Yes, It's Nice, But Do You Really Need All Of It?

Normally, when I have "time off" from something, it's a nice relaxing affair. That sporadic double bank holiday in Spring, for example, consists mostly of me sleeping. Then, when I've dragged myself out of bed at a time closer to when I'd get back from work than when I'd leave for work, I'll sit there and make lots of interesting plans, ranging from finding some cold sausages to how to carve an evil lair out of a volcano without (a) dying or (b) anybody noticing. They're relaxing times, full of dressing gowns, eating beans from a tin without a single care and pretending I'm a multi-squillionaire and going through RightMove/AutoTrader and finding my dream house/car. However when it comes to Christmas, I get more time off than any other time in the year, yet I need a holiday to recover from it! Seriously, Having spent two weeks moving house (which, without a van, was a very busy time indeed) I then ran full-pelt into the fun of Christmas shopping, followed by a bigger national tour than U2. Seriously, I've had to go and see my Mum, my Dad, my Grandparents, my Aunts, Mrs Max's Mum, Mrs Max's Dad, Mrs Max's Sisters and the Hanging Gardens of Babylon. Or so it feels. New year's eve-eve will be the only day where I have literally nothing planned, and I intend to keep it that way.


There's something I noticed when I was Christmas shopping. My wonderful new eye-fone has 8Gb of memory, meaning that something the size of my hand has five times the memory that our desktop PC had when I was in 12, which is mind-blowing. Whatever, the thing about 8Gb is that there's only so much music I can put onto it. I mean, I've already put on about a dozen albums and it's half full! Not that I'm complaining, as it simply means i've just got to make sure I don't fill the thing up with dodgy photos, or apps that show everyone some celebrity with their bum showing. However, during my run of Cambridge looking for flashy goodies for people, I ended up in the Apple Store. In fact, trips to Cambridge always seem to end with my going in there, partially to see if anyone's checked their Facebook account on the Mac-books and forgotten to log out. If I come across such a chance find, I'll update their status to "I can't believe I'm going to be a Mother/Father soon" and walk off, contemplating the explaining that someone's going to have to do shortly. However once I've finished creating days of explaining for someone, I noticed that, if I were so financially inclined, I could've picked up an eye-fone with 64Gb of memory. That's loads! Apparently, that'll hold something like 16,000 songs, or as I call it, more songs than have ever been written by anyone (that are worth listening to). I mean, there's only so many genres you can like, so I can't imagine it will ever stretch to that many!

So, having wondered away from the eye-fones, I found myself a nice iMac desktoppy computer. Sure, it was pretty, but it had 1Tb of memory! For those who have just re-read that and said "uh???", that's a thousand Gb. I mean, who is ever going to need that much memory? You'd have to get up very early in the morning to use all of that up! Now, I know that my aforementioned ol' school PC barely has enough memory by today's standards to type a sentence, but as I suspect that most PC's become expensive doorstops before this amount of memory becomes normal, this is irrelevant. Plus, unless you're buying it because you really really really need to finish off the Avatar sequel, you've just bought yourself a £1,600 Facebook machine. Nice one there, chuck! Afterwards, you can buy yourself a Lamborghini to ferry a microwave meal back from Tesco's. Also, mentioning cars, super-duper car makers do this as well. Thinking of buying that Porsche 997 Turbo? Silly boy, it'll do 0-60 in a pithy 4.0 seconds. No, this Ferrari 430 will do it in 3.9 seconds. Think of all the time you'll save with this? I mean, really! Are you really going to notice this 0.1 second difference? I can't even count that fast, so it's not like I'm going to go "ooohhhhhhh" if I compare them? A Bugatti Veyron famously has 1001 Horsepower, because obviously with only 500 that you get in a cruiseship-esque Lamborghini, you'll practically struggle to get it out of the driveway!

Then there's a supercomputer in Japan, called the K Computer, that can perform a whopping 10 Petaflops a second! To translate that for pretty much everyone in the world, that means it can do the sum 2x2 ten thousand trillion times a second. Cool! Bet it doesn't have the super celebrity bum-showing app, does it! Now, I'm curious as to why anyone would have a use for working out 2x2 that often, or if anyone stopped and said "you know what, lads? Tesco's sells a calculator for something like 18p. Surely we can work it out on that just once, then go to the pub?". I'm sure they could wire it to do something awesome, like work out where all the socks seem to disappear to, or why things turn up precisely twenty minutes after you give up looking for them and buy a replacement, or at least use this as a way of measuring how fast it is, rather than 2x2, which sits next to Murder She Wrote, flower-pressing and filming an episode of Wallace & Gromit on the "Things you'd rather gouge out your own eyes than finish" scale.

But, if I want my eye-fone to last as long as I want it to last (i.e. forever, or at least as long as it takes to build a time machine so I can pretend to be in Quantum Leap), then I suspect my 8Gb will become almost laughable. However, it currently stores nearly all the music I want on there, with space for it all over again. That's all I want. Having another 60Gb left would be just the same as about 95% of all the stuff bought in the last two weeks as Christmas presents:

A pointless waste that will never be looked at after a day or two.


(images credited to Graur Codrin and Sarunyu_foto)

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