Monday, September 02, 2002

Disk drives and Moore's law. The bit density of disk drives is doubling every year, which means that it is growing faster than the transistor population of microprocessor chips (which still obeys Moore's law, i.e. doubling every 18 months). By 2010, a single disk drive will hold 50 terabytes, the equivalent of 8000 DVD movies. By that time, PDAs will be more powerful than today's desktop computers. If the duration of copyright protection had remained 14 years (as it originally was) all movies (and TV programmes) made until 1995 would be in the public domain in 2010, i.e. they would be freely viewed and copied. [Jinn of Quality and Risk] so, the interesting problems then will be: finding enough data to take advantage of your drive -- attention will be the limiting factor...what problems could you solve that you can't solve today if you could just throw diskspace at it (e.g. indexing, tracking all the usage of file, storing every revision); finding a way to organize that doesn't take so much effort (how much time do you spend shuffling files into directories?); finding a way to dive/browse/search an archive of personal data so large you simply could not search it all by hand. 8:21:55 PM