Tencent is offering 10 Terabytes of Storage to Users

Jesus.

Tencent, the parent company to Weibo (China’s largest chat app),  is offering 10 terabytes of storage to their users. That sounds incredible! Amazing! Wondrous!

But I can’t even picture how much 10 terabytes really is…

So of course, I Googled and found some handy pictorial on Neatorama from like, 2008. They charted how much 12 terabytes is worth, which is close enough… I guess.

Behold. This, is 12 terabytes:

It’s nice to visualize, but it’s still hard to really picture (or maybe I’m just stupid?) and upon even further Googling, I came across more examples.

10 terabytes = 1,000 copies of the Encyclopedia Britannica. 300 hours of good quality video. All of the Library of Congress.
Library of Congress = ‘155.3 million items on approximately 838 miles of bookshelves. 35 million books and other print materials, 3.4 million recordings, 13.6 millioni photographs, 5.4 million maps, 6.5 million pieces of sheet music and 68 million manuscripts.

Um. What? 838 miles, is approximately the distance from NYC to Disney World. A little more than San Francisco to Vancouver — CANADA. From Mongolia to Kazakhstan (Borat) and it’s like climbing The Great Smokey Mountains. Either which way, that is a lot of frickin’ stuff on a lot of frickin’ mileage. It’s still a bit unclear to me how much 10 terabytes really is and how it makes my life easier.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t LOTS OF STORAGE! a bit backwards…? I mean… in the age of streaming, why would I even want to store all that data? Googling is so much faster and easier. I can find movies and songs, TV shows, reference books, dictionaries, thesauruses… what would I even do with all that storage space?

Maybe my digital habits are bit different because I long ago stopped being an Internet pack rat — I’m all about constantly organizing and discarding.

I’d rather have less storage room with more bandwidth to upload. The CAPd data message: “File upload failed, file too large.” always bums me out.

Any which way, looking forward to seeing how Tencent does.

Sources: 1, 2, 3, 4

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Tragic Incidents and Social Media

There was a 23 year old beaten and murdered outside of a California club. The news has been passing through my Facebook and Twitter newsfeeds all day. I’ve been meaning to Tweet or Facebook or something about the incident, but think it deserves more than a Facebook post or a 140 character tweet.

This is a tragic incident and my heart is absolutely broken at the notion of such a young girl meeting her death from such an every day activity as going out. This could’ve happened to anyone and it does. Just Google “beaten to death outside of club” if you’re into that sort of thing.

What’s really disappointing, is how people took the time to take photos and video to upload onto Instagram, Twitter and Facebook while this young girl was getting the living daylights beaten out of her. And then she ended up dying.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying it’s up to the spectators to be superheros but I wonder what it was like before all this social media stuff.

I mean, if people have the time to take photos and video, shouldn’t they… well, call for help? There are club bouncers for a reason. Or at least call 9-1-1 before taking the photo and choosing a filter.

Think back to when we had our Nokia phones, BlackBerries and even Sidekicks and we saw someone getting beat up. Did we still stand around and watch? Did we pretend not to notice? When did we start thinking collectively as a society, that it’s ok to share with our networks vs. helping?

Or is our sharing, just a way to help us humans process such shocking events?

Either which way, something to think about as functioning humans in civilized societies. And especially, for our next generations.

Coverage on the incident are here and here.

2014.

From Dec. 26th to January 4th, I traveled Japan solo. I chose to chronicle my trip on Hi — publishing platform — instead of Tweeting, Instagramming, Facebooking and even on my own blog.

People have been asking why, this essay beautifully captures why:

Africa burns my eyes and sets my nerves on edge.

Even if you aren’t interested in Hi, the essay is a must read, for anyone looking to be whisked away to a land far away with…words.

Read Craig‘s essay here.

A photo from one of the many of the small Japanese villages I visited.
You can read my entire trip here: “Epic Trip 2013”

Shirakawago