Tuesday 26 May 2009

Emptying the trash

I recently bought a new mac (Ok the University bought me one.) Anyway, since it has a larger disk, I now have about 30 Gig free on it. It is so hard NOT to empty the trash. I am tidying up various things and the other day I emptied the trash and then realised that I might have deleted something I need. Since I have multiple gigs free and much less than that in the trash, there was no need.

Just now I have, amongst other stuff, a 15 Gig file from a virtual machine in the trash. Since I still have 30 Gigs free after that there's no mileage in emptying the trash just now.

But it's an itch that wants to be scratched ...

Terrible gossip

Have you ever noticed, if somebody says you are a "terrible gossip", what they mean is that you are good at gossiping?

Saturday 9 May 2009

789,000 miles

I just thought about how much space paper tape would use up in modern storage requirements. 

I gather from Google that paper tape did 10 characters per inch.   To store everything on  a 500 GB hard disk (which is not a large store by today's standards), the paper tape would have to be 789,000 miles long.   Well, a little bit more than that, because I've rounded it down.