5 ms·

Software grows to match the hardware. If storage goes up 100x, data will grow to accommodate. Some things won't grow, to be sure. Anything text-based, for exam

Software grows to match the hardware. If storage goes up 100x, data will grow to accommodate. Some things won't grow, to be sure. Anything text-based, for example. But movies, music, pictures... would probably all explode in fidelity and thus size.

viraptor 12y ago
Would movies and music really explode? Music hit the ceiling long time ago - nobody's going to go for higher resolution / sampling rate than the current "uncompressed" sound. Big publishers are intentionally sacrificing the quality for loudness anyway. Movies can practically scale up to retina-equivalent on wall-size equivalent only. Even then not many people will want TVs bigger than they can look at without moving their eyes... Pictures could still grow, especially the internal raw representation taken from the light capturing element, but that's likely to be down-scaled when saving to kill noise. What else is there that really takes space? (that is not limited by the effective resolution of human senses)
- TkTech 12y ago
  Sensor data is one I would guess. Modern cell phones have an incredible number of sensors in them, but usually don't log the data when it's quickly sampled (accelerometers, background mic), or sample it rarely/slowly (GPS, barometer, ambient lighting) when it is logged. I would personally love to have days, weeks, or months of raw data sampled frequently. Edit: I'd imagine this is due both to a limited amount of storage, a limited number of writes to current sold-state mediums, and energy usage, all of which this technology appears to solve.
  - DelwinAmber 12y ago
    Energy usage is the huge one - if this is applied to computing and not just storage then maybe.
  - valarauca1 12y ago
    Sensor data is dirt cheap to store. Even at 100 data points per second. It takes 10 seconds to store a kilobyte of data (1000) data points). At 64 bits per point. 1GB/s of streaming data is 10,737,418 channels of 100 point per second 64bit floats.
- swalsh 12y ago
  Think about the oculus rift, movies/media might become a lot more complicated as VR or VR like technology comes of age. Or if its not VR there might be some other technology.
- noobermin 12y ago
  I think my argument is that we will find new things to store on our PC's similar to how we found new stuff to store on our PC's from the 90s till now. I guess it is hard to imagine, but let's dream a bit...one ridiculous possibility that I've thought about is consider something like google glass. Imagine recording every moment of your day from your smart phone, and not just when you wake up. Why would you do this? Well, may be there for little things like having a meeting with someone and you want to remember details without writing it down. Why take the time to record it manually when you have the ability to do it in HD, for cheap? Again, this is hard to imagine wanting to do especially for privacy reasons, but were things like facebook and twitter easy to imagine in the 80s? As things things have changed, so have social norms...I'm not saying this is a good or bad thing, I'm just stating an observation. So, I happen to not have any HD vids on my laptop at the moment, but I have a normal video on my laptop that is 10 minutes long that is 70 MB. For something like recording video for 10 hours say, that's 6 * 70 * 10~4GB. So, yeah that's about 250 days (little less than a year) on your smart phone at 1 TB ignoring all other things (full seasons of vids of shows, as another commenter mentioned, stuff like raw gps data that could be added to the video, other things), so may be it isn't quite reaching the limit but it's a good example for how as we have more space for stuff, it is possible to imagine finding more things to fill your smartphone's new TB of storage with.
  - vezzy-fnord 12y ago
    Again, this is hard to imagine wanting to do especially for privacy reasons, but were things like facebook and twitter easy to imagine in the 80s? Much easier than the example you give, yes. Considering things like Xanadu were already theorized in the '60s, Facebook and Twitter wouldn't be that huge of a stretch. What's more, Usenet and BBSes already existed in the '80s, so there was a text-based glimpse of the future in some way. Of course, imagining the scale, deep technical details and the heavy use of graphics back then was likely difficult. But the general concept? Hardly. Especially not something as simplistic as Twitter, the idea of it was most certainly not alien back then.
    - noobermin 12y ago
      I wasn't referring to technical aspects, I was referring to social aspects. I'll admit I wasn't born in the 80's, but even when I was a kid in the 90's, I couldn't imagine sharing my day-to-day interactions with 100's of people.
- dman 12y ago
  Retaining program traces for every program executed on the system.
- JoshTriplett 12y ago
