August 05, 2004

• Thanks for that - it covers the same territory as some thoughts I've been having about the implications of nearly free data storage, only it's a lot clearer and more convincingly argued than anything I could put together. Good article.
• What's the implication of massive, really cheap hard disk storage? Porn. Lots & lots of porn.
• Petabytes of hot, wet action!
• Last year all my friends were buying 200 gig ext hard drives and swapping entire music collections. I thought then that it was interesting that downloaded music was looked at as low-class -- unless you've got 100+ cd's, all perfectly ripped, no one wants to copy your music. Movies are now where MP3's were a few years ago, and as hard drives get bigger, I suspect the same thing will happen there. ... As a kid, I remember listening to my precious few tapes and CD's over and over, cuz that's all I had. What will be the music tastes of a child that grows up with a God Box?
• visual, audio information, memes, control, cybernetics, chomsky, yadda yadda.
• Having trouble getting past the first two paragraphs: Yahoo! recently announced that it would be raising the storage limits on its free e-mail service. The curious part is how high the new limits are. Before the change, Yahoo! gave users 4 megabytes per account. Did Yahoo! double it to 8 megabytes? Nope. The new limit is 100 megabytes, an astounding 25-fold increase. Yahoo!'s unprecedented giveaway is just one small example of the impact of a technological advance so rapid that it puts even Moore's Law to shame. "Unprecedented giveaway"? They only did it because Google announced Gmail, and there have been services even before Gmail that gave away 1 GB mailboxes. That hardly seems "unprecedented". Perhaps I'll read the rest of the article after lunch.
• It means the decibel level of curses, cries of anguish and thrown objects crashing will increase tenfold, after our terabytes of non-backed-up data vanishes after some nasty crash. Of course, on the video-content-graphics front, it means we won't have an excuse for not plunging into HD, and the whole motion graphics business will demad video clips where stills sufficed yesterday.
• I swear I've read the same sort of starry-eyed speculation about the data-rich future again and again. Back in the early 90s, we salivated at the prospect of 1GB of personal storage, which supposedly meant we'd never have to delete an e-mail, term paper, essay or news posting again. Today 1GB is chump change, yet few seem interested in keeping an organized "life record" of every single e-mail they've ever received. I daresay that keeping the full audio of every single phone call a person makes or receives is at least technically within reach (for an average amount of phone use, at least) right now - but who wants it? The dominant principle in effect has clearly been the "corollary of Less' law," that "the amount of stored data rises to fill the available space." In particular, most individual electronics consumers seem to be more interested in storing manageable numbers of increasingly huge data packets (pr0n in 1994, MP3s in 1998, movies in 2002) than increasingly huge numbers of small data packets. I bet that by the time 1TB fits into a matchbook-sized device, we'll also have invented ways to chew all that space up in a short while. Like panoramic, 200FPS, HD-video cameras built into cell phones. Games with photographic textures and uncompressed DVD-A quality 5.1-channel sound. 1GB Shockwave/Flash jokes and greeting cards e-mailed to and from all your friends. Database structures that trade stupid amounts of storage space for increased query speed. Other things we haven't invented yet. The fact that a terabyte "God Box" could store 60,000 CDs worth of MP3s could just be a sign that MP3s are rapidly becoming old hat. It's been possible for some time to fit, say, an Atari 2600 emulator along with every Atari ROM ever made onto a single $0.18 CD-R. But do you know anyone who's bothered?
• /looks at CD filled with VCS, MAME, ColecoVison, N64 ROMs on bookcase Ehh... no, no one. *cough*
• Great comments you guys. What i found interesting about the piece and why I posted it was the idea of new crimes made possible by cheap mass store.
• That post is straigth outta my '96 copy of Hennessy & Patterson. (Well, the "Silicon Valley should really be called Magneto Valley" part.
• Re: Flagpole: Okay, maybe I'm overstating the point a bit. I didn't really mean "not a single soul" but "very few people." And I suspect the sort of completist collecting that the article suggests will remain a niche thing. Do you ever actually punish yourself with play any ColecoVision games? *Shudder*.
• /wakes up from slumbering fantasies of a daring rescue of Smurfette... Erm, ah, no, never did... *COUGHCOUGH*
• There's an essay on this subject in relation to music here on a blog from Tom Coates who's one of the clever people at the BBC Radio and Music website ...
• Who wants to copy an mp3 when 90% of the original data is missing? Of course mp3s are low class, and low fidelity with it.
• dickdotcom: thanks for the link to Tom Coates, there's a wealth of info worth reading here...
• Who wants to copy an mp3 when 90% of the original data is missing? - Wolof I agree entirely. And this is why lossless music storage formats are slowly becoming more popular as data storage becomes cheaper.
• Who wants to copy an mp3 when 90% of the original data is missing? That 90% figure is misleading. The original data is analog, and it ultimately becomes analog again by the time it reaches your ears. Does anyone have real numbers showing the actual losses (Dynamic Range, SNR, THD, etc) of MP3 compression? And MP3 will be around until high-bandwidth net access undergoes the same price implosion as hard drives.
• There are better soundfile compression schemes than MP3 yet it's the only one that it's standart. That's the reason it still exists.