Brontowhat?

So you think a gigabyte is a helluva lot of data? And that 80 GB hard disk ensconced in your PC makes you feel real smug, doesn't it? Frankly, it's a bit teeny-weeny-microscopic, in fact--compared to what's in store in the years to come. If you don't believe us, take a deep breath, and read on. To put things in perspective, and make it easier to imagine and quantify, we have attempted to co-relate impending monster "byte sizes" with very real world stuff.

Megabyte: To get our bearings, let's start here. All of us know that 1 binary digit makes a bit, 8 bits make a byte, 1,024 bytes make a kilobyte and 1,024 kilobytes make a megabyte. Don't laugh, but when PCs first appeared, one MB meant a lot of data. Ten meg hard disks were quite the norm. Today, e-mail attachments often cross one meg, the average size of MP3 file is about 5 MB, and even a silly CD carries about 600 MB.

Gigabyte: A gigabyte is 1,024 MB. This is the Here and Now of storage today. Hence, the most commonly heard storage related term currently. To put a giga into perspective, hark this: One GB can store the entire contents of about 30 feet of books on a bookshelf. The tiny 5GB Apple iPod player can hold about 1,200 songs. And 40 GB portable media devices can carry up to 50 movies in compressed format.

Terabyte: That's 1,000 GB, or one trillion bytes. 1,000 copies of Encyclopaedia Britannica, or 300 hours of video would take up 1 TB. A top-notch academic research library would be all of 2 TB. All the printed content in the world, 1,700 TB.
We're on the threshold of what is being termed as Era of Tera as the terabyte is the next level of magnitude in this realm of tech. So when will we see a 1 TB hard disk? With terabyte storage banks already available, you could well have it squatting in your PC in a few years time.

Petabyte: One "pet" equals one million GB. 2 PB could hog up all the academic research libraries in the US. And a 32 "pet" media player could merrily trill-out seven billion MP3s, or ensnare about 50 million movies. And if you think that's serious storage, read on.

Exabyte: Equals 1,000 pets, or one billion GB. Five 5 exabytes would be equal to all of the words ever uttered by humankind. Need we say more?

Zettabyte: Approximately 1,000 exabytes. Call it 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes (without typos). Period. This was named after zetta, the last letter of the Latin alphabet as it was presumed that this was as big as digital storage could get. Until along came…

Yottabyte: Since this is a 1,024 zettabytes, the jury is still out on this one trying to size it up and put it in perspective.

Brontobyte: A brontobyte is 1,024 yottabytes. That is a million, million petabytes. Or should we just say 1 followed by 27 zeroes! That should be enough space to store everything ever written, filmed, photographed, spoken, and recorded. And still have adequate room left to include all of human thought.

That's what life in general will be like beyond the giga. Now limber up and get ready to heave-ho…

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Byte Sized Pieces!

Bit = 1 binary digit (zero or one)
Byte = 8 bits
Kilobyte = 1,024 bytes
Megabyte = 1,024 kilobytes
Gigabyte = 1,024 megabytes
Terabyte = 1,024 gigabytes
Petabyte = 1,024 terabytes
Exabyte = 1,024 petabytes
Zettabyte = 1,024 exabytes
Yottabyte = 1,024 zettabytes
Brontobyte = 1,024 yottabytes

Standing on the Shoulders of Giants

When in doubt, Google is where we scout. But if your needs are more academic and educational in nature, point your browser to Google Scholar (www.scholar.google.com) instead. This digi-librarian is a Google sub-set search engine for academic and scholarly material in all fields. It allows you to sift the grain from the chaff by specifically searching a treasure trove of academic literature, including peer-reviewed journals, theses, books, abstracts, technical reports and preprints, from all broad areas of research. You can dig up articles from an extensive range of academic publishers, professional societies, preprint repositories and universities. Nuggets of academia that get trampled and buried by the sheer volume of data that regular search engines throw up.

Google Scholar does not make a real world library obsolete--it expands your access to global altitudes by mining through vast amounts of data all at once. Though still in beta, its advantage lies in the fact that it is quite unlike a lot of other academic databases and libraries on the Web that are either clunky or limited. Scholar has a simple, tidy interface. It is not fee-based and there are no ads or pop-ups to mar the interface. It offers virtually unrestricted one-stop access to articles in subscription journals (though often only through abstracts), institutional repositories, open access journals, and e-print servers.

