Archive: FAQs

Que: Do you wish to say anything to Professor Peter Norvig, Professor Sebastian Thrun and class staff?

Ans: Thank you very much.

Personal:

Que: Who archived ai-class.com here?

Ans: Amber Jain.

Que: Why?

Ans:

• • I archived ai-class.com for class instructors, class staff, myself, my fellow classmates and for humans, bacteria, aliens etc that will take this course in future.

  • Moreover, many people were worried about ai-class.com website going off-line in near future. So, I archived *everything* (and not just videos) that I bumped into (including ordered youtube video links, site web pages, sweet memories etc.). Come with me if you want to live!

  • My third intention was to prove that anyone willing to offer a class online for free can do so with free tools and technologies (except ofcourse ignoring the hardware needed such as a touch tablet, webcam etc.) such as:

    • • Youtube

      • Google Sites

      • Google Docs, Microsoft Skydrive or Amazon Cloud Drive

      • Google Moderator, Area 51 (Stackexchange), Google Groups or Reddit

      • Twitter or identi.ca

• • • dotSUB

      • Et cetera

• • All for free! Yes, I mean it. For more details, feel free to contact me.

Que: How can I contact you (i.e. the site administrator of this archive)?

Ans: Send me an email. Or, post your comments here.

Donations/Thanks:

Que: I like this site and/or I want to thank you. How can I do so?

Ans: Contribute/donate to Khan Academy. If you don't have time/money to do so, email me a picture of your area (city, country etc.).

Que: Why don't you put up advertisements on this archive site and donate advertisement revenues to Khan Academy?

Ans: Because Google rejected my Adsense application few months ago. On a more serious note, since the original class site (https://www.ai-class.com/) didn't served ads, I won't do so either to keep the class spirit. Never.

Miscellaneous:

Que: What if class videos on youtube (linked from this archive site) are deleted or made private? What if youtube videos are in-accessible?

Ans: I don't see a reason as to why class staff will do this (given their view about free online education for all), but if this happens (whatsoever the reason maybe), I'll either link one of many copies uploaded by people elsewhere or upload (and link) my own copy of class videos (that I had already downloaded) from this archive site. If youtube links are not accessible on this site, feel free to contact me.

Que: Something needs to be edited on, added to or removed from this archive site. What can I do?

Ans: Drop me an email with details.

Que: Which programs and technologies did you use to archive ai-class.com on this site?

Ans: Google Sites, youtube-dl, tac, Geany, Firefox, DownThemAll, Screengrab, GIMP, reCAPTCHA etc.

Que: Are we allowed to mirror/archive ai-class.com content and host it on a public site?

Ans: I'm not a lawyer and so I didn't tried understanding class terms and conditions. If you are from class staff and you feel like I should not publish this site, please contact me. I have no intentions whatsoever to violate class policies, terms and conditions.

Que: How long will this archive site remain online?

Ans: This depends on multiple factors:

• • As long as humans exist.

  • As long as Google does not 'retires' Google Sites.

  • Et cetera.

  • Ideally speaking, if ai-class.com instructors/staff give their permission, this archive site will remain accessible forever.

Que: Why did you chose Google Sites to host this archive site?

Ans: Simply because of Google Sites' excellant WYSIWYG editor and infrastructure, Google's (almost?) 100% uptime and the fact that if there is one company on web that I need to name which won't go bankrupt in foreseeable future, it's Google. And guess what, it's free...forever. And, given Google's policy on moving data out of Google's products, we don't need to worry about Google making Google Sites paid or retiring Sites as a product as we can easily move a 'Google Sites' site to another host (or, atleast keep a backup). Plus, as far as I know, automating archival ai-class.com would have been very difficult due to it being AJAX based (correct me if I'm wrong). Therefore, I chose to do it manually on Google Sites.

Que: Do you want to tell me anything else?

Ans: Yes, this is what you get Youtube web UI (in a web browser) and this in youtube-dl, after you had requested video info of ~977 videos in a youtube playlist a few times (this reminded me of Authors@Google talk by Randall Munroe of xkcd in which he faced a similar situation with Google Latitude/Maps). Thank god, I had access to 2 shell servers at that moment.