Wednesday, July 25, 2007

Sharing Bandwidth and Disk

Bandwidth and Disk are interrelated just as money and time, but this doesn't mean it behooves anyone to meter it and charge extra for heavy use. Extra value is sometimes a product of sharing, and as you will recall sharing is caring!

I once discovered software for digital media transcription (read: backup), and the peasents rejoiced as they were enlightened. A copy house is like a data warehouse; duplicates of written or copy material are produced, that's copy that's sometimes written on CD and Disk media. Optical media can be reverse-mastered into an image which can be loaded from disk and accessed directly or copied to produce a duplicate of the original media. Files and disks can be shared as well as copied, and so can compressed files.

Network disk can be used to share files within a group; issues sometimes arise when clients and servers part ways, and revision control like Subversion helps determine original authorship. A server maintains a catalog of changes made by users who collaboratively administer a file space. Commits that derive from outside sources should provide citations. New and unique information is sometimes produced, and new ideas are dated in case of patent litigation.

This is all of the software you need to be a producer of media content on a desert island; that and an internet connection. Ideally we have a more elegant system for generating income from distribution than sending out messages stuffed into plastic bottles and hoping that they return filled with gold doubloons... still we might be surprised just how often this works!

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