Hitachi has just announced new drive technology that will enable 4 terabytes of disk storage on your desktop within the next few years (1 terabyte on laptops). View the article here. More evidence that the data explosion will continue to accelerate. Now, combine that with the huge shift in processor technology towards multi-core processors. The result: more pressure for data processing applications to handle huge amounts of data taking advantage of tens and hundreds of cores. Massive parallel processing will have to go main stream. Give me a dual processor/quad-core machine with 4 terabytes of disk space and I'll have more processing and storage capacity on my desktop than many machines in data centers today. A bit of a stretch, but not by much.