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Computers, Aliens and Operating Systems?
bhamon writes "Here's something from the you-have-too-much-time-on-your-hands dept. I've been watching the sci-fi show Earth: Final Conflict, it's about aliens that land on earth to bring peace but really want to enslave us ... blah, blah, blah. There's has been much integration between human and alien systems, bringing new technology. What I've been wondering is which current hardware would most be best to integrate with unknown alien technology? Which operating system would be most easily adaptable to be made compatible with alien systems? Would we still include legacy support for DOS applications??"
Just watch "Independence Day" again!
It's all there, man. The appz. The aliens. All of it. Right in front of you, man...
(And if you believe that, you probably thought this was a real slashdot story too!)
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
You know I am totally ammazed at how many movies show alien tech that works with ours. What was that movie with Will Smith and the attacking UFO's??? Yeah okay I'll just hack into their system and put them to sleep.
This person has more time on their hands and is watching to much sci fi. Get out of your house dude and get a grip on reality! Get a dog or something! It's just TV. What makes you think that any life other than bacteria is out there? And if there is what makes you think that there tech would even be remotely like ours?
Today's posts are the result of a server in Alaska that has take over Slashdot. Please be prepaired for a meltdown and DDOS at 4pm........ April fools!!!
I don't want a lot, I just want it all!
Flame away, I have a hose!
Only 'flamers' flame!
I assume this is another April fool...
-henrik
Let the aliens use DOS. Whatever.
What I want to know is if ESR's sex tips will help me get it on with a triple-breasted alien chick.
And then all of their equipment would run so slowly that they'd be completely immobilized! Brilliant tactic, general!
For Ed Wood fans, however, I'd point out that "Glen or Glenda" is probably worse.
For anyone who's actually watched "Earth: Final Conflict": did they fire all the writers last season and replace them with crackheads? There was an episode this season (Zo'or wants all the gold) that was so bad I laughed out loud. Don't make me flame it in detail; don't.
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
Expanding a vast wasteland since 1996.
I think aliens would be gamers.
does that make keeping more than one core dump on hand being constipated?
/.
Sorry, but that's abotu what I think of this apil fools days rush of bs here at
...that, and I think these pills are doing something to me.
--Nuintari
slashdot : where an opinion can be wrong.
Another race would be smart enough to learn and understand our languages. There is a lot of reference material on this planet to make things clearer, and if a baby can learn a language, so can a very-intelligent alien, with nearly unlimited information harvesting, processing power, and very advanced artificial intelligence.
If our historians can manage to figure out ancient languages, then so can aliens figure ours. If we want to communicate with them, we should make our best efforts to teach them our language.
If you would want to teach an alien anyway, you should probably want to try in multiple ways. The first thing you would have to teach the aliens is the basic vocabulary. A basic touchscreen with videos, each showing several nouns. It will speak out the word, and write it down on the monitor whenever it is touched on the screen. Afterwards you could do the same with verbs and adjectives (e.g. color).
You don't want any device like a keyboard or a mouse, because you don't know what physical properties the alien will have. So a touchscreen is the best choice. The operating system would have to be idiot proof and solidly built (and I don't think blue screens would help the aliens to better understand what's going on).
Numbers should be counted by sticks, e.g. 20 will be represented by 20 sticks. Not very useful for big numbers, but that's the simplest option. A small tutorial about basic maths with a video would also be useful.
Another interesting way to communicate with the aliens would be some variant of the Logo language (one that wouldn't use a keyboard). Or maybe even some simplified paintbrush.
And finally after some basic comprehension has been established, you might try to let the aliens surf the web with a basic browser(or perhaps some slightly filtered version of it - you don't know what will happen if they suddenly get a woody, they might become aggressive). Possible good homepages are Google, the Google Directory, and perhaps AltaVista's image search, and maybe a child education site. The pages would need to be cleaned and simplified. If the aliens manage to physically speak our languages, then maybe voice recognition would be helpful for the web interface.
Has Slashdot been contacted by THEM or something? Suddenly we're worrying about whether THEY get civil rights, how to integrate with THEIR technology, "politics without geographic boundaries" (clearly a reference to the impending colinial government of earth), "Slashdot during wartime," and even "What PDA do you think the Alien Overlords will prefer?"
WILL SOMEBODY CLUE ME IN, or at least get me a job with the Alien I.T. Department? My company just went bankrupt... or did it? MAYBE it's a plot by THEM to get me to turn against MY PLANET! BASTARDS!
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Napster-to-go says "Fill and refill your compatible MP3 player", which is a lie. It's not MP3. It's WMA with DRM.
my vote goes out for windows 9x. A few reasons:
If said aliens are going to enslave the human race, shouldn't we make it as hard as possible? Of course showing them that buggy POS would probably make them think less of us (also assuming they aren't using quantum computers and whatnot) But if they're anything like we are anymore, they won't know what to do if their computers aren't working, so forcing them to adapt to windows would at least delay our enlavement.
11 was a racehorse
12 was 12
1111 Race
12112
PLAN 9 From Outer Space
If you're not on somebody's shit list, you're not doing anything worthwhile.....
Haven't you ever seen Independance Day? When they fly up to the alien mothership, David's Apple Notebook is somehow able to negotiate a compatable protocol with the alien mainframe (maybe they run TCP/IP because they don't have enough lesbian porn on their planet?). Not only that, he also gets enough access to upload a virus.
So its obvious, the way of the future is the Mac.
