> I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of voices [of copyright attorneys and trade industry groups] suddenly cried out in terror, and were suddenly silenced.
Guess again. All that storage represents a virtually limitless crypto-space within which intellectual property rights holders can create one-time-pads, and disenfranchise future consumers with.
When combined with ubiquitous 4G coverage, all they'll ever need to stream are the limitless persistent auth tokens, as locking and unlocking assets as frequently as bandwidth will allow, while remaining profitable.
I bet some of the greediest and most tyrranical IP controllers will have 1:1 authentication ratios, with each and every text character, audio sample and pixel per video frame, such that they'll never reduce bandwidth, and even create backlogs of access history, for billing purposes, when network connectivity returns.
Yes, because you accessed five seconds of full motion video, and witnessed content in which Lady Gaga's eyes moved five pixels to the left, while she pronounced a fricative syllable in the third verse of her top 40 hit single, you now owe Viacom 1/20th of one cent. NOTE: Costs do not include third-party fees covering closed-captioning for the hearing impared.
Weird side point, but I'd be really interested to hear how people weight the importance of Wikipedia text vs media vs history. For me the first is 99% of the point, but clearly others feel differently.
When I saw that the film Defiance was based on a interesting-sounding real set of events, I looked at them on Wikipedia. The history and talk pages had an ongoing edit war with a sizable number of commentators who appeared to feel that the Bielskis should be treated as criminals and murderers rather than fêted as heroes, due to their killing of local Nazi sympathisers.
If you just stuck to the hashed-out Wikipedia page that was current, you'd be completely oblivious to the whole controversy.
Yeah, you're probably right. But the history can be really important on certain pages. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1671756 And images can make some of the math articles useful since they are too-often dense pages of formulas.
I find that Wikipedia's text heavy presentation disappointing especially considering that the articles are almost exclusively what I would consider extremely terse. It's like the worst of both worlds.
I remember reading about Xowa and there was stated that English wikipedia requires 25GB and images additional ~80GB which you can all download and access offline with Xowa. Considering there are 128GB SD and micro SDXC cards readily available for ~$100... that's actually amazing.
All of the textual wikipedia is about 10GB compressed, even with the garbage pages. I'd say a good chunk of the history and the images could fit in the remainder.
It could reduce the amount of data a smartphone needs. I'd like to keep a copy of my local area in my google map and then have it check in once a week to look for changes.
A smartphone could have an onboard map today. It's a conscious choice by google to make it work the way it does. Look at TomTom or any other navigator (and possibly some smartphone apps too) that come with integrated maps.
That service is just grafted on there, it's not a necessity.
There are other navigation apps that do store offline maps; the reason they're not popular outside of outdoor enthusiasts is that they take up a huge amount of space. It seems like a reasonable trade-off to me.
Nokia somehow manages to do offline maps just fine - you can download maps of the countries/cities you need separately and they take up no more than about a hundred MBs each.
I'm not sure I understand what you mean by integration; are you proposing that the mapping app contain the complete map data, which is then occasionally updated as needed? There's a clear advantage to not storing several GB of data you rarely if ever need on a device with very limited storage space.
Flash is a commodity, a typical navigation device will store all the maps for all of Europe including the most crazy little roads and cost a relatively small fraction of a cell phone, includes a good chunk of the hardware and comes with an SD slot for upgrades.
Cell phones could easily provide navigation capabilities for at least the country of origin of the buyer and several around it if the creators decided this was a desirable thing.
Flash runs a few $ / G. Of course your phone manufacturer will screw you completely on the memory when you buy it (the price difference between a 16G and a 32G phone is ridiculous, but I guess I can't fault them as long as people fall for tricks like that).
>a typical navigation device will store all the maps for all of Europe
Yeah but it won't also have several GB of games, audio, apps and photos on it as well. People would cry bloody murder if they found out google was using 7 GB of space to cache the world map by default.
If you are a person who needs a world map at their fingertips there are apps for that but the average person just needs google maps to figure out what turn the should take occasionally.
And this is all especially true if we start seeing memristor arrays replacing flash chips in mobile devices; at that point, the few GB it would take to store a worldwide transportation map would be pocket change.
StreetView is overkill to me, basic navigation is pretty much a must, even if you have no dataplan. But of course that's not the way smartphones are being marketed.
I've been holding out from the smartphone revolution for quite a while now, but a phone that would do off-line navigation would be a good thing because that means one less thing to carry along.
I don't like having services forced upon me when a single download would suffice.
Check out MapsWithMe - OpenStreetMap packaged as a basic mapping app, paid pro package for more than basic mapping/location pointing. The OSM db is segmented by country/province/US state so you can tailor the size / coverage as desired.
Haven't looked at the pro pricing or feature list, just having maps that my off-network, GPS equipped old brick can use near home is sweet enough.
I tried MapsWithMe, but those are only maps, no navigation.
If you use Android, check out OsmAnd. It uses the same OSM maps, has navigation (with voice pack too) and it's free for up to 8 countries IIRC. I have been using it for about three months and it works pretty good.
The only problem I found is that city names for some countries are in local language, so if you go to Greece for example, you would have to type in the names in Greek letters. It they fixed this, it would be perfect.
There is setting for the names (but I think there have been people on the OSMand mailing list having issues with it). The English names would also have to be present in the OSM data (not for any particular technical reason, just as far as I'm aware that is the only source of names the devs use for the maps).
Also, the free version allows for 10 downloads, where updating a previously downloaded map (which might only be a region of a country) counts as one of them. But the paid version is only $8.
Google maps does check for changes, but in a sort of braindead way. Every 30 days it'll check for map updates, and if it can't (e.g. no internet connection) it'll just delete your locally saved maps.
I ended up looking into this a little while back as an emergency kit type thing. Wikipedia is useful - and tells me how to do a lot of things. In a disaster, I probably don't have internet. So it would be a good idea to have local wikipedia.
Zim reader was the best I could do, and still is the best at the moment. But I would be totally fine with dedicating a few terabytes to keeping much more complete local archives on my file-server if the update process was reasonably automatic (something like bittorrent would be great).
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.
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)
> 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.
"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.
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.
It's a good point, though. He is mainly speaking to the data rates for media involving 'guided' experiences. Interactive experiences would benefit much more linearly with the amount of data able to be stored (google maps on your phone analogy).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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>
<!-- more poems go here -->
</anthology>
Aside from XML's lineage, there is no shortage of markup languages available with varying levels of readability.
The same reason <ul> has a closing tag but <li> does not: HTML is SGML where certain tags can be made optional. XML specifically did away with this and made all close tags mandatory (even on contentless tags, which is why xhtml requires you to do <img />).
In this case, the schema probably disallows any other tags inside <line>, which makes </line> superfluous and it can thus be omitted. If <stanza>s are not recursive and poems cannot contain <line>s outside <stanza>s, </stanza> can also be omitted. Etc etc.
I think it's funny to see people quoting Erik Naggum, though perhaps that's just because my context for him is largely his rather prolific and fiery output on usenet.
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!
Looking forward to carrying the library of congress, netflix's entire catalog, and all of openstreetmap on my phone in the next 5 years.