With Tencent's cloud, you need never run out of Ballmer-space
Posted on 08/31/2013 9:25:40 AM PDT by Ernest_at_the_Beach
Given the recent revelations about mass data slurping by the NSA, we were relieved to hear that a Chinese company has begun offering a whopping 10TB of free hosting to privacy-conscious punters.
After Chinese rivals Baidu and Qihoo 360 served up a terabyte of free cloud storage to punters, rival Tencent this week floated a 10TB giveaway, reports TheNextWeb.
The data bonanza requires users download an iOS or Android App, which gives them access to a terabyte of storage. As they use more data, Tencent will extend the amount of storage given away up to a whopping 10 terabytes.
This compares with a piddling 15GB freebie giveaway for Google Drive, up to 18GB for Dropbox, and 7GB for Microsoft's SkyDrive.
So, with that much storage, what could you actually keep in the Chinese cloud? Enter El Reg's patent-pending Ballmer scale.
With Tencent's cloud, you need never run out of Ballmer-space
This 378X250 pixel image of departing Microsoft exec Steve Ballmer takes up 23,269 bytes. Under Tencent's giveaway, you could spam 472,522,080 copies of this image up into the cloud.
Why stick with just one image? Steve Ballmer is 57, which adds up to some 29 million minutes, or 1,798,743,600 seconds, so if we had trained a camera on Ballmer from birth we could use Tencent to store one image for every four seconds of the venerable CEO's life to date.
But what if we wanted to save not just Ballmer's likeness, but his essence? The human genome can feasibly be stored in as little as 1.5GB of data. Given that the person-to-person DNA variance is about 0.1 percent, then, the unique Steve Ballmer can be represented by around 1.53600 megabytes. Therefore, the Tencent cloud could store an impressive 6,708, 739 copies of Ballmer's DNA profile.
For the culture vultures among us, you could also store around half of the Library of Congress – but why would you want to do that when you could stuff Tencent with a virtual army of Steve Ballmers? ®
Yeah, sign right up for that.
What could go wrong?
you go to the site link and it’s all in chinese. how would you read the disclaimer?
Remember when they said we would never need more than 64K of RAM? (for personal computing)
Now everyone is signing up for massive data collection out of shear convenience.
Put it in a 3rd party’s hands.
When you hand over your data to a cloud, you have given up sovereignty.
So the Chinese get to peruse your data instead of the NSA. Not much better of a deal.
Bill Gates famously said you'd never need more than 640K of RAM. Try squeezing Windows into that. Myself, I started with 4K of RAM, then splurged on another 16K of RAM for $250 (after it dropped from $500).
Difference is, it's easier to know what you had back then. Now, most people get lost in their data, like a hoarder with stacks of crap in their home. The Chinese are not going to have fun sifting through terrabytes of people's crap.
The Chinese are not going to have fun sifting through terrabytes of people’s crap.
Well, There is the rub.
Good question...but it looks like China has Market competition.....
The NSA is kicking themselves that they didn't think of using their Utah Fortress of Spyitude for this.
Don’t worry. It’s China—they’ll do what they please with your data anyway, so not having an English disclaimer keeps you from wasting any valuable time reading BS.
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