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To: RadioAstronomer

Oh no!

A petabyte of storage is more than I can comprehend, but I do have well over a terabyte.....


6 posted on 04/04/2005 9:49:22 AM PDT by Ernest_at_the_Beach (This tagline no longer operative....floated away in the flood of 2005 ,)
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To: Ernest_at_the_Beach

Terrabyte used to be huge! Now it is commonplace. What will computers look like in 2020 I wonder.


10 posted on 04/04/2005 9:56:11 AM PDT by RadioAstronomer
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To: Ernest_at_the_Beach
A petabyte of storage is more than I can comprehend, but I do have well over a terabyte.....

However, a second petabyte derive could record every moment of life, in high-quality video, of the oldest person on earth.

Eventually petabyte drives could be used in place of memory. Imagine having your ENTIRE life time indexed and recorded ?

I would think that you could start digitizing human minds with one of these things as well.

18 posted on 04/04/2005 10:21:45 AM PDT by Centurion2000 (Nations do not survive by setting examples for others. Nations survive by making examples of others)
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To: Ernest_at_the_Beach; RadioAstronomer
A petabyte of storage is more than I can comprehend

It's about 40 times greater than the sum total of human literature.

(There are 500,000 characters (bytes) per book, on average, which is two books per Megabyte, or two thousand books/Gigabyte, or two million books per Terabyte. Around Fifty million books are known to have been published, ever; that's 25 Terabytes. Granted, not every book can be expressed in ASCII, but most of the books are in English, and 16-bit Unicode can handle the small remaining fraction. We haven't even considered compression; plain text compresses easily by a factor of 4.)

29 posted on 04/04/2005 1:15:17 PM PDT by Physicist
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