packetstorm became the victim of FUD (fwd)

[Kragen Sitaker]

Brad writes:
> It could be worse than that, though.  If we loose all the technology to read
> all our electronic media in the world, we'll loose quite a bit.
> 
> Anyone for printing out the contents of 9GB drives every 6 months, and
> putting the printouts in strong boxes and burying them?

Not me.

A square inch at 600dpi contins 600x600 = 360,000 bits.  An A-size
piece of paper contains 8.5x11 = 93.5 square inches, for a total of 33
660 000 bits.  That's 4 207 500 bytes.  A 9GB hard disk contains 2296
pages of information.

But that's if you don't mind needing digital technology to read the
paper, and having to guess which way the bytes go, etc.  If you want to
print out the contents as text, you can fit about 3K per page.  Then
your 9GB disk contains 3 000 000 pages of information, or twice that if
you keep your text files compressed.  Even if you print really small,
you still have maybe 300 000 pages of information.

So it'll take a month to print it out on one printer, it'll cost
several thousand dollars, and the result will be 600 reams of paper.

-- 
<kragen@pobox.com>       Kragen Sitaker     <http://www.pobox.com/~kragen/>
Fri Jul 30 1999
99 days until the Internet stock bubble bursts on Monday, 1999-11-08.
<URL:http://www.pobox.com/~kragen/bubble.html>