Red Dwarf, a British sci-fi comedy sitcom is coming back to TV, or so goes the story.
Check out the full details here at io9.com
http://io9.com/5052663/details-about-red-dwarfs-revival-finally-emerge
Distributed file storage services come and go like fashion trends, and for some interest groups are the bane of their existence.
However, the concept is a sound idea. It seems reasonable to share out your unused storage so that a reliable collective “cloud” storage cluster is available to anyone and everyone.
Wuala, http://wua.la/ is one example of this service, but puts a mathematical twist into the how files are spread across many machines. In short, by using polynomial math functions to define what a file is, Wuala minimizes the number of computers that have to be available at any given time so that a file can be recreated, and also minimizes how space is used to store the information to create the files:
“…That is an amount of data equivalent to six versions of the original file, rather than the 100 that would be needed to achieve the same level of reliability if whole files were being stored. Moreover, the system needs the computers linked to it to be available for only 17% of the time, rather than 25%, for this to apply.”
Check out the full article at the Economist.com:
http://www.economist.com/research/articlesbysubject/displaystory.cfm?subjectid=348909&story_id=12081445
