Or so said a professor I had 8 years ago.
One of the things I do each day here in the Hermit Kingdom is discuss current events with the students.
This week I discussed the Nobel Prize in Physics and how it has impacted my students.
Like many children in industrialized countries, most of them have an MP3 player of some kind and all of them have a relatively new computer at home.
Yet, unsurprisingly, none of them could explain how Giant magnetoresistance (GMR) has changed their listening or viewing habits.
GMR, of course, is the quantum effect that was discovered twenty years ago and whose productive applications involve playing with fuzzy dice: within the world of electrons and magnetism.
Tell me something I don’t already know, right?
What about Kryder’s Law?
It is essentially the parallel version of Moore’s Law applied to the world of hard disk space and is named after professor Mark Kryder of Carnegie Mellon University.
Of bits and bytes
Geordie Rose recently linked to a story about several old disk drives and other computer gizmos made over the past 50 years.
However, one that did not make the cut was the IBM 305 RAMAC.
It weighed one ton and had a capacity of 5 MB. That product is just a tad bit different than the 4 pound, 750 GB drive you can pick up at the local computer store for under five benjamins.
Speaking of rapid changes, last week Popular Mechanics pointed out, that capacity of drive space has increased 50 million times over the past five decades.
And as mentioned above, Mark Kryder was also interviewed last week by PM and he noted that capacity increases a whopping 40% each year.
So where does this all lead?
As Charles Stross predicted this summer, probably to the digitally powered omnipresent world in which every person uses a lifelog, that chronicles every second of your life in full high definition audio and visual. All in a device smaller than an iPod.
I guess that will make you think twice about looking at the low-cut v-neck or midriff of your female coworker. Or maybe you will do it that much more…
[Note: back in 1997, my brother brought home a new 2.7 GB hard drive. He asked me how on earth he would fill it up. Suffice to say that the typical installation of Vista requires ~15 GB]
See also: What is wrong with Moore’s Law?