I'll admit it. I'm a prolific downloader. There, I've confessed. Actually, I've another confession. I'm also a hoarder of data. I don't delete much. In fact, I've kept just about everything I've ever downloaded since I started on the Internet almost 15 years ago, so that mean I have a lot of files, from Acrobat manuals for different things to software installers.

A lot of this is more useful than it sounds. I've lost track of the number of times when a particular update, file, or software package that I have squirreled on one of my file servers has saved my life, or at the very least a significant amount of time. There's nothing worse than realizing that you need a download from the Internet in order to actually access the Internet...

So I download updates and software and everything else. My biggest concern though isn't how long it takes to download or how much storage it takes. My file servers have a terabyte each, but disks are cheap and easy to install, and with Linux, so easy to share too.

None of this matters. What does matter is the amount of time I spend each month organizing and filing it all away. See as a hoarder, I'm also terribly organized. I don't use search tools or catalogs; I just have a nice effective system for organizing files that makes them easy to find.

The problem is during those monthly filing runs I spend more than 90% of my time trying to actually work out what it is I've downloaded. I'm unstuffing, unzipping, or untarring files just to find out what the contents are so I can rename the file and then move it into its final resting place.

Why do I have to do this? Because a large number of the companies and individuals who put their files up on the Internet for download think only about their little world. Let's take a product close to my heart as an example. Go to Perl.com to download the latest copy of Perl. When you download the latest version the file is called stable.tar.gz. Three weeks later, just what exactly does stable.tar.gz contain?

To find out, I have to open it up. Even if I remember that it's Perl, being organized, I like to know which version of Perl it is. Again, I have to open it up to find out. Why isn't it simply called perl-5.8.5.tar.gz? Sheesh, this is the source material for a programming language, and the Web site and deployment is run by programmers. Can't they sort it out so that when you click on stable.tar.gz it downloads a correctly named file?

Really, am I asking too much?

Opening up an archive is the easy part. Some file names and types need to be opened up before I can find out what they are. Download a sample chapter from most publisher sites and the filename will be Ch09.pdf. Chapter 9 of what? Okay, some titles are a bit long, but even a shortened or compressed version of the title like Mastering Perl Ch09.pdf would be an improvement.

Updates can be similar. How about v1.11.exe? Some of these applications I don't want to run. Some of them install stuff and don't give you the opportunity to stop them. Do these companies really think that their application is the only one with a v1.11 release?

At the end of the day we're living with an information glut, but dealing with all that information would be a heck of a lot easier if the producers of the information could give a bit more thought to what they call it.

I don't buy any of the explanations about "it's because of the content management system" or "we need to provide coherent links for that automated download."

Let's think about this in terms people can relate to. It takes me about three hours, but I'll assume I'm an exceptional case. Let's assume I'm not the only person experiencing this problem. How many hours are being wasted by other people doing the same organizational filter each month?

If it takes an average person an hour and there are, worldwide, a million of us doing this a month, that's 12 million man hours a year wasted just on renaming downloaded files so that we can identify their contents.

That's almost six thousand years of work (assuming five days a week at eight hours a day) wasted every single year renaming files.

Is there any way I can get some payback for this bad, but easily fixable, practice?

These companies may save themselves a few minutes by not naming their files sensibly, but they waste a heck of a lot more of other people's time.