Technology Notebook

INFORMATION OVERLOAD
We are already dealing in terabytes. In case you were wondering what comes
after that and how big is that really...

Kilobyte - (1,000 bytes) a very short story
Megabyte - (1,000,000 bytes) a small novel
Gigabyte - (1 billion bytes) Beethoven's 5th Symphony
Terabyte - (1,000 gigabytes) all the X-rays in a large hospital
Petabyte - (1,000 terabytes) half the contents of all US academic research
libraries
Exabyte - (1,000 petabytes) 5 exabytes - all the words people have ever
spoken
Zettabyte - 1,000 exabytes) as much information as there are grains of sand
on all the world's beaches.
Yottabyte - (1,000 zettabytes) as much information as there are atoms in
7,000 human bodies.

The world produced about three exabytes of new information in 2000, the
equivalent of about 500 novel-sized books,
or two floppy disks, for every man, woman, and child on earth.

- More new information will be created over the next two years than has been
created over the entire history of mankind.
- The amount of new information being created is doubling every year, with
no end in sight.
- Print comprises only .003 percent of the total.
- More information by far is created by individuals than businesses, a trend
researchers call the "democratization" of information.
- Already more than 80 billion photographs are taken every year, which would
require 80 million times more digital information storage than the same
number of words.