Database
(Copied straight from .XML 'backup' file, needs formatting and corrections. ZM User (talk) 19:20, 22 April 2024 (PDT))
The Confederacy Database of Redundant Knowledge
The Darjee, acting for the Confederacy, made available a complete set of what they described as 'redundant knowledge.' Effectively it was a database of historical knowledge up to a period 100,000 years before contact with Earth in the form of a wiki.
When queried the AIs were of the opinion that if humans wanted the information restricted they should have taken steps to limit its availability - after all it was freely available to all members of the Confederacy.
Topics known to be covered are terraforming, space stations, and all aspects of space flight though it is described as covering 'everything'. One point to note is that because the Confederacy is non-violent the database does not contain any information on weapons though it contains technologies that can be weaponised. An example given was of a mining laser.
The formal title of the document was The Confederacy Database of Redundant Knowledge but this was quickly shortened in common use to simply The Database.
To Copy The Data
It took five days using terabyte disks to copy the section covering the scientific and engineering aspects of space flight.
The copying process seems slow especially to those used to copying megabytes or gigabytes but this is dealing with petabytes of data on terabyte disks. Any system that interfaced with a human designed and built computer was limited by that machine and no matter how many processes it ran in parallel it was going to take time to accomplish this task.
The special terabyte drive fitted in a standard 5 1/4" bay and was linked to an expansion card which in turn slotted into the normal white (PCI) expansion socket on the computer motherboard.
Story Usage
A textual analysis of the story repository, current as of 9/2019 and performed on 2019-09-11 and using SS Lib ver 1.14 (9/11/2019) identified the following top ten usage counts for Database:
- Going, Going by Tomken 61 instances.
- Tufts Family Anthology by Doc Tufferson 21 instances.
- Joacim & L'ielit Anthology by Benjin 19 instances.
- Maquis by starfiend 11 instances.
- The First Command by Zen Master 9 instances.
- THE Harem Tales 4 We Gotta Get Outta This Place! by Omachuck 9 instances.
- We Few, We Happy Few, We Band of Brothers by LughIldanach 7 instances.
- A Perfect 10 Part 2 by akarge 6 instances.
- Call This A Castle by Duke of Ramus 3 instances.
- Pickup Loop Hole by corsair 3 instances.
(Someday this will be a navigation template. It will provide a bar across the bottom of each article with useful navigation links. Until then, this is just a placeholder to get rid of all the red "broken link" indicators. -ZM User (talk) 10:00, 3 May 2024 (PDT))