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
What if we had to communicate with some weird insect alien civilization that used millions of symbols in some weird pictographic languages? Communicating with them would exhaust UTF-8 unicode in 5 nanoseconds. Or perhaps we make contact with millions of alien civilations? Suppose each civilation had hundreds of regional alphabets like we have right now on earth? We'd have to create something like UTF-64 (at the very least) to keep up. I can see an analogy being drawn to the year 2000 problem, where future generations ask "why the hell did they use only two bytes to represent characters when they knew that we'd eventually make contact?" On the bright side, us 21st century coders who'll be considered dinosaurs well past our prime in 2360 might be thawed from cryogenic suspension to become highly-paid consultants dealing with legacy earth systems.
Second of all, I think its highly likely that alien technology wouldn't operate on the same principles our technology would thus making interfacing quite dificult and probably the data would be so foreign to make the whole thing maningless in the first place! Case in point: taelons have "biological" computers...
I will note however, my EFC soundtrack came on an audio cd, so cds are clearly the best format for inter-species data exchange.
Lastly, none of lifes higher questions can be answered by pondering a sci-fi show :) While I do watch EFC religiously, it has absolutley no content.
Free Techno/Jazz/DNB/MI Music by guys obsessed with monkeys!
Its april fools day shitforbrains. Stop being such a whiney loser.
This is vaguely a spoiler.
:-) [Crell?] Do you eventually learn enough that you become bored? [Q?] Do you no longer desire any contact with the younger races? [B5 First Ones?]
Maybe they want humans to integrate into their biotech?
I just love the way the technology of the really old races is shown on B5. It really made me think.
We've only been doing things this way for 50 years, some things 100 years, some things 150 years. Sure we've invested a lot in building on what we've got, and then building on top of that. But there are other fundamental ways of doing some things which we might just be on the verge of discovering this century. Consider where the state of electronics in, say, 1920. Might biotech/nanotech be about the same right now compared to the turn of the next century? How might we do things in 1000 years from now? 5000? 100,000?
What would happen as we learn to exploit biotech and nanotech? We would eventually be able to live forever. At some point, you want your population to quit expanding. Eventually your technology is indistinguishable from magic.
Anyway, back to the question. If aliens are much more advanced, their technology might not even resemble ours. Heck, their lifeform might not even resemble ours. In fact, they might consider us as resources, or as having fewer rights. They might consider earth uninhabited by intelligent life, and ripe for development/colonization, as we might a jungle or rain forest. Just clear back some of the natural habitat and animals.
The assumption of technology compatibility is assuming a lot. Can we recognize them as intelligent? Can they recognize us as (sufficiently) intelligent? Can we learn to communicate? Finally, if all of the above, then do we have products/services/culture of interest to the other? [Example: how B5 Centuari Prime first traded jumpgate technology in exchange for Earth's improved hair moose formulas.] If so, then the issue of technology integration might arise.
Those who would give up liberty in exchange for security and DRM should switch to Microsoft Palladium!
What's happening over there? Did you have a budget cut and lay off the last people with brains, or what?
What I've been wondering is which current hardware would most be best to integrate with unknown alien technology?
I don't know, but I hope that it would be sensible enough to electrocute anyone who tried to type the phrase 'would most be best'.
My other
Will Slashdot begin posting only hypotetical questions like would space aliens have civil rights?, what OS would best interface with space aliens?, and what would /. be like during war?. Will articles become increasingly self-referential and hypothetical until the only articles posted are idle speculation about whether, if space aliens landed, the only articles /. would post would be about what aliens would think of idle speculation about future /. postings about aliens? This is a burning question, people!
If I wanted a sig I would have filled in that stupid box.
Don't believe it? Remember that George Bush the senior used to be head of the CIA. Who knows what he did as part of those Black Budget programs. A perfectly programmed candidate.
Really, this is a joke
Really.
Don't look at those men behind the curtain
Please?
Check out the Vinny the Vampire comic strip
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
We choosed this way in the last 50 years, based on our knowledge of electricity. Why should they choose the same thing on an other solar system?They would probably choose something completly different, based on completly different knowledge.
I think interface with an other kind of computer would be really difficult.
NONE of our existing technology would be compatible with any alien technology. They are probably completely different beings, with completely different stuff. We probably couldn't communicate with them without years of research even with their help. However, just for us slashdotters, I would have to say that the first human alien translation program would probably be for Linux :)
The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
The borg survives by assimilating, they will see our planet controled by Microsoft Products, they will assimilate Microsoft Code and then the Borg will go down hill. They would have to rebuild the cubes every few months for no reason, just to keep of with the newest version of Borg XP. Parts of the Borg will attack themselves, causing the cube to lose its scary grey metal to take on the blue screen of death motif. The new cube will return to the Borg colony and be completely incompatable with everyother cube, it will spred viruses like mad, destroying the borg way of life, changing from a collective to seperate conflicting thought, then they will recive the licencing agreement, which will cause the end of the Borg, the we will cheer for Bill Gates for making such crap, but then he reveales himself as the new Borg Kind, Embrace and Extend.
If aliens were to read this discussion, they would undoubtably enslave us immediatly.
Seti@Home got signal last Friday.
By early Thursday morning, the message was decoded and unmistakable, it was a single phrase repeated over and over again...
ALL YOUR BASE ARE BELONG TO US
ALL YOUR BASE ARE BELONG TO US
ALL YOUR BASE ARE BELONG TO US
ALL YOUR...
This weekend is spring cleaning weekend at the VA Linux offices. Unfortunatly, they didn't open any windows and are now taking story submissions from the scrubbing bubbles that are sitting on their shoulders.
Watch for press releases from LNUX tomorrow. "Our space robots are happy and will revolutionize the world! And SPACE!!! These are forward looking statements and..."