Slashdot Mirror
1086 Domesday Book Outlives 1986 Electronic Rival
mccalli writes :"Thought people might find this amusing. In 1986, the UK compiled an electronic domesday book. They used BBC Master computers to do it, and the result was put on laserdisc. I actually used this project whilst at school. This article states that nothing can now read these merely 15-year old discs. The original, written approx. 1086, is still doing fine thank you very much." Sounds like a good candidate for Bruce Sterling's Dead Media Project. (Speaking of Sterling, the "graying cyberpunk" has an interesting article in the Austin Chronicle on the upcoming SXSW Interactive conference called "Information Wants to be Worthless" -- thanks to reader ag3n7.) Update: 03/03 19:38 GMT by T : That's "domesday" not "doomsday."
Wasn't it named the 'Domesday' book?
Domesday, not doomsday...BIG difference. Domesday compiled basically a census of 'who's who' in England. Doomsday means we all go boom or something. That's sort of an important thing to get right.
sig--we don't need no goddamn sig
I was about 10 at the time, and myself and about 3 schoolfriends survayed places like Westmarsh in Grimsby, Lincolnshire. It was quite goog really. I think it was organsied by the childrens TV programme "Blue Peter" or something. Obviously a waste of time retrospect, but still fun for a ten year old.
They should have used microdots or long lived microfilm, or really anything other then electronic media. For longevity sadly uou need something tangible.
Does it really matter if the disks are unreadable? If the data wasn't important enough that somebody didn't say, "hey, we need to transfer this stuff to new media," then maybe it's not such a big deal. At a minimum, I presume that it means that the data wasn't being used by anyone, or they'd have noticed that it was about to become unavailable.
While I believe the main topic deals with the lack of hardware to read the laserdisk, the same applies to any document written today. Will there exist tools in 'n' years that will read Word documents written 5 years ago?
This is exactly why Don Knuth developed TeX. He was concerned about the life expectancy of documents such as this.
His idea was to write your documents in plain text (the lowest common denominator) and use a processor to convert them to whatever format you need 'today': postscript, html, or whatever.
It may not be as sexy as WYSIWYG, but it will *always* work.
...in this comment.
With more and more of our culture being created and stored exclusively on digital media, there is a real danger that future generations may have little, or even nothing, to tell them what our lives were like, because everything we've left behind is inaccessible.
(BTW, this particular work is not the "Doomsday" book, it's the "Domesday Book," a comprehensive survey and ledger of the lands and holdings of King William in the 11th century.)
DennyK
Its not only the laserdiscs with a short lifespan, cds supposedly have a lifespan of 5 years until they start to curropt.
"We're lucky Shakespeare didn't write on an old PC."
I can still access WordPerfect files from an old home computer from 1987. That computer still has a floppy drive which I can write files to. It still has the capability of connecting a null modem up to it for file transfer. Granted, that's not the easiest thing to do, but it's still accessible.
There HAVE to be some laserdisc readers someplace in the UK that can read this. The point they're probably making is 'be wary of putting too much faith in technology'. That's a good attitude to have, but simply putting a bit more thought into keeping the data available in multiple formats would help ensure no loss of access. Hell, this was a multimillion pound project - they couldn't burn any of this to conventional CDs too? Yes, you couldn't run out to Dixon's or BestBuy and get a CD burner for $100 like today, but I'd have thought a bit more technology was available to a multimillion pound project.
"Unfortunately, we don't know what we will do after that. We could store the data on desktop computers - but they are likely to become redundant in a few years. "
Yes, the desktops might, but the data won't. Put the data in normal, documented data formats, and put them on regular drives, CDs, ZIP disks, DVD, whatever. Don't put all your digital eggs in one basket, should be the lesson. OR, simply have a technology upgrade plan in place for data that is important enough to outlive the media on which it is contained. Data that was worth millions of pounds at one time should merit a stipend of a few thousand pounds a year to keep it accessible.
creation science book
I thought the original goal of the doomsday project was to allow every school in the UK to have a copy. So there should be a BBC Master hooked up to a laserdisc player in almost every school ?
Here's what I think: An electronic version of the Domesday Book compiled in 1986 is now unreadable. The computers needed to read the discs of the £2.5 million BBC Domesday Project are now obsolete. While the original Domesday Book compiled in 1086 is in fine condition in the Public Record Office, Kew. The information stored on the laser discs which is the equivalent of several sets of encyclopedia's is now impossible to access, reports The Observer. "It is ironic but the 15-year-old version is unreadable, while the ancient one is still in perfectly usable," said computer expert Paul Wheatley. "We're lucky Shakespeare didn't write on an old PC." He has now started work on Camileon, a program aimed at recovering the data on the Domesday discs. "We have got a couple of rather scratchy pairs of discs and we are confident we will eventually be able to read all their images, maps and text," he said. "Unfortunately, we don't know what we will do after that. We could store the data on desktop computers - but they are likely to become redundant in a few years. "That means we have to find a way to emulate this data, in other words to turn into a form that can be used no matter what is the computer format of the future. That is the real goal of this project."
I wonder would happen to a newspaper editor that let one blatant error slide each day?
What?
The Domesday Disc (note spelling) was a double-sided videodisk that ran into a modified videodisk drive attached to a likewise modified BBC Master, a rather nice 6502-based microcomputer. The Master's video output went through the videodisk player. What happened was the client software told the player to display a particular frame, and the Master would overlay graphics on top of it. There was also a mechanism for reading raw data from the audio portion of the videodisk. It was really quite simple (but horribly expensive).
I would have thought that a conventional computer Laserdisk player would be able to get all the data off.
A few discs were made for the system, but the Domesday Disc was the only one that was mass produced. If you're interested, there's lots of information on the Domesday Project page.
If anyone was like me and had know idea what this book is check here: www.doomsdaybook.co.uk
iRepairIT - iPhone, Mac, & PC Repair
Unfortunately, due to server difficulties The Domesday Book Online has been unavailable for a short time. We apologise to all those who have tried but been unable to get to the site. The site as it was is now back online, but a new and much improved version will soon be unveiled so watch this space...
Oh... the irony...
Hmm, they never heard of PLAIN FUCKING TEXT?!?!?!?!?
It's the same thing, only we spell it doomsday now. Timothy probably thought he was correcting someone's bad spelling.
The nice thing about standards is that there are so many to choose from. - ast
If anyone was like me and had know idea what this book is check here:
www.domesdaybook.co.uk
Sorry, I posted this once already and typoed the link.
iRepairIT - iPhone, Mac, & PC Repair
From that article:
Betamax video players, 8in and 5in computer disks, and eight-track music cartridges have all become redundant, making it impossible to access records stored on them. Data stored on the 3in disks used in the pioneering Amstrad word-processor is now equally inaccessible.
Needless to say, the term redundant simply means that using standard equipment you'd have problems reading this data. But specialist media recovery firms maintain old machines and there are several that will convert your old 3-inch Amstrad disks or that Betamax wedding recording, for a fee.
The Domesday 1986 disks are undoubtedly difficult to access without specialist equipment, and that's the real problem--eventually any nascent technology will become obsolete and data will be lost. Eventually it will no longer be economic for data recovery companies to maintain their obsolete machines.
Paul Wheatley: "That means we have to find a way to emulate this data, in other words to turn into a form that can be used no matter what is the computer format of the future. That is the real goal of this project."
If they have any sense they'll store most of it on fiche and store that in good conditions.
Yeah, clearly the link says it was the Domesday book, not a Doomsday book. I was somewhat confused to read that they compiled an electronic doomsday book, as I really don't know what a doomsday book is, and furthermore I don't see why anyone would care about a doomsday book that can't be read.
