Welcome to Orcmid's Lair, the playground for family connections, pastimes, and scholarly vocation -- the collected professional and recreational work of Dennis E. Hamilton

 

1 Terabyte Per Person for Life?

ACM News Service: Conference Mulls Web as Personal Memory Store.  This blurb looks at several possibilities, including the impact of each of us have 1 terabyte (TB) of personal storage for ourselves.  That is the target for my Tablet PC: 100 GB non-volatile RAM plus 1 TB of personal memory on a hard drive.  I don't think we'll be there by July 2005, so I'll have to do at least one upgrade before reaching that point.  The question I am left with is how do I memorialize that material, and how do I ever do another upgrade?

It is now easy to see how Googol is able to promise 1TB per user for GMail, since they won't have to deliver for most of us - it is simply inexhaustible, based on other throttling mechanisms.  And, if the past is any guide, new developments and practices will overpower that assumption.

Top News Article | Reuters.com: WWW Conference Mulls Web as Personal Memory Store.  Eric Auchard's 2004-05-20 article covers the WWW2004 topic on holding access to ones "life history," especially as it is situated around Internet usage.  The key themes:

• We are developing affordable capacity (including $1000 per Terabyte) where there is little reason to throw anything away, and this can help preserve personal memory (Rick Rashid, Microsoft Research).
• Being able to revisit wherever one has been before with an intelligent "back button" (Stu Feldman, IBM internet strategist).
• Instant textbook updating (which doesn't seem to understand how instruction works)
• Continuous medical monitoring
• use of work toward the Semantic Web to make electronic mail easier to search and use. (Hmm, what does the markup and how do users establish their own context.  Hmm...).
• Your video-camera-equipped cellular phone and other always-on devices will be your eyes for digital capture of presence and important experiences
• The cultural impact is unfathomable

posted by Dennis at 5/23/2004 07:44:35 AM