Orders of magnitude

Well! Back online - what a relief. Still, it was good for the children to be without a computer for nearly five days; time spent in traditional pursuits - song, sewing, piano playing, film-making.

Back to blogging - normal service will resume shortly.

The computer's power supply unit (here Polish has a single word zasilacz; three syllables in place of six) had indeed packed up. And while getting it replaced, I ordered another hard disk drive for the computer - a splendid one terabyte of storage space. This is on top of the 300 gigabytes it already had. So now, there's 1.3TB available to store photos, films and music. I've backed up three and half years of photographs, in high-resolution, taking up just one-tenth of the capacity of the new drive - a mere (!) 100GB. The new hard drive cost 260 złotys, or £55 - which to me is mind-bogglingly cheap compared to how much storage used to cost.

Compare my past computers' hard drives:
1992 Apple PowerBook 140 laptop: 40 megabytes
1995 Apple Power Mac 5200: 2 gigabytes (2,000 megabytes)
2002 PC desktop computer: 40 gigabytes (40,000 megabytes)
2007 PC desktop computer: 300 gigabytes (300,000 megabytes)
2010 Upgrade to the above: 1.3 terabytes (1,300,000 megabytes)

That's 32,500 times more storage space for data - in Moni's lifetime (that first PowerBook was bought so I could work from home after Moni was born). Pricewise - computers cost roughly the same as they did. It's just that they do so much more, so much faster. Plus the internet.

Megabytes. Back in the '80s the word "mega" was a neologism - it meant thousands of times better, faster - mega. The world was at the start of its great* journey towards today's digital era of internet, mobile telephone and satellite broadcasting, the word "mega" signified the most up-to-date, fantastic, incredible anything.

From Urban Dictionary:

Mega:
Adj. Very, really, extremely. Used for more emphasis. Something or someone is really good, amazing and/or wonderful, etc.
1. That's mega awesome, man!
2. That was just mega wrong.
3. Ah, that's mega, mate.

How archaic! A problem with neologisms - especially ones related to technology - they have a short sell-by date. How long before terabytes give way to petabytes? 3TB hard disk drives are now becoming available...

* Note the over-use of the English word 'great'. At a conference the other week, the English chairman sprinkled it liberally throughout his introduction. "If you turned off your mobiles, it would be great." "That presentation was great." "We have a great panel here today." Etc. The epithet should be used sparingly; King Arthur The Great, Great Depression, the Great War etc.

In this regard, the Polish word wielki has maintained its strength and using it trivially actually sounds comical. Król Kazimierz Wielki. Both 'great' and wielki are pretty much exact translations of the Latin 'Magnus', so rząd wielkości = 'order of magnitude', and thus we come full circle...