The State of the Art

[andygates]

It's naughty-file-police season again and a landmark has been passed: for the first time, home movies are responsible for more naughtiness [1] than ripped music.  User-created media content finally has more weight on my servers than non-user stuff; even after we strip out the holiday and wedding movies (and the babies, and puppies, and cake-candle moments, dear gods the warm fuzzy banality of it) the rest of the user-content is a big thick wodge of data.  Of course if it's simple to video your puppy on your mobile, it's just as simple to video a knee arthroplasty and use it as a teaching aid.  Or to record a dull presentation for later cramming.  Rich multimedia content is now officially mainstream.

However, users have no idea of file size.  None whatsover.  "It's just a couple of pictures" is a common and honest response to "your AVIs are ginormous and bloated, you hideous time-wasting harridan".  What's 25Mb between friends?  What's, er, 6Gb in the worst case? (great holiday though, you should see the photos of those giant tortoises)  Icons don't present the impression of file size.  If you wanted to scale them to reflect file size, you'd have to use a log scale just to keep it sane, and it would still look absurd.  A "thing" is a "thing" is a "thing", whether it's a saved email or a Word document or a picture or a movie; saved emails are often the worst, all fat with embedded Powerpoint hunky firemen. 

Frankly, with storage generally cheap and huge, I think this is a good thing.  Freedom to play invites new ideas - users wouldn't have thought about videoing their knee arthroscopies if they hadn't first done Kitteh's First Snowflake beforehand and for this reason I continue to like our no-quotas approach.  So bring on the buckets of storage.  But... can I have some more disks, please?


[1] Methodology: report out all likely file types, eg MP3, MPG, AVI, and the like.  Eyeball the list.  Slap the sinners, give them a grace period, then delete the files.  Traditionally, one gets 60% "oops sorry!" 20% "how did that get there?" and 5% "how dare you peek in my private files?" with the rest non-responding.

Comments

[lurkingcat]

We are less nice about this. We have storage quotas and every so often an email is sent out reminding people what their quota is and what the company policy is about storing stuff for personal use on the work servers (this mostly boils down to Don't Do It). Then a second email is sent out a week later and then MIS get to decide whether they're going to be nice and contact individual users or just do what the email says and delete stuff. They're mostly nice about it to be fair.

Fortunately, I'm Classroom Support so this is not actually my responsibility and I don't have to listen to our sales team moaning about how their copy of the entire second season of Lost has just been deleted by cruel and unfeeling MIS people and what do you mean "You're lucky they didn't just report you to HR"?

Another common user misconception appears to be that if it's no longer filed in their Outlook Inox it can't possibly be taking up any space.

[andygates.livejournal.com]

Lost eh? I'll trade you for some Azerbaijani folk music. About a gig of it.

Maybe quotas would be a good idea for some ;)

[flitljm.livejournal.com]

Any way of persuading Windows to colour those icons by file size? Grey for ickle, red for massive?

[andygates.livejournal.com]

Alas, no.