PC World: PUPPY CAMS THREATEN INTERNET, CISCO SAYS

[beamjockey]

This is a news story about the rather staid goings-on at a telecom conference-- exabytes of projected traffic, yadda yadda-- but it has a great headline that may become a true classic of doomsaying.

Eventually this will become a TV story: "Puppy Cams Threaten the Internet! Film at Eleven!" I guess we already know what the film at eleven will show.

This story will also win points from metric-prefix buffs for mentioning "almost three-quarters of a zettabyte." One gets the feeling that Jay Gillette, the journalist, desperately wanted to work that word in, even if there was not a whole zettabyte available.

(Um, that's ten-to-the-twentyfirst bytes.) (Unless it's not.)

Comments

[wcg.livejournal.com]

That is quite a headline.

[rono-60103.livejournal.com]

(Um, that's ten-to-the-twentyfirst bytes.) (Unless it's not.)

Ahh yes. The old question about data counts magnitudes greater than a kilobyte. As far as I know, it is well accepted that a kilobyte is 1024 bytes (2^10). But there is more debate about the larger amounts: is a megabyte 1000 kilobytes or 1024 kilobytes (2^20 bytes if my math is working right), and similarly up for gigabyte and so on.

But it doesn't really matter all that much - most people (even us computer people) cannot really conceive of how much data even a few megabytes really is until put into more concrete terms.

[kevinnickerson.livejournal.com]

A kilobyte is 1000 bytes. You're thinking of a Kibibyte. If you want 1024x1024, that's a Mibibyte. Official, System International, units all.

[dd-b.livejournal.com]

A novel is about 600KB (which tells you something about the bloat levels in the data files of most modern word processors).

However, from my point of view, 5MB is -- less than half a photo file out of my main camera. (I'm using a RAW format with lossless compression, so the size varies some, but it's rarely as big as 15MB.)

I've also dealt with 20MB text log files from chip simulation software on occasion.

[apostle-of-eris.livejournal.com]

The way I express ASCII quantities to civilians is with the rule of thumb that a double-spaced "typewritten" page is 2,000 characters = bytes. So a 500 sheet ream would be a megabyte . . .