Prose exercise #3 - Sailboat in the Sun

This image "Sailboat in front of Golden Gate Bridge (c) Rod Boothby 2005" is a dramatic shot of a sailboat in San Francisco Bay with the iconic bridge in the background. The sky and water are realistic shades of silver and pewter with some beautiful sun highlights twinkling off the water. The brilliant lights spread out behind the sailboat under the bridge towards the horizon.

Pretty picture picked out of Google Images. But like a lot of things on the internet, it has an even more interesting context. It's from a blog kept by Jonathan Schwartz, Chief Executive Officer and President of Sun Microsystems. He used the sailboat picture to illustrate an entry he made March 12, 2007 saying that it "was faster to send a petabyte of data from San Francisco to Hong Kong by sailboat, than by the internet." A petabyte? That's one million gigabytes. He makes the point that, using one of my boss' favorite words, that storing data on drives and moving it through the internet is not 'scaleable' That much data takes a lot of machines and energy just to store and a long time to go through the 'pipes' of the internet, like 507 years. So, for some things, tape-based storage is more appropriate. You can get a lot of reels of tape on a sailboat and it's not going to take you five centuries to sail to Hong Kong. He uses an image borrowed from somebody else "Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of storage driving down the New Jersey turnpike" Or as my colleague from nearly 30 years ago used to say "sounds like a good application for a file drawer"