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128-bit storage: are you high?

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Re: 128-bit storage: are you high?

#3
The most interesting thing in this article is the reference to "Ultimate physical limits to computation." It's something I never thought about before and honestly it kind of blew my mind a little bit...

Re: 128-bit storage: are you high?

#4
post #2

One day, aliens will use our oceans as heat sinks for their great galactic computer. And even then, ZFS will serve them well.

We can use a ZFS storage system to make the moons of Saturn inhabitable. That's Sealand taken to a whole new level.

The network latencies are terrible, however.

Re: 128-bit storage: are you high?

#5
post #2

One day, aliens will use our oceans as heat sinks for their great galactic computer. And even then, ZFS will serve them well.

> One day, we will use our oceans as heat sinks for our great galactic computer. And even then, ZFS will serve us well.

FTFY

Re: 128-bit storage: are you high?

#6
Nice article, great calculation. There's a much simpler argument for 128 bit storage though: the observable universe has at minimum 10^79 atoms in it. Even if you could use each and every one of those atoms as a bit to store data, you'd still have more than 50 ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE left in ZFS for the rest of the data. We're probably safe.

Re: 128-bit storage: are you high?

#7
post #3

The most interesting thing in this article is the reference to "Ultimate physical limits to computation." It's something I never thought about before and honestly it kind of blew my mind a little bit...

Agreed. Unfortunately the Nature article is behind a paywall but the original paper is available on arxiv: http://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/9908043

Re: 128-bit storage: are you high?

#8
post #6

Nice article, great calculation. There's a much simpler argument for 128 bit storage though: the observable universe has at minimum 10^79 atoms in it. Even if you could use each and every one of those atoms as a bit to store data, you'd still have more than 50 ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE left in ZFS for the rest of the data. We're probably safe.

You realize that 2^128 is much less than 10^79, right?

Re: 128-bit storage: are you high?

#9
The 128-bit storage of ZFS reminds me a bit of TeX. As far as I can remember reading the TeX book, Don Knuth also wanted to play it safe. Internally, everything relies on integers (no floating point operations), and the smallest internal unit of measurement is less than the wavelength of light (don't remember the color ;-) ).

Re: 128-bit storage: are you high?

#10
post #2

One day, aliens will use our oceans as heat sinks for their great galactic computer. And even then, ZFS will serve them well.

Doesn't Douglas Adams touch on that? Wasn't Earth a big computer in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galacy?

From a wikipedia entry... "[The computer] Deep Thought does not know the ultimate question to Life, the Universe and Everything, but offers to design an even more powerful computer, Earth, to calculate it. After ten million years of calculation, the Earth is destroyed by Vogons five minutes before the computation is complete."

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