> Imagine a future with extreme local
> data storage -- whatever high number you choose, at some point you'll
> pass a threshold where you can store the N most likely pages you'll
> *ever* visit offline.
>
> So imagine stopping by 7-11 and picking up "this week's Web" like you
> would a 10-minute phone card... or the metaphor of charging up
> your phone with bits as you do electrons: a honkin' Li-Ion battery
> caches a 10 hour stream of electrons (talk time), so could your
> sugarcube hologram cache a 10 hour stream of most possible data you'd
> want.
If you're suggesting that we'll trade bandwidth for storage, I don't
think that we'll see such an extreme, except maybe when in the field
with a slower connection. Yes, buy the card, but more importantly,
never throw anything away once you've seen it, and even more
importantly, attempt to have the most up-to-date guess about the N
most likely pages you'll visit, and have those cached before you ask
for them. Idle bandwidth is wasted bandwidth.
I barely started plinking with this using overnight wget & instantly
deleting what I had grabbed, so that it would be in my squid cache
when my browser looked at it next, but either the web is still very
backwards with its expiry information, or I was unlucky. Even today,
I have enough disk for something like a shallow traversal of the links
off of the most recent page grabbed, but it would need a real traffic
shaper to not get in my way.
-- Karl Anderson kra@monkey.org <URL:http://www.pobox.com/~kra/>