The point was about how capacity increases and cost of storage decreases over time. My first hard drive had 50 MEGS of storage. 6 years ago a computer with a 4 gig hard drive was a monster. My next one will probably have 160 gigs (I'm looking now). At that rate, in 6 more years computers would have 6400 gigs of hard drive space. ----- Original Message ----- From: "Stewart Mason" > At 12:08 AM 7/12/2004 -0400, Josh Chasin wrote: > >Your friend makes a compelling case. > > Does he? I ran some numbers, and I'm not sure it washes. Experience and > intuition has led me to figure that the average pop song is a little over > three and a half minutes long. I've got a 3:34 WAV file open here on my > desktop ("Play My Song" by Redd Kross, something of a personal theme song), > which I note is 36,917 kilobytes as an uncompressed WAV of medium-high > quality. There are 1,048,576 kilobytes in a gigabyte, which means that 28.4 > copies of this WAV file could fit in a single gigabyte. There's a total of > about 10,000 LPs and CDs in this house including the stuff that's in deep > storage downstairs. Assuming 12 songs per album, that requires a minimum > of 4224.815 gigabytes of hard disk space (in other words, 52.81 times > bigger than the fairly spacious 80GB internal hard drive in this Gateway) > for the WAV files ALONE! Factor in room for File Allocation Tables, the > programs necessary to play, edit and otherwise futz with the files, and, oh > yes, the MP3 of each of these 120,000 songs...you know, I think it's > cheaper just to buy some custom shelves for the CDs and LPs. > > S > > > >