In the early 90's, the natural progression of all applications was to handle email (i believe this reached the apex when a few calculator programs offered to email their results to you.)
In the early 2000's the natural progression of all applications chanced to "becoming a language", and thus was born a thousand fragrant blossoms bloomed like so many open septic tanks upon the virtual landscape. This too changed and now every application wants to be a web client server possibly with some aspect living in the "cloud" of data ensuring that when your account on said "cloud" dissipates, you're screwed.
Of course, not to be outdone, the hardware industry is much the same, only instead of "email", "language" and "web client", feel free to substitute "mp3 player", "image gallery" and "phone". Possibly all three at once, along with the ability to handle email, have it's own scripting environment, be a web server and connect to some nebulous data repository system. (Thus probably explaining the overwhelming popularity of the iPhone.)
i bring these up mostly because whenever i'm deep in the throws of some gadgety lust, i always wonder about the amount of space i really need. As a f'rinstance, my car has a built in MP3 CD player, meaning that i can stuff 770MB of mp3s onto a chunk of plastic and have it play them. Figure that means i can put about 8 hours* of music on a single CD and have it play. (* figure that the average song is about three minutes, twenty seconds and i can stuff around 950 songs (~256kbps) into 1GB of memory.) That's enough to get me from San Jose to San Diego without repeating a track.
Not to be out-done, i've also got a GPS, which (it being a modern piece of equipment) can play up to 2GB of MP3s, which gets me about 18 hours of music, or to put it slightly differently, about a month of back and forth drives to work (provided i take the scenic route). Of course, i only usually listen to that when i forget to grab my 8GB mp3 player what can hold 72 hours of continuous music, or the Archos which can hold 30GB of mixed media (e.g. 7 full length movies plus 7+ hours of music) meaning that at the lower limit i'll be entertained continuously for something like 21 hours non-stop. Which might be appealing, but then so is things like sleeping, eating, and not driving off of steep cliffs.
Still, most of that insomniatic entertainment time is theoretical for me, mostly because i don't have that much entertainment i want to consume regularly.
i have just shy of 6GB of stored MP3 tracks on my media server. Of that, i'm willing to say that half are tracks that i'd not be terribly upset if they were lost in some magnetic decimation. (While i'm a fan of Crowded House, i'm not really a fan of "Hole in the River", with the 2GB mini-sd card i've got in there, i've got maybe half of it loaded with music, including more than a few "skip" tracks.
So when i hear about folks saying "wow, only 60GB of storage? i'm not sure i can fit everything on that." i boggle a bit. Actually, no, a helluva lot, really. Are folks really listening to all 540 hours of music on that, or are they carting around several hours worth of the siblings of "Revolution #9" just because the can? (i'd have nightmares of getting on a plane when the less choice tracks come up for random rotation and losing it somewhere 11,000 feet over Ohio.) Hell, what about the folks grabbing 320GB devices? Are they catching up on old episodes of McNeil Lehrer News Hour during the 120 days of continuous play?
Good Lord, people, if you're going to listen that long, start by listening to Groucho.
Think of it this way, my four year-old has never had a DVR-free moment of her life. Basically any episode of Dora or Deigo that she has ever seen is probably immediately available to her (in our living room).
Now let's further imagine car trips to see the grand parents, standard DVD players are okay, but I don't want to hear three hours of "but I want to watch the pirate pigs episode!!!"
*sigh* spoiled I guess.
I believe my Dad solved that problem in my youth by continual threats to turn this car around. That and my mother possessed the unnatural ability to be able to read aloud on some car trips, allowing us to hear the best bits from The Poor Mouth
I replaced my failing media drive over the weekend, and in the backup and restore process realized I have well over 100GB of music, and that's only scratching the surface when I include my undigitized CDs, records, and boxes of cassettes, to say nothing of hundreds of hours of shows I did when I was managing a radio station years ago. It's kind of overwhelming when I let myself think about it.
And I keep buying new music.
Oh, and one of the justifications for keeping the "non-fave" tracks is that my tastes tend to evolve and change over time, to the extent that I don't always trust myself to know if I like something or not at first blush. Vampire Weekend springs to mind as a band I really didn't like for the first two times through their debut, and now I really really love it — sometimes it takes a few plays to really start to grok a song. The abovementioned Crowded House is another example… every CH album, I started out really liking about three tracks, then wound up really liking a different three tracks, but it took dozens of listens to get to the point where the more subtle elements started to come out and impress me. "Hole in the River" is one of my favourite tracks off Crowded House (the album), actually, but I started out preferring "World Where You Live" and "Don't Dream It's Over".
Shep: Once again you prove you're a better man than I am. I won't say that my music tastes haven't changed over the years (I listen to significantly less Molly Hatchet now than when I was 16), but for the most part when I hear a song I like, it tends to stay that way, same with one I don't. Granted, just about anything can get me hooked or unhooked from a song. In the case of "Hole in the River", yes, it's about his aunt's suicide, but I can't get over thinking of a Wile E Coyote style silhouetted hole in the flowing river beneath a bridge and that just kinda throws the sanguine message of the song off for me.
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I think the late 2000s were when every piece of software tried to add a social network.