Q1: They have a knowledge of how to use BitTorrent, or Usenet or somesuch, without being caught.
Q2: They don’t, the point of a library is having things in case you want or need them, or maybe somebody else does.
Q3: I guarantee you it takes less energy and carbon to set up and operate a relatively small local library than it does to operate a giant realtime global streaming enterprise, by probably multiple orders of magnitude.
Fuck, I could do this with a SteamDeck, external drives or something, and run it all on a home solar power / battery system you can get off the shelf.
Have you ever seen, like physically seen, a massive datacenter the size of an auto manufacturing planr, a high rise building that is 50% server racks by floor?
Just how many racks there, how much water and energy is used?
Also: You’re arguing here that feeding evil megacorps is somehow better for the environment, than starving them?
If you are saying 330 movies is ‘hoarding’, I don’t know what to tell you.
When I grew up in the 90s, we had almost 50 VHS movies.
Wealthier friends of mine had up to or over 100 or 200.
Now what took a large shelfing unit or cabinet… fits into about the size of a brick.
Also… you are missing that digital data can be essentially instantly copied, duplicated, and shared with others.
You are also entirely discounting the idea that infrastructure could collapse, you are assuming that using it as we do now, will remain as relatively inexpensive as it is now, forever.
I am not so optimistic.
From that standpoint, it is less hoarding, as it is archiving.
On my own, I can somewhat regularly use 1tb of internet data in a month and I’m not even a data horder. I always keep a tv on in the background (which these days usually means streaming stuff). I also stream music pretty frequently.
Its not at all unrealistic these days for someone over the course of 2+ years to get 20tb of data all in one place. And if thats media that gets accessed frequently (like music) it probably saves bandwidth and energy storing it that way.
Music we listen to many times but it barely uses any space for today’s standards.
Streaming TV is always something different, so, no point in storing it.
And movies? There may be a few favourites we watch again and even if they were 4K wouldn’t use that much space. 20TB is space enough for 330 4K 2 hour movies! Or 10,000 1080P movies. Let’s say that your job is to watch movies 8 hours a day. That’s 4 movies per day, that’s 500 weeks to watch 10,000 movies. Or 10 years (if you take a two week vacation every year). And that’s without repeating.
Let’s say you have 100 favourite movies that you like to watch on demand on 4 K (really an exaggeration) you only need 6 TB.
It depends on the quality you’re looking for. Data hoarders often keep really really high quality files so they can convert it into whatever they want later on.
A 4k remux can range from ~30gb-80gb. That’s ~200 4k movies assuming most are around 50gb.
A 48khz .flac music album is ~500mb. That’s not alot but music makes sense to save locally, plenty of people just keep their music going all the time on shuffle.
Also
Streaming TV is always something different, so, no point in storing it
There is no point not storing it, you’re going to use the data either way, why not keep it? At the end of the day, you can get 20tb of storage for a reasonable amount of money, and typically the people with that kinda storage have accumulated it over the course of several years. You can always decide to get rid of stuff you don’t need if you find yourself low on space.
The real question is:
How do people have so much media to fill up those drives?
Followed by: how do people have so much time to watch that media?
Followed by: human driven climate change is real. How can people waste energy just to hoard media that they rarely ever see again?
I understand somehow if you are torrenting and contributing to the sharing ecosystem, but just hoarding?
Q1: They have a knowledge of how to use BitTorrent, or Usenet or somesuch, without being caught.
Q2: They don’t, the point of a library is having things in case you want or need them, or maybe somebody else does.
Q3: I guarantee you it takes less energy and carbon to set up and operate a relatively small local library than it does to operate a giant realtime global streaming enterprise, by probably multiple orders of magnitude.
Fuck, I could do this with a SteamDeck, external drives or something, and run it all on a home solar power / battery system you can get off the shelf.
Have you ever seen, like physically seen, a massive datacenter the size of an auto manufacturing planr, a high rise building that is 50% server racks by floor?
Just how many racks there, how much water and energy is used?
Also: You’re arguing here that feeding evil megacorps is somehow better for the environment, than starving them?
Really?
No, I’m trying to understand why someone would store so many pictures. 20TB is enough for 330 4K movies or 10,000 1080P movies.
“Just in case I need it” is the principle of hoarding.
If you are saying 330 movies is ‘hoarding’, I don’t know what to tell you.
When I grew up in the 90s, we had almost 50 VHS movies.
Wealthier friends of mine had up to or over 100 or 200.
Now what took a large shelfing unit or cabinet… fits into about the size of a brick.
Also… you are missing that digital data can be essentially instantly copied, duplicated, and shared with others.
You are also entirely discounting the idea that infrastructure could collapse, you are assuming that using it as we do now, will remain as relatively inexpensive as it is now, forever.
I am not so optimistic.
From that standpoint, it is less hoarding, as it is archiving.
On my own, I can somewhat regularly use 1tb of internet data in a month and I’m not even a data horder. I always keep a tv on in the background (which these days usually means streaming stuff). I also stream music pretty frequently.
Its not at all unrealistic these days for someone over the course of 2+ years to get 20tb of data all in one place. And if thats media that gets accessed frequently (like music) it probably saves bandwidth and energy storing it that way.
Music we listen to many times but it barely uses any space for today’s standards.
Streaming TV is always something different, so, no point in storing it.
And movies? There may be a few favourites we watch again and even if they were 4K wouldn’t use that much space. 20TB is space enough for 330 4K 2 hour movies! Or 10,000 1080P movies. Let’s say that your job is to watch movies 8 hours a day. That’s 4 movies per day, that’s 500 weeks to watch 10,000 movies. Or 10 years (if you take a two week vacation every year). And that’s without repeating.
Let’s say you have 100 favourite movies that you like to watch on demand on 4 K (really an exaggeration) you only need 6 TB.
Si, my question stands.
It depends on the quality you’re looking for. Data hoarders often keep really really high quality files so they can convert it into whatever they want later on.
A 4k remux can range from ~30gb-80gb. That’s ~200 4k movies assuming most are around 50gb.
A 48khz .flac music album is ~500mb. That’s not alot but music makes sense to save locally, plenty of people just keep their music going all the time on shuffle.
Also
There is no point not storing it, you’re going to use the data either way, why not keep it? At the end of the day, you can get 20tb of storage for a reasonable amount of money, and typically the people with that kinda storage have accumulated it over the course of several years. You can always decide to get rid of stuff you don’t need if you find yourself low on space.