Comic Discussion > QUESTIONABLE CONTENT

WCDT Strips 3076 to 3080 (24-30 October 2015)

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Rghfrgl:
This is not a serious situation. Claire's still a timid person. She was timid in yesterdays comic, which in comic time was like, 30 seconds ago.


--- Quote ---It's like every author is afraid to write timid or not-smart or, well, weak female characters.
--- End quote ---

I want to point out I wouldn't say Claire was weak at all. While timid and nervous that never really stops her from going after what she wants in life.

You could probably chalk up Marigold for all three though.

hedgie:

--- Quote from: BenRG on 29 Oct 2015, 00:26 ---So, I'm not a tech head. Would I be right in saying that, basically, Claire has threatened to simply lobotomise Pintsize by dumping a snapshot of the entire Internet a few years back straight onto his memory?

--- End quote ---

Yes, but just the index is enough.  And Pintsize would have all of his pr0n overwritten.

Akima:
I imagine it is like that scene that was never shot, in that Indiana Jones movie that was never made, where the brain of that Russian psychic/scientist/agent wasn't incinerated by a knowledge download.

jwhouk:

--- Quote from: BenRG on 29 Oct 2015, 00:26 ---So, I'm not a tech head. Would I be right in saying that, basically, Claire has threatened to simply lobotomise Pintsize by dumping a snapshot of the entire Internet a few years back straight onto his memory?
--- End quote ---

I'm thinking this is basically it.

Of course, I also think it's a bluff, because what server at Smif could even come close to using that dongle?

bhtooefr:
Well, although she states it's a USLOC dongle, it actually has a real-world equivalent (including in the scale of the data), and that'd be downloading the Internet Archive's index.

In any case, there's differing time scales of information here, but as of December 2014, the Internet Archive has 50 PB of storage, with 9.6 PB in the Wayback Machine, 9.8 PB in the books/music/video collection. As of July 1, 2015, the Wayback Machine itself is 23 PB of storage (for a total of 32.8 PB), and growing by 50-60 TB per week.

However, we don't care about the database, we care about the index. As of January 2014, the Wayback Machine had 378,825,513,000 CDX records. Let's say 512 bytes per record, that's a high estimate, but we'll go with it. So, back then, just the index was 194 TB. It's likely tripled or quadrupled in size since then.

(It's worth noting that the USLOC's digital archive is "only" 5 PB: http://blogs.loc.gov/loc/2015/08/experts-corner-collection-development-officer-joseph-puccio/)

I'll also assume that the archive is at modern levels, despite the setting being possibly 2006. AIs will increase the size of the database.

So, assuming that Pintsize's OS doesn't have proper disk space management, any drive you could possibly put in Pintsize would be wiped. However, a very large server could feasibly handle that index - if we're going with the setting being 2006, you were looking at 750 GB HDDs for nearline storage. We'll go with 3 U of rack space for 16 3.5" drives, 42 U per rack, 168 TB per rack. So, four racks full of SAN, and you've got enough storage for the entire index and all student data. It'd certainly have to be a school that's serious about keeping a local index of the archive, but...

Of course, this is also something that you wouldn't just hand to an intern. This is something that not even Tai, and not even the head librarian, would have as a physical object like that, most likely. It'd be a shell script run by a cron job on their server, most likely.

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