Google Scholar includes bibliographic information about books (scholarly or not) from the OCLC WorldCat database. The OCLC (Online Computer Library Center) database is an online catalogue of books, journals, and other materials held by thousands of OCLC member libraries. Google Scholar also analyses and extracts citations, even if the documents they refer to are not online. So your search results may include citations of articles and works that appear only in books or other offline publications.

On the downside, Google Scholar can churn up information that may not be considered scholarly, like press releases and calendars. And from the point of view of the librarian, it lacks a power search and the ability to search on fields like ISBN, and sorting by publisher, author, or dates etc.

Google Scholar is by no means perfect. Yet, what makes its appeal stronger than its rivals like CiteSeer (which focuses on computer science and infotech) and SmealSearch (which concentrates on business), are its inclusive abilities and broader spectrum of focussed searches.

Light and the Future of Computing

February 1928. A professor of physics at Calcutta University discovers that when light traverses a transparent material, some of the light that is deflected changes in wavelength. The prof is Dr. Chandrasekhara Venkata Raman. And his discovery, the Nobel Prize winning Raman Effect.

February 2005. Semiconductor giant, Intel announces that it has successfully deployed an all-silicon laser using the Raman Effect to carry data over light waves. Computing at the speed of light? Nay, more…

The Next Big Thing. Yes, four to five years from now, your PC could well be harnessing light instead of electrical currents to shuttle your bits and bytes to and fro. Apart from a leap-frogging computing speeds, the implication of this marrying of silicon chip technology with optical lasers, is that it could also lead to a drastic cut in costs for high-speed, high-bandwidth telecommunication systems, medical devices and defence equipment.

Behind Intel's Silicon Raman Laser breakthrough lies photonics. Photonics (derived from photon, a fundamental information carrier) is the science of generating, controlling, and using light to carry information. The advantage of carrying data over photons, or light, on optical fibre is that these generate less heat than electrons, the signal carriers on copper wire. And heat dissipation is one of the foremost problems that chip designers face. Since optical fibre can transmit greater volumes of data, it also means a reduction in cabling and the internal volume of computers. However, traditional optical components require exotic materials like indium phosphide and gallium arsenide, are difficult to manufacture and assemble, and consequently expensive. The cost limits the use of these photonic devices to special applications like long-haul telecommunications.

Intel's remarkable achievement is that it has miniaturised the Raman Effect so that it can be produced within a silicon chip, instead of employing costly optical components and bulky lasers. Intel has created a standard volume CMOS silicon chip containing eight continuous Raman lasers by using fairly standard silicon processes, rather than expensive materials and processes required for making lasers today. The lasers emit a continuous stream of light that can be modulated into a stream of impulses to represent data.

Thanks to our good Doc, the best in computing is yet to come…

Wikipedia: Of, For, and By the People

Nestling on a server farm in Boston, USA, and beaming into the darkest recess of cyberspace, is Planet Earth’s largest “live” reference resource, www.wikipedia.com.

In size, this Web-based free content knowledge encyclopedia offers nearly 520,000 articles in English alone -- compared with Britannica's 80,000 and Encarta's 4,500. Bung in Wiki’s 195 independent language editions, which include everything from Hindi to Hebrew to Hungarian, and the total count of articles shoots to a whopping 1.4 million!

Born in January 2001, Wikipedia is an “open content” encyclopedia. It does not have one publisher or authority behind it but is an on-going collaborative effort of thousands of users and volunteers worldwide. The very basis of the encyclopaedia is to encourage users to participate and help the growth of human collective knowledge. So anyone can add an article or information and edit someone else's article. And because it almost constantly being written, updated or edited, this monster knowledge library is termed “live”.

Despite receiving over 50 million hits per day, and being one of the most popular reference sites on the Web, Wikipedia's claim to be an encyclopedia has been controversial. Due to this "anyone can change the content" pproach, it has been criticized by academics for lack of reliability, authority and comprehensiveness. That’s true to an extent, but not entirely.

Fire a couple of comparative searches on Britanica, Encarta and Wikipedia yourself and see the difference. On many fronts, the Wiki is much bigger and more accurate than any commercial encyclopedia. Due to its open nature, Wikipedia has been able to vastly improve on its information sources, especially in topics like technology and current events. Its depth of information varies between a slew of knowledge to scraps and stubs. But overall, the sheer expanse of topics and subjects is absolutely mind-blowing. Other associate open projects here include a dictionary and thesaurus, free textbooks and manuals, a collection of quotations and free source documents.

And best of all, in spite of all its girth, the Wiki moves… and it moves as fast as greased lightening. Well almost...

Light the flame of knowledge, else flame me at ashishone@gmail.com...