I think a doomsday book from 1998 has been rendeded unreadable also, that edition of the Weekly World News is too faded and yellow to read.
"We shall show mercy, but we shall not ask for it" -- Winston Churchill
Eventually we will move on from this format. I have about 40 movies in DVD format, and it'll probably eventually beat out my VHS collection (at ~700).
I'm hoping that once we move on to yet another larger format that there are some countries free enough that I can download a program that will allow me to move the DVDs to the new format.
Oxidization also bothers me.
-no broken link
Any other media? Punch cards? What's the encoding? Paper tape same thing. Clay tablets? Storage and retrieval are hell. Printed? Storage and security are difficult and expensive, just ask the folks at the old library in Alaxandria.
There ARE mediums that can be assumed to be reasonably long-lived. Text on gold foil is pretty good, there are lots of other more exotic but similar-in-concept technologies. Of course one pertinant question is if anyone *cares*. If it was just realized that the modern Domesday Book was unreadable clearly it wasn't a standard reference. Yes it might be a loss to future historians but I doubt there's much in it that isn't replacable from any of the numerous more popular references.
I don't read ACs: If a post isn't worth so much as a nom de plume to its author then I wont bother either.
You don't read the paper often, do you? Hell, both AP and Reuters kept referring to the anthrax virus - something that I have never heard of despite many years of microbiology. The anthrax bacteria, yes... but a virus? Wow.
--
Evan
"$30 for the One True Ring. $10 each additional ring!" -- JRR "Bob" Tolkien
. . . Disney wasn't around to petition William the Conqueror for perpetual copyright extensions.
I can smell a law-suit coming up...
or is that "jolly goog"?
True story. I used to work for the defunct Computer City chain here in Toronto. One day a guy comes in with a computer where the tape backup drive is completely wrecked -- cracked from someone trying to force something into the drive. A young co-worker (about 15) comes up to me and says "How do we handle these things? He tried to play a tape in the drive, but I've never seen the format before..." I ask if it's a cassette tape, the kid laughs and says he's not that stupid. So I talk to the customer and he basically says "You can play music CDs in your computer, right, so why can't I play my 8-tracks?" $400 repair bill for "Best of ABBA"...
John Maynard Keynes: "When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do?"
The ananova story is a strangely stilted summary of this Observer story
Unfortunately, due to server difficulties The Domesday Book Online has been unavailable for a short time. We apologise to all those who have tried but been unable to get to the site. The site as it was is now back online, but a new and much improved version will soon be unveiled so watch this space...
And now they are going to be slashdotted. Ironic.
Pedro Côrte-Real.
"We have got a couple of rather scratchy pairs of discs and we are confident we will eventually be able to read all their images, maps and text," he said.
"Unfortunately, we don't know what we will do after that. We could store the data on desktop computers - but they are likely to become redundant in a few years.
"That means we have to find a way to emulate this data, in other words to turn into a form that can be used no matter what is the computer format of the future. That is the real goal of this project."
How about printing it on paper? Amazingly, it seems that the best way to 'emulate' the data over the past many centuries is to use a physical medium that requires no electricity, no magnetic readers, no lasers, no pools of mercury - only decent eyesight and some light. Hell, it's even portable!
If they complain that they can't fit it all on paper because there's too much data, then they should use very small print and include a magnifying glass like my grandmother's old unabridged dictionaries. It was still possible to read them without the magnifying glass if you got your eyes really close to the paper and squinted a little.
And if they complain that printing all the data on paper is too expensive, they should keep in mind how much money (2.5M) was wasted on the previous project. Better to spend more now and have it last a bit longer than 15 years.
First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win. -- Gandhi
First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win. -- Gandhi
The Domesday Book on laserdisk was pretty neat; you could look up pertinent details for your local area, and it formed the basis of a lot of good history projects. IIRC, it had some primitive hypertext facilities.
I'm absolutely positive that this could be resurrected if needs-be. Enough copies of this went out to schools that finding a readable laserdisk shouldn't be a problem, and there has to be a working reader somewhere. I seem to remember that the data wasn't in any particularly obscure format, so mounting it on a BBC Master and sending it to a different machine shouldn't be too difficult.
If needs be, one could probably export the whole thing and mount it via a hacked BeebEm.
Lead developer, http://wisptools.net
Look around at what we have that will last 10,000 years... Nearly nothing will last that long. All the plastic, all the books, all the concrete will be dust. Metals will all corrode away to nothing. Even if a DVD would last that long, the encryption in it would prevent it from being read. Imagine if egyption hyroglifics had been encrypted too. We would know nothing about them at all. And most source code and data is compressed, can you imagine trying to figure out LZW compression without knowing anything about it.
We only build things to last 100 years at most anymore. And most things get torn down long before that. The only thing we make that lasts longer than that is our toxic waste.
Can you imagine how suprised a future archielogist will be when they dig into some radioactive waste that is still active in 10,000 years? Lethally suprised. *L* Maybe there will be legends of curses on people who dig in ancient sites? Kind of like the curse of the mummy.
There may have been civilizations before that were just as advanced as our own. When they collapsed they may have simply vanished with nary a trace in just a couple of thousand years. It isn't as hard as you think. A 1 mile wide asteroid hits the earth, dust obscures the sun for a few years so that all the plants die and the people fight and die for the few remaining scraps of food.
I often wonder if maybe the few real UFO's that are seen and the aliens that we hear about are visitors from space colonies that these previous civilizations managed to place on the moon or in the asteroid belt. If they aren't all the feverored imaginings of half crazy people.
-- Never make a general statement.
... realy wan't to have the data acsessible in 40 years, and have a large pile of money to throw at it. Whu not make a propitary computer wich only recuires power. domsdaybook-computer(tm). insert powercord and read...
My understanding is that laserdiscs are analog media, not digital. Thus, it shouldn't be surprising that the data didn't last?
Anyway, I still have a laserdisc player in my livingroom, so they aren't dead yet! hehe.
Actually, "Domesday" IS an old spelling of "Doomsday" (and the book was also referred to as Domesdei). It referred to the fact that the census was both unavoidable (EVERYONE was examined), and a final verdict--in other words, if the Domesday book said that Hugh de Montfort owned the castle at Saltwood (which, if anyone cares, he did), then he had the full weight of the law behind him. Any brothers or cousins who came forth to dispute that would, in theory, be ignored.
The humor of the title probably wasn't appreciated by many of the people chronicled in it, as the study was carried out on the orders of William I, who had just conquered them. It was, in many ways, an inventory of what he had just gained by beating the Saxons and taking their lands.
Think about it. Pick a very popular recent source of art.. say, the Beatles. How many formats is their work stored in? In how many languages? Really, this is a good argument for Peer-to-Peer media sharing systems. It takes media that society considers important and replicates and archives it all over the world..
Much how popular folk songs have been passed from generation to generation via spoken or sung words, current media is being passed around the globe and stored on everything from hardcopy to harddrives to optical media.
The only information we have to worry about losing is that which is forgotten by the masses.. for it is in danger of not being replicated and passed around.
... no kidding.
Digital storage *is* perfectly viable. But digital storage 15 years ago and digital storage today would be like comparing accountancy before Arabic numerals and after.
Today reliability, speed and capacity is what, 1000 times greater? No more need for weird compression techniques -- plain text (or TeX) documents can be stored. Viciously *uncompressed* graphics, too.
With 6,000,000,000 people on the planet, surely we can task a few of 'em with keeping the media current.
(Also, to be pedantic: Optical media are disCs, magnetic media are disKs.)
forma3
... Where can I get a Chu Mei Feng VCD before it goes bad?
---If you can't trust a nerd, who can you trust?
