From trillion-flop game consoles to trillion-dollar tax cuts, the significant digits of our lives are now followed by 12 zeros. The whole world is tera-fying. This spring, Hitachi will ship the first terabyte hard drive aimed at consumers. It’s capable of storing 1 trillion bytes — that’s 11,500 copies of The White Album. And hard drives aren’t the only machines measured on the terascale. Sony likes to claim that the PlayStation 3 runs at 1.8 teraflops, while distributed processing setups like Boinc — which powers SETI@home — regularly process trillions of tuples per second. If you’re finding it tough to get your head around all these big numbers (math is hard!), here’s our guide to help you get acclimated to life on the terascale. — Patrick Di Justo
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Make Backdating a Thing of the Past
Tera! Tera! Tera!
