TerraScale SneakerNet

Disks are becoming sequential storage, more like tapes than memory, and Jim Gray is mailing entire computers around because it’s faster than using the 'net. Found via Jon Udell who found it via Tim Bray who presumably discovered it on his own.

I certainly can sympathize with the notion that capacity has grown too fast for access and processing to keep up. I just let an SQL update run overnight on a “small” sample dataset and it still hasn’t finished.