ASCII's all well and good, but not everyone uses the roman alphabet. You honestly expect the Thai, or Chinese, or Japanese to store all their data in plain ASCII? Also, what about text data which is unable to be displayed in ASCII such as scientific equations or charts? ASCII drawings are honestly evil.
And am I the only person fed up of getting apostrophes converted to little boxes when put through various emailers? I can honestly say than I believe ASCII is a legacy format. 8 bits just simply dain't cut it no more.
tlhf
xxx
And anyway, ASCII is implicity WYSIWYG. Or did it just feel nice cussing a buzzword?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I know this is kind of "off the wall" but why not use outer-space to our advantage?
Aim some waves at a far-off planet or something, and with the right calculations we should be able to have our data bounce back to us at a predetermined time.
This may be kind of radical, but if there was data that was that important to civilization (not saying that the Domesday stuff is or isnt), why not put it in an "outer-space safe deposit box" and let it come back to us some time in the future? Even in the event of a Nuclear war, if the calculations were done right, knowledge of this data "being out there" could help preserve a lot of todays knowledge.
-kwishot
A computer and network geek who seems to go by the name of markl and nothing else has some fascinating pages on the Domesday Project. He even seems to have some movie clips but I have not looked at them.
If hieroglyphics is an encryption, does that mean the Rosetta stone is illegal under the DMCA?
Not as far as I know. William I was an extremely brutal invader, and after the Sack of Yorkshire in the early 1080s (1082?) his Doomsday book assed the value of Yorkshire to be only 5 shillings - 4 ounces of silver in other words. The invasion of England was ultimately a business venture for the feudal Normansand he needed to know just how much money he could extract from his new estate, as subdivided by his barons etc. Doomsday it was. Now the entire Anglo-Saxon land ownship sysytem was overthrown, people were precisely put into catagories such as villain (i.e. land-owning peasent), tenent (renting land), serf (land-tied part-slave, part renter), and slave. The who period was a bloody disaster for the English, basically to feed the Norman-French war machine. That was why the book was called the Doomsday book as I understood it. I think Domesday is just an archaic spelling meaning the same thing.
I anticipate a day, 2,000 years hence, when a copy of DeCSS becomes a new Rosetta stone for all those DVDs cluttering up archaeological institutes :P
"As you might know, one time pads when propertly implemented are very difficult to crack in a reasonable amount of time."
Minor nit, but one-time pads properly implemented are uncrackable.
-Vercingetorix
"Necessitas non habet legem." -St. Augustine
...otherwise this is a blatant DMCA violation. Maybe this should be used as an example of why the DMCA is a bad idea...
I had a desktop computer 15 years ago. I can still read the media from it. Granted, 5 1/4 floppy drivess aren't exactly sold new in stores anymore, but I guarantee I can still find one if I need to. I worry more about the media itself being unreadable due to age rather than not having the required equipment to read it.
:)
Is it really such a difficult project to simply upgrade your digital storage as time goes on? Even though people might see this as a waste of time, consider your savings in storage. Converting old media, especially old magnetic tapes (think nasa) to newer, longer lasting, and SMALLER media formats, just makes sense. Nasa isnt' going to suddenly quit collecting data, its going to continue. The savings in physical storage space alone would make it worth the effort. The fact that this information will then continue to be accessible for generations to come is just a benifitial side effect.
-Restil
Play with my webcams and lights here
Think about hospitals. They have to keep your data accessible, generally the faster the better. They can't really afford warehouses of paper records (hence there big push into CD-R, microfilm, etc). They also have to keep your data confidential, which in a digital world means encrypted.
How easy is it to destroy your identity? Are they still using the encryption that came with the original version? Can they confirm you actually got your MMR vaccine back in the day? Can insurance companies see your X-rays and deny you coverage?
How do they make backups? where are they stored? how long will the media remain valid? How long before they obsolete the drives to read it? Will they migrate the data or is it forgotten? I need a copy of my birth certificate, What do you mean I have no medical history before 2002?
---- Smokin' another sig.
Well, something that is truly uncrackable is "very difficult" to crack. :)
The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach
It's just an archaic spelling of the same word, though I guess it's a fair point that some non-British readers may not have heard of the Domesday Book. The name was a deliberate allusion to the census as something akin to the final judgement that was supposed to follow the second coming of the messiah.
With the length of copyright terms, the illegality of copying a protected DVD (or even discussing the methods used to do so, according to the MPAA) and the shelf life of the media, the industry can make their money on their works and guarantee that they never live to see the light of public domain. Neither film nor DVD will survive long enough.
On the other hand, in 100 years, no one will remember who Britney Spears was, either, so I guess it's not all bad.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
That is more a case of unfamiliarity with the subject. You would think that when you are dealing with a specific news area, the people posting the articles should have the sense to know what is what, or at least the ability to research it.
What?
What is the big deal? It seems that either they cannot read the format and are having to reverse engeneer it, which can only be the fault of the people who made the disks, because it is up to them to at least remember what damn format they used. Or they can't find hardware to read it, which suggests that the disks were never used for jack shit anyhow. If the disks were regularly used then they would either have been copied to newer media as times needed, like when all the old readers began to break down. This media not being readable anymore is basically like what happens when a language dies out... has nothing really to do with technology being inherantly faulty.
Right now I'm converting my Divx collection into a colony of cockroaches... take that MPAA!
Well, they are crackable if they are used more than once (hence one-time pad), which can either mean that they are indeed wrongly implemented or that a language is not a one-time pad :)
We could store the data on desktop computers - but they are likely to become redundant in a few years.
Ironic that your repost of the article was moderated as redundant after a few minutes only. Our digital heritage is being moderated down the drain.
"[Don Knuth's] idea was to write your documents in plain text (the lowest common denominator) and use a processor to convert them to whatever format you need 'today': postscript, html, or whatever."
Pardon for asking a beginners question, but isn't that what SGML is for? Are TeX and SGML competitiors?
"With more and more of our culture being created and stored exclusively on digital media, there is a real danger that future generations may have little, or even nothing, to tell them what our lives were like, because everything we've left behind is inaccessible."
,music ,literature,film ,art and Ideas, These important things which underpin and define our culture and hence our society.I wonder what the future will be like for our culture.But what ever happens ,I would say ,as long as the content industries can make a buck from films or books or whatever they will keep updating the content.
With more and more of our culture being controled and confined
_________________________________________________
I have a laserdic(k) too!
One way to solve this problem is to archive all information in the data storage pool created by networked computers. With current peer-to-peer file sharing systems (e.g. freenet, gnutella) we have an ever growing pool of information, which is distributed and continually transferred to newer media (e.g. users upgrading their hard disks). As this concept grows in the coming years, and data storage gets cheaper, it may become common to have shared data automatically replicate between nodes in a peer-to-peer network. The result would be an information pool that never becomes obsolete, because the data exists on many nodes in the system, preserving it as each node is replaced with newer hardware and storage mechanisms.
From http://www.domesdaybook.co.uk:
The original book even outlasted the online version! ;)
"Yeah, well, Dracula called and he's coming over tonight for you and I said okay."
Never seen the series, but from the book, it looked like it might have been a good watch. I take it it's still on!
Yup, still on. Not watched it in a looong time. British TV tends to change at the speed Soviet computer technology did. Used to be a lot about making things from old yoghurt pots, pasta and glue. I think these days its mostly about enviromentalism and boy-bands.
A team of programmers including a 15-yr old broke the DVD encryption within a few years - I am sure that humans 10k+ years from now will be able to replicate that same type of work!
Um, that fifteen year old knew everything he needed to about DVDs *except* the encryption/encoding algorithm. People in 10K years, if the disks are still around, will not have a clue as to what the information on the disks was supposed to be.
