Computer scientists say it’s time to start looking at treatment of data waste

by Bob Yirka, Physorg.com

As anyone who has ever used a Windows based computer for any length of time knows, the longer you have it, the slower it goes; this is because of the accumulation of data files and entries in system logs; information that in many cases isn’t really necessary. Thus, our computers slow down due to the accumulation of “waste.” Now, two computer scientists from Johns Hopkins University have published a paper on arXiv, where they argue that data waste management on computer systems could, and should be handled similarly to the way physical-world waste is managed.

In their paper, Ragib Hasan and Randal Burns pick up where computer scientists at Cornell University left off after discovering in 1999 that up to 80% of files written to the hard drive by the Windows NT operating system were deleted within five seconds of being created. ……  Report