superterran dot com

Focusing on the Negative

Mon, 17 Jan 2011 23:29:44 -0600

It's not that things are so bad, it's that I ignore the bad and live in a delusion where it's always good. It's unhealthy, and on a night like this it's hard to ignore how thrown this mindset has me.

I've got this old employer who still stalks me. Bastards bought a TLD in my honor trying to besmirk me on the internet, I guess. One of them keeps IMing me on Yahoo! Messenger propositioning me for gay sex. He's not all gay for me, mind you - he just thinks I don't know who it is and one day i'll wake up gay, meet him in an ally-way and he can put a pic of me on my knees on the .com he keeps in my name. The next time I see him, I'm going to beat him until my knuckles collapse in to my fists. I know your reading this, too. Test me.

I'm not a violent person, it irks me... but geeze that burns me up. Think of how many people are trying to find me and end up hitting that stupid page? That's not all though, there's more...

Thrashed a friendship in March. It was a long time coming. I couldn't even stand the guy. Been that way since High School, but stupid me doesn't like confrontation so I kept putting up with him. Every week he'd show up at my house unannounced and crash land in my room over some girl. This went on for like a year and a half. The entire time, on the side, His girl kept texting and IMing me, and instead of doing the right thing and staying the fuck outta it, I couldn't keep well enough alone. Dude thought I loved her, but I didn't love her. Hell, I couldn't even stand her. Eww and gag reflex. Fucking users, the both of them; It's all about them. It was the same problem with her, I didn't listen to myself and take the path I knew was right. Instead, I just maintained and let it grow into a crazy rat king that was completely unmanageable. When it finally fell apart, I was so relieved. I went for a month grinning like an idiot, whistling Dixie. Eventually, I couldn't escape how badly I handled it all. All this guilt over two asshole losers that I never even liked. A couple of conversations, a 'dude listen, you gotta quit bugging me' and things would have turned out the way they should have. But I wasn't man enough to just say how I feel and tell them to get lost.

I don't feel like I have any outlets anymore. I spend so much time on Facebook playing quote-a-lyric and high-fiving my friends from high school that I might as well be a chat bot. Get this, I'm scared to post to my own blog! It's pathetic; It's like I gotta walk on egg shells here because I don't know who's reading it. I don't know what ammo I'm giving people, I don't know who I'll offend and what the future consequences are. This leads me to ignore this place, and when I do come to write something it's so safe and boring that I can't even bring myself to finish the post. So I spend what little free time I have on Reddit playing devils advocate to everything I read in the comments in a vain attempt to prove how smart I am to the universe. I keep trying to conjure a decent defense of Christianity from atheists, whom I agree with completely. Like my defense of the undefendable makes me more enlightened than those who think like I do. It's stupid, and I probably look like an idiot in the process.

Speaking of Christians, I'm surrounded by them. It's not that I dislike Christians or anything; that's not it. It's just I'm alone in the woods. They are so flamboyant with their beliefs, and so offended by mine. It makes me sick when I think about what these people would say to me in a frank discussion, what they think of me deep down. Disheartening. At work, I've got several church based projects on my desk; some of it's good work that I'm proud to support. Other stuff should give me pause. Do I speak up in meetings and say 'you know, I don't know if I can support this. This goes against my core values.' No. I just rationalize it to myself, just think on it until I feel like I could defend it if ever prompted to do so. If I'm not going to call shenanigans over it, who will? This isn't the only dimension of which i'm alone in the fold. I do some relatively technical work that nobody around me really understands. They get it in a strategic sense, but their eyes gloss over when I try to have a real discussion about it. I moved my 'New Features and Strategy' whiteboard from my studio to my house, because I'm the only one who understands it. Every time I have a discussion about it, it devolves in to a marketing debate. Not even a good marketing debate... it's just... ugh

As long as we're on the topic of work, It kills me how little people know about their profession. In the last year, we've had a high turn-over. It always boils down to the same thing, these people don't know the first thing about what we hired them for. I got this one guy who bills himself as a digital media and video production expert, pays his mortgage with it. Has for like two decades. Dude will not stop calling the AVI container a codec, and when I ask him 'what specifically do you need these files encoded as?' he says 'Microsoft AVI'. Fucking Microsoft AVI.