Here, let me capture data from my Tri45, encode and segment it for processing on a Quazar-32, and encrypt it using RTY. I put the data on a disk and give it to you. Of course, you don't know anything about the technologies I used, and they've been lost in time now and will never be recovered. But you wouldn't know even that much.. So, let me know when your society figures out what the data means..
I worked on a digital archive project at a library research institiute (OCLC). Digital archives are a royal pain. You first have to transfer the analog material to digital. Doable, but costly. Then you have to have a way of indexing it. And remember, we need an index scheme that can handle poetry, baseball cards, and music scores as well as gov't docs and books. Then you need to be able to store it. Finally, there is retrieval and display.
Now make it all last a zillion or two years. Any digital media we have today (tape, cd, etc.) might last 20 years if you are lucky. Even if you built a special purpose computer to store it, the silicon chips themselves might last only 20 years before they break down. If you can find a media that lasts, then you have to guarantee that the format will be readable. This requires that you archive the software that reads the format and perhaps the OS that the software runs on.
A digital library also loses a lot as well. If we archive the Domesday Book and lose the original, we have lost any opportunity to learn about the paper and ink technology of the original copy.
There is a branch of Library and Information Sciences that studies these problems. There have also been a couple of ACM CACM issues devoted to some of this.
FreeSpeech.org
This is what linux is for. My god, someone is even writing an Apple Prodos filesytem module... and I'm trying to convince a friend of mine to do the same thing with a userspace program he wrote, that reads Atari 800 disks.
Anyone ever heard of a catweasel board? Even GCR encoded floppies, all the way back to the 8 inchers are readable. Truly, with a little effort, I don't see the problem they are having. Pull the stuff off these discs, and archive it on cd or a big RAID array somewhere. Hell, people would mirror it too, as far as that goes. And as for a file format that won't be obselete? I'd go with html myself, though pdf wouldn't be too awful. Sure, these might be old and crusty in 10 years, but we'll never suffer from a way to read them. Someone will always write new software for these formats, and only that if for some reason the old software itself won't compile. This is truly a hardware issue, and not too bad of one at that.
Of course, the Luddites have to have something to complain about, might as well be this.
This very type of situation has been in the back of my mind for a while now. I have several co-workers that are archiving old family pictures and slides onto CD with the idea that they will "last forever." But how much longer can we expect to be able to purchase hardware that can read the current CD-R/CD-RW formats? 10 years maybe? That's a far cry from the "forever" these family archivists were hoping for. The next generation may never get to see good photos of their great-grandparents.
Actually, stone tablets are quite good too. Arranging menhirs also works well.
The article claims that the 1086 Book is still "perfectly usable". It is not. In order to understand it one has to know 1) Latin and 2) the odd medieval abbrevations common to Latin manuscripts in England at the time. Both these skills are just as obsolete as BBC microcomputers. I don't see how they are any different, really.
>>Bad arguments all the way around!
Errr, no.
>>A team of programmers including a 15-yr old broke the DVD encryption within a few years - I am sure that humans 10k+ years from now will be able to replicate that same type of work!
No, they had one key that wasn't encrypted to begin with that let them decode the system. If you don't know the layout of the file system to know which groups of bits are the unencrypted key, you will never, never, never be able to decrypt the data. They also kind of knew what the output is going to look like, and already knew how to decode the compressed video and audio streams, something that will not be doable in 10,000 years.
>> Second, the Egyptian writings were in fact encrypted - ideogram languages are very effectively encypted. Essentially they many are encrypted using "one time pads" (where the "one time pads" are the language themselves. As you might know, one time pads when propertly implemented are very difficult to crack in a reasonable amount of time. This is why you will see entire ancient languages which we larely do not understand.
Ideograms are _not_ one time pads. One time pads change with each message. A language is consistantly used.
>> Name five. Or actually, name two.
1. Maya. Very advanced mathematics, their calander lasts 10,000 years without any corrections. We have to correct our calendar every 4 years, and again every 100, 400, and 1000 years. They vanished without a trace most likely because there was a drout and thier extensive irrigation systems failed. An irrigation system that we are only just now matched in scale here in the US.
2. Atlantis. All the myths about previous civilations have been rolled into this one fabled land.
3. Acient Egypt. We would have to struggle very hard to match the engineering needed to build the pyramids, and even with laser surveying we would struggle to be as precise as they were. Let alone moving the 100,000 ton blocks that make up a lot of their construction.
4. There are the huge deserted cities swallowed by the jungle to be found in Asia.
5. In the Americas there are the mound building indians of Ohio.
6. And the cliff dwellers of the South West.
7. The Romans had every luxury, including hot and cold running water, sewers, hot tubs and saunas. They even had huge automated mills that were ran with water power to process the grains every year. They also were building steam engines just before they failed. Their failure is also know as the dark ages. When empires fail they leave chaos and ignorance behind.
8. Ghenis Kahn's empire streached from the Pacific Ocean in China, to Poland and down to the meditranian in the middle east. Nothing is left to show that this empire existed, except in the history books. It was the largest empire to ever exist on the face of the earth. It could also field an army of 5 million men and keep them on a campaign for years.
9. Carthage lost against Rome and not a single thing remains of them except for a few footers of some buildings.
I can go on and on all day long. There are hundreds of advanced civilations that have come and gone, whose only existance lives in word of mouth or in copies of copies of copies of writings from word of mouth.
We know that there was an extensive trade network in prehistory, because cocain has been found in Egyption mumies and cocain is only available from South America.
The city of Troy was also thought to be a myth and never exist, but it turns out that it did exist. It was actually under a city that is now called a different name.
I named more than 5, do I get a prize?
-- Never make a general statement.
Hmm, come to think of it, maybe the Rosetta stone was outlawed by the ancient Egyptians...
That means we have to find a way to emulate this data, in other words to turn into a form that can be used no matter what is the computer format of the future.
Hey moron, why not move the data over to the new media formats as they gain popularity? This isn't a "write once, throw in closet for all eternity" application we're talking about here - isn't the point to have access to the information? It's not like you need to get monks to spend their lives transcribing text to copy the data - it's already in an electronic form that can be copied automatically and checked against the original with little or no difficulty (unless the data format is proprietary and requires a custom reader that nobody knows how to build, which somehow wouldn't surprise me). And it's not like old formats disappear overnight - there are still people using 8-Tracks and Beta VCRs, so I don't think CDs and DVDs will vanish before the data can be copied (unless the SSSCA takes hold, in which case it won't matter because we won't have control over information anyway). If I can maintain copies of school reports I wrote 15 years ago and have no need to access, why can't people maintain data that cost 2.5 million pounds to gather?
Domesday=Doomsdayc h?q=domesday
http://www.dictionary.com/sear
ubi dubium ibi libertas.
And here's what I think: Copying and pasting part of the article as a comment is not +1 interesting. The fact that the moderators obviously haven't read the article before modding people up is definitely +5 trolling IMHO.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Let's see if I can explain this well.
SGML and derivatives only define grammar rules. A document is then either valid or invalid according to the rules of grammar.
The most obvious examples a hrefs:
<a href='foo.html'>link</a>
SGML can only determine that the above statement is valid. There is no way in SGML to say that this should have the effect of creating an underlined word that sends info to your browser when clicked on.
It's the same with some sort of <font size=14pt> statment. SGML can only say that this is valid. Although you and I can tell what this means, it doesn't mean anything in SGML as far as formatting documents.
TeX data actually defines specifically how it should be rendered.
Trolls throughout history:
Jonathan Swift
Okay, and...
You would think that when you are dealing with a specific news area, the people posting the articles should have the sense to know what is what, or at least the ability to research it.
So in other words, this instance was a case of unfamiliarity with the subject.
