Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: Yamhill
From: jfc@mit.edu (John F. Carr)
Date: 23 Jan 2003 16:56:56 GMT
Message-ID: <3e301ed8$0$3938$b45e6eb0@senator-bedfellow.mit.edu>

In article <864r83crly.fsf@number6.magda.ca>,
David Magda  <dmagda+usenet@ee.ryerson.ca> wrote:
>Kai Harrekilde-Petersen <khp@vitesse.com> writes:
>
>> Last year I last realised by 7GB and 13GB were getting a bit crowded,
>> so I bought a 80GB disk, and I thought(*) "Wow, I'll _never_ use all
>> that diskspace".
>>
>> Later same year, I bought a mini-DV video camera. I shot a tape full
>> video (about 1h30m), and found that I had used 25-30GB of disk space.
>
>Parkinson's Law of Data:
>        "Data expands to fill the space available for storage."
>
>http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/jargon/html/entry/Parkinson's-Law-of-Data.html
>
>It works similiarly for traffic: traffic increases to fill the space
>available on freeways. California learnt that one, yet most people
>say "build more highways" as a good solution to traffic
>congestion. <sigh>

There are highways, and computer systems, where the demand is huge
and fast-growing.  My MIT account is near full, as are most urban
highways.

There are highways, and computer systems, where the demand is moderate
and slow-growing.  Both my home system and I-88 in New York have excess
capacity for a long time.

The increase in bandwidth, computing power, and car traffic is
exponential.  How long a particular expansion works depends on
the exact numbers.

(In the case of highways, recommended policy is to design for the
traffic needs of 20 years in the future.  Typical timeline:
Design year -20: protestors spend five years lobbying against the new road
Design year -15: protestors spend five years in court
Design year -10: construction begins
Design year  -5: road opens
Design year    : road may be full
Design year +epsilon: protestors say "I told you it wouldn't work")

>> p0rn drove the VHS wave, or so I've heard, and I won't be surprised if
>> it drives yet another wave of technology to the masses.  OTOH, really
>> fast Internet links might just eliminate that need.
>[...]
>
>Generally speaking, which web sites do you thinking are actually
>making a profit? :>

"Pornographers pay their bills on time" -- an anonymous employee of
a web services provider

When I worked on a web content delivery network I thought porn was
the obvious market.  I guess our marketing people didn't agree.

--
    John Carr (jfc@mit.edu)