Again, there's good. More good than bad, in fact. But I've got to drop this notion that if I ignore the bad it'll go away. I've got to embrace this notion that for the bad to go away, I've got to deal with it. I've got to get over this bullshit about how I can't be me and be successful at the same time. Like the front I'm putting on is working so well. It's a stupid delusion, and it holds me back. So, I'm reclaiming this place and planting my flag. I'm back.

Life after death?

Thu, 13 Jan 2011 02:56:35 -0600

I believe that there isn't any type of life after death. In short, I think that after I die, my life has ended and that's that. it's not recoverable, I don't transcend to another plane of existence, or go to heaven/hell. I surmise that what I consider consciousness is localized to my brain, and once that breaks down, i'm lost forever.

I always hear people use the rationality 'well, matter in the universe isn't created or destroyed, it just changes form' like that somehow makes a cosmic sense. First, I would wager that we'll discover that matter is routinely created and destroyed in the universe, and even if it doesn't, that changing state mess is still a pretty big deal. If i take my MacBook and super-heat it until it turns in to some kind of plasma, It shouldn't be much of a shock that i've lost all my data and my laptop. Pretty irrecoverable, I should imagine. Rather or not the constituent atoms and particles still exist isn't the issue. The issue is rather or not they're arranged in such a way where i can check my email and use iTunes. I know as humans we feel like these natural laws don't apply to us, but I'm pretty sure they do.

I also don't consider reincarnation as worthy of my consideration. Even if my understanding of the mind so wrong that it does happen, I still don't see why I should care. I don't remember any of my 'past lives', and there's no indication at all that I'll remember this life in my next one. It all seems pretty fishy to me.

I prefer the notion of a finite life as defined between birth and death to any of the alternatives that I'm aware of. I could get poetical about it, but the honest truth is that living forever in any of the religious frameworks wouldn't be much of a life. The faustian bargin of trading eternal life for eternal worship just seems sadistic and inherently evil to me, and I don't want any part of it.

I don't want to spend all eternity brown nosing a god, or being tortured for my petty earth sins. If god and an afterlife does exist, I vote that we use our science and technology to rise up an conquer him and take over his realm. Maybe heaven would seem more appealing to me if it was a democratically ran republic with strong civil liberties. Maybe I should just get over my instinctual fear of death and quit trying to rationalize my denial of the obvious with myths about an invisible paradise in the sky.

My dabblings in SEO

Wed, 22 Dec 2010 01:00:21 -0600

As some guy who's looking to build my career in website development, I'm constantly coding new things and adding bits to the pile. I've got a ton of websites under my belt; I just cleaned up my Desktop PC (my baby, sorry all my macs) and found backups of this very site dating back to 2002. In that time, I went from constructing websites in netscape composer (aka what most people do now in Dreamweaver), hard-coding html sites, to building html templates for complicated content management systems and building plugins for said cms'. Finally, in it's 9th year, I'm using (for totally selfless reasons, too) a cms of my own design, pretty much written entirely by these ten fingers.

So it goes without saying that I have some experience with web traffic. Believe it or not, at this site's apogee, ~2008, this site could rely on a good 30k uniques per month. Peanuts, I know. Mostly people searching for rants about Kim Komando and PETA, and pics of Lala and Morgan Webb nude. Today, after being sucked dry by SEO whores after I dropped the domain for a spell, it's a lonely world in these parts of the internet. Seriously, you're the only traffic I get. btw please be sure to click on things before you leave!

So how does one drive traffic? I consider this one of my weaker subjects, so I'm working on some projects to help improve my standing in the field. but just as someone who's dabbled, I think I have a working grasp on the basics. So, let's go down the list.

Organic Traffic. This is the name of the game. Your goal should be to have people come to your website because people gravitate to your content. I'm convinced that there is an artistry of knowing what it is that people are looking to consume, packaging it, and placing it in an obvious place. With blogs (like this) it's all about writing unique content about (which this isn't, sorry me) and making it easily digestible. With e Commerce sites, it's about having stuff people want, at competitive prices, showing up in places people use often. Google Product Search is wonderful for that, and it's easy to work with.

Build Sites about things. Do you have a popular product? Then chances are your website will reflect that products popularity. Do you have a favorite TV show? So does everyone else. For some, their favorite is also yours. There's a couple of ways you can take this. I find that community sites surrounding a central topic are pretty popular. Remember, all good content online is searchable. So, your forum community about babylon 5 will be a resource for all who care about the intricacies of Narn/Centari politics.