--
Evan
"$30 for the One True Ring. $10 each additional ring!" -- JRR "Bob" Tolkien
But it's the BBC, old boy, they'd be analogue
- Derwen
http://fsfeurope.org/
It's even more than cultural work. Scientific work can be lost. Just because something is unimportant now, doesn't mean that it won't be in the future.
. htm
Take the case of the Aloutte satellite that was launched in 1967.
http://www.geocities.com/Area51/Cavern/8434/essay
It collected tons of information about the ionosphere and stored that information on now obsolette tape. At the time, the information was processed and condensed and placed in an archive.
There are tonnes and tonnes of these tapes. Twenty years later, historical information on the o-zone layer became important. Since the original Aloutte researchers weren't looking for o-zone data, they never bothered to analyze that data. The only way to do that is to go to the original tapes.
The problem is, only a few machines can read these tapes and since the tape readers are *extremely* slow by todays standards, it will take years to transfer all that information to CD. What's worse is that some of the tapes are already worn out, so a good deal of information will be lost.
Just imagine what would have happened if the ancient greeks were so advanced that they stored all their information on CDs. We'd never get out of the dark ages, because people lost interest in preserving knowledge while Rome was crumbling.
All of Aristotle, Euclid, and other scientist's work would be on CDs that no-one knew how to read. No-one would even know what the CDs were for. They'd get as much respect as AOL CD, being used as frisbees, placemats, decorations, or just thrown in the trash.
All too true. Furthermore the document was intended to act as the basis for a systematic taxation system, updating the traditional Saxon system based on "hides" of land.
:)
Notably, the Saxons, and their conquered nobility, were assessed more severely than William the Bastard's/Conqueror's transplanted Norman French nobility - an early example of racial discrimination, if you will. All rather interesting, since there are people today who can trace their families back to those in the book.
Incidentally, I've found reference to my own family in the book. They were, evidently, Saxon's, and were assessed rather harshly. Perhaps I can claim compensation
P2P network is only useful if the content is popular enough that multiple clients have it online. Have you ever seen file free of bad encoding, overcompression, data corruptions ?
The other thing is that smaller files seem to propagate better. If you have to spend 160 hours downloading a file from someone in the network, what is to prevent the link from dying ? Witness Morpheus. Now the content of the network is scattered everywhere. I have loads of unfinished downloads that have been sitting on my hard drive for a couple of months.
Fahrenheit 451 anyone? The intermingling of the message of the medium with the message carries meta information. For myself, as a Canadian, the Domesday Book carries the stamp of the defeat of the saxons by the normans. (didn't the saxon king and his men fight two battles on the same day, winning the first and losing the second?) The written word in the barely literate world of the 11th century carried with it the near magically quality of standing against time until DOOMSDAY :-). It's interesting to see the character of a people continuously redispersed through the newest medium. The Brits, maintaing the monarchy, would choose the Domesday Book to be among the primary works dispersed through the latest medium. Is the class system of Britian still strongly entrenced in the collective consciousness? My stepfather, whose family is listed in said book, is fond of saying the British upper class breeds their children as well as it breeds horses. No matter the medium the idea contained in the Domesday book will last as long as the character of the British people.
heuristic algorithm seeks stochastic relationship
Somebody recently wanted to go back to read some of the life-detection experiment data from the 1970's Viking Mars landers after discovering a new pattern to look for in certain Earth microbes.
IIRC, they ended up keying in the data from an old printed paper listing. I don't know if they ever got the tape reader/interpreter working to check the data entry though.
IIRC, somebody volunterily kept the listing in their personal archive.
Viva Packrats!
Table-ized A.I.
Infact it did mean day of judgement, just not by G-d but by the King and his tax collectors. William the Bastard (AKA William of Normandy) had just taken over England, and he wanted to know what he had and more importantly how much it should pay in taxes. It historicly a very interesting document, and you probably can find large parts of it on the web. In both the original Latin and in Modern English.
Erlang Developer and podcaster
>>That was the original post. I asked for five, or even two examples of civilizations that were just as advanced as our own. There have been none others. NONE. The examples you list are of advanced civilizations. But do not be fooled - they were not as advanced as our own
s et ta.html
The Mayan calander is _more_ advanced than the calander we use. The Egyptians build structures that we would struggle to build right now. Atlantis had flying machines, according to the legends. So I gave you at least 3 examples of civilizations that are _more_ advanced than we are now.
It's funny, we have cars, but how many people can build their own car? 1 in 10,000? We have TV's but how many people can build their own TV? 1 in 100,000? How many people can build their own plane? 1 in 1,000,000? How many can build their own jet plane? 1 in 10,000,000? Face it, we are barbarians, we use things, but they might as well be magic to us. If civilization breaks down, it will go down fast and stay down for a long time. And very few traces of our existing civilization will remain.
By what standard are you saying we are more advanced? Most people in the world live exactly the same as their ancestors live. They might occassionaly see the jet trails of their overlords in the sky every now and again, but have no hope of ever flying in one themself. They use animals to power their farm implements. Maybe 5% of the people in the world own a car and live like most americans do. But even now 20% of americans live in abject poverty. You just need to get out more and open your eyes. It's fun to raise 3 kids on minimum wage.
Building cool machines is not the only definition of civilation, especially when 95% of humans never get to use those machines. And I've talked to a lot of people in chat who seem to only be able to say, "Any hot babes wanna give me a blow job?" Yeah, that's the reason we have the internet, so assholes can attempt to get laid. Try to engage them in a conversation about Platos' republic will more than likely result in a "Platos who?"
I think that you are ignorant if you believe that the education that a greek got wasn't as good or better than the college education that we get from a State University now. Remember, that some of these people were taught in person by Socrates, Aristotle, and Plato. These three people are the foundation of modern Western thought. More than likely, only an echo of their knowlege was passed down to us. I only recall a couple of good college professors out of the dozens that I've had and none of them were as good as these people were.
>> Likewise, using just deductive logic and a few working examples most anything can be reverse engineered. Foreiogn knock-off artists can reproduce just about any thing electronic. Hell, the entire GNU project is based around the idea. Granted we have pretty good idea of the realm of which we are working.
What working example? In 10,000 years there will be no working examples of DVD players. I doubt the DVD's will still be good in 10,000 years, because of the plastic falling apart, but I know for a fact that all the DVD players will be gone in 100 years.
>> I have confidence that humans (or successors) in 10,000 years will be able to successfuly extract digital information from our current technology - just as we are able to decode data from civilizations thousands of years ago.
But you just said that there are languages that we _can't_ translate, and I agree with you. Without the rosseta stone we would not have been able to translate Egyptian either. So _no_, they won't be able to decode everything, unless they can find a rosetta stone too.
As far as you saying that Egyptian is different between artists, that's pure crap. It isn't even a pure ideograph system, because some of the symbols are phonetic.
Here is the link for knowing that Egyption had phonetic symbols, also how they used the rosetta stone to translate Egyption to modern languages.
http://www.chesco.com/~cslice/aurora/rosetta/ro
-- Never make a general statement.
It should be noted the Great Khan's army conquered their way from Mongolia (next to China) to Poland, and then turned back due to his death and a struggle over the succession--not because they were defeated. Only the Japanese ever withstood them, probably because each voyage decimated them (along with the conscripted Taiwanese sailors).
For example, nobody is publishing software on 5.25 inch floppies anymore, but my new (athlon) desktop can still read them quite easily, thanks to the simple expedient of "liberating" the appropriate old drive from my high school. It looks odd next to my dvd-rom and 3.5 inch floppy drive, but it works fine. Thus, all my old backups and software are accessible, and can be copied to modern media.
I'm the stranger...posting to
Good point, what if there was a cubic mile of low level radiation? Is that enough to instantly kill someone?
