He believed that the internet was entering a new era - an era of websites such as arXiv.org that contain a huge amount of stuff and can't be mirrored. Consequently, he disliked the search engines because they were attempting to mirror the whole archive of Ginsparg which was clearly impossible: it would take an infinite amount of affine time. However, a search engine called
suddenly showed that it was not only possible, but in fact very easy to reproduce the whole archive. Later, Google has also introduced a version of an interdisciplinary SPIRES with a full-text search capabilities
While Google was the first company to defeat Ginsparg's no-go theorem, the second defeat has been even more spectacular. She's called
(guess who took the picture on the website above) and she's, together with Alanis Morissette and a few more friends, a Canadian girl who rocked the world. What is her answer to Google.com?
It sounds great, does not it? How many of you have been sitting in the aircraft with your laptop, before you suddenly got a great idea, but you needed a formula that you knew could only be found in hep-th/0301173 - but where can you get this paper 6 miles above the middle of the Atlantic?
Because of Joanna, this won't happen to you anymore. It's the end of this most frequent kind of nightmare.
In fact, you can upload the "hep-th" archive to your iPod or Zune, if you have one (Steve Jobs tells you Thank you!) - it's just 8 GB or so. So far, Joanna only offers a demo - the year 2004 which is roughly 850 MB. What kind of technology do you need to download these gigabytes to your MP3 player or laptop?
Because Joanna is surrounded by the fans of the amateurish software (also known as Open Source software) - this category includes her brother as well as boyfriend - the answer had to be as obscure as BitTorrent - but that should not discourage you. Enjoy! :-)