Understanding Page Rank. I don't. The Google Page Rank algorithm, as with all the other fancy bits of magic that power the clouds, is a spaghetti jumble of mess that nobody - I repeat NOBODY - actually understands. Probably the secret of mastering this chi is to first admit that you don't understand it. At best I have a few solid notions that make sense. Some study it seriously and have a more clear causal understanding, but here are the fundamentals as I understand them. PageRank essentially works by measuring how many other sites link to you, how popular those sites are, and weighing that against other sites with similar content. So what you want to do, is to have links to your site on popular webpages. I find that Search Engines value sites who play nice. Robots.txt, Sitemap, and registering your site for all sorts of bells and whistles will also help.

Play well with others. I've got an RSS feed, I ping a ton of sites when my blog is updated, I drop links to my blog online, I use fancy urls, I don't duplicate my content... my code could validate if i massaged it, but it's good enough. It renders in the right browsers, I use social networks but I don't splater the site with knobs and widgets. All this so hopefully i'll get some karma for not snooping as low as my competitors. That might not work in the short term, but I think it's a better long term strategy.

Well, this post is already uncomfortably long. I'll return to the subject down the road. I've been using some new toys to let me get a better handle on how the traffic works across my sites. I've also started cultivating some properties just so i can study cause and effect of trying to get page views. It's really one of the most important aspects to this business and the more you understand it the better off you'll be. So stay tuned to watch me figure it out!

Shut up about iTunes 10

Sat, 27 Nov 2010 01:00:38 -0600

So, iTunes 10 was released recently, and the internet is in an uproar at how pedestrian an update it was. The logic, initally, was that as it's an update to it's tenth release, th e only proper way to honor such longevity was a total rewrite. Since the begining, anyone with ipods, iphones had to use iTunes to transfer their data to their devices; music, movies, tv shows, app backups, etc. The iOS devices are becoming so hugely popular that iTunes has become woefully inadequate to handle it all. So everyone was super-hoping that version 10 would be something special.

Personally, i think Apple's update was fitting, given the direction they've taken as of late. You see, Apple seems to be diving head first in to the streaming content market, trying to get away from giving people digital copies of their media. We see, with their new Apple TV, that they have switched to a rental model for tv and movie content. It's no secret that Google is brewing some monopoly busting cloud music service (but probably all kinds of media), and Apple has already started working on fanciful ways to make all your digital media evaporate up to the cloud.

Streaming media makes sense for everyone. The DRM actually works, you have all sorts of problems you can eliminate like hard drives, managing so many files, seperating your streaming and local media, you can quit managing local (offline) experiences and just not support them. you can start getting very accurate usage statistics, and best of all - everyone on your platform is paying their fair share. And, Apple can fully support the shady piracy scene by Approving the VLC app. VLC, a truely cross platform univesal media player, sews it up for the rest of us. Anyone consuming pirated good would have be crazy to get it from Apple. They're getting it from other sources, and it's probably stuff apple doesn't carry anyways.thus - apple doesn't really see the problem.

So, with this push in to streaming media, we can see the need for an iTunes app decrease dramatically. Movies, TV shows are streaming. iTunes is still makes sense to manage the music library on the phone, but i bet they'll end up restricting iTune's involvement with your phone to that, and maybe even delegate those features to streaming too - just for unity across the product line (Apple's favorite tune). So, now we're just down to device management features, right? Which they could roll into it's own application and throw in the Utilities folder. Not to say it'll be worn out by use - I think it's criminal to expect people to manage a phone, or any wireless device, from a computer program like iTunes or Nokia's Ovi Store. Maybe Android has spoiled me, but the only program I use to manage my phone is my web browser. I think that's the direction apple's going too.

If you notice, as a music player, iTunes is pretty wonderful. I know I really enjoy it. I've tried to replace it with something more flashy, but alas there isn't anything as good as iTunes on both Mac or Windows. Linux doesn't count, as Amarock suits me there. So, like with so many other reasons, Apple wins by default. So, I thin k we'll be seeing Apple withdrawing most of the bloat from iTunes and placing it in out-of-the-way places nobody will trip over, and restoring iTunes to it's mp3/acc managing glory. And that's why they released version 10 like they did. So shut up about it.

Stupid MOTO Cliq XT

Sat, 20 Nov 2010 01:00:31 -0600

Can't get enough of capitalizing MOTO. so awesome. Anyways, is there no end to my suffering? As a small town ATT user, I'm forced to go elsewhere for my android fix. at least was the case many months ago when I grabbed this shiny new t-mobile phone on craigslist. Balancing price and availability, and after a few google searches, i made the plunge and bought a very slim, sexy phone with very mediocre specs.

