CTO Articles
Published in IT World
June 13, 2006
A megabyte, by any other name, would sound as sweet
A young child of my acquaintance is very fond of ice pops. I have recently been explaining the basics of money to the aforementioned child. The conversation went like this:
Me: This is a 2 Euro coin.
Child: What is a Euro?
Me: A Euro is one of these coins, they are smaller than the 2 Euro coin.
Child: What can I get for a Euro?
Me: 2 ice pops.
Child: So a 2 Euro is 4 ice pops?
Me: Yes.
Child: Can I have the 2 Euro coin?
An older child of my acquaintance is very fond of music. I recently visted a PC store with the aforementioned child to purchase an MP3 player. The conversation went like this:
Me: This is 1 gig MP3 player.
Child: What is a gig?
Me: A gig is about 1000 meg.
Child: What is a meg?
Me: It is about 1000...hang on a sec. Lets do this differently...This is a 64Meg MP3 player. It can hold roughly 20 songs. This is a 128meg MP3 player. It can hold roughly 40 songs. The 512meg model is four times that so it can hold about...
Child: 160 songs.
Me: Yes. Possibly more, possibly less depending on the length of the songs and the quality of the sound. Now a 1 gig MP3 is twice that again giving you about 320 songs.
Child: Can I get a 1 gig player?
I recently visited a second PC store on my own and happened to be glancing at the MP3 players. To my surprise, there was no mention of megabytes or gigabytes on the labels. Instead, the MP3 players were laid out from left to right, in increasing cost order, starting with "20 songs", "40 songs" and so on up to "1000 songs". Old timers like me mentally translate this vista into 64meg on the left up to 4 gig on the right. None of the kids around me were doing similar calculations.
The pop song - long a potent cultural unit of measurement - has become a unit of measurement for storage capacity. A passing fad or a sign of things to come? I suspect the latter.
How long will it be before PCs are marketed with 20,000 song hard disks? Will we see broadband speeds marketed in terms of songs-per-minute download speed? Perhaps this is short sighted of me. Given the ever increasing capacity of all things digital, perhaps the music video is a better baseline unit of measurement? A 1000 pop video MPEG player anyone? Perhaps that too is short sighted. We need something bigger as a baseline. Something cultural yes, but bigger...
How about the Lord of the Rings Trilogy with its common acronym LOTR?
Me: This is a 2 Petabyte MPEG player.
Child: What is a Petabyte?
Me: You remember the Lord Of The Rings Trilogy? Well, this entry level MPEG player can hold 10 of those.
Child: Ah, now I see. I have a 100 LOTR MPEG on my keyring already. Can we go get ice pops now?