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Stephen Hawking's Ph.D. Thesis Crashes Cambridge Site After It's Posted Online
- endswapper 9y agoDirect link to thesis: http://schema.lib.cam.ac.uk/PR-PHD-05437_CUDL2017-reduced.pdf http://schema.lib.cam.ac.uk/PR-PHD-05437_CUDL2017-reduced.pd...
- DrScump 9y agoIt would have been more helpful to post mirror site addresses rather than exacerbate the problem. Anybody know of mirror sites? A basic web search doesn't show any, and archive.org doesn't show it.
- matthewbadeau 9y agoMirror: http://web.archive.org/web/20171024005153/http://schema.lib.cam.ac.uk/PR-PHD-05437_CUDL2017-reduced.pdf http://web.archive.org/web/20171024005153/http://schema.lib....
- its4tom 9y agoLink to thesis on Scribd in case helpful: https://www.scribd.com/document/362484322/Stephen-Hawking-PhD-Thesis-Properties-of-Expanding-Universes https://www.scribd.com/document/362484322/Stephen-Hawking-Ph...
- PhilWright 9y agoThe PDF is just a scan of actual book printed pages. No wonder it is a monstrous size.
- ccvannorman 9y agoSo a man who uses a machine for synthesis into text for speech, wrote a book which was then printed, scanned, and uploaded. I wonder if they faxed it at some point too?
- lallysingh 9y agoWhat's this got to do with his speech problems? Did you want him to ready it to you?
- ReverseCold 9y agoI think the point was that he entered the information in digitally, so it should have been easier to provide a digital copy rather than scan actual printed pages. Note: Didn't go to the link, so just guessing.
- aardvark291 9y agoHis thesis is from 1966, an era in which (1) it is likely that he typed it on a typewriter, and (2) he was still almost completely able-bodied.
- Sharlin 9y agoNot only did he type it with a typewriter, all the math notation in the thesis is hand-written! There was no math typesetting available in 1966 outside major printing houses. (Or, I guess, any reasonable priced option for getting your PhD thesis properly typeset and printed at all, math or not.)
- ktta 9y ago>he entered the information in digitally This is Stephen's Hawking's PhD thesis. It is dated 1966. How could he have entered it digitally? UNIX research didn't even start until 1970s. I believe this comment chain thinks the thesis was written recently. So you guys thought Stephen Hawking didn't have a PhD till now?
- seanmcdirmid 9y agoWell, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expensive_Typewriter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expensive_Typewriter came out in 1961. Cool name also (because computer time was expensive back then!).
- retox 9y agoWhat percent of downloads will actually be read I wonder. I'm guilt of downloading and hoarding things that seems interesting and never getting round to even opening them. "When I'm retired", I tell myself.
- callinyouin 9y agoGuilty as charged, as well. I download just about any programming manual/book that's free in PDF or similar form and I've probably read maybe 10% of them.
- colinbartlett 9y agoSeems like a perfect use for a torrent. Is there a tracker link?
- logicallee 9y ago"I've watched everything" "What do you mean everything?" "TV shows. Movies. Even the japanese ones." "How about older stuff" "I've gone through early Chaplin work. I've seen Metropolis 17 times." "I'm sure there's something" (grabs his friend) "You don't understand, Paul. I've been reading Shannon. A Mathematical Theory of Communication. I've run out. I've taken to begging strangers for a fix." "That bad?" (Guilty), "I just... " (resigned) "I just asked someone to put up a torrent of Stephen Hawking's Ph.D. thesis..."
- B1FF_PSUVM 9y ago> Movies. Even the japanese ones. Even the Eastern European ones. And all of Ingmar Bergman. (shudders)
- scandinavegan 9y agoThat's the good stuff! I recommend Satantango, and all of Bergman.
- ktta 9y agoInfo hash: e5878b9cdd55286310135419a69371a31195a32a Magnet link: magnet:?xt=urn:btih:e5878b9cdd55286310135419a69371a31195a32a&dn=PR-PHD-05437_CUDL2017-reduced.pdf&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Fexplodie.org%3A6969&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.coppersurfer.tk%3A6969&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.empire-js.us%3A1337&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.leechers-paradise.org%3A6969&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.opentrackr.org If you don't have a torrent client: https://instant.io/#e5878b9cdd55286310135419a69371a31195a32a https://instant.io/#e5878b9cdd55286310135419a69371a31195a32a
- accurrent 9y agoArticle has a typo in the quote should be Olber not Older who described what's now known as Olbers paradox.
- tbrock 9y ago99% chance someone used apache’s default configuration.
- Bromskloss 9y agoWhat is the limitation in that default configuration?
- jerf 9y agoKeepAlive, probably: http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/19/running-apache-on-a-memory-constrained-vps/ http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/19/running-apache-on-a-memo...
- eighthnate 9y agoI just have to ask why this is news? Is this really something newsworthy? Cambridge's network probably isn't as hardened to spikes in traffic since they don't get much traffic. But still, it isn't 1995. They should have some form of load balancing or distributed/clustered web/data/file systems to handle temporary spikes in traffic and data requests. Serving simple static data isn't something that should "crash the site".
