space, and what to do with it

I've been thinking recently about how very few people have been talking about Google's Gmail's generous gig of storage (how's that for alliteration) and then tonight Curtis posts about Yahoo's decision to increase email storage for its subscribers to 100 Mb. As a Yahoo user I'm totally psyched, since I prefer to file away emails rather than delete things I may someday need.

According to Matthew Kirschenbaum (and follow his link to Mark Bernstein's blog) we're on the threshold of not needing to ever delete files to make space -- storage costs are decreasing so rapidly, and the technology for compacting storage is improving so rapidly.


A somewhat related note: I was thrilled when I first read Bernstein's blog a week or two ago, via the link above -- Tinderbox sounds like just what I'm looking for. But so far it's only for Mac. Sigh. (and no, I'm not converting.)

I'm in the process of looking at notetaking/bibliographic/idea sorting software -- my copy of Endnote is way out of date, and it doesn't really do everything I want it to anyway. I'm considering Citation or Biblioscape. (There's also Noteworthy). What I miss is the old SquareNote (link is to the current version which doesn't work under XP). It was a really fabulous DOS program which I used from 1991 until 1999 or so, and even then sporadically until I got my XP machine. It was compact (fit on a 3 1/4" floppy), intuitive (index card-like design), and did a fabulous job of keeping track of references, notes, ideas, quotes, bibliography, etc. It didn't generate works cited lists etc like Endnote -- but it did a much better job of managing project ideas etc. I just hate the idea of needing to use two or three different systems to keep track of my stuff: bibliographic software to manage sources, notetaking software for ideas/notes, perhaps something separate on my Palm. If anyone else could possibly care about all this, here's a good page with links to reviews of different things useful to writers & researchers.