How many GB would one file cabinet hold?

I just stuck this on stumbleupon like 12 hours ago, and we were up to over 400 guests looking at this thread just a few minutes ago.

:D
 
I was thinking WTF until about 3/4 way down, then I realized what it was and now my wife just callled me a dork for laughing :D
 
wait. may just be a slow day. but is this right
4MB = 33554432 bits
i thought it is, 4mb=4,000kb=4,000,000bytes=32,000,000?
 
Side note: I have more hip hop albums than your friend. I always wondered how much weight can a harddrive hold. Like if you physically weighed all the content that it was storing. DVDs CDs photos ... Stuff like that.
 
Ok, let's see if I can figure this out.
One Page = 6460 characters
1 Gigabyte (GB) = 1,073,741,824 Byte
Therefore One Gigabyte = 1,073,741,824/6460 = 166213.90464396284829721362229102 pages.
So therefore, hard drives of the following volumes would require this many pages:

10GB = 1662140 pages
30GB = 4986418 Pages
80GB = 13297113 Pages
120GB = 19945669 Pages
160GB = 26594225 Pages
250GB = 41553477 Pages
1TB = 170203038 Pages

Now, One page = 0.16 ounces [Source]

Therefore:

10GB weighs 265942.4 ounces, or 16621.4 pounds (Ok, now that's just freaky) (7 539kg)
30GB = 49 864.18 pounds (22 618kg)
80GB = 132971.13 pounds (60 314kg)
120GB = 199456.69 pounds (90 472kg)
160GB = 265942.25 pounds (120 629kg)
250GB = 415534.77 Pounds (188 483kg)
1TB = 1702030.38 pounds (772 027kg)

Oh, and the cost of sending 1TB from New York to San Francisco: $111849 (consisting of 24314 letters each weighing 70 pounds) or $4236888.75 if you want it Express Mail overnight.
 
Cromewell said:
What if you used a smaller text size and a condensed font? :P
Click to expand...
Exactly, and why are we assuming we have to use binary? if we are talking about text we could convert the binary into any textual represention, we could use tertiary etc.
or why not just use the actual number that the binary represent? so i can squeeze binary 11111111 into 255, increasing capacity by 266%.
Then if we bring on board alpha numeric letters we can go crazy with the size
so by adding one letter to make an 8 bit block into a 9 bit, so 11111111[x] were [x] can be any letter. I cant even do the math but that gives a massive increase in space alone (like 100x)

Heck why even bother with the first 8 bits in binary, and why bother limiting to 24 alpha chars, there are well over a hundred possible chars in thousands of possible fonts, plus the underline, subscript, strike out, double strick out, italics (and combinations thereof). AND THEN we can start using different colours for each character of which there are thousands of colours. There must be over a 10,000,000 possible district characters that could occupy one character space on a sheet off paper. and then we could start looking a combinations of these!!. In short you could probably compact an entire song into about 1 line (maybe just a few chars) under this system, albeit the system would be complex.

Just because computers can only read in binary doesn't mean the human eye can. You'd just have to run a converter across it (much like we do when we convert a programming language into (ultimately binary)
 
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wow what ever happened to losing you imagination when you mature. that is well thought out. i here by vote we make apj do this project and send us a copy of it :P o and the converter ;)
 
apj101 said:
Exactly, and why are we assuming we have to use binary? if we are talking about text we could convert the binary into any textual represention, we could use tertiary etc.
or why not just use the actual number that the binary represent? so i can squeeze binary 11111111 into 255, increasing capacity by 266%.
Then if we bring on board alpha numeric letters we can go crazy with the size
so by adding one letter to make an 8 bit block into a 9 bit, so 11111111[x] were [x] can be any letter. I cant even do the math but that gives a massive increase in space alone (like 100x)

Heck why even bother with the first 8 bits in binary, and why bother limiting to 24 alpha chars, there are well over a hundred possible chars in thousands of possible fonts, plus the underline, subscript, strike out, double strick out, italics (and combinations thereof). AND THEN we can start using different colours for each character of which there are thousands of colours. There must be over a 10,000,000 possible district characters that could occupy one character space on a sheet off paper. and then we could start looking a combinations of these!!. In short you could probably compact an entire song into about 1 line (maybe just a few chars) under this system, albeit the system would be complex.

Just because computers can only read in binary doesn't mean the human eye can. You'd just have to run a converter across it (much like we do when we convert a programming language into (ultimately binary)
Click to expand...


Well of course there are infinite ways in which you could store more information... you could use colored microscopic dots, as small as you could possibly make them, with each color representing a different value, and be able to store an astronomical amount of information on each sheet of paper, but that never was the point of the example. The point was to see how much you could store on printed paper at using average text in the same format as a hard drive... binary data.
 
PohTayToez said:
Well of course there are infinite ways in which you could store more information... you could use colored microscopic dots, as small as you could possibly make them, with each color representing a different value, and be able to store an astronomical amount of information on each sheet of paper...
Click to expand...

Funny you should mention that - did you ever see this:

http://www.techworld.com/storage/news/index.cfm?newsID=7424

256GB per page! ;] Well, OK, it probably actually works out to something closer to 2.5MB per page, but still a significant improvement.
 
Dude, your friend seems cool

Man, your friend sounds really hot..anyway I can get his number?


Lol..T-rain..hit me up tomorrow.
 
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