Despite it's shortcomings, it's actually a not-terrible phone. sometimes laggy, plagued with silly bugs, the woefully mediocre MOTOBLUR is a blemish on android - these critiques are all true. Yes, it's currently rocking Android 1.5. Sure, for years motorola has been promising an update to 2.1; an upgrade they've famously mishandled and will probably end up being vaporware. Treading dangerously close to Duke Nukem Forever territory.

You can get a sense of the frustration when you read the offical forums. Hundreds of pages of angry cliq owners, me included, bitching about them dragging their heels. My understanding is that it's pretty much totally done, the entire hold-up is over some official driver to some chipset.but who knows.

Recently, Mark - one of the official forum moderators - has alluded to the release happening over his vacation, and even subtly dropped a date - september 18th, which according to one of my browser tabs, makes some sort of cosmic sense. translation? could happen in a few days. We've been burned before, though. Remember, it felt like things were moving at a snails pace when MOTO was promising it would be done by the end of Q2. Now we're beating Q4's door down. Will it slip to Q1 2011? Will they just scrap the whole thing? Only time will tell. Until then, and hell - even afterwards, kindly quit buying motorola phones.

Do you know the real irony? if you read the discussion happening on the moto owners forums, there seems to be an 11th hour rally. folks thinking MOTO, the folks who brought you the no details non-update of 'we decided not to release it now', will somehow find it in their hearts to upgrade this monstrous pain in their neck to 2.2. Listen folks, there will be no Froyo on their Cliq XT. At this point, we'll probably never even see eclair. Hell, I'd feel slightly better if I could get 1.6!! Oh sigh.

First Post!

Sat, 17 Jul 2010 01:00:34 -0500

So, a long long time ago i let this domain lapse and go off in to auction. It was bought by some SEO whores and pimped out as a mock computer repair site. All links turning tricks for PPC money. After awhile, as superterran.com's pagerank plumeted, the evil owners relinquished control of this wonderful top-level domain. Lately I found out it was open again, purchased it, and pointed it to my humble web server.

See folks, lately, yours truely has been rolling his own site framework. A PHP/mySQL Content Management System type thing. Nothing fancy, just a first-shot framework to enable lazy developers to quickly build out complex sites. So, when you look around and say 'what's this built in?' it's that. I feel like, if you are currently writing a CMS, and you decide to build yourself a website, you gotta use your own code. So that's why this isn't running WordPress. If you're going to be coding on it anyways, you might as well be improving your products.

Maybe I miss blogging, perhaps the company I half-run has no SEO mojo and I'm going all autin powers on the problem. Who knows, but here it starts. So, I fully expect that this new stab at superterran.com will excede in every way superterran.com 1.0. It's going to be epic. I learned a lot of lessons about being popular on the internet - both from a technical and an authors perspective. Anyways, I'm sure there's tons left to learn, and even more to implement, but as I learn the best practices and develop the code to elevate this site to stardom, i can let the rest of superterran industries ride in it's coat tails.

Expect more soon; a comment system forth-coming, i'm going to bridge this with DHatcher.com and start a personal project space. It'll be pretty interesting. I'm spending so much time behind a text editor lately, it only makes sense that I start showing it off. It'll make me feel like i've gotta make it look cool.

Walt Mossberg on the Yahoo!Microsoft Deal

Tue, 18 Aug 2009 17:49:41 -0500

Maybe if you hear it from the only technology journalist in the world, youll finally believe it.

Who likes Stargate SG-1?

Sat, 08 Aug 2009 02:52:33 -0500

Since my departure of the internet back in February, Ive managed to knock back a few of TVs most discerning series. Some of which barely deserve mentioning Kings, for example, is at best mediocre. Hardly worth the two sentences ive dedicated to it in this post.

Still, some are the very textbook definition of good TV. The very reason TV exists in the first place. One show, in particular, is probably the best military sci-fi series ever written. Im not even talking about Star Trek DS9. I, of course, am talking about StargateSG-1.

For those who have never seen SG-1, its a military sci-fi epic about a command in the Cheyanae Mountain Complex that conducts ongoing missions to the various reaches of the galaxy through a device, called a Stargate, that creates wormholes to other stargates all throughout the galaxy. Throught the series, humanity becomes more adept at reverse engineering alien technologies and by the end of the series has a whole mess of starships and could pretty much give the NX-o1 a run for her money.

