News - US data consumption goes through the roof

[HEXUS]

A new study has found Americans absorbed some 3.6 zettabytes of information in 2008.

Read more.

[Revilgo]

Must be the recession. Too much free time.

[borandi]

Who hasn't heard of a zettabyte? Zetta is just a common prefix for a certain power of 10, like kilo-, mega-, giga- tera-.

Did they mean the base-10 zettabytes (10^24, 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000), or base-2, i.e. binary, zebibytes (2^70, 1,180,591,620,717,411,303,424), because that is an 18.59% difference.

[ChuvelxD]

Who hasn't heard of a zettabyte? Zetta is just a common prefix for a certain power of 10, like kilo-, mega-, giga- tera-.

Did they mean the base-10 zettabytes (10^24, 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000), or base-2, i.e. binary, zebibytes (2^70, 1,180,591,620,717,411,303,424), because that is an 18.59% difference.

No one is impressed.....

Yes, zettabytes. And no, we never heard of a zettabyte before either, but it's apparently 1 billion terabytes, or 1 million million gigabytes.

Gigabyte > Terabyte?

[12GaugeShotty]

I'd say that 95% of that was bittorrent traffic.

[Funkstar]

I'd say that 95% of that was porn

Fixed that for you

[borandi]

No one is impressed.....

This is the internet. Leave your brain outside the door, we have wikipedia.

Though seriously, 18% is a huge difference.

[12GaugeShotty]

Fixed that for you

No. That would be 4%. BluRay rips tend to be anywhere from 4GB to 15GB in size and are downloaded at mind blowing rates over private torrent trackers. That dwarfs the traffic of porn and regular internet browsing.

[Aranthos]

Gigabyte > Terabyte?

1 million = 1 thousand * 1 thousand = 1 thousand thousands
1 billion = 1 thousand * 1 million = 1 thousand million

1 million million / 1 thousand = 1 thousand million
Which, conveniently, matches the "1 billion terabytes or one billion billion gigabytes" in the article.