"Howard J. Rogers" <hjr_at_dizwell.com> wrote in message news:<4147d493$0$23893$afc38c87_at_news.optusnet.com.au>...
> > Cern, for instance, will generate around 10 Petabytes of info a year
> > when they fire the accelerator up. It could run for 10-20 years.
> It was a good answer. But I have to say, a little cynically, I doubt the
> world will be a better place for all this data.
>
> Seems to me that in the rush to capture everything, we've forgotten how to
> precis or discriminate between the worthless and the priceless.
>
> But that's a topic for another day.
>
> Thanks for the link, by the way.
>
> Regards
> HJR
Just one small remark about CERN to point out that sometimes huge data
doesn't mean worthless heap of everything. I had a small discussion
with the guy working for CERN on this collider business and if I
understand him correctly (probably not) the reason for this huge
storage is this:
The very principle of research with colliders is to bounce various
particles against each other and waiting what is going to happen. It
can be described as some odd kind of lottery, because almost all
collisions are not winning (e.g. nothing interesting happened) and
only just one in millions can be a catch. The problem is that you
can't tell if something happened or not just by "looking" at. So the
way how to deal with this is to store data about all collisions and
then use complicated program analysing certain patterns to get the
winning ticket. The probability of getting the game winner is
increasing with increasing of data available for analysis. So they not
only want to store really huge amount of data, but the also need them.
--
Dusan Bolek
http://www.db-support.com
Email: spambin_at_seznam.cz
Pls add "Not Guilty" to the subject, otherwise your email will face an
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Received on Wed Sep 15 2004 - 08:08:38 CDT
