In the last paragraph of his Electoral Vote site, Andy Tanenbaum writes:
So why am I a happy camper? We survived an unprecedented triple flash crowd and logged it all. As it turns out, two of the faculty members in my Dept., Maarten van Steen and Guillaume Pierre, are doing research on coping with flash crowds. The research issues include how many replicas to set up, where to place them, how fast to deploy them, and how to do it automatically, in real time, and at minimum cost. To simulate proposed algorithms, you need data about real flash crowds and real attacks, preferably at the same time. And boy oh boy do we have data now. Students interested in this and other areas of computer systems might want to check out the English-language Masters program I am running at the Vrije Universiteit.
I knew it. There was a reason behind the site. Andy was just conducting research into the best way to respond to crowd attacks on web sites, a significant availability problem in Computer Security.
Similarly, Brad Fitz of LiveJournal recently posted a presentation about the design of LJ, and how it works with distributed open source servers.
Just goes to show: Nothing is wasted time. One can usually find useful research anywhere.
I’m not wasting time. I’m conducting research.
Note: This entry was originally posted on Observations Along The Road (on cahighways.org) as this entry by California Highway Guy. You may comment either here or there (where there are 