- Insanity 9y agoThe technology behind the repository itself is not great. (DSpace[1]), add to that the factor that it is not actually build to handle this many requests and scaling quickly is out of the question too because of the server set up. Even without issues, it often felt a bit sluggish when serving locally. The pages are quite large, and the whole pipeline from content -> webpage is rather tedious.(Java, XSLT -> html) It shouldn't have happened - but I assumed it would. disclaimer: I am a former contributor to the project [1]: https://github.com/DSpace/DSpace https://github.com/DSpace/DSpace
- maxpert 9y agoOk I am confused, 60k hits in a day? What broght down the website? 72MB of size, network congestion, or 60k hits? Even with authentication for download what can bring the system down? I have handled more traffic on a RPi with 100MBps connection. I really don’t get it.
- lstyls 9y agoIf you're hitting a single box, this seems perfectly possible - especially if the server or the network is poorly configured. This is what CDNs are for.
- dsfyu404ed 9y agoThis isn't Joe's blog running from a desktop found in a dumpster. It's a university with actual infrastructure. They should be able to handle this. Registration is probably more load. A 72MB file being served 500,000 times over a 24hr period is 3-4Gb/sec. The department probably has one or more web servers serving content off a network drive. Your average "rack of network storage" won't even blink at that. There was probably a gigabit switch somewhere or that was being a bottleneck or the web server was simply misconfigured for this task.
- lstyls 9y ago+1, thanks for the correction. Apparently I have a skewed perspective only working on web at big corporate joints.
- maxpert 9y agoHere I made a quick copy and a quick domain, almost 10 LoC and it will be more reliable than what Cambridge had http://hawking.sibte.ml/ http://hawking.sibte.ml/
- chauhankiran 9y agoWow! Thanks. But, I do not understand the <script> tag in homepage contains lots of ![]+[].
- netsharc 9y agoI'm glad NPR used this headline, another news site said it "broke the internet". Journalism!(tm)
- ianopolous 9y agoHere is an ipfs link to it: https://ipfs.io/ipfs/QmNwcSE8BYQmHSS99dtg2VdAez4uswVkvCssj4Rgce4rLp https://ipfs.io/ipfs/QmNwcSE8BYQmHSS99dtg2VdAez4uswVkvCssj4R...
- dredmorbius 9y agoThis points to challenges of digital information. Stephen Hawking and his dissertation are high-profile as these things go. The NPR mentions other popular items generating 100s of requests per month. I've run across items with lifetime request counts in the double or triple digits frequently (and suspect I doubled the count on one particular item). More often, though, the truth is that this material simply isn't available online. There are several thesis repositories (either Michigan State or University of Michigan are one, as I recall), and I can frequently turn up a shelf reference via WorldCat ... somewhere. But there's work from surprisingly prominent names in numerous fields that simply isn't available in electronic format. The worst case is for materials from rougly 1924 - 1980: to late to be out of copyright, and too early to have been composed, or converted to, digital formats (and 1980 is an early cut-off date for that, though it's when material seems to start appearing in bulk). This includes PhD dissertations, Masters theses, and numerous academic or other writings, often including government documents not under copyright. Thankfully with Sci-Hub, actual published academic journal articles can be found, freely, with a very high success rate. Particularly painful for me are popular magazine and newspaper items, for which even the indices are very frequently locked behind site-restricted or affiliate-only access. The time-and-effort differential of being able to look something up online, vs. travelling many miles to a facility for access, is tremendous. And it absolutely stops a great many incidential queries dead. See Rick Falkvinge's excellent rant about how the KRACK vulnerability was blocked behind corporate-only paywalls for over a decade: https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/blog/2017/10/the-recent-catastrophic-wi-fi-vulnerability-was-in-plain-sight-for-13-years-behind-a-corporate-paywall/ https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/blog/2017/10/the-recen... Note that the issues here are twofold. One element is the task of scanning and making available documents, and organising the results in a manner useful for search. But much the harm is the direct consequence of the present regime of copyright and paid access to information, AS WELL AS the perverse incentives of advertising-backed media and media manipulation have created a media regime that is actively harmful to society. I'd really like to see the elements of this addressed.
- zamber 9y agoSuggestions on getting this in audio form? I guess it requires transcribing the handwritten parts. The Chrome OCR fails there. Is there a better one? Sample: This implies that the universe is spatially homogeneous and isotropic since there is no direction defined in the 3- space orthogonal to Ua. In this universe we consider small perturbations of the motion of tl1e fluid and of the '.ifeyl tensore 1 Ne neglect products of small quantities and perform derivatives with respect to the undisturbed metric. Since all the quantities we are interested in with the exception of the scalars, µ, ~' e have unperturbed value zero, we avoid perturbations that merely represent coordinate transformation and have no physical significance. To the first order the equations (1) - (4) and (7) - (9) are