We have all come to get used to speaking about one gigabyte of storage space as if this were something of everyday use. Let me give you a comparison to get a perspective on what we are talking about. One byte of information is the storage space we need to store one letter of the alphabet. Let us say that this is the equivalent of one grain of rice. If we are speaking about one gigabyte of information this is enough rice (or, more correctly, bytes) to fill two large containers of this size.
Now that is a lot of rice - enough actually to feed everyone in a large city one good meal of rice. But more importantly, what does it take to find two grains of rice in these two containers - then you must have them well marked, I would say. We are talking about exactly the same in terms of search technology. Google, for exmaple, can pick out the two grains from the two containers.. Now if we leave the gigabyte and the terabyte and come on to the petabyte we are getting into the dimensions that google can relate to. One petabyte in terms of rice is equivalent to 20 ships full of those containers we were talking about. And guess what? Google handles 20 petabytes per day. A lot of rice and a lot of info.
Little wonder their electricity bill is over $1 million per month!
No comments:
Post a Comment