Posted by: tanstaafl.
Terabytes with a grain of salt - 20/09/1999 15:16
There's an outfit at url http://www.edtn.com/story/tech/OEG19990823S0062-R that is claiming new storage technology to be marketed within two years that will allow 2,300 gigabytes of storage on the proverbial credit card sized device. Oh, and it will only cost $50, and it will transfer data at 100 MBytes/second.
I take this with the proverbial grain of salt. But just think - if it's the size of a credit card, then we could have maybe six of them in an empeg. Instead of the limited, miserly 500 hours that Hugo and crew are sticking us with, we could have what we all truly want - almost a quarter million hours of MP3 compressed music. Just think - every piece of music ever recorded, stored in the dashboard of your car, and it would take less than 30 years to listen to it all assuming you listened 24 hours a day. Better get that hierarchical playlist working, Mike -- nearly five million titles will be hard to deal with using PIN numbers!
Does anybody out there in empeg-never-never-land think this product could be real? I must admit to being highly skeptical myself. Improvements in storage technology tend to be incremental, rather than by orders of magnitude. But, what do I know? I found it hard to believe the predictions five years ago that today gigabyte hard drives would sell in the $100 range. I'm sure stranger things have happened. I'm just not sure when.
tanstaafl.
"There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch"
I take this with the proverbial grain of salt. But just think - if it's the size of a credit card, then we could have maybe six of them in an empeg. Instead of the limited, miserly 500 hours that Hugo and crew are sticking us with, we could have what we all truly want - almost a quarter million hours of MP3 compressed music. Just think - every piece of music ever recorded, stored in the dashboard of your car, and it would take less than 30 years to listen to it all assuming you listened 24 hours a day. Better get that hierarchical playlist working, Mike -- nearly five million titles will be hard to deal with using PIN numbers!
Does anybody out there in empeg-never-never-land think this product could be real? I must admit to being highly skeptical myself. Improvements in storage technology tend to be incremental, rather than by orders of magnitude. But, what do I know? I found it hard to believe the predictions five years ago that today gigabyte hard drives would sell in the $100 range. I'm sure stranger things have happened. I'm just not sure when.
tanstaafl.
"There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch"