I’ve been going through one of those patches of life where there’s not enough time to do all you want to do. The internet makes matters worse – and better. I don’t know about you but I find Wikipedia is getting more and more of my attention these days and I even amend/correct/add to articles. Personally I think it’s a fantastic resource that reminds me of Isaac Asimov’s Foundation library.
Can you imagine what the world’s going to be like when the whole of Wikipedia’s information can be stored on a single USB drive?
Well you know what? It probably already can!
As of August 2007 the whole of Wikipedia was estimated at 7.5Gb so if it’s gone up 10 times since then (which is a pure guess) then you need a 75Gb USB drive. There are already 64Gb drives available from Amazon so in fact we are already in this position, especially if you allow a bit of data compression.
I wouldn’t be surprised if USB capacity tracked the size of Wikipedia’s growth for a while.
I can now access my spreadsheets after an awkward hiatus. I’ll take a look shortly in the Google Docs Blog to see if anyone sheds some light on the situation.
Hopefully a little local and temporal difficulty with Google Docs this morning as one of my AdWords Management clients ‘phoned to asked me where a spreadsheet we are sharing had gone. Sure enough, when I looked into Google Docs, it was totally blank. A quick scout round the support forums showed that we weren’t the only ones with this problem. Curiously, and thankfully!, the data seems to be in place because I did manage to download a pdf version as a safety measure (although no formulae of course).
Generally I’m finding that I’m using Google Docs more and more but this episode will undoubtedly dent the confidence people have in the system. I like the idea of cloud computing but I do like to be able to rely on accessing my data when I want it. However, this is the first problem I’ve suffered from and provided the data is secure (and it seems to be) then I’ll definitely carry on using the Google Docs system, especially now that you can apply CSS style sheets to docs to make them look smart.