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Who created Physics Forums? Who is its founder? Does anybody owns it?
 
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PF was created in 2000 by a team of psychiatrists at the Moronvia Institute in DuBuque, Iowa, U.S.A. as a psychological experiment to see how many time a day you could interrupt people's connection to an internet forum before they went berzerk.
 
http://www.lancs.ac.uk/ug/mcknight/nerd.jpg
 
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I would like to know the relationship between Greg and Warren. Are they related, friends or..?
 
Tom Mattson said:
I can't believe no one PM'd me about Chief Crazyhead Mattson. You guys usually watch my back better than that!

haha I always wondered why you never had a response to that :biggrin:
 
Mattara said:
I would like to know the relationship between Greg and Warren. Are they related, friends or..?

Warren is my mom's cousins dads step son's ex girlfriends classmate
 
Did you watch your school pull off the upset, Greg? You do go to UWM, no?
 
Greg Bernhardt said:
Warren is my mom's cousins dads step son's ex girlfriends classmate
Thrice removed.

Greg and I have never actually met, or even conversed on the phone, believe it or not. I joined PF a number of years ago and spent most of my time being an arrogant jerk to the crackpots. Eventually, somehow, I was promoted to mentor (I guess I softened up!). Later, when Greg realized I could help him with some of the site's programming, he made me a co-admin.

- Warren
 
my time being an arrogant jerk to the crackpots

Said like a true scientist
 
So then Greg you must be crazy rich by now like all the other Internet people.
 
I bet these two Google guys have been knocking on your door lately.

Are we talking seven digits numbers? Or stock options?
 
What're you trying to say? That Google would buy PF? I think you have it all backwards... Greg's been talking about investing his PF profits in some little search engine company for a while now.

- Warren
 
But don't you realize how much money is needed to keep the site up? With the amount of data on PF, the hosting package isn't 100 MB of disk and 500 MB bandwidth! I wonder how much bandwidth PF uses monthly.
 
z-component said:
But don't you realize how much money is needed to keep the site up? With the amount of data on PF, the hosting package isn't 100 MB of disk and 500 MB bandwidth! I wonder how much bandwidth PF uses monthly.

Close to 300gig total bandwidth (http, ftp, ssh, backups...) and near 3gig raw data (over a gig for all those latex images!). Good thing we have a dedicated server with unlimited bandwidth and two 160gig drives!
 
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:eek: Yeah, good thing! I had no idea LaTeX images took that much.
 
No one "created" PF. It evolved over millions of years from protoforumoids like sci.physics usenet.
 
Okay, this is probably going to sound like a weird question, but I've been thinking about asking for a long time. Since I know very little about how the net works, I'm curious about where PF is. Is it all in one honking huge computer somewhere, or distributed among a bunch of them, or am I just a Solipsist and dreamed the whole thing up?
 
Danger said:
Okay, this is probably going to sound like a weird question, but I've been thinking about asking for a long time. Since I know very little about how the net works, I'm curious about where PF is. Is it all in one honking huge computer somewhere, or distributed among a bunch of them, or am I just a Solipsist and dreamed the whole thing up?

It's in a datacenter located in New York.
 
Greg Bernhardt said:
It's in a datacenter located in New York.
That's weird. I always figured there was this big sort of borg cube in your garage that you went out and banged on with a wrench now and then.
 
Greg Bernhardt said:
It's in a datacenter located in New York.
Okay... next question (and no, I'm not kidding): what's a datacentre?
 
Danger said:
Okay... next question (and no, I'm not kidding): what's a datacentre?
It's a building that has (hopefully) redundant power supplies, and multiple carriers with fiber into the building. They rent out space in their building to people that want to place their servers and other equipment in a secure environment.

There are other concerns such as HVAC, fire prevention, you don't want water pouring onto your server in case of a fire, security.

There are obviously different levels of providers, some outright lie about their facilities. I quite often have clients call me saying that XYZ data center says I have fiber into their facility and I don't.
 
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