Dust to Mountain or Mountain to dust

Shall we bite some interesting information about BYTE

Dust is a general name for solid particles with diameters less than 20 thou  (500 micrometres). In geology, a boulder is a rock with grain size of usually no less than 256 mm (10 inches) diameter. While a boulder may be small enough to move or roll manually, others are extremely massive. In common usage, a boulder is too large for a person to move. Smaller boulders are usually just called rocks or stones. Dust, boulder, rocks and stones make a mountain.  Like wise the bits, byte, kilobyte, megabyte mount to petabytes viz. a mountain size of data.  Are we adding that much of garbage in the outer sphere and satellites.

The term byte was coined by Dr. Werner Buchholz in July 1956, during the early design phase for the IBM Stretch computer. Originally it was defined in instructions by a 4-bit field, allowing sixteen values and typical I/O equipment of the period used six-bit bytes. A fixed eight-bit byte size was later adopted and promulgated as a standard by the System/360.The term byte stems from bite, as in the smallest amount of data a computer could bite at once.

The byte is a unit of digital information in computing and telecommunications. It is an ordered collection of bits, in which each bit denotes the binary value of 1 or 0. Historically, a byte was the number of bits (typically 6, 7, 8, or 9) used to encode a character of text in a computer and it is for this reason the basic addressable element in many computer architectures. The size of a byte is typically hardware dependent, but the modern de facto standard is 8 bits, as this is a convenient  power of 2. Most of the numeric values used by many applications are representable in 8 bits and processor designers optimize for this common usage. Signal processing applications tend to operate on larger values and some digital signal processors have 16 or 40 bits as the smallest unit of addressable storage (on such processors a byte may be defined to contain this number of bits).

Humanity’s total digital output currently stands at 8,000,000 petabytes - which each represent a million gigabytes - but is expected to pass 1.2 zettabytes this year.  One zettabyte is equal to one million petabytes, or 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 individual bytes.

There is a huge increase in video and digital photography storing. In the old days people would take one photograph, now they can knock off 20 photos and rather than store just one, people store all 20. Then there is the fact that the number of devices where information can be generated and stored has also increased.

The rapid growth of the “digital universe” has been caused by the explosion of social networking, online video, digital photography and mobile phones.  Around 70 per cent of the world’s digital content is generated by individuals, but it is stored by companies on content-sharing websites such as Flickr and YouTube. The latest survey confirms that current size of the world’s digital content is equivalent to all the information that could be stored on 75bn Apple iPads of average storage capacity of 30-60gb.

In one side man is demolishing the mountains to granite / blue metal stones to construct buildings and roads.  In another side small bites pouring into the satellites by way of digital outputs amounting to petabytes,  nothing but a mountain of digital data.

See the "Broken Hills' dust. Is this dust becomes Mountain or Mountain is crushing to dust.