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Stephen Hawking's Thesis Crashes Cambridge Site After It's Posted Online (bbc.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from BBC: Demand for Stephen Hawking's PhD thesis intermittently crashed part of Cambridge University's website as physics fans flocked to read his work. Prof Hawking's 1966 thesis "Properties of expanding universes" was made freely available for the first time on the publications section of university's website at 00:01 BST. More than 60,000 have so far accessed his work as a 24-year-old postgraduate. Prof Hawking said by making it available he hoped to "inspire people." He added: "Anyone, anywhere in the world should have free, unhindered access to not just my research, but to the research of every great and enquiring mind across the spectrum of human understanding. It's wonderful to hear how many people have already shown an interest in downloading my thesis -- hopefully they won't be disappointed now that they finally have access to it!" The 75-year-old's doctoral thesis is the most requested item in Cambridge University's library. Since May 2016, 199 requests were made for the PhD -- most of which are believed to be from the general public rather than academics. The next most requested publication was asked for just 13 times. The Cambridge Library made several PDF files of the thesis available for download -- a high-resolution "72 Mb" file, digitized version that's less than half the size, and a "reduced" version that was even smaller -- but intense interest overwhelmed the servers. Here's the first paragraph of Hawking's introduction: "The idea that the universe is expanding is of recent origin. All the early cosmologies were essentially stationary and even Einstein whose theory of relativity is the basis for almost all modern developments in cosmology, found it natural to suggest a static model of the universe. However there is a very grave difficulty associated with a static model such as Einstein's which is supposed to have existed for an infinite time. For, if the stars had been radiating energy at their present rates for an infinite time, they would have needed an infinite supply of energy. Further, the flux of radiation now would be infinite. Alternatively, if they had only a limited supply of energy, the whole universe would by now have reached thermal equilibrium which is certainly not the case. This difficulty was noticed by Olders who however was not able to suggest any solution. The discovery of the recession of the nebulae by Hubble led to the abandonment of static models in favour of ones which were expanding."
60,000 hits? That is amazing. How can a website cope with such high numbers? They need to use "AI" to speed it up.
Sounds like this might have been a good application for bittorrent. Have only magnet links on the campus website.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Why is Edwin Hubble credited with the idea of an expanding universe? The idea was first proposed by Georges Lemaître, a Catholic priest in Belgium who published a paper on it in 1927, two years prior to Hubble. Although Hubble did provide very useful observational evidence to support the theory, it is inaccurate to attribute the theory to him.
Why is that is science paper that is 50 years old is finally free?
Amazon mixes 1-year trials into their "free tier" page. They may have even used up their free trial for another site. Hard to know what is free, and what might end up costing the University more money. I imagine there is a sizeable database of non-time sensitive content. Meaning outside of a rare case such as this, the server doesn't need much to operate, and might be more useful to the education facility itself, and so is more cost effective to host in house.
Wikipedia defines a crash as when a computer program "stops functioning properly and exits". A crash is generally a non-recoverable state. Are you sure you don't mean the site was overloaded?
More interesting is the website "intermittently crashed". I think we'll need Mr Hawking to explain the mechanics behind a program that is both crashed and not crashed. It must be that quantum physics stuff.
Thus "Olber's Paradox". Text recognition error?
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
Or the most superior version of all: BitTorrent.
Offer a fallback slow link for people who can't use a torrent. Hell, do it as a Google Drive / Dropbox / Box / One Drive / whatever link.
If you can't cope with hosting it, there are plenty of free options.
>"The Cambridge Library made several PDF files of the thesis available for download -- a high-resolution "72 Mb" file, digitized version that's less than half the size, and a "reduced" version that was even smaller"
Why not just provide TEXT or a vectorized PDF? OCR it and do some clean up and then, compressed, it would be what, a few hundred kilobytes, if that? This isn't rocket science :)
Here's a link to a copy of the original 72M version:
https://mega.nz/#!dgRUgLhS!OcP...
Yes, and uploading copies of all the various renderings of the document to archive.org would have given them this, time-honored robust hosting via an ordinary HTTP GET request, from a secure site that doesn't require Javascript to use (contrary to the Mega download link someone else posted to /. elsewhere in this story), made a "download" URL available one could put anywhere (even their own website without alerting most users the data was actually coming from archive.org such as a requirement to go through a separate download page), and done it all gratis. Perhaps the IT admins involved should look into doing this now.
Digital Citizen
The conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra can't run a website, either.
I bet Mick Jagger would struggle to run a website as well.
In between sneering about that, maybe you can hop up in a jiffy and see if the toner needs changing in the LaserJet on third floor for us, like a good IT guy?
Why not post it on AWS S3 or Cloudfront
Or better still, on Sci-Hub.
Math error on universe, the answer is actually 42.
"Stephen Hawking's Thesis Crashes Cambridge Site "
Well, there's a lot of gravity in that thing.
Yeah
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
I'd imagine some Varnish would probably have done enough.
I'd love to know what their general architecture is. I know "get some Cloudfront" or "get an Akamai contract" are solutions, but I'll bet this site gets a small base-load year-in, year-out and so doesn't really justify much expense. It'd be nice to know what architecture fails as much as what works.
As for BitTorrent - it's great and all, but it's not just a matter of "click the link, wait for the download" for most people. Perhaps it should be, but right now it's "download a client with a strange name, install it on your PC, don't install the Chrome toolbar, don't install the McAfee trial, bla bla" - way too much work for "just one download".
because the cloud is just some one else'1s computer. and amazon is evil and doesn't deserve to be supported in any way or form.
News for nerds, stuff that matters. Slashdot is reporting on the slashdot effect!
And? The comment you replied to didn't mention Hawking at all, so comparing him to conductors or rock stars is completely irrelevant. A better claim would be why you think the London Symphony Orchestra doesn't need a functioning website.
Cambridge University'sprimary purpose is not to create websites, any more than the LSO or Mick Jagger's is. Nothing to do with Hawking per se.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it