On Sat, 12 Jan 2008 11:05:33 GMT, bealoid <signup@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
>What devices used in "today's" science fiction will the future people
look
>back on and laugh at?
>I was listening to some SF thing on the radio last week. One of the
>characters - in a space ****p, between the stars - pulled out a slide
rule.
>[1]
>Any storage media in movies looks a bit odd to me - floppy disks look
>really old, but even standard optical media (which could be some form of
>'super DVD') look old fa****oned. Using a smaller size optical media
>doesn't help either.
>Transflash (MicroSD) cards can store a huge amount of information - 4GB?
>8GB? and they're *tiny*. Smallness isn't great but when I see someone in
>the future pull out a storage mediem the size of a can of soda/pop[2]
that
>had better store a **huge** amount of data. Or processing power. Or
both.
Actually, I don't think I've ever seen SF use ****table data storage that
bulky. Mostly, they use some nifty-looking thing that's about the size of
a 3.5" floppy or a mini-CD.
And in real life, I don't think I've ever seen anyone use an SD card or
the like as a data storage medium. Those are used as working memory for
various sorts of gadgets, and only ever removed from the gadget for
immediate transfer to some other sort of storage.
Because, and SF gets this right almost all the time, the optimal size for
any ****table information-storage medium, is just big enough to carry an
easily-read label and not get lost in your pocket. A small floppy, or a
large thumb drive. Or maybe a small thumb drive on a lanyard.
And that's independant of the ammount of data. Kilobyte, petabyte, or
anything in between, you're going to be looking for something the size
of a small floppy or a large thumb drive. The grain-of-rice drive is
right out, and if the standard "floppy disk" of your era holds a full
petabyte and you only care about a kilobyte, it's going to go on a
99.9999999999% empty petabyte floppy.
Well, OK, 99.9% empty - the minimal file header will be a gigabyte and
the AI file-handling system will occupy a terabyte :-)
>[1] Don't get me wrong, I love slide rules. But come on, even the people
>who use them think that they're not used very often.
On the other hand, the one time I routinely *do* use a slide rule, is when
I'm navigating an aircraft.
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