What?  Almost 6PB?  I have that much data on my external hard-drive?

What is funny about this, at least in a geeky way, is that 6 Petabytes is a lot.  In fact, it’s so much, that I couldn’t name a single natural or man-made quantity even approaching a PB (and my spell check keeps telling me that it’s not a word).

To prove a little explanation, I did a little searching and found a few interesting hits.  For example, James Cameron’s 3D money suck Avatar takes up 1PB when it’s fully rendered.  The same article claims that a 1PB MP3 at standard quality would play for 32 years.  This site claims that all the US research institutions combined would equal 2 PB.

In a effort to get my head around this, I did a little math.  0.001 PB is a Terabyte.  Terabytes are becoming more common these days and I think I’ve got a good grip on those.  I tend to thing in terms of DVDs.  Your average DVD is about 8 Gigabytes.  Therefore a Terabyte is about 125 DVDs and a Petabyte is 125 thousand.  That is about the same as every single movie made in the world between 1999 and 2007 (Source).

Side note: Despite all this fun, you might be asking “what the heck is a byte anyway?”  The answer is simple if you’re talking about text.  Open a new text document and type 1 character.  Save it and the file will be 1 byte large.  If you’re talking about images, movies or even word docs, there is no human equivalent – to explain we would need to talk about binary, hexadecimals, octets and other nonsense.  Stick with the text answer – 1 character = 1 byte.

The error message was obviously inaccurate.  There is no way that my game required 125 thousand dvds to install.  (If this happens to you, the most likely source was a zip file too large for Windows 7 to handle (5.7GB).)  However, despite the inaccuracy of my error message, the real point is this:  These numbers, strange and somewhat silly as they may be, are part of our lives now.  In my opinion, it’s worth taking a look around and questioning what they mean.

Of all the research I did to write this, this site did the best job of explaining the different terms.  Go check it out!  Also, if you really want to laugh at how geeky programmers are, check out the Wikipedia entry for a “nibble” (1/2 a byte… I’m not even kidding).

~ab

Mag+ from Bonnier on Vimeo.

Part of the video that I find particularly interesting is the conversation around the magazine cover.  When I was a kid, I got a subscription to Rolling Stone and I’d read it cover to cover.  However, it was the cover art that drew me into each volume, enticing me with (admittedly half-naked) beautiful shots of my favorite stars and short, but catchy taglines.  Here is a link to one of those covers.

I think the issue is larger than just magazines.  We’ve started a fantastic conversion from paper to e-whatever.  However, we’ve forgotten some of our favorite parts – the things that made us read in the first place.  As much as we’d love to pretend, it’s not all about the text.  There is a reason that artists have labored on the surrounding graphics for centuries.

Right now, I’m reading 20,000 leagues under the sea by Jules Verne.  It’s a surprisingly easy read, filled with adventure and lovely science.  The kindle version I’m reading has been cleaned of all images and I can’t help feeling like I’m missing out on half of the experience.  Take a look at this cover (left) of the original book in 1871.  I love the little sea explorers in the bottom left corner and the varied beasts battling it out.  This image was not in my version and I’m glad I went to Wikipedia to find it.

In the end, my thoughts haven’t changed much since I reviewed the kindle for the first time.  The graphics and layouts are the next step.  For the web, we have CSS (cascading style sheets), a method of organizing pieces of HTML (that’s the web language) into a magazine like format.  I apply a “float left” to the image above and the text magically wraps around it.  This can be understood by nearly every browser in the world.  Why can’t we do this for e-books and e-magazines?  We could apply CSS to the dull text of our digital texts and include images without developing anything new?

Anyway, them’s my thoughts.  I’d love to hear what others have to say.  Enjoy the video!

~ab