I had Dijkstra for a graduate CS class in the Fall of
1996. It was an exploration of elegance in the process of quantitative reasoning. I must say that he taught me the virtue of careful thinking more so than any other instructor during my formal education. Check out
this link starting around manuscript 1237 to see the course notes. As an example, he showed us an algorithm for calculating increasing cubes (x^3 for x=1 to N) of integers that reduces to 2 C statements and uses only integer addition and initial assignment as operators. E-mail me if you want the code. Hint: It would only be a 2 statement algorithm for any arbitrary polynomial function. k u r t AT s p a c e s h i p . c o m
How deep does this archiving go? Are they going to store every single page and image of every single website?
The goal is to get all publically available Web pages and their images. Technical and labor limitations prevent this from happening as yet, but we are working on it.
How much storage space is required for the whole web?
No one knows for sure, but the best estimates I've seen put it at about 20-30TB.
What software/OSes are they using for this project?
We've got got our own software running on Linux, although we are migrating to FreeBSD because of the 2GB file size limit. As a shameless plug, we are hiring!!
When do we get to see the archive?
We intend to provide access to researchers, scholars, historians, etc. Research proposals can be submitted here.
Kurt Bollacker Technical Director, Internet Archive kurt@archive.org
We buy PC's with 20 75GB IDE hard drives, paying about $11/GB for storage. Pretty cheap these days. We've calculated that the growth of the Web and the growth of disk drives tend to track pretty closely, so the cost of keeping up with the Internet will mean a relatively constant spending rate.
Kurt Bollacker, Technical Director, Internet Archive kurt@archive.org www.archive.org
Given our recent exposure, I thought I'd make a few comments since journalists tend to miss/skew important details.
We are *NOT* a company. We are a non-profit organization (www.archive.org) making our archives freely available to researchers, scholars, historians, etc.. A for-profit company may not be the right model to insure long term longevity of the collections. We only archive publicly available information on the Internet. li> We buy storage PC's with twenty 75GB IDE hard drives, 2 667Mhz CPUs
Slashdot Mirror
I had Dijkstra for a graduate CS class in the Fall of 1996. It was an exploration of elegance in the process of quantitative reasoning. I must say that he taught me the virtue of careful thinking more so than any other instructor during my formal education. Check out this link starting around manuscript 1237 to see the course notes. As an example, he showed us an algorithm for calculating increasing cubes (x^3 for x=1 to N) of integers that reduces to 2 C statements and uses only integer addition and initial assignment as operators. E-mail me if you want the code. Hint: It would only be a 2 statement algorithm for any arbitrary polynomial function.
k u r t AT s p a c e s h i p . c o m
The goal is to get all publically available Web pages and their images. Technical and labor limitations prevent this from happening as yet, but we are working on it.
How much storage space is required for the whole web?
No one knows for sure, but the best estimates I've seen put it at about 20-30TB.
What software/OSes are they using for this project?
We've got got our own software running on Linux, although we are migrating to FreeBSD because of the 2GB file size limit. As a shameless plug, we are hiring!!
When do we get to see the archive?
We intend to provide access to researchers, scholars, historians, etc. Research proposals can be submitted here.
Kurt Bollacker
Technical Director, Internet Archive
kurt@archive.org
We buy PC's with 20 75GB IDE hard drives, paying about $11/GB for storage. Pretty cheap these days. We've calculated that the growth of the Web and the growth of disk drives tend to track pretty closely, so the cost of keeping up with the Internet will mean a relatively constant spending rate.
Kurt Bollacker,
Technical Director, Internet Archive
kurt@archive.org
www.archive.org
We are *NOT* a company. We are a non-profit organization (www.archive.org) making our archives freely available to researchers, scholars, historians, etc.. A for-profit company may not be the right model to insure long term longevity of the collections. We only archive publicly available information on the Internet. li> We buy storage PC's with twenty 75GB IDE hard drives, 2 667Mhz CPUs