When
· Naughties
· · 2003
· · · March
· · · · 10 (2 entries)
Half a Billion Bibles · I spent the day in meetings with a maker of storage technology; it seems quite possible that Visual Net will find a handy application with these folks. My mind is just now unboggling, because these guys deal with disk subsystems measured in tens of terabytes. One customer, they said, is managing three petabytes up and down the East Coast. At this point in the meeting, I got real quiet for a while while a hamster in the back of my head got stuck on the treadmill of all those zeroes. Um er 3,000,000,000,000,000 bytes. We seriously need some perspective ...
Mapping the Penalties of Failure · Below is a picture of of a map that hangs in my office; it shows an area in the Balkans and was created around 1790. I bought it in a dusty little bookstore in Juneau Alaska, but that's another story. It's inscribed in French, Polish, and Turkish (written pre-reform in Arabic script). Like many maps it's very beautiful, but it's more than a little weird, and carries an important lesson ...
