Over the past couple of days there has been a lot of discussion regarding some new, higher density flash memory devices. While I don't think a doubling of density is all that remarkable or technology shifting (flash is still quite slow compared to a modern hard drive. This isn't to discount it, and there are a tremendous number of very valuable uses for such a solid-state, low-power technology, but just wanted to mention that it isn't a panacea and there are compromises), what fascinates me most about these sorts of discussions is the metrics articles use to help people understand capacity. The article linked above states that "By combining 16 of these, manufacturers get 32 Gb[GB - sic] of flash memory that can store more than 32 hours of HD video files, 8,000 digital music files (670 hours), or 200 years of daily papers.". Woo, 200 years of daily papers (all papers? One paper?). Remember when the standard metric was the number of copies of the King James Bible? I never knew how much space the Bible would actually require, but it sounded like a lot when something could hold multiple copies of it.   [UPDATE: Looks like it's about 4.8MB uncompressed, so a 32GB flash card could hold 6,826 copies. Sounds impressive. But how many "Libraries of Congress" could it hold?].

As flash memory starts to compete with hard drives, operating systems will need to mildly adapt. For instance, flash has a limited lifespan, with localized degradation each time you erase a block: The common behaviour for operating systems to page out blocks of memory to the storage system unnecessarily, such that Windows does regularly, and to endlessly create and destroy small temporary files on the filesystem. Either wouldn't be a wise thing to do with flash. It will be a good thing as operating systems adapt, as I'd love for my hard drive to actually power down when I'm not doing something that actually requires its involvement.