  > Music hit the ceiling long time ago - nobody's going to go for higher resolution / sampling rate than the current "uncompressed" sound. Spatial audio that supports dynamically computed surround sound for arbitrarily many speakers and headphones. > Movies can practically scale up to retina-equivalent on wall-size equivalent only. Even then not many people will want TVs bigger than they can look at without moving their eyes... > Pictures could still grow, especially the internal raw representation taken from the light capturing element, but that's likely to be down-scaled when saving to kill noise. 1) High color depth, allowing bright and dim objects to coexist in the same picture without loss of fidelity, and allowing dynamic lighting. 2) Complete depth data, allowing dynamic depth of field changes. 3) Complete geometry and scene-graph data, allowing you to change the camera and perspective.
  - jerf 12y ago
    "Spatial audio that supports dynamically computed surround sound for arbitrarily many speakers and headphones." Still covers only a small arbitrary constant factor of data that is already very small by modern standards. Note that surround sound data is, IIRC, already not "twice" the size of stereo. And your video points 1 and 2 are also still at most only small constant factors of increase over what we already have, with 3 potentially being a compression technique. Video is nearing its apex; sound is pretty much already there. There's actually a maximum rate at which our senses can convey information to our brains; any use of data beyond that rate is literally impossible and anything carried beyond that is wasted. Even a full sensorium just isn't that much larger than what we already have. We are, after all, talking about technologies that are in the same ballpark as the maximum theoretical data density that human brains can have, and in practice the memristor storage is going to be much higher. It should not be surprising that it's very difficult to truly "use" all that storage.
    - maxerickson 12y ago
      Isn't having a computer process some data and zoom in on a portion of it 'using of data beyond the rate at which our senses can convey information to our brains'? I guess you are talking about the utility of media at higher and higher fidelity and I am just snagging on how you have phrased it.
- frik 12y ago
  Holographic movies require a high bandwidth and a lot of storage space (recorded/pre-rendered). Current holographic displays require a movie-source for every few-point. And to make it convincing for a small POV (e.g. 19" 4:3 holographic monitor) you need at least 8 few-points, for a 360° next-gen holographic display you would many terrabytes of data for one movie (and a high bandwidth to stream the data to the display). Depending on the holographic technology you need additonally a very high resolution in contrast to the visual output. If you use a common HD resolution the current visible pixel range is about 640x480 - at least some expensive research displays I used in 2011.
  - frik 12y ago
    *view-point
- regularfry 12y ago
  Caches for streaming the media. The BBC has this problem every now and again, with big events or popular shows: the pipes to the cabinets in the streets aren't big enough to unicast to everyone simultaneously. A CDN node in every cabinet is probably not too far off.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
aragot 12y ago
> Software grows to match the hardware. You mean XML for instance?
- swalsh 12y ago
  Not sure why he was downvoted, xml is a trade off for developer convenience. A trade off we were willing to make because we had disposable bits.
  - valarauca1 12y ago
    What was the trade off? Harder to parse files for less human readability?
    - Touche 12y ago
      What was the predecessor to xml that was easier to read?
      - biot 12y ago
        "If GML was an infant, SGML is the bright youngster who far exceeds expectations and made its parents too proud, but XML is the drug-addicted gang member who had committed his first murder before he had sex, which was rape." -- Erik Naggum GML is from the late 1960s and is, arguably, easier to read. SGML from the 1980s expanded upon this. XML is essentially just an offshoot of SGML and much less readable than SGML is. For example, here is a valid SGML document: <anthology> <poem> <title>The SICK ROSE <stanza> <line>O Rose thou art sick. <line>The invisible worm, <line>That flies in the night <line>In the howling storm: <stanza> <line>Has found out thy bed <line>Of crimson joy: <line>And his dark secret love <line>Does thy life destroy. <poem>  </anthology> Aside from XML's lineage, there is no shortage of markup languages available with varying levels of readability.
        Touche 12y ago
7952 12y ago
Bandwidth won't grow and IMHO that is now the chief constraint in computing. For low usage it is cheaper to store data on S3 for a month than buying the bandwidth to transfer it once!

