Update from World Nuclear News : Operations to relieve pressure in the containment of Fukushima Daiichi 3 have taken place after the failure of a core coolant system. Seawater is being injected to make certain of core cooling. Malfunctions have hampered efforts but there are strong indications of stability.
I was supposed to travel out to China but postponed my trip to Wednesday. So I get to catch up reading the magazines that pile up while I’m away. An fascinating article about cloud computing in Bloomberg Businessweek gives a run-down of where we’re headed with amassing digital information on the planet. Here it is, with a few lines I added of my own.
1,000 kilobytes (kB) is a megabyte (MB) .. 106 bytes
> a picture file taken by a cell phone is 2 MB big
1,000 megabytes is a gigabyte (GB) .. 109 bytes
> a high-end desktop computer has 10 GB of random access memory (RAM)
> a corporate SAP system may have 200 GB of memory
1,000 gigabytes is a terabyte (TB) .. 1012 bytes
> a high-end desktop computer has 1 or 2 TB of disk drive space
1,000 terabytes is a petabyte (PB) .. 1015 bytes
> 1 TB equals 13 years of HDTV content
1,000 petabytes is an exabyte (EB) .. 1018 bytes
> 1 EB of mobile traffic data was generated in the USA last year
1,000 exabytes is a zettabyte (ZB) .. 1021 bytes
> 0.8 ZB equals the entire globe’s digital data in 2009, according to IDC
> 35 ZB is the forecast for the volume of all digital data in 2020,
and finally (for now!)
1,000 zettabytes is a yottabyte (YB) ..1024 bytes
