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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • When I was in highschool we toured the local EPA office. They had the most data I’ve ever seen accessible in person. Im going to guess how much.

    It was a dome with a robot arm that spun around and grabbed tapes. It was 2000 so I’m guessing 100gb per tape. But my memory on the shape of the tapes isn’t good.

    Looks like tapes were four inches tall. Let’s found up to six inches for housing and easier math. The dome was taller than me. Let’s go with 14 shelves.

    Let’s guess a six foot shelf diameter. So, like 20 feet circumference. Tapes were maybe .8 inches a pop. With space between for robot fingers and stuff, let’s guess 240 tapes per shelf.

    That comes out to about 300 terabytes. Oh. That isn’t that much these days. I mean, it’s a lot. But these days you could easily get that in spinning disks. No robot arm seek time. But with modern hardware it’d be 60 petabytes.

    I’m not sure how you’d transfer it these days. A truck, presumably. But you’d probably want to transfer a copy rather than disassemble it. That sounds slow too.





  • I think the technologies are pretty bubble based. We are 80/15/5 Mac/Linux/Windows and it’s been 15 years since I worked on a software team that’s thats mostly windows. But I talk to them from time to time. But if anything Mac feels underrepresented compared to my bubble.

    I admit I’m probably biased in favor of believing the survey is representative. I work on one of the databases.

    Speaking of databases, I don’t work on SQL Server but can see the appeal. It implements a huge array of features and it’s documentation is pretty good. Folks have told me it’s a lovely database to use.