To give you some idea, the text (and only text, not pictures, and in plain vanilla ascii format) of the Library of Congress will fit in 1/4 of one rack (20 storage nodes). So figure a ten-rack PetaBox will store 40 Libraries of Congress.
I don't know about you, but I'll take good, dense reading material over movies or music any day. Of course my preferences are low on the priority list:-) so it's being pre-filled with all kinds of flashy stuff.
-- TTK
Well, at the Archive we host "contribution" file sets (basically enduser-submitted audio, text, and video documents which are not protected works), and we also crawl the known world wide web about once every two months or so (about 60TB worth of data) and save it. This first petabox is being pre-stocked with our complete "collections" data (about 25TB worth) and a part of the "web" data.
It's not *quite* the authorative repository of all human knowledge:-) but it's a start. You could think of it as a huuuuuuge web browser cache;-)
-- TTK
> What do I backup my petabox with?
Under the current setup, the petabox backs itself up onto "partner" nodes, so if a disk drive bursts into flame, a new one can be plugged in and refilled with its old data.
-- TTK
> Think someone like the government is going to keep track of who buys these things?
They can't. The complete specs for making your own will be published (RSN), as well as the software and documentation, all open-sourced. Anyone will be able to build one without going through us at the Archive.
-- TTK
Argh.. well, I made sure vi and emacs were installed, and jove is installed (my personally preferred editor), and pico is installed, but there is no teco.
Guess your monkeys will have to use something else:-)
I'll throw in my vote, too, for the Pilot Precise V5 and V7 models. They are by far my favorite pen. I've been using them for so long now, in fact, that they have molded my writing habits to accomodate them.
They are a bit pricey, however, and lately I have been trying out some other, cheaper pens. Most have been abyssmal failures, but a few months ago I struck on a winner: the Superball Roller Ball Pen (Extra-Fine Line), by Pentel. The only drawback to these is that I have to press down a little harder than I'm used to, to get a reliable flow of ink. This is a mixed blessing, as the Pilot Precise always borderlined on too much ink flow, and would bleed through the paper if I wasn't careful.
Right now I am using a mixture of the two. I have one Superball which I try to use as much as possible (so I can see how well they hold up from long-term use, and how they behave when their ink starts to run low), but I already have a lot of V5's scattered about (a notepad or book tends to "own" a pen, clipped to its back cover, so that whenever I pick the book or pad up, I automatically have a pen that goes with it).
The V5's are running out of ink or springing leaks, though, one by one, and I hope to have their replacement settled upon before running out of them entirely, so that I don't have to buy more.
Another substitute model which I've used and liked is the Uni-Ball Vision (fine), by Sanford. (Not Stanford, but Sanford.) These are really too thick around, and flow ink too quickly (even faster than the V7) for me to use them on a regular basis. (Also, all of the Uni-Ball pens in the house are my wife's, so I can't hold onto them for very long anyway. She's jealous about keeping her pens.)
Note: I'm a big guy (6'4"), with very large hands, but I still prefer narrower pens over thicker ones. My writing grip is also a little nonstandard (I curl my fingers a lot more than most people), which might have something to do with it.
Even though I'm a "computer guy" (SWE and UNIX sysadmin), I've always done my best creative work with pen and paper. I use it to organize, reflect upon, and evolve my ideas. Once I've designed my software on paper, then I sit at the computer and write the code that implements the design. So I use pen and paper quite a lot.
There is already a material being produced which is superior to spiders' silk in every way -- stronger, lighter, higher elongation-to-break, and easier to mass produce. It is called ultra-high molecular weight high-density polyethylene. Spectra is one form of the stuff; Dyneema is a superior form.
UM-HDPE is basically the same stuff that garbage bags are made of ("ordinary" HDPE), but the polyethylene chains in it are several tens of thousands of times longer. This was made possible by the discovery of a new process by which to build the PE chains, using a new catalyst (and lots and lots of MAO, which always cracks me up).
UM-HDPE production has been ramping up slowly over the past several years. In time, we should expect it to be fairly commonplace and inexpensive (Dyneema is currently extremely pricey stuff, due to limited production). So cracking the silk "code" is nothing to get riled up about, at least not from a material engineer's perspective. It's a johnny-come-latey. I seriously doubt its production could be ramped up any faster than Dyneema's, and Dyneema has a huge head start.
.. would be the elimination of plutonium as a waste product.
There is a type of nuclear reactor called a "breeder reactor" which generates as its waste product more plutonium, which can then be used to power more breeder reactors. All of the recently-constructed nuclear power plants in Japan are of this type. It was hoped to herald a new age of wasteless nuclear power.
Unfortunately, the breeder reactors produce more plutonium than can be used, both in sheer volume and in rate of production. Quite simply, they couldn't build new power plants fast enough to keep up with plutonium production, nor would they want to. Oops.
To make matters worse, the plutonium "waste" is more dangerous than the normal kind, and more difficult to safely store.
If we could economically zap plutnonium en masse and make it into something relatively benign, it would enable the existing breeder-reactor technology to revolutionize the power industry. This iodine-zapping trick only helps with non-breeder plants, which are vastly less valuable.
Not to seem as though I'm harshing on these guys -- Kudos to them! Rather, I hope they are able to apply this technology to plutonium "waste", eventually. If they get it to work economically on iodine first, that's also good, because there is a lot of iodine waste sitting around being dangerous. It would be nice in the long run if we could replace the older iodine-producing nuclear reactors to breeder reactors, but to do that we'd need to figure out how to deal with the plutonium.
