TechNutters in association with Baynham & Tyers is now hosting the first (of three) of the Legendary Contraption videos, inspired by Rube Goldberg/Heath Robinson...

This video was initially made in one of the college dorm rooms at St Johns College, Cambridge (UK) and hosted on the university server. On a raining Saturday afternoon in the middle of March 2005, the video was posted on Slashdot http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/03/12/196237 resulting in over 100,000 downloads in a 24 hour period, causing the university servers to grind to a halt and disrupting a couple of thousand students.

The email (below) was received the following Monday (14/03/05):

“It has come to our attention that the online movie of 'The 3rd Court "Contraption"' has given rise to some 500 Gbytes of network traffic over the last weekend. This is rather in excess of the moderate recreational use permissable under the Computing Service guidelines and it has been causing performance degradation of our systems to the detriment of others. The Acting Director of the Computing Service has therefore asked me to request that you remove the video from the system.

You are probably aware that the University levies network charges based on total traffic that is measured at the JANET gateway. As, in the past, the amount of network traffic from personal PWF web sites has been comparatively small, it has not been cost-effective to charge out this traffic. However, if we were billing for this traffic, the 500 GB so far would correspond to a charge in the region of £250.

I hope that you will cooperate with this request. If you do not, I must warn you that we may decide to charge you for any further large quantities of network traffic.

Finally, I congratulate you in producing such a successful video,
though I wish that your advertising had not been correspondingly so successful.

--------------------------------------------
Head of the Network Division
University of Cambridge Computing Service”

Needless to say, we had to find a more generous hosted solution for our other Contraption videos...