Amazing numbers

kinda :bs: towards the end there with the computers exceeding the human mind.. being that they don't even know to this day the limits of a human brain, how can anything exceed it? Also, scientists have yet to develop an accurate working prosthetic hand, and all that is is bone and tissue. Granted, Moore's Law has held true since it was introduced (and continues to boggle my mind every time I try to comprehend it) But the semiconductor manufacturers are starting to get down to the atomic level with nanotechnology and the likes, and once you're down that small there's nowhere else to go. I don't think that the law will end anytime soon, being that the current leading chips are running at ~ 45 nm, and with some fairly logical ideas can be made quite a bit smaller, it's one thing to know how to do something and completely different to actually do it and be successful. Meh, whatevs... just take it from me, 16-20GB phones/ thumb drives/ SD cards are NOT far away.. within the next 2 years easy, probably before.

Yup, the next great computer revolution will be the end of hard drives. Solid state (flash, or one of it's derivatives/competitors) will soon replace hard drives in notebooks, (It's already being done) which saves a ton of power, not to mention weight. Expect very fast startup times too when you don't have to load the OS from a mechanical drive. In fact, the computer very likely will have it's OS installed in some kind of nonvolatile memory instead of in the storage medium and the computer could be in sleep mode for indefinite periods of time. Much like the ECU on Speedy. Twist the key, and it's ready to go in a few seconds.

We actually seem to have topped out at processor speed, which is why you are starting to see stacked processors. They're not any faster (it's a heat issue) but they stack several on top of each other and spread the work load around. I was talking to an Engineer who worked at Intel about a year ago. He said their latest high end processor was essentially 128 stacked Xeon processors. Not a consumer level processor of course.

Willgaut said:

floppy disk? wtf is that ;P

Click to expand...

Alright you young whipper snappers! Listen up!

There used to be these things called "Clay Tablets". You kept records by carving gouges in the clay, then letting it dry. This was a fairly bulky method of storage, so later some smart-arse found that by painting on leaves with berry juice you could store considerably more in the same amount of space. This had the side benefit of being able to carry more than your grocery list without a herd of camels.

Eventually, some middle eastern genius (From the Arabic word: djinn, often Anglicized as "genie" The djinn were demon like supernatural creatures, and often were considered thieves.) found out how to grind up vegetable matter and dry it on a screen. This produced paper, and even easier medium for keeping records. This led to the development of government and bureaucracy. Thanks, you Arab motherfucker.

Finally, by the magic of electronics, it was found that you could encode a series of ones and zeros (zero- another Arabic term causing much confusion and general mathematicalness) in magnetic pulses on a tape. This was great, except that people kept confusing the tapes for old Elvis Prestly recordings and burning them for their Satanic content.

Finally, in a fit of rage, a bunch of college kids who's keg had run dry conceived of the ability to keep their bar tab encoded on a little plastic disk that looked nothing like a fucking Credence Clearwater Revival cassette. The only problem with these new "Floppy Disks" was that if you left them in the sun or carried them around in your back pocket they went bad. This caused many a newborn computer geek to retreat into his fathers collection of old Playboy magazines to cry.

Finally, Apple Computer nerds in the early 1980's realized that if they wanted to keep their porn reliably they needed to encase the floppy part of the disk in a nice durable plastic casing. This worked quite well, but was sneered at by the IBM PC using community for being "too geeky". Eventually even the PC community grudgingly admitted that the Apple Geeks might just be onto something and started storing their own porn on plastic armored floppy disks. Thus was brought about the enlightened computer porn industry of the 1990s.

But the story is not over there! Pretty soon it became obvious that the whole idea of magnetic storage wasn't so good if you wanted to keep your porn for more than a few months. Setting your magnetically encoded images of Pamela Anderson on top of the subwoofer of your stereo tended to make her look like Richard Dean Anderson instead. Luckily there was a new medium that used lasers and rotating disks of plastic coated foil. These had been used for quite a few years for the storage of old Elvis Prestly music that had unfortunately not been stamped out by the burnings.

Thus the Writable CD was born. Again, the Apple Computer "Mac" community Geeks thought this was such a great idea that the early iMacs didn't even HAVE a floppy drive. The PC users all laughed at the foolishness of the Mac geeks as their computers were overrun with virus's and malware. The PC users continued to demand that a floppy drive be incorporated into all PC's, just in case you needed to move your resume from one PC to another. With the birth of "America Online" (for many subsequent years the ISP provider of choice for PC users) they started to rethink their premise, as daily deliveries of little cardboard envelops containing free internet use showed them the error of their ways.

Of course by this time it was impossible to encode more than one piece of porn on a floppy disk, but what the hell? You could still burn a hell of a lot onto one of those rainbow spinny sparkly disk things that the Mac Geeks were all raving about.

And here ends our history of spinning data storage. I hope you enjoyed the slide show.