FileFront Reopens Its Doors

boarder8925 writes "FileFront, who announced on March 24th that they would be shutting down, has been given new life. The original owners of the website bought it back from Ziff Davis Media, who shut down FileFront because it had become financially unviable. 'We're happy to announce to the gaming community that as of today, April 1st, 2009, FileFront is a completely independent company again and is no longer part of Ziff Davis Media. All previously suspended services should be active and working again. We thank Ziff Davis Media for their cooperation and willingness to keep the site and community alive.' They repeatedly state that this is not an April Fool's Day joke, and indeed the site appears to be up and running as usual."

Comments

The beauty of the Internet

[mcrbids]

The beauty of the Internet is information does not die! It takes very little work to "bring back up" massive amounts of information and service under a new banner - often just a few days, as has happened here.

Go Internetz!

We have seen article after article criticizing our archiving media. CDs last perhaps a few decades, and the equipment to read magnetic tape backups often doesn't even exist anymore.

Yet, paradoxically, it can be maddeningly difficult to get the Internet to "forget" information once it gets out there. Names, addresses, copyrighted information, all gets distributed in a matter of minutes and can be near impossible to entirely get rid of. Storage capacity grows year after year, even as new, faster, and more reliable technologies like SSD increase their market share.

As it continues to grow, the Internet is increasingly modeling another highly effective information storage medium: the human brain.

See, The human mind retains memories and information in a highly effective manner, even though it loses and replaces component braincells constantly throughout its existence. Somehow, the brain maintains your sense of you and memories of your childhood despite being all but completely replaced, cell-by-cell since then.

As this continues to grow and evolve, I believe that we'll increasingly see less need for a specific archive medium, and grow to rely more and more on the Internet itself. Yes, information will still have to be stored. But by making storage itself cheap, reliable, and the exact medium irrelevant, the Internet stands to operate as the perfect interface.

Do you care if the video you are streaming is ultimately stored in a SCSI disk, a SAN, a SATA drive, an SSD, or a RAM disk? As long as the datarate and reliability of the original medium is sufficient and can stream the data over the standard IP network, you wouldn't care if it was stored on paper tape!

So we get to the "live archive". A good example is archive.org. It's a big cluster of cheap servers, built for low-power usage and power efficiency, with lots of big-ass, cheap hard drives. Redundancy is built in, so if a server fails, they just swap it out and slap in another one. It builds for a few hours to reload the HDDs, and then it's up, like a server-level RAID 5. It's so efficient that the entire cluster is maintained by a single guy. Part time. Who mainly just unplugs the server(s) that die in a particular week, and plugs in a new one, and turns it on.

This is true mass "live archive" storage, done right.