Cox Crow
Asking the Stupid Questions Since 1971
Thursday, February 28, 2002What we're seeing is consumer devices starting to take advantage of network effects. The home is not often wired for Ethernet, unless you're a geek, but it doesn't pose too many obstacles to wireless. The problem is getting all these things to talk to each other.
I have few CDs, compared to some, and even fewer videotapes. I even have cassette tapes and vinyl records. (We don't really collect media except books.) But I do want to be able to listen in any room of the house, control from any room in the house, and take what there is of my collection on the road. And unlike the RIAA, I think it's appropriate for me to make a mix that reflects my mood.
We have boxes of photographs. Some of these were digitized during development and are stored at Snapfish. We might get a digital camera; all the point-and-shoots we've bought recently have been utter junk, and my Pentax K-1000 is a little too manual to take action shots of a zooming toddler.
The problem that I see, that Steve glosses over, is backup. Backup has become difficult for the home user since disk drives passed the 8GB mark. Now with entry-level systems shipping with over 80GB, and with all of this wonderful digital data, the problem is significantly magnified. Tape storage has not kept up with hard disk capacities and costs. The only reasonable solution is to distribute the data across multiple devices. This could be a disk farm — a RAID array. Or it could be replication of the data across all the devices on the network, i.e. LOCKSS and Freenet.
4:33:45 PM #
