for human behavior with regard to data storage.

    It would involve a constant for the amount of time and effort it takes to delete stuff (the same whether you have a terabyte-class iPod or a 2 Gb hard drive), and a factor for the percent of free space you have on the storage device.

    When you have 99 percent free space, you're much less likely to think, "Do I really need this?" than you might if you had ten percent free.

    Yeah, we're just walking bags of seawater,
  • Because storage is so cheap, why not keep everything....just in case.

    My personal storage timeline:

    1994 - 200MB
    1996 - 1GB
    1998 - 3GB
    2000 - 30GB
    2001 - 90GB
    2002 - 170GB
    2003 - 290GB
    2004 - 1.01TB

  • Maybe they figure they have to stock up now, before the DRM folk and Inland Revenue figure it out.
  • Every disk drive I get is bigger than the last one. Usually the contents of the old one ends up as ~/old/ on the new drive. I now have ~/old/old/old/... a good few levels deep.

    Apart from the standard collection of MP3s (the only ripped off stuff being old radio series like The Burkiss Way - not cos I'm precious about copyright, but cos I can't be arsed with p2p most of the time) it's all freeware. I love trying out little apps that I can d/l over the net. I collect source code - just to have a look at mos

  • hmmm. (Score:3, Interesting)

    by meatspray ( 59961 ) * on Friday December 10, 2004 @10:37AM (#11051583) Homepage
    1Gig on the phone, (mostly 15fps converted xvid moveis, mp3's and video capture from the phone)
    1Gb on the Istick USB Drive [pricegrabber.com] 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 [archos.com] become mainstream.

  • I'm a collector. I like collecting. I can only imagine what I'd collect if I had a terabyte of storage. It's not really a matter of whether I'd use it or not, but having it just in case.
  • I'd say hoarding is basic human behavior. It can even be altered by Brain Damage [psychologytoday.com], suggesting a strong, hard-wired component.

    So, this doesn't seem abnormal to me. Though it's interesting to imagine how humans will react to the ability to hoard more in the same or even less "space" as it's all information.

  • doesn't that get heavy? (Score:3, Funny)

    by boomerny ( 670029 ) on Friday December 10, 2004 @12:28PM (#11052805)
    1000-2000 songs? my powerbook starts to get heavy with just a few hundred tunes on there.

  • It's cost of storage, not quantity (Score:3, Insightful)

    by rfc1394 ( 155777 ) <Paul@paul-robinson.us> on Friday December 10, 2004 @01:03PM (#11053256) Homepage Journal
    When cost of storage drops to near zero for any item, and quantity of storage becomes near unlimited, it becomes less necessary to delete or remove items than it was when space was precious and/or expensive. It also makes it unnecessary to pick and choose what to take. If your storage system has the capacity to store all of your music, even the stuff you don't listen to very often, why bother choosing? If the system can search, find and organize your collection to allow you to select which songs you want to listen to at a particular time, it's a more effective use of your time to have the system do the picking of what you are going to hear from everything, than bothering to decide what to take.

    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.

  • migration since 1988 (Score:3, Interesting)

    by johnrpenner ( 40054 ) on Friday December 10, 2004 @04:24PM (#11055678) Homepage

    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 [earthlink.net].

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