-- Never make a general statement.
People have already thought of this.
WIPP Exhibit: Message to 12,000 A.D.
This goes through all of the technicalities of signposting things so that people in the future will stay away from them or be aware of dangers into the future.. even if they can't understand English.
There are a lot of diagrams there.. most of the ideas revolve around using imposing spikes.. or 'universal' pictures, such as that of someone dying.
mogorific carpentry experiments
The problem with paper is that only highly specific types of paper are all that durable over many years. Most normal kinds of paper that you typically see have a high acid content, which causes them to yellow and then disintegrate with age. Your average paperback book will start to crumble in a few decades or so, most newspapers even earlier. I have quite a few paperbacks that are about 20 years old (which is when I started buying my own books), and they have definitely started to yellow and turn brittle even though they have been stored in a dry, clean, reasonably climate-controlled place (i.e. my living room).
Acid-free paper can also deteriorate over time, especially if handled a lot (since sweat from fingers also contains acids and bacteria) or just exposed to the air (which is also slightly acidic in normal circumstances, especially if the air is at all polluted), and also depending on the kind of inks used. Soy inks, which are increasingly popular with mass-printed media, may decay or fade over time (though they have not been in use long enough to know for sure); offset inks can also turn acidic if not properly mixed and/or discolor over time.
So it's not as simple as just "printing on paper". You need to use specially-produced acid-free (slightly alkaline) paper; use a non-acidic ink with a chemically stable pigment; and store it in climate-controlled conditions, where it can't be handled or even breathed upon.
Ironically, parchment and soot ink have proven remarkably stable over time. So long as parchment books were not stored in overly bad conditions (too damp or in polluted air), they held up for many hundreds of years with no trouble.
In a way, this story comes as no surprise to anyone who's interested in calligraphy and medieval history -- take a look at the books in museums, like the Lindisfarne Gospels at the British Museum or the Book of Kells at Trinity College, Dublin, and they look amazingly bright and fresh some 1300 years after they were made.
Those monks wanted to write for a very long posterity, and stumbled on just the way to do it -- sheepskins (vellum) and ink out of bone black.
If you're interested in medieval writing materials, check out these pages:
Ink Recipes
Handmade Paper -- Archival Paper
Medieval Manuscripts
Cheers,
Ethelred
Everyone wants to be Ethelred. Even I want to be Ethelred.
Given that this is a UK project, I doubt US law would be very applicable.
They were, in a sense--the Coptic language had died before modern scholars started to read them.
Pepys deliberately encrypted his diary using a homemade shorthand, and wrote some of the sexual passages in a vulgar dialect of latin.
The current generation of DVD encryption is no challenge to a good mathematician.
Circa 1990, Sony, with optical digital output. And a Sony reciever with optical in and out and cabled digital out. And a Sony DVD player with digital and analog in/passthrough. And a DVD controller connection to my PC. And a DVD burner. If I could transfer this from the old crap laying around my house, what is the problem with these people?
Ha, Ha, I don't think so.
Microsoft - Where would you like to go today, Maybe Jail?
I wonder would happen to a newspaper editor that let one blatant error slide each day?
I "religiously" read the daily paper here. And there are numerous spelling and gramattical errors (not to mention typos) every day. Some of it is obvious "word substitution" by someone's spelling checker; some it has obviously not been run through any spelling checker.
I've always chalked it up to the pressure of meeting a daily deadline. "It may not be perfect, but at least it's on the street."
If you're a zombie and you know it, bite your friend!
Interestingly enough, this is similar to the way most word-processing documents are written on the BeOS.
The document is just plain text, but all of the formatting is stored as metadata.
The upshot, is that unlike most word processing documents, they are clearly readable with simple text editors. Even if you edit the document in a simple text editor, the formatting will remain coherent the next time the document is viewed in a word processor.
Of course this isn't as robust as TeX or such, because it relies on the metadata storing capabilities of the filesystem, and you may be limiting yourself to the BeFS (though there is no reason why NTFS or any filesystem like perhaps XFS or ReiserFS when taking advantage of Linux's VFS couldn't have similar functionality.) Even then , if you were to copy the document to another less enabled filesystem, you would only lose advanced formatting information. The body of text would still be fully useable.
-castlan
The Observer is the original source of this article. The linked version is a reshash of that, but the Observer is more informative.
It's funny. How many people can build the pyramids? 1 in 100,00,00? How many people can build extensive irrigation systems? 1 in 10,000? How many people can make a calandar that lasts 10,000 years without any corrections? 1 in 100,000?
You are basically talking about things that take more than one person. Obviously not many can build an entire jet plan, or even know how to build one. A group of people work together to do it. Just like the slaves how built the pyramid didn't know how to build. - phranck@nycap.rr.com
Don't eat shrimp candy, just a heads up.
Sorting yesterday through old letters from my (now) wife I saw that many of them had been damaged through the actions of silverfish. Yet I still have her very first email to me stored perfectly and electronically (Unix mail -> 5 1/4" floppy -> hard disk -> CDROM).
Of course, if I had stored those floppies in the wrong place...
What is the inverse of the Matrix?
I have an old PC with a 5.25" floppy drive. Now I know I will keep it, despite the pressure (wife) to get rid of it. Someday it will be unvaluable, to read old floppies.
I am not sure, but I believe the newer motherboards don't support 5.25" floppies. So, I'll have to keep the whole box. I am sure it will be worth millions, in about 300 years. All I gotta do is wait.
"Tiii-i-ime is on my side, yes it is..."
Sigged!
Yes, the Mayan calendar is more accurate than our current one. But does that make them a more advanced civilization? I mean, you can probably find many tribes that had what I would consider more sane religous beliefs than the current USA, but I wouldn't classify them as "more advanced civilizations".
We *could* build the pyramids. It'd be difficult using the techniques that the Egyptians did, but if Egypt really wanted to knock off another pyramid and was willing to put up the money, they could do it. Yes, it would be expensive, but it was expensive back then, too.
Atlantis is bullshit.
Your complaint that everyone doesn't know how to build a car or a TV or a plane is bogus. In an "advanced civilization", specialization is inevitable. There's too much knowledge for each person to master all of it. So I become a computer programmer...but I cannot grow crops to feed myself. That's fine -- I rely on the rest of society. At one point, the single-celled organisms that make up our bodies didn't depend on each other to live, either. Wouldn't you call a human more advanced than the blue-green algae that they descended from?
You say that 5% of the people in the world own a car and live like most Americans. So? He didn't say that everyone in the world was part of an advanced cilivization. You can probably find a few remote tribes that have very little contact with the outside world. Doesn't say anything about first world civilizations.
You say that "20% of Americans live in abject poverty". Hah. Perhaps below the poverty line. But that is a joke, a sheer joke, compared to what civilizations in the past underwent, and in some ways their lives are better than a fifteen century king. It's almost impossible to starve to death in the US, regardless of what happens. It's fairly easy to purchase an *enormous* variety of food, even if you don't have tons of money. You can get vegtables in the *winter*! We have soft, machine made cloth that's much nicer than hand-knitted wool. We have lots of clothes compared to the one, *maybe* two outfits that a fifteenth-century English pesant would have. Most Americans, if they live in a cold environemtn, have access to a heated building. Most Americans have running water and sewage, something that you could only dream of in the fourteenth century. If you can afford an old TV (not cable), which most people can manage to scrounge up from somewhere, you have 24-hour entertainment. With a radio, you have a wide selection of 24-hour music playing for you. Even if you don't own a car, in most places public transportation carries you quickly and in comfort -- far better than even an aristocrat's bumpy carrige did once. Our sanitary and health situation is much better, and we are free of scurvy, smallpox, plague, and the like. You have the ability to travel fairly easily -- even someone with very little money can save up and get the gas money to travel great distances -- far more than an English peasant might hope to travel in their lifetime.