SG-1, the flagship team of Stargate Command, is by all accounts a group of heroes and geniuses who manage, time and again, to thwart the evils of the plethora of big bads occupying the two galaxies. For most of the series, the big evil were a group of parasitic brain snatchers called the Goauld. They were the rulers of this galaxy, who for thousands of years ran the galaxy masquerading as egyptian gods by use of advanced alien technologies.

These advanced ancient technologies include pretty much every single sci-fistaple. Vast starships, transporters, rail guns, the stargate system, control over life and death. The only glaring omission was the personal communications device, giving SG-1 a clear and decisive advantage where ever they met a superior force.

In the SG-1 universe, the walkie talkie has an effective range of 1AU. Suprisingly enough, no other alien species thought that two-way communication was useful in wartime. Sure, the villains could talk to one another across the galaxy, but SG-1 could literally take out a whole mothership of people with absolutely no fear of anyone ever being alerted.

Now, the Goauld, as mentioned previously, were parasites. They literally break the skin of human beings and wrap themselves around the spinal cord and take the human host body as their own. By use of advanced ancient technology (literally, the ancients are a race in the SG1 Universe) the bastard goauld managed to trick the human and Jafaa population of the galaxy in to believing that they were gods.

Out of fear of angering a real and actual god, the Goauld had a stranglehold on the galaxy until SG-1s Samantha Carter and Daniel Jackson managed to figure out how the gate system works. This was not a good thing for the Goauld.

You see, the Goauld were in a perpetual state of war with each other, fighting over resources and control over populations. Collectively, they were called the System Lords, and the twelve or so of them made up of the majority of military force of our galaxy.

So, once SG-1, commanded by Cornal Jack ONeall, with archeologist super-genius Daniel Jackson, Science super-duper genius Samantha Carter, and this alien dude named Tealc who could totally kick your ass, got their bearing straight by the third episode, they went on an eight season crucade to rid the galaxy of these serpent bastards. Which they did, almost like it wasnt any trouble at all.

Of course, anyone reading this has probably went to wikipedia and realized that SG-1, infact, was a 10 season show. This is of course true, the last two seasons being dedicated to what happens when you have a power vaccumn?. As it turns out, you get invaded by even more egocentric super-beings who try and take up the slack. And sure, its not like the original cast remained together the entire run of the season. Michael Shanks was fired by season 7, and brought back sometime during season 8.

Richard Dean Anderson and Don Davis didnt renew his contract for season 10. This caused the Sci-Fi channel, who started airing SG-1 in season 9, to add several new characters to the series. Two front liners, Camron Mitchell and Vala Marand, were both cast members in the just canceled show Farscape. General Hammond was replaced by a different talking head with exactly the same dialogue.

The heart of the show is about freedom of choice. The whole show was an allegory for religion and atheism. All the villians are trying to force a false belief system on the galactic masses, and its only SG-1 and a handful of less-than-useful allies that maintain that the gods are false.

Throughout the show they explore how people are sucked in, mostly be fear and persecution, and how they finally rise up against evil. The two major villians in the show, the Gouald and the Ori, were both proclaiming themselves as the only true gods. The Gouald were just in it for the spoils and security, the Ori were actually feeding on the soul of their worshipers.

The Ori Priors passed around The Book of Origin, which was an analogue of The Holy Bible, and twisted its moral homilies to suit their sinister purpose. The Ori would show up, display their incredible power, and then demand the peoples worship or else they would kill them all. If they declined, they would do something more drastic like set a plauge on the people. The only cure for the plauge, until SG-1 engineered one two episodes later, was to believe that the Ori were gods.

This led to some very interesting scenes where the good guys would try to convince the simple townsfolk to revolt against their gods. More successful than not, it was just this kind of grass roots soul saving that systematically defeated the Gouald and totally ruined the Oris shit.

Meanwhile, back on the planet Earth, contrary to SG-1s constant good-doing in the name of truth and justice, the United States spent most of the series keeping the stargate project a secret from everyone. The Russians were the first to figure out what happened, and eventually the US came clean to the members of the G8, and managed to keep the project hidden from everyone else.

The SGC managed to thrart no less than a dozen attempts to destroy the planet without so much as blowing a single cover story. Of course, it didnt fool France and China thus their eventual cooperation but the irony of deception from an organization hellbent on fixing all the evils in the universe isnt lost on the writers.

