Digital Convergence

Growing up with fiction, they talked about the great digital convergence as if it was some strange and amazing phenomenon.  And it really is.  As I write this, I'm transferring all my music to a new computer across the room using Team Viewer (because domain/non-domain file sharing is a pain and it's quicker).  It provides something we never thought possible.  After spending years working with UltraVNC, Symantec PCAnywhere, and Famatech Radmin, I find Teamviewer to be the best of the group.   

 

Teamviewer does what it's supposed to do, and works pretty darn good.  It also provides something Windows XP doesn't: a data transfer rate.  Windows data transfer has always perplexed me.  You would think it would transfer items between a computers in the order selected, but that is incorrect.  It generally picks up 2-3 of the last items, puts them first, and then transfers everything in whatever order it feels like.  That's not what I want when I transfer files.  I want to transfer files in a logical, repeatable pattern.  What happens if that transfer fails?  Then I have to go back and transfer individual folder after individual folder, looking for that one random file that was missed.  Eventually, (hours after I should have stopped looking) I find the point at which Windows quit transferring. 

Perfect example of XP transferring data weird: while copying this from Microsoft Word, paragraph 2 ended up first and paragraph 1 end up second.  Strange....

I guess I could also use DropBox, but that's only a 2GB limit.  Right now, I'm working on a 13 GB folder named A-D.  Before the digital age, my CD collection was around 200.  There's no telling where it is now, or where it would be if I hadn't lost a lot of it here and there.  The acquisition of data itself used to be important to me, now not so much.  I would acquire hundreds of gigs of music and movies, and never watch any of it.  Most of it is now gone from a purge several years back. 

I still burn CDs and DVDs for work fairly often, so that part of the old style of system isn't gone.  Moving pure digital sounds interesting, but there's too much proprietary stuff in the business world to go there.  I suppose you can go with straight off the shelf equipment like eGenuity does but I'm still not convinced that is the way to go.  I still have to reboot the SQL server every three or four days because something has gone funky and isn't working.  With any luck, I reboot a VeriFone Sapphire less than once every 4 months. 

There are tradeoffs and differences in all equipment, but as much as the digital convergence was sold as being a life changer, I'm not convinced yet.  Sure, it changes the way I do things.  But it's still the same things over and over again.  I may not spend as much time transfer files to disk and walking it across a hall, but I do spend just as much time installing and configuring the software.  Let's think...   13 GB of music would be roughly 3 DVDs at 4.7 GB per DVD.  That could be burned in approximately 10-15 minutes per DVD.  Including setup, we're talking one DVD worth of material transferred every 30 minutes or so.  In the last 30 minutes, I've also transferred 5 GB worth of data using TeamViewer.  Approximate time to completion jumps up to about 2 hours.  The only difference between me burning DVDs and transferring using TeamViewer is that I'm perfectly willing to work on other things (like writing this) while TeamViewer is transferring files.  I wouldn't be willing to do so while burning a DVD.  That's got to be something, right?