Losing Count

Assuming you could count at a rate of three numbers a second and didn’t need to sleep, it would take ten years, six months, 25 days, four hours and 48 minutes to count to a billion. On this basis, counting 96 billion lots of eight would take 8110 years, 28 days, nineteen hours and twelve minutes.

I’m calculating this to teach myself a little humility. I am currently configuring the most badass set of servers I’ve ever had the privilege of working with. My only gripe with them is that they take about four and a half minutes to carry out their 96GB memory check, and I have to spend this time staring at a blank screen, and if I don’t pay attention I’ll miss the BIOS configuration option.

Four and a half minutes staring at a blank screen seems like an annoying amount of time, but compared to how long it would take me to manually count up 768 billion bits, it doesn’t seem so long. We have fourteen of them, so I’d be finished by the year 115550. 115551 if I stop for a break half way.

Computers are both awesome and terrifying.