Which pretty much leads us to the reason why this show was so good. The shows an awfully lot like Star Trek: The Next Generation. The entire series is optimistic and touts the inherent greatness of humanity. Hell, even the away teams are in groups of four. The only difference is that in the Trek universe, the humans are on the top of the food chain, and in the SG-1 universe were on the bottom. Of course, by the end of the series, were on the top, and the only real diffence between the two series is that the captain of the starships in SG-1 are corporals instead of captains. But i digress.

I dont know how id rank it in the likes of DS9 and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I would probably put it in my top five, and I wouldnt be surprised if the stargateuniverse doesnt go the distance and eventually become my all time favorite. Its that good.

Finally! A Joke I Can Remember

Fri, 06 Feb 2009 02:53:26 -0600

A SQL Query walks in to a bar and sees two tables. It goes up to them and says May I Join you?

Disk Compression and You

Thu, 22 Jan 2009 03:01:03 -0600

Disk Compression is the process of running all of your files through a compression algorithm for storage, and a decompression algorithm for usage.

The idea is that you free up space on your hard drive by compressing all of the files, and the trade-off is that you decompress the file when using it, which takes up CPU resources.

http://www.vistarewired.com/2008/03/10/
free-up-hard-drive-space-without-deleting-a-single-file-xp-and-vista

Honestly. I was unaware that MS Double Space was still around. Apparently it is, and Ive used the original versions, and I know enough about file compression to reliably say the following.

Only idiots use disk compression. End of story. Youve got to be some kind of dumbass to compress all of the files on your hard drive in a vein attempt to recover a gigabyte. Heres a few real good reasons why Im right:

Large files, i.e. Movies, Pictures and Music, are already compressed. The compression techniques employed are, in all likelihood, better than the ones Microsoft uses. At best, you wont see any space saving with these files, and at worst it could take up even more space. (You see, it takes space to mark files as compressed, and in some instances to store checksums so they can be decompressed in the future. Since the file cant be compressed any further, its possible that by doing it over again could actually increase your file sizes. Might only be a few kb, but youre worried enough to compress the entire disk) Got a file, and its missing a few kb somewhere in the file? Its probably not the end of the world. Got a compressed file thats missing a few kb somewhere in the file? Well, you cant decompress it because in a compressed file, all the data is important for file integrity. So, your screwed. Performance hit. Heres what you do. Find your my documents folder, and compress it using Microsofts Compressed Folders. See how long that took? Depending on the size, you probably said two hours! and clicked cancel. Yes, compressing saves space but requires processer resources. It might be a small performance hit on a file-per-file basis, but its those large files you use all the time, and those files are going to make your slow, storage deprived machine feel like its even older than it actually is.

Back in the day, they called it Double Space because it could theoretically double the amount of data it could store on your disk. Back in the day, just about everything was a derivative of a text file. Text files are extremely simplistic and could be easily compressed and decompressed at like a 2:1 ratio. I used to use it because I had a 20MB disk, and even back in 1992, there wasnt shit you could do with 20 megabytes of storage.

Your Run of the mill Microsoft Word Document is somewhat more complex, and thus less compressable. Most binaries take up so much resources by themselves that adding compressing/decompressing the binary and support files on the fly would ruin your hopes of ever getting anything done.

Practically everything on the internet is already compressed, and theres only so much compression you can do without a transcoder. And Volume Compression might be many things, but its no transcoder (a transcoder takes data in one format, and changes it to another format. i.e. A 8 GB DVD Movie is compressed to a 700MB Divx File with a Transcoder. Both formats, by virtue of being optimized for size are already as compressed as they can possibly get. By changing a video from a lossless to a lossy format, you forego quality for size, and thus the reference the process can take several hours).

I know what your thinking. But Doug! Ive got a 80GB hard drive, and im down to my last 60MB, and if I run this disk compression thing itll give me like an extra gig! I need that extra gig!

Look. Dont be a dumbass. When youre running out of space, you get more. Hard drives are insanely cheap, and a data migration isnt all that hard to do. Most drives come with the software on a CD, just pop the sucker in and if youre half-way competent, click next and wait.

If your below the all-important 10% free disk space barrier, your performance is already suffering. The goal should be to clean it or upgrade it, not to pile on on-the-fly compression/decompression to the mix. Disk Compression is a bad idea. Its been that way for like a decade now. For the life of me, I cant understand why someone would recommend it.