Slashdot Mirror
To give you some idea, the text (and only text, not pictures, and in plain vanilla ascii format) of the Library of Congress will fit in 1/4 of one rack (20 storage nodes). So figure a ten-rack PetaBox will store 40 Libraries of Congress. I don't know about you, but I'll take good, dense reading material over movies or music any day. Of course my preferences are low on the priority list :-) so it's being pre-filled with all kinds of flashy stuff.
-- TTK
Well, at the Archive we host "contribution" file sets (basically enduser-submitted audio, text, and video documents which are not protected works), and we also crawl the known world wide web about once every two months or so (about 60TB worth of data) and save it. This first petabox is being pre-stocked with our complete "collections" data (about 25TB worth) and a part of the "web" data. It's not *quite* the authorative repository of all human knowledge :-) but it's a start. You could think of it as a huuuuuuge web browser cache ;-)
-- TTK
> What do I backup my petabox with? Under the current setup, the petabox backs itself up onto "partner" nodes, so if a disk drive bursts into flame, a new one can be plugged in and refilled with its old data. -- TTK
> Think someone like the government is going to keep track of who buys these things? They can't. The complete specs for making your own will be published (RSN), as well as the software and documentation, all open-sourced. Anyone will be able to build one without going through us at the Archive. -- TTK
Argh .. well, I made sure vi and emacs were installed, and jove is installed (my personally preferred editor), and pico is installed, but there is no teco.
:-)
Guess your monkeys will have to use something else
-- TTK
I'll throw in my vote, too, for the Pilot Precise V5 and V7 models. They are by far my favorite pen. I've been using them for so long now, in fact, that they have molded my writing habits to accomodate them.
They are a bit pricey, however, and lately I have been trying out some other, cheaper pens. Most have been abyssmal failures, but a few months ago I struck on a winner: the Superball Roller Ball Pen (Extra-Fine Line), by Pentel. The only drawback to these is that I have to press down a little harder than I'm used to, to get a reliable flow of ink. This is a mixed blessing, as the Pilot Precise always borderlined on too much ink flow, and would bleed through the paper if I wasn't careful.
Right now I am using a mixture of the two. I have one Superball which I try to use as much as possible (so I can see how well they hold up from long-term use, and how they behave when their ink starts to run low), but I already have a lot of V5's scattered about (a notepad or book tends to "own" a pen, clipped to its back cover, so that whenever I pick the book or pad up, I automatically have a pen that goes with it).
The V5's are running out of ink or springing leaks, though, one by one, and I hope to have their replacement settled upon before running out of them entirely, so that I don't have to buy more.
Another substitute model which I've used and liked is the Uni-Ball Vision (fine), by Sanford. (Not Stanford, but Sanford.) These are really too thick around, and flow ink too quickly (even faster than the V7) for me to use them on a regular basis. (Also, all of the Uni-Ball pens in the house are my wife's, so I can't hold onto them for very long anyway. She's jealous about keeping her pens.)
Note: I'm a big guy (6'4"), with very large hands, but I still prefer narrower pens over thicker ones. My writing grip is also a little nonstandard (I curl my fingers a lot more than most people), which might have something to do with it.
Even though I'm a "computer guy" (SWE and UNIX sysadmin), I've always done my best creative work with pen and paper. I use it to organize, reflect upon, and evolve my ideas. Once I've designed my software on paper, then I sit at the computer and write the code that implements the design. So I use pen and paper quite a lot.
-- TTK
I have to agree.
There is already a material being produced which is superior to spiders' silk in every way -- stronger, lighter, higher elongation-to-break, and easier to mass produce. It is called ultra-high molecular weight high-density polyethylene. Spectra is one form of the stuff; Dyneema is a superior form.
UM-HDPE is basically the same stuff that garbage bags are made of ("ordinary" HDPE), but the polyethylene chains in it are several tens of thousands of times longer. This was made possible by the discovery of a new process by which to build the PE chains, using a new catalyst (and lots and lots of MAO, which always cracks me up).
UM-HDPE production has been ramping up slowly over the past several years. In time, we should expect it to be fairly commonplace and inexpensive (Dyneema is currently extremely pricey stuff, due to limited production). So cracking the silk "code" is nothing to get riled up about, at least not from a material engineer's perspective. It's a johnny-come-latey. I seriously doubt its production could be ramped up any faster than Dyneema's, and Dyneema has a huge head start.
-- TTK
.. would be the elimination of plutonium as a waste product.
There is a type of nuclear reactor called a "breeder reactor" which generates as its waste product more plutonium, which can then be used to power more breeder reactors. All of the recently-constructed nuclear power plants in Japan are of this type. It was hoped to herald a new age of wasteless nuclear power.
Unfortunately, the breeder reactors produce more plutonium than can be used, both in sheer volume and in rate of production. Quite simply, they couldn't build new power plants fast enough to keep up with plutonium production, nor would they want to. Oops.
To make matters worse, the plutonium "waste" is more dangerous than the normal kind, and more difficult to safely store.
If we could economically zap plutnonium en masse and make it into something relatively benign, it would enable the existing breeder-reactor technology to revolutionize the power industry. This iodine-zapping trick only helps with non-breeder plants, which are vastly less valuable.
Not to seem as though I'm harshing on these guys -- Kudos to them! Rather, I hope they are able to apply this technology to plutonium "waste", eventually. If they get it to work economically on iodine first, that's also good, because there is a lot of iodine waste sitting around being dangerous. It would be nice in the long run if we could replace the older iodine-producing nuclear reactors to breeder reactors, but to do that we'd need to figure out how to deal with the plutonium.
-- TTK