On Thu, 6 Oct 2011, Yaron wrote: > On Wed, 5 Oct 2011, Jason Hsu wrote: > >> This has me wondering how soon it will be before operating systems >> require a Blu-Ray disc simply because the 4.7 GB of a DVD is too small. >> I think there is a slight chance that Windows 8 will require a Blu Ray. >> If it doesn't, I think Windows 9 will. > > I think it's more likely they'll require a live internet connection, > like the latest Mac OS X did. If they insist on physical media I think > they can go to multiple DVDs or heck, thumbdrives. Right -- multiple DVDs, just like we used to install software using multiple floppies. That was very common. We also used to do backups onto 50 floppies, and other crazy, painful things. Ubuntu still installs from a CD, but that doesn't really tell you how big it is because as soon as it finds the network it starts downloading stuff, or at least I thought it was doing that. Then I complete the installation by updating, which downloads many MBs of data, and finally running synaptic to install loads more. If an OS installs from DVD instead of from CD, that probably just means that it was too big for CD, but it could also mean that DVDs are now cheaper than CDs in bulk (are they? I don't know.) If it's a size problem, then the disk has to be more than about 800 MB, but a DVD is about six times that size. So moving from CD to DVD doesn't mean that the DVD will soon be too small. An IT friend of mine told me that he read that Microsoft makes a lot of money from all the ads they put on their install disks -- all the extra crap it spews onto the desktop and the links it builds into IE. He said they get so much from that junk that they can afford to pay Dell to install their OS on Dell machines instead of having Dell pay them. I haven't looked it up, but it sounded credible. They also make money later by selling upgrades to Windows addicts^H^H^H^H^H^H^Husers. (The young people might not get the ancient "^H" joke.) Mike