I love factoids, and Shift Happens is chalk-full of them. My favourite being:
-The amount of technical information is doubling every years [ok, I guess that's reasonable in the short term]
-For students starting a four-year technical or college degree this means that…
-Half of what they learn in their first year of study will be outdated by their third year of study

Exactly… the existence of a million how-to-hack-your-Nintendo FAQs means that half of what you learn about sorting algorithms is outdated. Except that that’s ridiculous, there are some easy things coughHTMLcough that you used to be able to make a living doing that are now commodities (and thus essentially outdated), but the new stuff is on the fringes: some people move a little laterally but you don’t through out what already works.

I interviewed at a large healthy software company a month ago, they recommended I brush up on my programming before the interview: the book they recommended was over 20 years old.

But here’s the kicker:

-By 2010 it is predicted to double every 72 hours

How can that even make sense? Where is that going to fit? Does the author honestly believe that in on January 1st there will be X petabytes of documentation and on December 31st there will be 2 658 455 991 569 831 745 807 614 120 560 700 000 times as much? Note, that’s not a typo, doubling every 3 days, means 121 doublings, or 2^121 times as much information. For reference, the internet today is maybe 100 billion pages.

The charitable interpretation is that they are including things like server logs in their very liberal definition of documentation. But even if the sentence you’re reading now is the only technical document in existence in 2009, by the end of 2010 there will be more documentation than everyone who has ever lived and likely will ever live could ever read (Quick check of my seemingly outrageous claim: 20 billion people * 1000 pages a day * 50 sentences a page * 80 years * 365 = 29 200 000 000 000 000 000 possible sentences not even close)

There are other claims, like one taken from industry implying that data transfer will triple every 6 months for the next 20 years, or 12 157 665 459 056 928 801 times as much.

But hey, if it’s in a slideshow it much be true!