IBM has announced a new storage technology that might allow your IPOD to carry "500,000" songs--Apple's odd little units to characterize its little gadget. In real units, it would be about 12-13 "terabytes"--12-13000 giga-bytes. Assuming an average song is about three minutes long, that's close to 70 years of music, night and day, without ever repeating a song. If you're into watching movies, that's about a year's worth of movies.
One wonders if those pushing for ever more memory in devices ever really think through the implications of how anyone could ever enjoy that much entertainment. Technology for the sake of technology seems to be rapidly approaching, or even surpassing, the capabilities of our senses to process the data.
Don't worry about it becoming reality too soon, though. If IBM had believed in hiring the people it needed to manufacture things in a cost-effective manner, they just might still be in the business of making PCs and disk drives. They certainly had the technology to eat the lunch of their competitors at any given time.
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4 comments:
Hi there. Avid reader here.
I NEVER (okay, rarely) agree with what you have to say, but I do enjoy how you say it. I never comment, because the topics are generally about fundamental differences in the way we view the world...and who has time to go round-and-round on that nowhere train?
This topic (technology) is a softy though. It does not touch our hardwired differences. And with that, I comment --
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"One wonders if those pushing for ever more memory in devices ever really think through the implications of how anyone could ever enjoy that much entertainment."
The technology you mentioned would not only be used for entertainment. There are many other applications where it is useful to have portable terabytes of storage.
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"Technology for the sake of technology seems to be rapidly approaching, or even surpassing, the capabilities of our senses to process the data."
A .338 Magnum goes really really far. Is it even possible to hit something 4 miles away, or is it just cool that the bullet can go that far? I imagine a little bit of both.
I remember when I got my first computer. It had a 640mb hard drive. I thought that was silly, because I'd never fill it up.
Then, again, in college, I was laughing with a friend how stupid people would be to pay extra for an 8gb hard drive in their laptop (we'd both just gotten 4gb hard drives in our laptops).
I'm not making that mistake again.
Brian, good points; I would simply return that even Internet servers ought to have a finite capacity requirement when we consider how much visual and audio interaction our bodies can process. Is there really that much information--let alone knowledge--that can be created by man?
It's certainly true that computers hog up a lot of memory these days. It's one of the reasons that my > 2GHz Pentium or whatever with Windows NT is ALMOST as fast as my old 486-33 with Windows 3.1, and does a little bit more.
Again, is there a real need here, or are we trying to create one? I'm skeptical.
I'm thinking that we'll try to create a need... On my iPhone, I can add pictures of everyone that I have a # (or 3) for.
I don't have much music, but I can enter everything that is on our calendar to it. Not much data there.
Listen to ESPN podcasts? Not yet.
Hmmm... Full body, real-time, 3D virtual reality immersion movies? I think that they'll take more data per minute than little phone holds... And they'd be a good exercise package too, but wearing the sensor/stimulation suit would probably be forbidden at work or in the car. ;^)
But I digress... More functionality soon coming to your iPod for a lower price at an Apple Store near you... Probably with better profit margins too! :^)
Oh, and Brian, some people can hit that target at 4 miles (or similar seemingly ridiculous distances with other calibres)... It takes teamwork and is usually best done by women.
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