Moore's Law

[dsrtao]

My corollary to Moore's Law, Areal Density Variant: buy the disk space you need, not the disk space you think you'll need.

I was pleased when I could buy a good hard disk for a dollar a megabyte. (340MB, 1996)

I was pleased when I could buy a good hard disk for
$100 a gigabyte (4GB, 1998)

I was pleased when I could buy a good hard disk for $10 a gigabyte. (40GB, 2000)

I was pleased when I could buy a good hard disk for $1 a gigabyte. (250GB, 2004)

I am now pleased to buy good hard disks for ten cents a gigabyte. (1.5TB, 2008)

Comments

Parkinson's Law

[robertdfeinman.livejournal.com]

How about a variant on Parkinson's Law? Instead of work expanding to fill the time alloted, we have data expands to fill the space allotted.

It's not just the number of items that people collect, it is their size. We went from text (a few K for a book) to web pages, to PDF to images, to music and now to video.

Soon to arriving even higher def video in 3D.

I thought the network was going to become the computer and we wouldn't actually need to store anything, just fetch it seamlessly when needed. Apparently Itunes has proven that idea wrong.

Re: Parkinson's Law

[dsrtao]

The problem is that the network isn't necessarily there when you need it, so you cache everything you might need.

If there was a cheap ($10/month) unlimited usage, reliable 0.5Mb/s nation-wide wireless network, iPods and similar digital audio players would be replaced by tiny devices that only had enough buffer space to get you through tunnels. You would leave your music at home and access it anywhere.

If that network could do a reliable 2Mb/s, we would do the same with video. At 6Mb/s, HD video, and many people would stop using desktop computers entirely, and drop household wired Internet services.

Re: Parkinson's Law

[metahacker.livejournal.com]

Some years ago sml and I extrapolated the craze in video now occurring just by wondering "what's bigger than audio?" We came up with 'worlds' as the next step...entire simulations of places and things. We'll see if it pans out.

AS for your second point, Local storage got cheaper than local bandwidth did. Much, much cheaper. But the iPhone(/generic smartphone) is close to caught up -- I can stream music and crappy video to it with no difficulties, which means I don't bother to store videos on it at all.