Back to RootsTech 2012

The second day of RootsTech starts off early with a breakfast meeting with the FamilySearch Research Wiki Support Team. Fortunately most of the places in downtown Salt Lake City is that you can walk. That is really foreign to someone who lives in Phoenix where it is usually so hot that no one at all unless under dire need would think of walking.

Today's keynote is from Josh Coates. You can read his background on RootsTech.org as well as see a live feed of his presentation. By the way he is wearing Levi's and has bare feet. Maybe that goes with being a programmer? He is a very good presenter by the way.

Highlights as usual.

Social Networks
1978 UseNet
1985 BBS
1989 AOL Online
1994 GeoCity not a real social network
1997 SixDegrees
2002-Present Social Networks


Value of social networks is equal to the number of people (n) on the network but varies on the number inter-connections between the users. Talks about friend collectors, the maximum number of friends in 241. 2007 Green Peace tries crowd sourcing. Now we are in the age of the power of social networks.


Where are social networks going: there will be a next Facebook. Why doesn't your social network idea probably won't work?

• Not enough critical mass available
• Costs too much to acquire users (free still has costs)
• No reason to come back or return to the network (no compelling content generation)

Data Storage (related to the ability to store information to enable social networking)

• 1 MB is 300 page book
• 1 GB take ten years to read aloud
• 1 TB 32,000 trees of paper
• 1 PB 1.4 million truck loads of paper
• 1 Exabyte All the trees in the US cut down and turned into paper or 30 billion trees
• 1 Zettabyte more than all the grains of sand on a thousand earth.

We are now in the Petabyte Era at about a $100,000 per Petabyte. We are now in the Exabyte era. Discusses the failure of hard disks. Of 4000 hard drives, every day one disk dies and once a month a matched pair of disks dies. Physical limitations in the degradation of the media.


Solid state drives are what will take us to the Exabyte Era.


Cloud Computing
Happening now. We have cloud computing. Very confusing at first.
Grid Computing became Time Sharing became ASP became SaaS became Cloud Computing

You can build a supercomputer in your basement. Questions of the era is what would you do with

• Unlimited Users?
• Unlimited Bandwidth?
• Unlimited Storage?
• Unlimited CPU?

We can all of that right now -- Cheap. Off the record I know someone who built a supercomputer from parts.


On the next presentation