Director's Take
by Dave Hull

In 2004 Google announced their new email service, GMail. GMail would feature the same type of interface that Google users had come to know and love, including targeted advertising that keyed off of the text of a user’s email. Under this system, Google would programmatically scan the contents of your email messages and attempt to provide advertising in the sidebar that matched words in your email. For instance, say your roommate sends you an email reminding you to pick up hotdog buns for the weekend, Google might pick up on that and post advertisements for hotdog buns in the sidebar.

Privacy advocates went berserk, but ultimately lost because everyone knows that email is like a postcard. You do know that, right? There is no such thing as privacy when it comes to email. Unless you are using some type of encryption software to protect the contents of your messages, they can be read at many points along the path to their destination. Remember, email is like a postcard.

Though the privacy advocates didn’t like it, people loved GMail. When the service first started it was by invitation only. Having a GMail account became a bit of a status symbol for folks in the geek culture. GMail invites were even being sold on eBay.

Aside from the nice interface, the main attraction was a whopping one gigabyte (1GB) of storage space. At the time that was 250 times more space than Yahoo! offered their customers and 500 times as much as Hotmail offered. It was so much space, that the original GMail didn’t even have a delete button, instead everything was meant to be archived. Today, GMail boasts 2.5GB of storage per user. And if you’re a paying subscriber to Google Apps, you can get 25GB of storage.

How much is 1GB? A typical character on your computer screen requires a single byte (we’re talking ASCII not Unicode (Google it)) of storage space. A thousand such characters is called a kilobyte, a million is a megabyte and a billion is a gigabyte. Leo Tolstoy’s classically long winded "War and Peace" contains about 3.1 million characters, you could store that more than 640 times in your GMail account.

Why am I rambling on about GMail and it’s storage possibilities? Because the KU School of Architecture has a remarkably liberal standard of offering students 5GBs of storage space. It may not seem like much when you can go plunk down a few hundred bucks and walk out of the store with 500GBs of storage, but it’s more than double what GMail offers and it’s generous compared to what other departments are doing and comes with a backup and is accessible world wide.

But when you’re dealing with large files, even 5GB doesn’t last long and once you’ve maxed out your space, things may stop working or you may not be able to save your work. So how do you know when you’re getting close to your limit? The easiest way to find out is to double-click on the “My Computer” icon and type \\fscs\students in the address bar. You should see a list of folders, find the one that has your username and use the mouse to right-click on it, select properties. One of the items on the properties page will be the size of your folder.

Now that you know how much space you’re using, how can you reduce it? Start by emptying the recycle bin on the desktop. Next, delete anything you don’t need anymore. If you’re still close to your limit, move things off to an external hard drive or thumb drive, you can pick these up at various stores around town. A cheap thumb drive may run $30 or so for a couple gigabytes. For a few hundred bucks, you can purchase as much as a terabyte of storage space… that’s enough to hold Tolstoy’s "War and Peace" more than 322 thousand times.