Wired is reporting that the dirty little secret of the hardware centric Consumer Electronics Show is that Software rules.

"Consumers buy PlayStations and Xboxes for the games they run, not the boxes themselves."

Now, I love my Xbox 360. It does make pretty noises and have colorful lights, However any gamer knows it's the games not the box that matters.

Bill Gates is making a full court press to create an alternate cult of personality to Steve Jobs. Gates seems to be everywhere making wild statements about the future. Most notably is that in this age of digital media the average family will need terabytes of storage to preserve their digital movies, music and pictures. Wow! I remember when terabyte storage was only in the realm of big IT enterprises. I thought 60 gig of music was a lot, but hey, video does take up a lot of space. Do you already have a terabyte for personal use? Can you see yourself using a terabyte of storage?

Easily; If you count read only media like dvd's/cd's, I have several terabytes of information right now. And that's just at standard def video and compressed or 2 channel audio; add in hi-def picture and better sound and I could see many, many terabytes necessary to store all this. Of course I'm not exactly representative of average, many people will be well under or around a terabyte I think...

if they get a terrabyte on my system anytime soon Im gonna copy all of my cd's to hard disk and leave them safely in thier spindles in case something happens.

I have 160 gigs on this computer and I have barely used up a fraction of it.

Unless I get into media editing I cannot see myself using a terrabyte. However I can easily understand how someone might need that much so I'm not going against it.

But it makes sense. Back then people thought a gigabyte looked big, but hey, look at it now.

Well, I have 710GB in hard drive space (about 600GB is filled -- mostly with game!!) and I have hundreds of CDs -- again, mostly games.

As far as pictures, they don't really take that much space. You can store a LOT in a 20GB drive if it's just pictures. For videos, it depends... in the future, will we have better compression, or will be still have the bad compression that we have now? Obviously, there are some good compressions out there, but the ones most people use are still really bad and you can easily take up GBs for a 1.5hour+ video.

My 120GB drive is only 50GB full. I don't download movies, nor do I do anything with recording my own video, so that plays a large role in things. I also don't have a digital camera, so the images on my drive tend to be standard resolution, taking far less space. To put it simply, I don't live on my computer that much anymore, and so it doesn't get used like it could.

I have a 20GB drive of which only 10GB is in use. I tend to delete unused stuff and uninstall games that I haven't played in a while. The article seems a bit disjointed in that it skips from software to storage space.

"Consumers buy PlayStations and Xboxes for the games they run, not the boxes themselves."

But isn't the quality of games determined, at least in part, by hardware? If you were a game developer and had to choose a platform for your next-gen game, wouldn't you prefer a strong, stable, easy-to-work-with piece of hardware over one that isn't? If a console technically sucks, developers will start to avoid it and the console will be left with second-rate games and ports from other consoles. That's partly what hurt the Gamecube.

If it is determined that product quality will be the primary focus for generating revenue, then yes. Otherwise, not necessarily.

The most stable, strong, and easy to work with piece of hardware may be very obscure with a tiny consumer base. On the other hand, a lower quality piece of hardware may have a gigantic consumer base.

I suppose it depends on what you mean by "sucks". Didn't the Gamecube feature superior hardware and easier software development than the PS2? Unless you count DVD playback, all the PS2 had on the Cube was the software and more disc storage space. I agree with you in saying that the quality of hardware affects the software, and I suppose the PS2 is a good example of where software quality and quantity helped to win the day, despite the hardware inside.

in the future, will we have better compression, or will be still have the bad compression that we have now?

hardware is getting cheaper at a rate that now makes efficient compression (and other programming, for that matter 8) a losing horse. Why spend millions to develop an algorithm that will only save fractions of pennies? (True, amortized across hundreds of uses by hundreds of thousands of users, it adds up... but in order to enjoy the fruits of cheap hardware we must continue encouraging their economy of scale.)

The only forum for tightening things up now is portable computing in celphones etc.

Pictures can take a lot of space. It just depends on how you save them. I have scanned some of my pictures from negatives and I could squeeze about 12 of these scans on a CD. And this wasn't a pro class scanner, which make scans several times larger (typically 4000dpi @ 48 bpp).

As well, RAW pictures from camers with 10M pixels (the new norm for prosumer cameras) are quite large. One gigabyte memory card fills up quickly.

My scanner does negatives and can scan at a really high dpi (can't remember what right now), but I could definitely fit more than 12 on a CD... that's like 65-70MB each.

And, yes, RAW takes a lot of space, but how often do you store all of your pictures on your computer in RAW instead of saving them into a compressed format like JPG or PNG or something similar?

Yep, that's right. This is the scanner: http://www.zx81.org.uk/computing/opinion/dualscanii.html


If I had RAW in my camera, I would probably save them all in RAW. If you save in JPG you do something you can't undo. If you don't want RAW, shoot in JPG in the first place.

Well, to answer your question flipkin; yes, no, and maybe :)

First the maybe; I can see possibly NEEDING terabytes in the future simply because history has shown that larger and larger amounts of storage space can and will be utilized. I will never consider the status quo in any sector of computing to be the highest level of digital evolution that shall ever be attained.

Yes; in that I would use up terabytes of storage space if I had it available, but

No; in that not having terabytes doesn't prevent me from doing what I need to do, and furthermore I'm good to go on storage for a very long time to come. I might be pressured at some point to start really managing storage space to make the most efficient use of what I have.

As far as current storage resources, I have a total of 1 terabyte of space if you count a networked shared drive. Here's something to consider though; if space is filling up it's quite simple for me to burn a CD or DVD and free up room on the HDD.

Until games or programs that I'll regularly use require at least 200GB of storage space or more, I'll not need to have more hard drive than I already do.

Yes. Yes. Yes. Terrabyte? I'm already thinking of a Zigabyte if there is such a thing. Really want to upload my brain one of these days and shutdown. Re-download after technology finally finds a way to create disposable clones of supermodels.

Ah...

Hard drive space actually in use: 2 terabytes (video capture rig is a big chunk of that, 1 terabyte by itself)

Space taken up by DVD-Rs and CD-Rs: At last estimate, about 7 terabytes. Stuff I've burnt myself.

Space taken up by commercial DVDs: I've got less than 200, so that's almost a terabyte.

So 10 terabytes for me.