Posted on 10/29/2003 5:34:07 AM PST by LurkedLongEnough
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NEW YORK (Reuters) - All those e-mails -- junk or otherwise -- are adding up.
In 2002, people around the globe created enough new information to fill 500,000 U.S. Libraries of Congress, according to a study by faculty and students at the University of California at Berkeley.
The 5 billion gigabytes of new data works out to about 800 megabytes per person -- the equivalent of a stack of books 30 feet high -- the study by the university's School of Information Management and Systems found.
That's a 30 percent increase in stored information from 1999, the last time the global study was conducted.
The information area with the biggest percentage increase in data was, unsurprisingly, hard disk drives. The study found the amount of stored information on these increasingly high-capacity storage media rose by up to 114 percent from the previous study in 1999.
The study also put to rest any lingering myths about the paperless office. The amount of information stored on paper, including books, journals and office documents, increased up to 43 percent in 2002 compared to 1999.
"We thought in our (last) study that film and paper would head toward digital formats," UC Berkeley Professor Peter Lyman said.
With paper, that has not been the case, as people access documents on their computer, but then print them out, he said.
But photography is fulfilling his initial expectations.
"Individual photographs are really moving quickly to digital cameras, or even image-producing telephones," Lyman said. That helped contribute to a decline of up to 9 percent in film-based photographs in 2002 compared with 1999, and fueled the growth of magnetic storage.
The study received financing from Intel Corp. (INTC.O), Microsoft Corp. (MSFT.O), Hewlett-Packard Co. (HPQ.N) and EMC Corp. (EMC.N), technology companies whose businesses deal with managing information.
In addition to looking at stored data, UC Berkeley measured electronic flows of new information at 18 billion gigabytes in 2002, of which about 17.3 billion gigabytes occurred over the telephone.
Whether or not that information has any value is another question.
"I couldn't come up with a very simple way of understanding quality because it's so much in the eye of the beholder," Lyman said.
How, or if, all that information actually ends up being used will be the topic of his next study, Lyman added.
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Actually, it's equivalent to 800 megabytes on a hard drive per person not a 30 stack of books. I'm not sure it's a useful metric to compare what people keep on their hard drives to stacks of paper. Now, if people suddenly wanted to print all those mails, sure then that'd be a significant comparison. The thing is though, these mails can be deleted and still take up the same amount of space in non-hyper reality. The hard drive doesn't get any bigger or smaller either way in actual physical dimensions.
Or if dealing with 8x10 inch 300 dpi uncompressed images (21.6MB each) you have the equivalent of 37 pages. I guess a picture is worth a lot more than a thousand words.
My current system runs a pair of 80GB drives today. That is over 1000 times the capacity of my 1993 system and it was only 10 years ago. Following the same curve, in 2013, I can expect to have a system with the capacity to store roughly 200 Terrabytes.
One Terrabyte = 1,000 Gigabytes
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