[Beowulf] dedupe filesystem

[Lux, James P]

On 6/5/09 10:18 AM, "John Hearns" <hearnsj at googlemail.com> wrote:

> 2009/6/5 Lux, James P <james.p.lux at jpl.nasa.gov>:
>>> 
>> In theory, then, with sufficient computational power (and that¹s what this
>> list is all about)  with the data on a small thumb drive I should be able to
>> reconstruct everything,  in every version, I¹ve ever created or will create.
>>  All it takes is a sufficiently powerful ³rendering engine²
>> 
> If I am not wrong, you have been reading "Godel, Escher, Bach: An
> Eternal Braid"?
> In which case you will next say that all of these keystrokes can be
> encoded as one unique prime number, which is very
> easily stored on a very small thuimb drive.
> 
Gosh. I haven't thought about GEB for decades, but I don't think you need to
restrict it to primes. I just need MY unique number (and the cool thing is
that I can retire, because knowing that, and having that rendering engine, I
can render the future as well as the past.)  Let's see... World population
of a few billion, maybe add a few bits for redundancy/ECC.. Everyone needs a
40 bit or so number.  Hmmm... Maybe that's why DES has 56 bit keys?
Everyone has their personal DES key. Or is there some more mystical reason..
I must go find my copies of Umberto Eco..