Compression

If a megabyte is 8,000,000 bits, that means that all of the different kinds of megabytes would add up to be about 8 terabytes large, right? So (assuming one had at least 8 terabytes of space available) couldn't someone, in theory, refer to the position of a megabyte in a big chunk rather than using it? For example, an empty megabyte could be referred to as being being megabyte "00000000" and a full one could be referred to as being "7999999". Then, instead of an 6 megabyte picture, we could have a text file with 48 digits in it (6 megabytes*megabyte position identifers==48 digits total) that's a tiny fraction of the original image's size. Why aren't there any compression methods like this out there yet? It'd also make filesharing easy, and provided that everyone had the 8TB file, you could carry lots and lots of different files on your flash drive without taking up almost any space at all.

I'm not a programmer, but would something like this work?

No, actually 8mb has 2^8000000 possible bits, and there is 2^8000000 different files.
Storing them is not possible.

>>2
This wouldn't be storing every possible group of 8mb, but, rather, 1mb.

>>3
1mb would store 2^1000000 bits

>>4
One megabyte is 8,000,000 bits.

Just remove all the zero bits when compressing and reinsert them when uncompressing.

This thread is full of stupidity.

>>5
1MB is 8388608 bits

>>8
388608 were stolen by hardware manufacturer.

>>9
Thats nothing:its not uncommon to see speed advertised in mb (megabits),while is actually decimal "mega" bits,while people think it MB(megabytes, though its often seen as decimal megabytes).

>>10
not uncommon
We have a word for that, and it's `common'.