"The Web strongly favors documents in the 256 to 512 byte range, while Unix
files are more commonly in the 1KB to 4KB range." [1]
>Even as Moore's Law skyrockets, we're stuck with a fundamental
>cognitive speed limit.
Axiom 2: The latency between wanting a 4k chunk and getting it should
approach 0.
However, this axiom bears out the same results. Massive portable storage
isn't about carrying the Web for novelties sake, but for cache sake.
>That is, a DVD-ROM equipped PalmPilot could hold, what, 1 billion
>email messages or HTML pages?
Well, I'm quite happy to carry my inbox and whatever web pages I have
sitescooper pick up for me for a couple of days with respect to being able
to reference things. With an IBM microdrive, I could store most of my
critical emails and an index over it for super fast memory augmentation.
>At some point, we WILL cross the Zipf law distributions for Web site
>popularity and change frequency to make a 'rion' viable.
I wonder how many (i) preference clusters there are out there? I'm sure I
would fit a zine/geek profile quite well.
[1] Carlos R. Cunha Azer Bestavros Mark E. Crovella. Characteristics of WWW
Client-based Traces. Boston University.
http://www.cs.bu.edu/faculty/crovella/paper-archive/TR-95-010/paper.html