You're upset that you can talk about blowjobs but not the Republic online. Again, hah! No past civilization that I know of of any reasonable size has had the degree of education that we do in the US. Yes, there's still highbrow material that people won't be able to converse about...but who do you expect to talk to about the Republic in ancient times? The overwhelming majority of people in fifteenth century England (okay, so I like using this as an example, but I don't know about France or anything else as well) were illiterate.
You claim that a Greek is as good or better educated than a state university education. Very, very few people were actually taught by Plato, Socrates, and Aristotle. In the case of Plato and Socrates, it was primarily wealthy young men. If you read the Republic that you so happily wave around, you'll notice that Aristotle favored a very strong form of aristocracy -- few, very few people were educated and of the philosopher-king ruling class. I don't know about the makeup of the students in the Academy, but I suspect it wasn't much different than those wealthy young men that hung out with Plato way back when.
"I only recall a couple of good college professors out of the dozens that I've had and none of them were as good as these people were"
Well, given that you're reading a compiled summary that's been translated and often interpreted for both Plato and Aristotle, it's kind of hard to attribute what you're reading to their skills alone.
I agree that DVD players are not likely to be around in 100 years.
Finally, I think that the Rosetta Stone isn't that relevant. Finding a modern reencoding of something in an ancient format shouldn't be hard, even if it's just Hitler's speech at the Olympic Games (stealing a page from Contact). The problem is even knowing what something is -- video or audio?
Plus, language is relatively simple and has quite a patterns compared to an encrypted stream that runs through many different circuits before popping out the other end.
This porn is "Hao can".. (My mandarin is bad.) Anyways, I was in Taiwan with my gf when the shit hit the fan with this scandal. Funny stuff. Everybody in the freaking country was talking about it. As for the vcd, I have it- and it isn't a vcd; it's in windows media.
A witty saying proves you are wittier than the next guy.
I'll upload it somewhere, but I'm not going to share a 120 meg file directly.
A witty saying proves you are wittier than the next guy.
Hrm... how about printing it out and binding it together! Make bunches of copies, send them their separate ways. Oh... a book!
They had the original Domesday book on display at the White Tower for the millenial celebration.
I stood in line for 30 minutes so I could see it, and I can assure you it is not perfectly useable. First of all you have to know Latin and how to read really bad handwriting.
You're also not allowed to take pictures of it, and if you try to do that or even touch the book these guys with guns point them at you and say "Don't you dare."
I'd have better chance at decrypting DVDs, or reading the Windows source code than using the original Domesday book.
BBC/Domesday Book == London
DMCA == United States of America.
//FIXME: Bad
I wonder if that was the idea in Willis' choice of title?
Danny.
I have written over 900 book reviews
Perhaps they could talk to this guy, who had one working 1 1/2 years ago:
a lA 4IJ95Ewnu%40hirschorn.demon.co.uk
http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=en&selm=K9rr
What if we recorded our writing on stone tablets then? That would last a while.
I'd rather be lucky than good.
It also had GenLock type features; when used with the BBC Master menu's etc would appear over the stills and video.
I also have one of the LD's from the set. I don't have a BBC Master or the software to use it properly, but if you play the disk as though it were a normal LD you get lots of stills of allsorts of stuff flashing on the screen at 25fps.
Very strange experience indeed!
It doesn't really matter that DVDs won't last 1000 years or however long you care to pick as being 'ancient' timescales; the data that people are interested in will just be converted to new formats, and will echo down time, changing medium as and when people desire.
:)
:)
Consider 'Caseblanca'; how many of you have viewed it on it's original medium? The medium has become irrelevant today, precisely because, as the RIAA/MPAA have discovered to their cost, it's trivial to convert to whatever format you want to use. This ensures the continuity of data, at least as long as technological civilisation lasts.
As to the idea that there have been many civilisations that have been "just as advanced as our own": err, where? In material terms, it's all very one-sided; It's interesting to note the lack of, for eg, non biodegradable rubbish, remains of deep mines, advanced alloys; even if you suppose these have all been decayed by time, there's one critical hallmark of how advanced our civilisations: where are the Ancient satellites?
In intellectual terms, it's also a one-horse race; sure the greeks and romans had great minds, people weren't stupider then. But the total intellectual output of our civilisation is just phenomonal; it takes a lifetime of study to become expert at a tiny corner of our total knowledge. An additional point is that clearly if Plato invented a concept, then it's not a question of whether our civilisation can replicate this; it's already there for us to use!
All in all, what we know will not get lost unless everything is lost; and there's never before been a time like now. Just wait til you see next millenium!
But information wants to be worthless is a good read. I've been on many of the fronts. From making 2,000$ a month playing Asheron's Call, to developing Gnutella on the front lines, and to breeching the security of Microsoft Passport in my own way. Anyone want some credit cards? LOL
"It may not be perfect, but at least it's on the street."
Isn't that Microsoft's slogan? I smell some trademark infringement here...
The Mayan calander is _more_ advanced than the calander we use.
The calendar we use today dates back to the 1500's and is used not because it is best we could come up with, but for historical reasons. Also I doubt that the Mayans had time pieces as accurtate as our atomic clocks.
The Egyptians built structures that we would struggle to build right now.
We would have a hard time constructing the pyramids using Egyptian techniques but using modern tech we probably could though the expense would be prohibative. But the Egyptians probably could not build structures like Skyscrapers, the Chunnel, Hoover Dam etc.
Atlantis had flying machines, according to the legends.
According to fact so do we. Hell, we have even been to the Moon.
So I gave you at least 3 examples of civilizations that are _more_ advanced than we are now.
No you didn't. You gave examples of three advanced civs who have been matched and surpased by our civilization.
Exactly how big would an archive that takes "tonnes and tonnes of these tapes" be if it were put onto paper? How much would it cost to store? Do you think people would still pay to store it for 20 years if they did not need it?
How "extremely slow by todays standards" are human beings reading paper? My guess would be hundreds of times slower than the most obsolete tape reader.
There is no way in SGML [or XML] to say that [a particular markup] should have the effect of creating an underlined word that sends info to your browser when clicked on.
However, a Plain Old Ascii Text(tm) format document can describe the behavior of a particular application of SGML or XML. An example of such a document is the W3C HTML 4.01 spec.
TeX data actually defines specifically how it should be rendered.
So does XHTML + CSS.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Imagine if egyption hyroglifics had been encrypted too.
Remember the Navajo code-talkers of WWII? In the casual sense, "encrypted" just means "obfuscated". In that sense, all languages are "encrypted" -- to non-speakers, that is.
When certain people I work with want to have a private conversation with each other, they speak Spanish. An encrypted communications channel? Not in the technical sense, but it works!
The article claims that the 1086 Book is still "perfectly usable". It is not. In order to understand it one has to know 1) Latin
In order to understand the source code to your precious Linux kernel one has to know 1) C
and 2) the odd medieval abbrevations common to Latin manuscripts in England at the time.
sed makes short work of those once the text has been ocr'd into a computer.
Both these skills are just as obsolete
Hardly. The Italian language is nothing more than the modern form of Latin. Any Italian speaker could be up to speed on Latin in a matter of weeks.
as BBC microcomputers.
The difference between knowledge of Latin and possession of a BBC micro is that Latin is software, whereas a BBC micro is hardware, and hardware costs much more to physically reproduce than software does.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Rx? Why do you want to keep people away from wasted perscription medicines for 10,000 years? :)
Do you even know anything about perl? -- AC Replying to Tom Christiansen post.