viraptor 12y ago

Would movies and music really explode? Music hit the ceiling long time ago - nobody's going to go for higher resolution / sampling rate than the current "uncompressed" sound. Big publishers are intentionally sacrificing the quality for loudness anyway. Movies can practically scale up to retina-equivalent on wall-size equivalent only. Even then not many people will want TVs bigger than they can look at without moving their eyes... Pictures could still grow, especially the internal raw representation taken from the light capturing element, but that's likely to be down-scaled when saving to kill noise. What else is there that really takes space? (that is not limited by the effective resolution of human senses)

TkTech 12y ago
Sensor data is one I would guess. Modern cell phones have an incredible number of sensors in them, but usually don't log the data when it's quickly sampled (accelerometers, background mic), or sample it rarely/slowly (GPS, barometer, ambient lighting) when it is logged. I would personally love to have days, weeks, or months of raw data sampled frequently. Edit: I'd imagine this is due both to a limited amount of storage, a limited number of writes to current sold-state mediums, and energy usage, all of which this technology appears to solve.
- DelwinAmber 12y ago
  Energy usage is the huge one - if this is applied to computing and not just storage then maybe.
- valarauca1 12y ago
  Sensor data is dirt cheap to store. Even at 100 data points per second. It takes 10 seconds to store a kilobyte of data (1000) data points). At 64 bits per point. 1GB/s of streaming data is 10,737,418 channels of 100 point per second 64bit floats.
swalsh 12y ago
Think about the oculus rift, movies/media might become a lot more complicated as VR or VR like technology comes of age. Or if its not VR there might be some other technology.
noobermin 12y ago
I think my argument is that we will find new things to store on our PC's similar to how we found new stuff to store on our PC's from the 90s till now. I guess it is hard to imagine, but let's dream a bit...one ridiculous possibility that I've thought about is consider something like google glass. Imagine recording every moment of your day from your smart phone, and not just when you wake up. Why would you do this? Well, may be there for little things like having a meeting with someone and you want to remember details without writing it down. Why take the time to record it manually when you have the ability to do it in HD, for cheap? Again, this is hard to imagine wanting to do especially for privacy reasons, but were things like facebook and twitter easy to imagine in the 80s? As things things have changed, so have social norms...I'm not saying this is a good or bad thing, I'm just stating an observation. So, I happen to not have any HD vids on my laptop at the moment, but I have a normal video on my laptop that is 10 minutes long that is 70 MB. For something like recording video for 10 hours say, that's 6 * 70 * 10~4GB. So, yeah that's about 250 days (little less than a year) on your smart phone at 1 TB ignoring all other things (full seasons of vids of shows, as another commenter mentioned, stuff like raw gps data that could be added to the video, other things), so may be it isn't quite reaching the limit but it's a good example for how as we have more space for stuff, it is possible to imagine finding more things to fill your smartphone's new TB of storage with.
- vezzy-fnord 12y ago
  Again, this is hard to imagine wanting to do especially for privacy reasons, but were things like facebook and twitter easy to imagine in the 80s? Much easier than the example you give, yes. Considering things like Xanadu were already theorized in the '60s, Facebook and Twitter wouldn't be that huge of a stretch. What's more, Usenet and BBSes already existed in the '80s, so there was a text-based glimpse of the future in some way. Of course, imagining the scale, deep technical details and the heavy use of graphics back then was likely difficult. But the general concept? Hardly. Especially not something as simplistic as Twitter, the idea of it was most certainly not alien back then.
  - noobermin 12y ago
    I wasn't referring to technical aspects, I was referring to social aspects. I'll admit I wasn't born in the 80's, but even when I was a kid in the 90's, I couldn't imagine sharing my day-to-day interactions with 100's of people.
dman 12y ago
Retaining program traces for every program executed on the system.
JoshTriplett 12y ago
> Music hit the ceiling long time ago - nobody's going to go for higher resolution / sampling rate than the current "uncompressed" sound. Spatial audio that supports dynamically computed surround sound for arbitrarily many speakers and headphones. > Movies can practically scale up to retina-equivalent on wall-size equivalent only. Even then not many people will want TVs bigger than they can look at without moving their eyes... > Pictures could still grow, especially the internal raw representation taken from the light capturing element, but that's likely to be down-scaled when saving to kill noise. 1) High color depth, allowing bright and dim objects to coexist in the same picture without loss of fidelity, and allowing dynamic lighting. 2) Complete depth data, allowing dynamic depth of field changes. 3) Complete geometry and scene-graph data, allowing you to change the camera and perspective.
- jerf 12y ago
  "Spatial audio that supports dynamically computed surround sound for arbitrarily many speakers and headphones." Still covers only a small arbitrary constant factor of data that is already very small by modern standards. Note that surround sound data is, IIRC, already not "twice" the size of stereo. And your video points 1 and 2 are also still at most only small constant factors of increase over what we already have, with 3 potentially being a compression technique. Video is nearing its apex; sound is pretty much already there. There's actually a maximum rate at which our senses can convey information to our brains; any use of data beyond that rate is literally impossible and anything carried beyond that is wasted. Even a full sensorium just isn't that much larger than what we already have. We are, after all, talking about technologies that are in the same ballpark as the maximum theoretical data density that human brains can have, and in practice the memristor storage is going to be much higher. It should not be surprising that it's very difficult to truly "use" all that storage.
  - maxerickson 12y ago
    Isn't having a computer process some data and zoom in on a portion of it 'using of data beyond the rate at which our senses can convey information to our brains'? I guess you are talking about the utility of media at higher and higher fidelity and I am just snagging on how you have phrased it.
frik 12y ago
Holographic movies require a high bandwidth and a lot of storage space (recorded/pre-rendered). Current holographic displays require a movie-source for every few-point. And to make it convincing for a small POV (e.g. 19" 4:3 holographic monitor) you need at least 8 few-points, for a 360° next-gen holographic display you would many terrabytes of data for one movie (and a high bandwidth to stream the data to the display). Depending on the holographic technology you need additonally a very high resolution in contrast to the visual output. If you use a common HD resolution the current visible pixel range is about 640x480 - at least some expensive research displays I used in 2011.
- frik 12y ago
  *view-point
regularfry 12y ago
Caches for streaming the media. The BBC has this problem every now and again, with big events or popular shows: the pipes to the cabinets in the streets aren't big enough to unicast to everyone simultaneously. A CDN node in every cabinet is probably not too far off.

