• Skydancer@pawb.social
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    5 days ago

    Americans used just over 100 trillion megabytes exabytes of wireless data in 2023

    Megabytes are absolutely the wrong unit for this amount of data.

    • Mac@mander.xyz
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      5 days ago

      nobody knows what an exabyte is so why would anybody use that?

      • mycodesucks@lemmy.world
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        5 days ago

        We live in a world where finding out what an exabyte is takes all of 3 seconds. You really want to argue the standard for communication of information should be based on the most ignorant and unmotivated people?

          • mycodesucks@lemmy.world
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            5 days ago

            I don’t know… I can’t answer what you’re trying to argue. That’s your hill to defend if you want to.

          • scholar@lemmy.world
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            4 days ago

            They are smaller, more familliar numbers paired with more appropriate units that people have heard of

            • Mac@mander.xyz
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              4 days ago

              I guarantee you that most people still don’t know what a terabyte is. gigabytes, probably…

              anyway all I’m saying is that a headlines goal is to reach and be understood by as many people as possible so obviously they’re not going to use something that nobody knows, like exa, peta, and terabytes.
              I think most people have a general feeling for how much a megabyte is because most of the things that we deal with are sized in megabytes.

              • Strykker@programming.dev
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                4 days ago

                But a hell of a lot more people will know what a gigabyte is compared to an exabyte, even I had to think for a few seconds to figure out what scale exabyte was compared to what I know, and I work with computer hardware everyday.

  • Theoriginalthon@lemmy.world
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    6 days ago

    100EB that’s the one after PB, good to know that the government can store it all as ZFS supports files that large

    • hakunawazo@lemmy.world
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      6 days ago

      He was hoarding all the toilet paper in the corona supermarket wars. New conspiracy unlocked. /s

    • Possibly linux
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      5 days ago

      That feels like a bad comparison. Technically paper could told a huge amount of data if you write small enough

    • [email protected]@sh.itjust.works
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      6 days ago

      About 14 football fields, stacked up to the crossbar.
      according to GPT-4o-mini that I haven’t double-checked, which means it’s likely wrong somewhere.

      Summary of Paper Volume and Football Fields

      Data Capacity of a Letter-Sized Page

      • Dimensions: 8.5 x 11 inches
      • Average Text Capacity:
        • Approximately 500 to 600 words
        • About 2,500 to 3,000 characters
        • Roughly 2,500 to 3,000 bytes (using standard ASCII/UTF-8)

      Total Pages for 100 Exabytes

      • 100 Exabytes = 10^20 bytes
      • Average Bytes per Page: 2,750 bytes
      • Total Pages: Approximately 36.4 trillion pages

      Volume of the Paper

      • Volume of One Page:
        • Volume = 8.5 inches x 11 inches x 0.004 inches ≈ 0.000374 cubic inches
      • Total Volume for 36.4 Trillion Pages:
        • Total volume ≈ 7.89 million cubic feet

      Volume of a Football Field

      • Dimensions:
        • Length: 120 yards (360 feet)
        • Width: 53.3 yards (160 feet)
        • Height: 10 feet
      • Volume: Approximately 576,000 cubic feet

      Football Fields Needed to Hold the Paper

      • Calculation:
        • Number of football fields ≈ 7,890,000 cubic feet / 576,000 cubic feet ≈ 14
      • Result: Approximately 14 football