Time to reformat the old wallet and embiggen your smartmobe: The 1TB microSD is here As of today, you can now buy a 1TB micro flash card to store massive amounts of pictures and videos on your camera or mobile phone – though it'll set you back a not inconsiderable $449. SanDisk has said its Extreme 1TB microSD card is shipping to customers after being announced in February. The Extreme 1TB card retails for $ …
By the number of bits per mm3 and we all know that the actual chips in these things are even smaller.
Years ago when domestic tape based video cameras were evolving into smaller and smaller packages, we all joked that the Japanese had a shrinking machine since there was no way they could fit that many rec/play heads onto such a tiny drum.
Maybe that Tardis technology has come on really well.
Oh, just by chance Youtube recommended the latest (released 15th) Royal Institute lecture. Guess what they covered? XD
So the number is "very very very very large" to put it frankly. If loop quantum/quantum gravity is a thing, may even be slightly smaller than the planck length! :O
I recently got a compact camera for my daughters photography gcse and it took me a long time to realise the number on the screen was not the seconds to the heat death of the universe but number of photos that could be taken. I did calculate that it would take till the heat death of the universe to ..er.. collate them!
I will let the early adopters with deep pockets pay these launch prices. I will pick one up in another 12 - 18 months when they are down to around a quarter of the price. Especially when I can pick up 64GB cards for around a tenner at the moment and just swap them out for a fresh one as needed.
I was driving yesterday and as always, instead of paying attention to the road, I was going all Sci-Fi and drifting off to a weird fantasy. I though... imagine if I blinked and found myself driving my BMW i3 in the year 1919... kinda like “Back to the Future” but without Mr. Fusion.
My car had been recently cleaned so all I had with me was my backpack. And I freaked, because I had my play laptop, a Microsoft Surface Go and it didn’t have and development tools on it... not even VS Code. And I was like “I have a JRPG video game, some movies and the only programming language I had was Powershell, whatever is in Office, vbscript, the web browser... ok... I can code... but I don’t have Google, Wikipedia, or StackOverflow”
I could made do I told myself, and then I thought to myself, on my phone, I have about 150 videos on multivariable calculus, chemistry and encryption. Woot!
Then I realized how screwed I was because I didn’t have the parts I needed to build a USB to.. well anything interface... all I had for peripherals was a USB-C to USB and HDMI dongle. I could design a USB to serial UART. In fact, I also have on my phone an FPGA course and I could make a simple VHDL to schematic compiler in Powershell if I had to. But of course, I would have to make my own semiconductors and I’m not sure I could produce a stable silicon substrate capable of 12Mhz for USB using 1919 era laboratories.
Then I realized I had a really awesome toy with me... I have a 400GB MicroSD in the laptop. I don’t think I could even explain to Ramanujan what 400GB is and that’s a guy who was pretty hard core into infinite series. Could you imagine explaining to people 100 years ago that you had a chip that was visually the size of a finger nail which had the storage and addressing circuitry for about 4 trillion memory cells?
So, today... without even thinking of it, I found myself loading VSCode, .NET and Julia onto my laptop. Yesterday afternoon, I found myself packing a USB-RS-232 dongle too. I also realized that I had 3D Studio Max and OpenSCAD installed.
And oddly, I believe I have an Arduino and USB cable in my glove box. Though, I don’t have the software, but I think I could write an Atmel assembler from memory.
Today if I got sucked back to 1919, I could use my laptop to design a simple field emitting transistor which I’m sure would be reliable at 50Khz, a simple cathode ray tube, a simple CPU, a reliable and reproducible carbon film resistor, a half-assed capacitor (don’t know the chemistry on those, but I could fake it), and probably could produce a reasonable two sided circuit board etching and plating system... and I could probably do all this with my laptop and 1919 era tools and tech. I would have to do it at Kodak in New York.
Oddly, I could probably do most of this with just the information I have on my phone, but it would probably take me a while just to make a stable 5V 2amp power source to keep the phone running for any period of time.
To be honest, I think I’d find the closest thing to epoxy available at the time. I would use gold leaf to make traces... then I’d use a simple acid based battery. I wouldn’t trust 1919 electrical mains.
Anyway... anyone else here ever get geeky like this? Wouldn’t you love to show off a 1TB MicroSD card to people back then? Hell just try to explain the concept of what it would take to fit 10 trillion non-volatile memory cells into something that size :)
I saw that documentary about that bloke who got flung back to the middle ages with his high school chemistry book, his Oldsmobile Delta and a chainsaw. Groovy.
There's also an earlier book with a similar concept written by Richard Something about an English man finding himself in Roman Britain. I too have indulged in day dreams of what I would do with my smatterings of 21st century knowledge if I found myself several centuries in the past. Besides the gaps in my knowledge, my chief concern would be my strange accent and ignorance of etiquette without getting killed for being a Frenchman or witch (depending upon the era). I feel my first steps would to find a patron and protector who can make use of my knowledge.
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