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Comment by noduerme | Hacker News Reader

That and DRM was always defeated. Physical distribution was profitable. And who loves waiting 30 minutes for Steam games to update on a slow connection? Imagine what we could pack on physical media now and mail to your door if that were still the model.

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Physical distribution is actually less profitable. Obviously you're going to invest in the creation of your piece of software or media but now you have to pay someone to press a certain number of discs, find a distributor willing to sell them for you, and then pay someone to go out to stores to convince them to buy discs from the distributor and sell them to customers. Product doesn't sell too well? Well you're still on the hook for the pressing and paying all the people who got it into stores. Product sells too well? Now you've got to get more pressed ASAP before a competitor can drop their version. For better or for worse, there was no margin for major bugs or exploits. You couldn't easily issue a patch without wasting money on another pressing. Once the Internet got fast enough and storage space got large enough, it really didn't make sense to rely on physical copies as the sole distribution method. Games can now be sold cheaper. Developers can take home a bigger cut of the profits. CD-ROMs made perfect sense for the era. It followed the music distribution system which again made sense because how else would someone buy music? You could distribute 700MB per disc of content to someone that might not even have dialup.

One problem with what you're suggesting is that everyone has a different steam library. If Valve offered a service where they could send you an update pack for your library every week or month, it would require a custom build for each customer. Is that something that would even be affordable?

Many console games are available on physical media. They still don’t have gigantic differences in size from the digital only pc Steam games.

That’s probably because they’re sold on Blu Ray discs though. If you had cartridge based consoles maybe you could have gigantic games nowadays.

Actually…couldn’t you have gigantic terabyte games anyway? I’m not aware of Steam or any of the consoles restricting game data size…

Hmmm

Give it a few more years and the annual Call of Duty title may well hit a tb. The latest one is up to something like 300gb iirc.

The Switch is a cartridge-based console, but it can't really benefit from massive assets since the hardware is so weak.

Best I can find is that the cartridge is limited to 32 GB, though whether that's because it's just SDHC under the hood or there wasn't a reason to make a larger one yet, I don't know.

One problem with flash memory is that it starts getting surprisingly expensive when you need it to be large, fast, and reliable.

> And who loves waiting 30 minutes for Steam games to update on a slow connection? Imagine what we could pack on physical media now and mail to your door if that were still the model.

Shipping physical media takes a lot longer than 30 minutes..

Most games are a lot faster to download for me than 30 minutes, and updates are typically even faster. (But then, we got fibre to the home here. I guess that's less common in the less developed countries of North America or Europe?)

> And who loves waiting 30 minutes for Steam games to update on a slow connection? Imagine what we could pack on physical media now and mail to your door if that were still the model.

I mean, say what you will about Steam's server bandwidth, it's at least higher bandwidth than the postal service.

Depends where you live ;)

But once it gets to your house, it's actually yours. And then you can play it going forward without a service tracking you. Digital ownership is a massive ongoing failure of a marshmallow test.

What is a "marshmallow test"? I've never heard that phrase before?

A psychological study of children if they would take a small but immediate payout versus a larger but delayed payout.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_marshmallow_experim...

Honestly, I would take the single marshmallow:

I don't actually like marshmallows enough, so I would probably enjoy two marshmallows less than a single one. Definitely less than twice as much as a single one.

And: given that you are in a psychological experiment, who knows what cruel twists of the experiment the scientists are trying to inflict on you? Perhaps they are actually studying how angry you are going to get when they break their promise? Just eat the damn thing, and they'll have a much harder time taking it away from you.

Children, um, don't use this kind of reasoning.

Depends on the exact age, and how much your kid expects to be trolled.

You mean that study, where they forgot to check for affluence?

https://behavioralscientist.org/try-to-resist-misinterpretin...

No, it's definitely not. The postal service can easily beat any internet service's bandwidth. It might take 5 days to reach you, but if someone sends you a large box full of 20TB hard drives packed with data, there's no way you could download that much data in 5 days over a normal internet connection.

Somewhat dated by the reference to tapes but still true overall:

https://www.reddit.com/r/mildlyinteresting/comments/20jlv3/n...

It's always been true, depending on how you interpret it. At any given point of time over the lifetime of the internet, there was always more bandwidth in packing a car full of the prevailing storage technology than in using the network. Over time, tape/drive capacities have increased, just as network speeds have, but I don't think was ever a point where the network was faster.

Also, it's probably still true, using the latest LTO tapes.

Do any of these theoreticals account for filling the storage media with data at the source, or ingesting it at the destination?

Yes a container of tapes is a lot of data, but how long would that reasonably take to write to tape? How many tape drives could you realistically have attached to the host system ?

I guess you never saw a proper tape library?

· Start with an 80-slot 6U form-factor Base Library Module, and add up to 6 Expansion Library Modules for a total of 560 slots in a 42U rack form factor

· 25.2PB of total maximum compressed capacity with 560 slots and LTO-9 drives

· Performance scaling from 1 to 42 LTO HH Tape Drives and transfer rates of 300 MB/s per LTO-9 Tape Drive.

https://www.hpe.com/psnow/doc/c04111416.html?jumpid=in_pdp-p...

>I guess you never saw a proper tape library?

Does the robot armature in the enclosure swapping tapes around in Schwarzenegger's Eraser count?

Thanks for the example, that is a lot of tape and a lot of throughput.

Heh, I don't even remember that film.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=41z8_qPOrJE Mail slot ie loading/unloading thingy, so you don't need to open it

https://youtu.be/sYgnCWOVysY?t=92 TS4500 itself

https://www.ibm.com/downloads/cas/JZALEYPD TS4500 data sheet for even more impressive numbers:

- Number of drives ... Up to 128 per library

- Capacity* with 3592 advanced cartridges ... Up to 877.5 PB native

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9boQn3nHnCA "27PB in the rack"

It's especially ludicrous if you contemplate the microSD card. You can theoretically put 10+ exabytes in a car now. Driving that even across the country is like 100 TBps.

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