Americans used just over 100 ~~trillion megabytes~~ exabytes of wireless data in 2023
Megabytes are absolutely the wrong unit for this amount of data.
this post was submitted on 12 Sep 2024
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Ditch exabytes, return to bytes
nobody knows what an exabyte is so why would anybody use that?
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?
looks like you answered your own question there bud
I don't know... I can't answer what you're trying to argue. That's your hill to defend if you want to.
How about billion Gigabytes, or million Terabytes?
at that point what's the difference?
They are smaller, more familliar numbers paired with more appropriate units that people have heard of
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.
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.
yes, that's what i said
I misread and thought you said people wouldn't know gigabytes, I disagree that people won't know Tera bytes especially since most laptops seem to ship with at least 1TB drives these days.
100EB that's the one after PB, good to know that the government can store it all as ZFS supports files that large
Honestly the sad part is that you aren't wrong
Can I have that in football fields worth of Bill Gates's paper stacks? Pic for context
That feels like a bad comparison. Technically paper could told a huge amount of data if you write small enough
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
He was hoarding all the toilet paper in the corona supermarket wars. New conspiracy unlocked. /s
1.618x10^7 at a height of bill gates
How many Danny DeVitos is that?
Not enough, I can tell you that! We need more Danny Devitos.
In what resolution? Lossy or lossless compression?
Before or after offering us an egg in these trying times?
Why does the headline & story use megabytes for this? Especially in a report about 2023.
That's the measurements survey used. Survey: https://api.ctia.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/2024-Annual-Survey-1.pdf
Added to the body post.