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The State of the Art
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.
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.