Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips

We have more data today. Really? I don’t think so. We do have more places to put data, so we need to put something there. Right?

I don’t know how many times I have read about all the new data we have today. The amount of data we have is BIG. The amount of data we will have in five years will be a thousand (or is it a million) times more than we have today. We are collecting zillions of zillions of bytes every day.

I disagree. Those are opinions, and we can all have our own opinions.

Fact: we have more places to put data than ever before and the places to put data is rapidly growing.

This week I read about 30TeraByte disk drives coming next year. Put a dozen of these 30TeraByte disks under my table at home and … and I don’t know what to do with them. I can put a few dozen sensors in my backyard that record the weather a thousand times a second and store that data on all those 30TeraByte disks. I can put a dozen 120FramesPerSecond cameras in and around my house and put all that data on all those 30TeraByte disks. Wow! Data. Data storage.

And what would I have? Data that has almost no meaning and almost certainly has no audience of persons who want any of it.

My opinion is that when we have a place to put data, we will find data to put there. See? We did grow our data by leaps and bounds. Our predictions were true. Right?

We have the ability to collect more digital data. Wonderful analog-to-digital converters made that possible. We have the ability to store more digital data. Wonderful new magnetic-media technologies made that possible.

More data? I guess so. More data that anyone wants? I doubt it.