Thu, 15 Oct 2009

Thinking Big . . .

The next generation of computer scientists has to think in terms of what could be described as Internet scale. Facebook, for example, uses more than 1 petabyte of storage space to manage its users’ 40 billion photos. (A petabyte is about 1,000 times as large as a terabyte, and could store about 500 billion pages of text.) [source]

When I read this in an article, I was struck by the though that the laptop at which I'm working is a gateway to more data than has been available to anyone at one point throughout history. It seems to me that the problem in the past has been formulating meaningful ideas with too little data. The problem is rapidly becoming turning too much data into meaningful information from which significant ideas can spring.

posted 07:37 [/Technology] permanent link