2014-04-26 10:52:28 -04:00
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flash crowd
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2014-04-26 11:54:15 -04:00
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Larry Niven's 1973 SF short story Flash Crowd predicted that one consequence
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of cheap teleportation would be huge crowds materializing almost instantly
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at the sites of interesting news stories. Twenty years later the term passed
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into common use on the Internet to describe exponential spikes in website or
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server usage when one passes a certain threshold of popular interest (what
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this does to the server may also be called slashdot effect ). It has been
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pointed out that the effect was anticipated years earlier in Alfred Bester's
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1956 The Stars My Destination.
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