Just a quickie before I finally jump in the bath. I just found this and it really made me smile, so I thought I'd share it.

We've all seen those surprise first dances at weddings on youtube, well, this is something a bit different. It's the original, and they've disabled embedding. Rather than go find a copy, I thought I'd just post the link, and give them all the hits they can get. Go look, and have a great Wednesday evening.

CLICKY

Just got home from dropping the parentals and associated offspring back at Shannon Airport after their stay. Had a good week overall, with a few ups and downs. Highlights include two flat tyres in the middle of nowhere, a stunning day at the lakeshore, a dip in the rather chilly Atlantic and around 40 bottles of beer.

Will post more later or tomorrow.

Who am I kidding? It'll be next week sometime.

This post is a bit of a geekgasm, I'm afraid. Please bear with me.

I've been thinking about digital storage; it's pretty amazing how quickly it expands. Companies are working tirelessly to fit more memory into smaller spaces, and it's never enough. I talked about it a while back, but it bears repeating - remember when we had floppy disks? 1.4MB if you were lucky. That's not even enough to store one full-resolution photo from modern digital cameras today. 1MB is almost nothing today.

Remember when Windows or Office (or was it Works?) came on loads of floppies, and you had to swap out the disks all the time you were installing? What a pain in the bum.

Then came CDs. 700MB, the equivalent of 500 floppy disks. That kept us happy for a while, but pretty soon applications and games gobbled up all that space and started coming on multiple CDs.

DVDs hold 4.8GB on a single layer, which is around 6 CDs worth of information, but they can have two layers, effectively doubling their capacity. This is where most people today are storage-wise, and commercially it's plenty of storage for most applications and games, as well as movies, of course. Recordable dual layer discs are becoming more common, but are still fairly expensive.

Blu-Ray discs are the newest "optical" format - and quite possibly the last. They hold 25GB of data on a single layer, 50GB over two layers. That's plenty for now, but we thought 1.4MB was enough once upon a time.

I've not got to the point I wanted to make yet, but stop and think about that for a second. A dual-layer Blu-Ray disk, an item exactly the same size as a CD, which potentially holds the same amount of information as 70 CDs. Pretty amazing, huh?

I said above that Blu-Ray is possibly the last optical format. That's because other storage mediums are developing faster than optical technology. Look at flash drives/pen drives/key drives - whatever you want to call them. USB devices that store your files. You can pick a 1GB drive up for a couple of quid now, and they're available in MUCH higher capacities if you're willing to pay. Related to flash drives are memory cards - one of the most common being SD cards. Used in a variety of devices, and capacity going up all the time. Not only is the capacity going up, but the physical size is coming down - MicroSD cards are used in many mobile phones now.

Flash memory is more convenient, portable and sturdier than CDs or DVDs, but the cost of higher capacity drives or cards is prohibitive. One compromise is portable hard-drives. These come in a great variety of sizes, but you can easily get a 500GB drive for under £100.

500GB. That's insane. It's nearly 36000 floppy disks. In one small device. And that's not even the biggest drive available. 2 terabyte hard drives are now readily available if you've got the cash to spare. A terabyte is 1000GB.

2000GB on a single device. That's over 300 DVD-quality movies, or nearly 3000 CDs.

So, with storage so cheap, and broadband speeds increasing, before long DVDs are bound to go the way of CDs - MP3 downloads are becoming the norm for music purchases, and plenty of movies and TV shows are available to download already. It's surely just a matter of time before you don't think twice about buying a newly released movie online and downloading it to your television's built in hard drive.

So. The reason for my post. Terabyte is the current benchmark for data storage, but even terabytes are starting to feel limiting. I have around a terabyte of data hooked up to my telly via a computer and various external drives. It's running out. So, soon I'll have 2 terabytes.

But what's next?

Petabytes.

A thousand terabytes. A million gigabytes. A billion megabytes. That's the equivalent of over 13 YEARS of continuous HD video. Not DVD quality, HD. There are companies working to bring the first 1PB drive to consumers within a couple of years.

And I can't wait to fill it up with my crap.

This post was inspired by an image from Gizmodo.

Just did a lovely long post about the sudden downpour we just had here, and it cocked somehow up as I posted it. It just got truncated and ended with "%20".

That'll teach me for blogging. I shan't do it again.

This is my first post via my iPhone. It's a bit fiddly cos I'm not used to the keyboard yet, but I'm getting better at typing on it. It helps that the autocorrection feature is quite good...

Also, I've noticed that my tweets aren't being posted lately, and they're posted by email like this will be, so I won't hold my breath until this post finally appears.

And I'm also a geek, which is why I flippin' love this! A modern retelling of West Side Story. Ladies and gentlemen (and Nick), I give you...

Web Site Story.