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

aragot 12y ago

> Software grows to match the hardware. You mean XML for instance?

swalsh 12y ago
Not sure why he was downvoted, xml is a trade off for developer convenience. A trade off we were willing to make because we had disposable bits.
- valarauca1 12y ago
  What was the trade off? Harder to parse files for less human readability?
  - Touche 12y ago
    What was the predecessor to xml that was easier to read?
    - biot 12y ago
      "If GML was an infant, SGML is the bright youngster who far exceeds expectations and made its parents too proud, but XML is the drug-addicted gang member who had committed his first murder before he had sex, which was rape." -- Erik Naggum GML is from the late 1960s and is, arguably, easier to read. SGML from the 1980s expanded upon this. XML is essentially just an offshoot of SGML and much less readable than SGML is. For example, here is a valid SGML document: <anthology> <poem> <title>The SICK ROSE <stanza> <line>O Rose thou art sick. <line>The invisible worm, <line>That flies in the night <line>In the howling storm: <stanza> <line>Has found out thy bed <line>Of crimson joy: <line>And his dark secret love <line>Does thy life destroy. <poem>  </anthology> Aside from XML's lineage, there is no shortage of markup languages available with varying levels of readability.
      - Touche 12y ago

7952 12y ago

Bandwidth won't grow and IMHO that is now the chief constraint in computing. For low usage it is cheaper to store data on S3 for a month than buying the bandwidth to transfer it once!