Fri, 03 Sep 2004 16:08:58 GMT
We Are Becoming Digital Pack Rats
“Personal computers — our jukeboxes, photo labs, accountants and film studios — are becoming the proverbial junk drawer, scattered with scads of must-have information. Sister devices such as digital cameras, MP3 players and digital video recorders overflow with often barely a bite of spare storage.
The ravenous nature of society coupled with the quest for convenience has spawned a nation of digital pack rats, eager to possess every gigabyte of media they can download, and too greedy — or lazy — to let it go….
One's desk might be clean and tidy, but countless computer desktops have become chaotic.
'It's like an infinite attic, and we're filling it,' said Peter Lyman, a professor at the University of California at Berkeley School of Information Management and Systems. 'People are feeling overwhelmed and trying to find coping strategies.' “ [The Indianapolis Star, via Library Link of the Day]
Heh – good timing! I just wrote about the rise of the personal server as part of my “Product Pipeline” column for the next issue of netConnect. The day after I turned it in, I bought a 1GB SD card for my Treo because I can't carry around enough ones and zeroes on my current 512MB version. Storage storage everywhere, and not a drop to drink! I paid a little under $100 for the new card, a Gigabyte of portable storage the size of a postage stamp! Next year, terabytes will be affordable.
To quote Roy Tennant, “Storage is officially cheaper than dirt.”
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i hoard, but i am waiting for tiger to make sense of it all. see i download alot of text and save it as pdfs and i want to be able to use that text very efficiently, to write. tiger's search engine should do this. no more looking over my hd to find things….
