I’m not embarrassed to admit that mind boggling things confound me. With billion dollar bailouts and trillion dollar budgets, it feels pretty great to get some useful perspective once in a while. Since this is Artengine’s blog after all, let’s bring it back to technology. Although I don’t understand how this was ever possible, I’m pretty sure the first computer my brother and I shared was stuffed with a 40mb hard drive. 40 megs people! That was over 20 years ago and I’d be shocked if you could even find a 40mb hard drive today. I mean damn, it’s probably tricky enough finding a USB key smaller than a gig.

I guess if we were to look back realistically, you didn’t need much more than 40 megs to run DOS, Wordperfect and a calculator program in 1988. At this point, the opening credits of a poorly compressed movie would probably require more than 40mb of space. Shooting right through megabytes, to gigabytes to terabytes, the space we need to store our thoughts is growing fast and I’m all about it. I also fully appreciate that this is crass advertising courtesy of Hitachi, but for the sake of making the bit and actuator even more cute than we all know they are, here is an animated explanation of how it’s done

Now, with all this data stored and our need to access it at pretty much any time, search engines and Google in particular had a finger pointed at them recently with regards to efficiency, power usage and the cushioned insole of their carbon footprint. Here is a overview of thoughts that I enjoyed learning about. Not allowing their good name to be blemished, Google has also been considering offshore “water based data centers”. I love it when smiley faced mega corps pull it together for the sake of our planet (insert the amount of sarcasm you deem necessary here). If you really want to get physical about the offsetting, planting trees for searches should also put a spring in your step. As a supporter of analogue and digital working together, I must say this last article is my favorite.

And with that, I save these thoughts to a server and ask you to pollute just a little bit.

Tags: carbon footprint, Environment, storage space, Techno-Discourse

This entry was posted on Monday, April 6th, 2009 at 10:45 am and is filed under Chillerman1602. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.