You both missed my point.  Large MPEGs are no problem; you just use a larger drive.  The point I was trying to get across was that a system designed around MPEGs or text files or whatever (it doesn't matter), will not be drawn to capacity prematurely if waste *relative* to its size is not excessive.  I was writing in relative, not absolute terms.

If you had read my post, you would have seen that I was addressing readability, clarity, brevity, etc., with "bandwidth" being a mere mention, and resources are always resources in the circumstances, thus relative.  If I have a system with a capacity of X, I'm not going to double its capacity because of nonsensical application, such as that which results in 60% waste when it can operate well within specs if operated as intended.

The cost of storing tons of junk data depreciates faster than it can be accumulated, but regardless of the acceleration in your speed of processing or capacity, excessive quoting is a pain to deal with from a logic viewpoint, and no matter how fast a machine I employ to search and manipulate archived data, in general terms, retrieval would have been twice as fast without the waste.

Michael


At 02:31 PM 6/19/01 AST4ADT, you wrote:
>Well, waste is waste, but 60% of 35 Megs just isn't any longer a
>serious consideration. As someone who began with an Osborne with 96K
>diskettes and 128K of RAM, I'm astounded to hear myself say that --
>
>The real issue here is readability.  It's quite true that the more
>garbage there is the more problem for people on digest, and the more
>challenge making much sense of the archives.