Correction

Saturday, I quoted the NY Times as follows:

Wal-Mart has 460 terabytes of data stored on Teradata mainframes, made by NCR, at its Bentonville headquarters. To put that in perspective, the Internet has less than half as much data, according to experts.

After discussing it with my brother, the idea that the Internet contains less than 230 terabytes of data seems absurd. We've got servers at work that hold a terabyte of data. You can buy a terabyte (1000 gigabytes) of storage space for your PC for $800. This article says that there are some 550 billion documents on the web. If there were only 230 terabytes of data, that means that each document averages about 418 bytes. The italicized portion of this post (above) is 418 bytes. This blog page currently has about 140,000 bytes of text, not counting the pictures and comics (my October archive is 610,000 bytes). When you consider all of the news, sports, financial, weather, music, video and other sites on the web which have way more data on them than this site, I think you'll agree that the Internet contains way more than 230 terabytes of data. Whether Wal-Mart has twice as much as that, or it has 460 terabytes, I don't know. It just can't have both.