Michael Hart wrote:
This far exceeds Moore's Law projections from 10 eBooks in 1990, which would predict 15,000 around August, 2006, and which every pundit has continually said was an impossible growth rate:
Projected Growth Rate
Total Date Doubled Years
10 Dec, 1990 0 0 20 Jun, 1992 1 1.5 40 Dec, 1993 2 3 80 Jun, 1995 3 4.5 160 Dec, 1996 4 6 320 Jun, 1998 5 7.5 640 Dec, 1999 6 9 1280 Jun, 2001 7 10.5 2560 Dec, 2002 8 12 5120 Jun, 2004 9 13.5 10240 Dec, 2005 10 15 15000 Aug, 2006 10.5 15+ <<< Predicted Date for ~15,000 20480 Jun, 2007 11 16.5
Bzzzzt, wrong. But thank you for playing! You tried to show that the number of books in the collection obeys Moore's Law. Moore's Law tries to fit the data to an 2 ^ t exponential curve with a doubling rate of 1.5 years. In that case we have: you started in 1971 and we have reached 10.000 books by the end of 2003. That's roughly 33 years for 10000 books. With 33 years and 10000 books we get: x * 2 ^ (33 / 1.5) = 10000 and we solve: x = 0.002384 A year later than book 10.000 we should have gotten to: 0.002384 * 2 ^ (34 / 1.5) = 15873 which we have failed to do. We should get to #20.000 a year and a half after #10.000. That would be May 2005. So much for Moore's Law, which, by the way, doesn't work well in computer science either, but is for some strange reason one of the most-cited "Laws". I'll attach a plot of the function: 0.002384 * 2 ^ ((x - 1971) / 1.5) starting at x = 2000 and ending at x = 2008. That is, if the attachement comes thru. Otherwise use Gnuplot to plot it yourself. -- Marcello Perathoner webmaster@gutenberg.org
