Editing HorizonVirtual:Area And Distance In Program Space

If there’s one problem I have with the world of Virtual as written, it’s the idea that one megabyte on a hard drive equals one square (or cubic) mile of Program Space. Let me explain in terms of comparison:

Depending on which source you credit, New York City occupies between three and four hundred square miles of real estate. Add in the metropolitan land area, and you’re looking at over a thousand square miles.

My personal hard drive has eighty gigabytes of storage space, approximately half of it used. By ''Virtual'' reckoning, it would generate eighty thousand square miles of Program Space, over one hundred and sixty percent of the area of New York State. My PC is networked with my wife’s, which also has an eighty-gig drive. Just these two PCs would create an area over three times the size of New York State. Considering the sheer volume of networked computers in homes, businesses and governmental authorities in New York, the New York Hub would be incredibly huge (even accounting for the fact that a majority of these would be shut down outside of User Space daylight hours); even assuming a significant amount of virtual wilderness, you’d probably wind up with NYH being almost a planet of its own.

While you could possibly justify this argument by treating each major region as a D&D plane, the text gives the impression that, although regions can be wildly different, they are closer to cities or even nations, instead of self-contained planes. Based on this, I’d be tempted to equate one square mile of Program Space with one gigabyte. This means that, rather than the average (approx. 40-60 GB HDD) home PC being effectively a state of its own, it becomes roughly equivalent to a medium-sized metropolitan area. This still results in a massive region on the User city scale, but this still becomes slightly more manageable when you consider a good portion of that area “wilderness” (i.e. unused hard drive space).

--[[User:IMAGinES|IMAGinES]] 21:42, 12 Jun 2005 (PDT)
<br/><br/>
I would also like to add that I think the Weight Factor is off, as well.

The average White Male between 20 and 30 is about 168 pounds, or 76 Kilograms. In Virtual, the factor given is 1 Kilogram = One Byte of Code.

This's unacceptable. That means that a Waker takes up 76 Bytes of Code. As an example of how small this is, the Calculator program in Windows 2000 is 89 Kilobytes. Meaning that the Calculator takes up well over a thousand times more coding then a sentient program(1 Kilobyte Equals 1,024 Bytes, meaning that the calculator takes up roughly 91,136 bytes). That's insane. I'd find it more acceptable to say that One Kilogram equals roughly 500 Kilobytes of coding. Meaning that the average Userclone Waker would take up a more respectable rough estimate of 38 Megabytes.

--[[User:Igtenio|Igtenio]] 20:28, 18 Jun 2005