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back to article Wired defines the storage 'PornYear'

Wired has thrown down the gauntlet to El Reg's Standards Soviet by defining the storage "PornYear" - equivalent to 0.94 petabytes. Yes indeed, forget Jubs, Linguine, and the theoretical maximum velocity of a sheep in a vacuum - the future will be measured by the number of millions of hours of HD vid smut you can theoretically …

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  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Two centuries' worth of porn, eh?

    Bring it on.

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  2. ad551
    Happy

    Tip off?

    Yes, I suppose that may happen after a PornYear

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  3. gnomedeplum
    IT Angle

    Hardware/storage surely?

    not Bootnotes as it has an IT angle

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  4. Chris McFaul
    Stop

    maths?

    188PB for 2.7 million hours works out at 69GB/hour

    which even for HD seems outrageous, thats well above blu-ray where you can squeeze a 2 hour move onto a 25GB SL disc.

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    1. Anonymous Coward
      Reply Icon
      Paris Hilton

      Quad HD / 3D

      By the time disks of this size exist videos will be in 3D 2160p (or more) and 69GB/hour will look like nothing.

      Paris - because she needs to hurry up and have a daughter as we will all have lots of storage to fill in 18 years time

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      1. Chris007
        Reply Icon
        Joke

        and how do you know...

        ...how much storage space Paris' daughter will have to fill then ;-)

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  5. Alex-TheManfromUncle
    Coat

    "PornYear"

    Quite a 'handy' title..

    Yes, that's mine, thanks..

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  6. Anonymous Coward
    Flame

    erm..

    'That figure is "188 petabytes of data", equalling "188,000 one-terabyte drives"'

    Shouldn't that be 188*1024? Giving 192512 one-terabyte drives. Well probably more as disk manufacturers use 1,000 instead of 1,024 when multiplying up their bytes.

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    1. Richard IV
      Reply Icon
      Paris Hilton

      erm... no

      Kilo, Mega, Giga, Tera et al are SI _decimal_ prefixes denoting factors of 1000.

      Kibi, Mebi, Gibi, Tebi et al are the IEC _binary_ prefixes denoting factors of 1024 that were introduced to avoid confusion.

      It's only been that way for the last 10 years or so *sigh*

      Bonus factoid: Megabyte used to have 3 definitions - the third being 1000 kibibytes (as used on the IBM floppy). A quick back of the envelope calculation reveals this to be about 1/30 of a porn second - roughly equal to a money shot ;)

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      1. Anonymous Coward
        Reply Icon
        Boffin

        Ah, the Kirbybytes!

        Those that the prefix-nazis seem to impose on stuff that has always been measured in base-1024. Nobody but disk manufacturers use base-1000, and even then, sometime around the 80's the HDD sizes were actually 1024-based. Either that, or the loss wasn't that much for users to notice.

        BTW, RAM does come in base-1024, as base-1000 would break quite a lot of stuff!

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    2. Elmer Phud
      Reply Icon

      But . . .

      How much storage is required for a vist by Mr's Palm and her five lovely daughters?

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  7. Velv
    Coat

    Portable?

    Given it's portable media, when will Apple add a Compact Flash to the clitPhone (yes, yes, I read the article that they'd removed pron from the iTunes store).

    (ClitPhone - because every c**ts got one)

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    1. Anonymous Coward
      Reply Icon
      Boffin

      RE: Clitphone

      "ClitPhone - because every c**ts got one"

      Except most mobile phones aren't iPhones...

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  8. AListair 6

    Given the media's unwillingness

    to use anything as usefull as Watts Joules or KW/hr When talking about green energy perhaps you should add units of power and energy to the convertor (just mix them up together, journalists don't know the difference anyway)

    I'd propose

    'enough to power a house' (this can be a random number)

    'enough to boil a cup of tea'

    'Enough to power the streetlights in birmingham' (during the day)

    'Enough to power a town the size of Stoke'

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    1. Ken Hagan Gold badge
      Reply Icon

      Re: 'Enough to power a town the size of Stoke'

      Hmm. You're right. That *is* the way it would be phrased, but (just going off topic for a moment) can any journalists here explain why "a town the size of Stoke" is never abbreviated to "Stoke"?

      Is there some reason why you wouldn't want to power Stoke itself, but would be happy for an similar-sized settlement to enjoy the benefits of a 21st century lifestyle?

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    2. Anonymous Coward
      Reply Icon
      Anonymous Coward

      I'm not sure that "KW/hr" is a particularly useful unit

      You'd be measuring a rate of increase of power consumption or something like that?

      Perhaps you meant "kW h"!

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  9. Anonymous Coward
    Thumb Down

    The Stoke alternative?

    So @Ken Hagan, you haven't been to Stoke then?

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    1. Evil Auditor Silver badge
      Reply Icon

      @Brian Morrison

      Maybe he's been living there all his life and has never ever left. So his question might be an indication for the lack of comparison.

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  10. Anonymous Coward
    Paris Hilton

    but how far......?

    will all that beaten meat stretch to the moon ????

    giving the thread a more fact based Angle cos Paris luves the hard facts of a story

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  11. Gordon Guthrie 1

    Standard Unit Of Beauty

    The mili-helen - defined as 'enough beauty to launch a ship'

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  12. Roby

    Oh snap

    I only just got used to light years being a unit of length rather than time, and now this!

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  13. Anonymous Coward
    Coat

    Minnesota

    So as a Minnesota resident I could never actually download a Minnesota worth of porn because in attempting to do so I would be increasing the size of the unit (fnarr, fnarr)?

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  14. Shady

    "succulent"...

    ...or Suck-u-lent?

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