On Wed, Nov 26, 2008 at 11:40:38AM -0800, Kelly Clowers wrote: > On Wed, Nov 26, 2008 at 10:42, lee <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > That shouldn't be there in the first place. You end up with hundreds > > of megabytes of totally useless thumbnails > > They are not useless, they keep thumbnail display times reasonable. > I have used programs that generate thumbnails on the fly, per session > and it is slow and annoying.
Ok, if it helps you, it's good to have them. But then, using them should be an option, and I would want to be asked if I wanted to use that option. Dumping an unlimited amount of files into a hidden directory, eating up an unlimited amount of disk space without even telling the user about it is retarded software design. > They are needed to keep display times reasonable. All programs > should use the same cache, and many do. If you have a favorite > program that does not use ~/.thumbnails, you should probably > file a bug. How am I supposed to know which programs would use a cache and where the cache is when they don't even tell me? These files remain there indefinitely if I don't delete them myself, no matter if I'm using them or not. Why didn't they make it so that the user can specify how much disk space can be used for thumbnails? > However, I am not that worried about it. Disk space is abundant and > cheap, That isn't true. I already have two 300GB SATA disks in software raid-1, and there are only two more SATA devices I could connect without buying another SATA controller. One of that will be a DVD drive, so I could connect only one more disk. But that is not an option because I won't put data on a single disk anymore, it has to be at least raid-1. I've seen too many disks failing in too short time for not to use raid. --- I also can't just add another disk and change it to raid-5 (even if I could still get one more of the same disk): I would have to copy the data somewhere to change from raid-1 to raid-5, but I don't have anything to copy it to. I happened to just look at SATA controllers: There are cheap, crappy cards and more expensive ones that are also raid controllers. I don't want the crappy cards (The SATA disks are still slow compared to the SCSI disks I have, and the SCSI disks are years older than the SATAs.), so I would have to spend $270 for the 8-port raid card and then at least $220 to get two SATA disks. You can get 1GB SATA disks for about $100, but what's the quality of those? Are they fast and reliable? --- On a side note, there are only so many PCI ports on the board. Plugging many of them with SATA controllers is not the way to go, so even if I wouldn't go for an SATA raid controller, any additional SATA controller should support at least 8 devices. My SCSI controller does 32 or so ... So if you want more than 2 relatively cheap disks and a DVD drive, you're looking at about at least $500 for the controller and two disks. You probably don't really need that much space, but it's questionable if it's worthwhile to buy 500GB disks for more than 1/2 the price of a 1TB disk. That is still relatively cheap compared to what disks used to cost not long ago. A single disk is also relatively cheap. But to have a fast, reliable and flexible storage system giving you a lot (by todays standards) of disk space is *not* cheap. Backing up the data is another problem. That isn't cheap, either, and it gets more expensive the more data you need to back up. Imho it's better to design software so that it doesn't waste resources. I probably haven't used 99.99% of the 350MB thumbnails in more than two years, but now I'm supposed to spend $500+ on getting new disks for crap like that? I don't think so. But if you want to give me the money for it, you're welcome :) As to setting up cron jobs to automatically delete data, I'm very reluctant to do that. If something goes wrong, the job might delete data I don't want it to delete. Something as simple as filenames containing spaces can already make it go horribly wrong. -- "Don't let them, daddy. Don't let the stars run down." http://adin.dyndns.org/adin/TheLastQ.htm -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
