a whole book!

[faceless_wonder]

there's a lot of talk on the internet about how humourously bad the "series of tubes" speech that ted stevens gave last year is. it's all well-warranted...it's a really stupid speech.

but, i've never actually seen anyone remark about the part of the speech that i think s clearly the stupidest, the part that clearly shows how unfamiliar that ted stevens is with the internet.

he remarks at one point in the speech about how corporate users are trying to stream "ten, twelve movies at a time...or a whole book at a time" across the internet.

are you thinking what i'm thinking? because i'm thinking that the text of a whole book would take up less memory and bandwidth than one movie, much less ten or twelve. (except for what, maybe the OED? even then, that won't be as big as TEN MOVIES STREAMING ACROSS THAT INTERNET!) every time i hear this part, i laugh, or at least stare agog at my computer. the way he says "a whole book at a time" in such a shocked manner, after rattling off comments about people streaming ten or twelve movies across the internet several times before in the speech just cracks me up.

a book? one book? taking up as much space in the computer world as a movie? as ten or twelve?

and this idiot is in charge of regulating the internet. i'm going to go cry now. or drink. or something.

Comments

[hilabeans.livejournal.com]

Actually, I bet the entire OED would be a smaller file than even a single movie. Text takes up far, far less space than even a single image, much less a series of images over an hour long with attendant sound. I think even a PDF of the OED would be smaller - although you could probably watch an entire movie in the time it would take Adobe Acrobat to open that file...

Also, I'm pretty sure the OED counts as more than one book. Because, you know, there's that whole multi-volume thing. You made a good point, I'm just a nitpicky bitch. :-)

[faceless-wonder.livejournal.com]

haha...yeah, i don't want to think of a computer trying to open the OED in PDF. that would take forever.

that's what i thought...i just wanted to cover my bases and be conservative in my assertions about how much space that much text would take...since, well, i don't know as much about computer data storage as some.

granted, i also don't regulate the internet, but i still feel i know a little more about this particular "series of tubes" than ted stevens does. :)

[hilabeans.livejournal.com]

Although sometimes I wish Ted Stevens was right, because that would make it possible to send cupcakes through the internet... :-P