by Tdarcos » Tue Feb 05, 2013 12:11 am
Ice Cream Jonsey wrote:Tdarcos wrote:good MP3 compression can nicely reduce files without them sounding terrible to 1 meg a minute.
In all honesty, I agree with you - I can barely hear the difference. I guess I just want to future-proof the game. Disk space will always seem like less of a big deal when time moves forward.
Disk space has gotten so cheap as to be nearly free, removable and transfer media have gotten larger and larger as we (as a society) learned to pack bits more efficiently. I noticed when I was at the computer store on Sunday that Blu Ray burners are now at the $60 range, and DVD drives are down to $15, so we can presume that CD drives are probably no longer available since a DVD drive is downward compatible, similar to a Blu Ray.
There will always be incidents like the one in Malaysia or wherever it was where a major hard drive plant went belly up - you posted about it on Caltrops - and hard drive prices spiked for about a year, but in general hard drives will keep getting bigger at the same or lower prices, and eventually people might not even bother erasing files all that much, they'll just keep accumulating crap and occasionally pull stuff when their start menu gets too crowded, or move stuff around into fewer start menu categories, instead of one for each game or application (as a lot of software manufacturers default their installs and want to put their stuff at the highest level of the folder hierarchy) the users will (correctly) classify applications by type and include them in those folders.
The big issue is not the huge amounts of data we collect, create and retain, it's managing it. Categorizing files so we can find what we are looking for; it's getting to the point that hard drive space is so vast and the penalties for wasting it almost nil that if you download something from the Internet it's often faster to just download it again than to find it unless you're well organized.
But I'm getting old; I can remember when 100 meg of disk space was significant (and large and expensive). I gave my brother a 16 billion byte jump drive to encourage him to easily back up his computer files, it's the size of a pack of gum and was on sale for $8 at Staples; it's so cheap I bought myself one. Is he going to notice or care if there's a couple hundred meg of unimportant files? Yet you couldn't read a hundred meg of information in your entire life based on about 2K per printed page.
A real issue is conversion. Libraries and archives collect large amounts of material, which now includes digital and stored formats, and the problems we often have are of data files created by various programs. It's very bad when the system that creates them has no export to other formats function.
When was the last time you used a cassette? If I got one I'd probably have to visit my sister to listen to it. And a lot of people today have probably never handled a 78RPM record. And wire recording - I know about it but I've never seen it - existed back in the 1920s or so but if there was anything from that media if it wasn't copied it's gone forever. 8 Track tapes died a miserable death, mostly because they were a listen-only medium; cassettes lasted as long as they did because you could record on them.
There is huge amounts of data - or is it "there are huge amounts of data?" - collected for space exploration, analysis of earth information, linear accellerator data and other huge data generators back in the 1960s, 1970s and early 1980s where billions and trillions of bytes of data were generated to mag tape which we no longer have the hardware to read, or the machines to run the software that can read it, and the software was all proprietary, as were the file formats they generated to store it. Anyone know how to read disc files using the RMS data file format from Digital minicomputers, or DASD hard drive images from old IBM mainframes?
Lots of stuff we've had has been lost forever because we didn't or couldn't convert it when the old machines were still around and now there's no way to read or interpret the proprietary data file formats they used then.
[quote="Ice Cream Jonsey"][quote="Tdarcos"]good MP3 compression can nicely reduce files without them sounding terrible to 1 meg a minute.[/quote]
In all honesty, I agree with you - I can barely hear the difference. I guess I just want to future-proof the game. Disk space will always seem like less of a big deal when time moves forward.[/quote]
Disk space has gotten so cheap as to be nearly free, removable and transfer media have gotten larger and larger as we (as a society) learned to pack bits more efficiently. I noticed when I was at the computer store on Sunday that Blu Ray burners are now at the $60 range, and DVD drives are down to $15, so we can presume that CD drives are probably no longer available since a DVD drive is downward compatible, similar to a Blu Ray.
There will always be incidents like the one in Malaysia or wherever it was where a major hard drive plant went belly up - you posted about it on Caltrops - and hard drive prices spiked for about a year, but in general hard drives will keep getting bigger at the same or lower prices, and eventually people might not even bother erasing files all that much, they'll just keep accumulating crap and occasionally pull stuff when their start menu gets too crowded, or move stuff around into fewer start menu categories, instead of one for each game or application (as a lot of software manufacturers default their installs and want to put their stuff at the highest level of the folder hierarchy) the users will (correctly) classify applications by type and include them in those folders.
The big issue is not the huge amounts of data we collect, create and retain, it's managing it. Categorizing files so we can find what we are looking for; it's getting to the point that hard drive space is so vast and the penalties for wasting it almost nil that if you download something from the Internet it's often faster to just download it again than to find it unless you're well organized.
But I'm getting old; I can remember when 100 meg of disk space was significant (and large and expensive). I gave my brother a 16 billion byte jump drive to encourage him to easily back up his computer files, it's the size of a pack of gum and was on sale for $8 at Staples; it's so cheap I bought myself one. Is he going to notice or care if there's a couple hundred meg of unimportant files? Yet you couldn't read a hundred meg of information in your entire life based on about 2K per printed page.
A real issue is conversion. Libraries and archives collect large amounts of material, which now includes digital and stored formats, and the problems we often have are of data files created by various programs. It's very bad when the system that creates them has no export to other formats function.
When was the last time you used a cassette? If I got one I'd probably have to visit my sister to listen to it. And a lot of people today have probably never handled a 78RPM record. And wire recording - I know about it but I've never seen it - existed back in the 1920s or so but if there was anything from that media if it wasn't copied it's gone forever. 8 Track tapes died a miserable death, mostly because they were a listen-only medium; cassettes lasted as long as they did because you could record on them.
There is huge amounts of data - or is it "there are huge amounts of data?" - collected for space exploration, analysis of earth information, linear accellerator data and other huge data generators back in the 1960s, 1970s and early 1980s where billions and trillions of bytes of data were generated to mag tape which we no longer have the hardware to read, or the machines to run the software that can read it, and the software was all proprietary, as were the file formats they generated to store it. Anyone know how to read disc files using the RMS data file format from Digital minicomputers, or DASD hard drive images from old IBM mainframes?
Lots of stuff we've had has been lost forever because we didn't or couldn't convert it when the old machines were still around and now there's no way to read or interpret the proprietary data file formats they used then.