CD

A colleague asked if I could help burn a data folder into a CD. “Sure,” I said. The folder contained materials for a workshop the department is organizing, and the organizing committee thought that it would be good idea to give each participant a CD. When I went to the computer, I saw that the folder was just about 6MB-large. Since a typical CD can nominally store between 650MB and 700MB of data, I thought that it would be a huge waste to burn a CD to only use less than one percent of the storage capacity.

Instead, I suggested simply providing the materials on every computer during the workshop. Participants could then either save the materials onto their own USB flash drive or email them to themselves. This way we could save a lot of CDs. Everybody nowadays walks around with a USB flash drive with at least 1GB of storage anyway. With ever bigger and cheaper hard disk drives and USB flash drives, broadband Internet connection and web-based email services like Gmail offering free online storage in the Gigabytes, CDs are fast going the way of the 2.5-inch floppy.

However, the committee insisted. They wanted to give the fee-paying workshop participants something concrete to take home with, other than a folder full of course materials. So I burned the CD.

During our conference last April, a few participants actually went around room to room collecting hard copies of the presented papers even though they were already given to everyone in a CD. There were more than sixty papers presented at the conference. I doubt that they read all those papers during the conference. I doubt that they actually took all those papers home either.