I can get new old stock floppy disks for less than $2 each, but no one has floppy drives anymore. If I'm lucky, these run about $.50 each.
I can get brand new 8gb MicroSD cards for about $5 each. I can't find anything cheaper upon first glance.
I can get CD-Rs for less than 20 cents each.
Based on this, I conclude that CD-
Rs are the ideal medium for distribution in terms of price at this time, but I really don't like them. (see next post)
I can get printable top CD-Rs for between 10 and 20 cents each. I can print the tops for less than one penny each. I can get plastic sleeves for $.05 each, and make card stock covers for $.07 + ~1 cent for ink. So a CD-R would give me 700MB in a pretty package for ~$.28 + TIME and a little bit of labor to trim and stuff.
I've done this before, when we were releasing CDs for bands. It works well, and the end results look really nice.
But this method is Time Consuming in the extreme.
Time is the biggest concern here.
It takes ~5 minutes to burn a 700MB CDR on my machine. If I get 4 machines going at once, I can burn ~40 CDs/hour.
It takes about 2 minutes to print each CD, and I have one CD printer.
I can print ~30 CDs per hour.
I can burn and print at the same time, meaning I can have 40 CDs burned and printed in just over an hour.
It will take another 15 - 30 minutes to print the cardstock covers, and another 20 minutes to trim them to size and stuff them all in to their sleeves.
That's a total of ~2 hours of my time for every 40 CDs produced resulting in an average of 20 CDs per hour.
If I pay myself minimum wage, my labor costs are ~40 cents/CD.
That still leaves CDs as the cheapest option for distributing digital artifacts by a fairly wide margin.
But I don't make minimum wage. My time is more valuable than that.
And those numbers are pretty optimistic, and assume no bad burns or wasted prints.
Even with that loss, and with paying what my time should actually be worth, CDs are still the cheapest method of distributing digital artifacts that I'm aware of.
But I really hate making them, and I'll never actually have 700mb of stuff to share (unless I actually have *way* more than that.)
And all of that is *before* we consider that hardly anyone actually has a CD drive anymore on anything other than their desktop (if they even have a desktop) and regardless, if I'm making a digital magazine, I want them to read it on their tablet or their phone.
(And Apple specifically makes that really shitty.)
So the solution, I guess, is to abandon physical media because physical media is a pain in the ass.
The solution is to build the damn BBS network that I've been talking about for years (Here's an article from last July about it: https://medium.com/@ajroach42/fixing-the-internet-32e042199749
and another from a few months earlier: http://ajroach42.github.io/a-modern-bbs/)
Because without a network like this, digital distribution is limited to physical media or physical proximity.
@ajroach42 oh I love the BBS idea!
@LottieVixen ME TOO!!!
But it's complicated to federate a BBS without using the internet.
Like, I still run a little local intranet that has message boards and file sharing that you can reach from most parts of my apartment complex. There are a handful of nodes that connect with one another over wifi, and then they broadcast an SSID that other people can connect to. Requires two radios per node.
I only have ten or fifteen people using it, but whatever.
But any further away than that...
@LottieVixen Establishing connections between the nodes is hard.
I need to make the sneakernet thing work.
@ajroach42 @LottieVixen Do you have to have all the media as one time use?
'cause if you can bundle all the smaller files together and not worry about latency then you could use something like the "packet" in Cuba but extend it with local wireless nodes
Large lump of data gets passed around local node operators who make it available over wireless to their areas
I am entirely unfamiliar with Cuba's packet, but what you're describing sounds a lot like a traditional sneakernet, yeah?
I hadn't really considered just straight mailing a portable hard drive or flash drive around between node operators. That'd be a great way to get large files distributed.
@ajroach42 @LottieVixen It's very much like that, but on a larger scale
They call it El Paquete Semanal, every week a hard disk filled with stuff (films, music, TV, etc.) arrives in Cuba (somehow), and then it gets copied and sold on to a bunch of people
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_Paquete_Semanal
https://www.vox.com/2015/9/21/9352095/netflix-cuba-paquete-internet
@ajroach42 @LottieVixen I'm reminded of a Tanenbaum quote: "Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway."
Which can probably now be updated to "Never underestimate the bandwidth of a FedEx box full of hard drives"
Drives have gotten so cheap, too. You can get a 256GB flash stick from microcenter for like sixty bucks.
Amazon has 4TB external drives for ~$100.
My brain is all a flutter.
@ajroach42 @LottieVixen Oh damnit, as with everything there's an XKCD (what if) for it https://what-if.xkcd.com/31/
@ajroach42 @LottieVixen Back of the envelope calculations, if you use a FedEx small box and 256GB SD cards you'll have total capacity of over 450TB
It'd cost over a quarter of a million dollars but that should be enough capacity for it
And if not they're starting to make 1TB SD cards
@LottieVixen @ajroach42 I mean, compared to running underwater fibre lines across an ocean that's a bargain really
Our experiments so far have all been with a file size limit of 50kb.
That's 9,000,000,000 posts.
@ajroach42 @LottieVixen ah that's barely 1 post each for every man, woman, and child on the planet
Might need two
@troubleMoney @LottieVixen
Fascinating.
But yeah, that'd work just as well as any other form of data transfer. No reason we can't mail a copy of our monthly archive between operators to cover the big distances.
I'm down.
Now I wanna work on that again.