Slashdot Mirror
How Heavy Is a Petabyte?
Jon Morgan writes "Whilst heaving around numerous data storage systems to sell (they weigh A LOT!), we got to wondering: How heavy is a Petabyte of data storage? Our best guess is 365KG, which is 6 million times lighter than in 1980! But is there a lighter way to store a Petabyte?"
Since data storage is just one case of transmission channel (just sending it through time, not space) you can store the 6 Petabytes in a transmission. All you need to do is place one sender here, and one eh, let's say at the end of the Universe. As long as the data is being transmitted, it doesn't really weight anything. Yes silly question will get a silly answer :)
I don't think there is a storage media with higher density available commercially right now - and probably not until the 64GB microsd cards becomes available.
See, this is why I love slashdot. Ask a silly question and more often than not you'll get an answer.
What doesn't kill you only delays the inevitable
A year is two AU wide, about 300 million km.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
Yeah, but that's called "voiding their bladder" or the even more unpleasant related process.
So when some asks you "How wide is this circle?" do you tell them the circumference? If someone asks you, "How wide is this desk?" do you provide them the length of the perimeter?
I propose that your definition makes less sense than any of this. :)
Their may be a grammatical error, misspeling, or evn a typo in this post.
A year is actually 0AU wide, 6 months would be 2AU
I'm no expert in this field but I think the link that you provided had underestimated the human brain by many orders of magnitude. The human brain is not a hard drive. I don't think there is even any counterpart to it in current computer technology (maybe quantum computing?), whatever that is, so the comparison is meaningless. The brain doesn't just "store" information like a hard drive. It analyses, modifies, categorises, correlates, extrapolates, fills in missing blanks, filters and blanks out others and many other things that we are just beginning to discover. For example, a human child will quickly grasp the concept of doors and doorknobs, without any "programming" (I've had toddlers so believe me on this). This is why I think A.I. enthusiasts will ultimately fail.
People like you drive me nutters. The human brain has billions of years of evolutionary programming built into the seperate layers of the brain, there are so many built in functions that we don't even realize it in normal everyday activities. For example, your brain is "hardwired" from birth to recognize human faces, and to emit "happy juice" when the faces are familar or matched with motherly smells. Just because its not programmed after birth, does not mean that the hardware itself is not built for the task. This is no different from creating a custom asic or fpga for doing GA's or ANN's.
That's about half of what 1 terabyte of magnetic storage weighed in 1980, so I guess that in 1980 books still had better information density than magnetic media.
what sig?