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Info Glut - Five Exabytes of Data Created in 2002
securitas writes "If you had any doubts that you are overwhelmed by the volume of information in your life, a new Berekley study (PDF) shows that five exabytes of data were created in 2002, twice the 1999 total. That's five million terabytes of data, or 500,000 Libraries of Congress, which works out to about 800 MB of data for each of the 6.3 billion people on the planet. Of note is that 92 percent of the new information was stored on magnetic media, which may create an interesting problem for historians and archaeologists of the future. The study was conducted by University of California-Berkeley's School of Information Management and Systems professors Peter Lyman and Hal Varian. More at CNet, Infoworld, ByteAndSwitch and The Register."
I looks like they are counting every tiny email about "going to lunch". Lots of DATA little INFORMATION.
That's a believable number. Consider the amount of published data on Kazaa, or that 45 minutes of raw DV video is roughly 12.5 Gb*. Move 100 of your CD's to MP3s and you're consuming/creating roughly 3.5 Gb* (or more if you're using higher than 128kb MP3's). And I'm not evern commentin on pr0n.
(*I said roughly...comment on the comment, not the mathematical precision of the statement.)
"Draco dormiens nunquam titillandus."
...how much info is destroyed each year to offset these numbers. I mean shredded files, stuff thrown in trash, bills, deleted data files, discarded/lost storage media, etc... In the end (of each year), I wonder, what is the actual increase in stored information?
500,000 Libraries of Congress, huh? I've always had several problems (SI questions aside) with this unit of measurement. The Library of Congress is constantly expanding & adding new material. What year Library of Congress do they mean? I imagine they aren't working w/ up to the minute data and that the libary is expanding much faster now. Not to mention the fact that everyone always makes exabytes ~2.4% smaller than they really are (and with numbers this big, it actually makes a difference!)... So call me the new number nazi troll already and get it over with...
Webmaster Wanted - Entropic Reactions
What did you burn on those 500 CDs?
Do you run your own particular psuedo-random number generator and store the results? Do you go out with a digital camcorder and record tons and tons of images of the world? Do you write that much prose or poetry in a year?
Or are you just talking about 500 CDs of data that you or somebody else 'ripped' from exisiting media and are shuffling around?
A Good Intro to NetBS
I think other parts of this discussion are probably already arguing about "data vs. information" but this post, I think, points out one of the reasons for that argument: between 1999 and 2002, how many more digital cameras are around and how much larger (in pixels/bits) are the images? Just because there are more digital pics with more pixels each, doesn't mean that there are more actual pictures being taken. And for each new digital camera that is being used, how many fewer film cameras are being used. I suspect that there *are* more pictures being taken but this study doesn't necessarily prove that.
Cheers,
Dcobbler.