On Wed, Jan 23, 2002 at 09:48:49AM -0500, Scott A Crosby wrote:
> 
> If you think I'm in error in this case, I'm happy to be convinced
> otherwise.
>
(not entirely seriouse response...) 

Think bigger?

There is a very interesting interview with Brewster Kahle about
Archive.org, worlds largest Database (100TB):
http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/webservices/2002/01/18/brewster.html

 Kahle: Having the capital cost of equipment drop to effectively zero allows
 you to think bigger. You start thinking about the whole thing. For instance,
 the gutsy maneuver of saying "let's index it all," which was the
 breakthrough of Altavista . Altavista in 1995 was an astonishing
 achievement, not because of the hardware -- yes, that was interesting and
 important from a technical perspective -- but because of the mindset. "Let's
 go index every document in the world." And once you have that sort of
 mindset, you can get really far.

 So if all books are 20 TBs, and 20 TBs are $80,000, that's the Library of
 Congress. Then something big has changed. All music? It's tiny. It looks
 like there're only one million records that have been produced over the last
 century. That's tiny. All movies? All theatrical releases have been
 estimated at 100,000, and most of those from India. If you take all the rest
 of ephemeral films, that's on the order of a couple hundred thousand. It's
 just not that big. It allows you to start thinking about the whole thing.

-- 
Marcus Denker marcus at ira.uka.de  -- Squeak! http://squeakland.org