Interesting discussion of the number of bytes necessary to store all the syllables ever uttered by every person who ever lived, and when acquiring that number of bytes will be in the realm of affordability.
First, the proposed configuration would amount to 1.2 petabytes, which is a thousand times smaller than 1.2 exabytes. Second, a 5 exabyte store would roughly be eight thousand times too small to store "all words ever spoken by human beings", at least in audio form. Therefore the 2007 cluster's storage would be too small by a factor of about 32 million rather than a factor of 4. I freely confess that maybe the authors were thinking about text — but in the first place I'm a phonetician, and in the second place most human languages have not had a written form. So bear with me here for a while.
(via Ben Hammersley)