Unfortunately, most of the "solutions" suggested here are the electronic equivalent of just that, an attempt to make data permanent by preserving it in its original form, like the Epic of Gilgamesh pressed into clay tablets, whereas we really should be looking at ways of determining what data needs to be recopied into new formats to insure that it does survive. Lacking that, what survives will continue to fall to the knowledge and whim of the private collector. Aristotle, apparently, just wasn't a good enough writer to warrant collection and preservation of his nonfiction works. The point, for those here who tend to easily miss it, is that there are static solutions and dynamic ones, and it would appear to me that the problem of data loss to changing formats needs a dynamic solution.
As for your pathetic attempt at humor, or was that an attempt at deprecation?--it's so hard to tell when you're dealing with illiterates--I would suggest that the lack of techno-jargon is not always a sign of primitiveness. It is actually sometimes a sign of lack of pretense. This is the worst flaw that I find among the technically "advanced" and the scientifically "enlightened." I am reminded of Oppenheimer giving odds on the possibility that the atom bomb would vaporize the atmosphere.
Hic iacet Arthurus, rex quondam rexque futurus.
Like I said before: "As this concept grows in the coming years, and data storage gets cheaper, it may become common to have shared data automatically replicate between nodes..."
In other words, I'm talking about a future system that will replicate all data without being told to do so by a user, thus avoiding a data popularity contest. Here are some relevant links:
OceanStore
Mojo Nation
As far as I know only sound (as you
implied correctly above) was stored digitally
on a laserdisk.
So connecting it to a regular computer to
transfer the data would invovle a lot of
work. (Digitzing the images, referencing them
for access, etc.)
Books can be slashdotted the easiest.
Ever tried to read a book with somebody
else at the same time?
A team of programmers including a 15-yr old broke the DVD encryption within a few years - I am sure that humans 10k+ years from now will be able to replicate that same type of work!
However, said team had some idea of the purpose behind that shiny silver disk, and some idea of what the plaintext should look like.
Consider 12000 CE.
You're an archaeologist, and you find a shiny silvery disk approximately 10 flurburbs in diameter. What is it for? It has some markings on one side that your specialist in dead languages tells you says, "Porky's 2: The Next Day". The other side apparently functions as a diffraction grating.
Now what?
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
If it (rosetta stone) was not illegal (by the egyptians) why woud they "bury" it as another stone in the building and not on display?
-mikeeusa-
The other part of this is: What we consider important may not be what historians of the future consider important. They will most likely want to know how we lived, etc. We might save historical records, scientific data, etc but is anyone religiously copying DVDs of popular shows and will they keep doing it for as long as it takes?
So, with your limited resources, what do you save? Apollo mission logs or 'N Sync?
See the problem?
Looks like it's moderators on crack day today.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
We do exactly the same thing at my company every day.
I wouldn't be suprised if the result is tossed in the corner and never used though.. like multi-1000 page reports which get tossed straight in the bin except for the coverpage.
Opportunity knocks. Karma hunts you down.
One principle of data storage that many people overlook is data maintenance. Think about it; it makes sense. Everything decays, whether it's rock, paper, celluloid, magnetic tape/disk, or plastic-encased discs of reflective metal. Even the polarization of magnetic domains and the waveforms of electromagnetic energy. It all breaks down eventually.
Furthermore, storage methods and technologies evolve. It wasn't very long ago that Thomas Edison made the very first audio recording on a cylinder of metal foil. Look how far we've come since then.
For these two reasons (decay and evolution), you cannot record one generation of something (for example, the first edition of a book, or the original pressing of a CD) and expect the information to last. If you want it to last, you must maintain the data, and the medium on which it is stored. This would mean checking the integrity of the data every few years, and re-recording the data when necessary, possibly on a new type of media.
Because the development of new forms of storage is a continuous, overlapping process, there should be no trouble transferring the data from one type of media to another as long as it's done within a reasonable amount of time. For example, it's currently very easy (legal barriers aside) to convert the information on old audio casette tapes to CD or DVD audio. As long as both technologies exist in some form (or can be reconstructed), the conversion can be made.
Finally, proper storage of media is essential. Most of the ancient information media that we have today, such as the Rosetta Stone, are still around because they were "stored" in environments that did little damage to them. The six most important words for storing data media are "Keep in a cool, dry place."
Just my two cents worth of incoherent rambling...
So what? We don't have a need to change our calendar, certainly no need that would outweigh the inconvience doing so would entail. We have instruments to measure time far more accurately than the Mayans could dream, and tools that let us model their calendar with a greater precision than they ever hoped to achieve.
The Egyptians build structures that we would struggle to build right now
Only because it would be hard to convince people to waste resources on such a scale to build a useless structure. I wait eagerly for you explanation of how the Egyptians might build the Panama Canal, or the Channel Tunnel, or the Iternational Space Station. These are the things we struggle to build, and they're a damn sight more useful than a tomb that failed in its mission to protect its contents for eternity.
Atlantis had flying machines, according to the legends
We have actual flying machines, far more persuasive than the wishful interpretations of credulous fools.
So I gave you at least 3 examples of civilizations that are _more_ advanced than we are now
You gave nothing more than ill-considered drivel.
By what standard are you saying we are more advanced?
By any rational standard
I think that you are ignorant if you believe that the education that a greek got wasn't as good or better than the college education that we get from a State University now.
Whilst I can but shrink from the spectacle of your masterful command of the language, I must question whether your university really sets the standard for higher, or even base, education.
Well, no, that'd be counterproductive. As freenet stands now, data that isn't accessed frequently assigned to fewer and fewer computers, and eventually, if the size of the freenet archive exceeds the size of the freenet's combined storage capacity, it could be deleted. Shakespeare might disappear in favor of Brittany Speares in the nude.
Gnutella and other more "traditional" P2P systems face other problems. While unpopular archived data would not be deleted as freenet does, all data is dependent on who wants to keep it on their computer. I'd prefer to keep the soundtrack to [i]Gattaca[/i] on my computer instead of the Domesday book. While there are most likely some people who would take upon the task of archiving important files on their computers, the survivability of those files is dependent on the willingness of the people to store them. If one person decides to stop sharing their copy of Othello it has essentially disappeared. While distributing the Library of Congress among all US citizens' houses may seem a noble idea to protect against an attack, it's still possible that the Constitution will disappear when someone's house burns down.
I said: [i]Gattaca[/i] Ah, so this isn't UBB? Oops :)
It's preposterous that a civilization could have grown as large as ours (geographically & in terms of population) without consuming the same resources that have fueled our own rise. It is equally preposterous that on the merely human scale you mention (kiloyears) those elements could have been redeposited from scattered artifacts or minerals suspended in seawater.
This is the real danger our species faces, not some simple loss of archival records: should our civilation collapse there can not be a rise until our decendents somehow master deep mining and undersea drilling--because we've already consumed the resources that were lying around on the surface...
A lot of the posts here are really funny. I mean just look at the past ... and I don't mean distant past. Things are lost! It actually takes some effort to preserve things. Our current culture is actually working very hard to prevent things being preserved. I bet in 100 years time all the code for Linux will be intact but not one song of Britney Spears ... well sometimes entropy can be your friend! The point being the only reason we have ancient manuscripts is because people used either papyrus (in Egypt) or velum .. they didn't use modern acidic paper. Velum lasts easily for centuries, but our modern paper wont last 50 years ... take a look at the old 50s pulp mags in a second hand bookstore or whatever .. if you can find them they brown and crumble very easily.
Now advanced technology that prevents copying is guaranteed to make that artist^H^H^H^H^H^H author obsolete in a very short period of time. The RIAA is dooming most artists to total obscurity in a few years. And the current technologies mean that a savvy encyclopedist would put the data in reproducible format ... maybe ASCII or its kin XML or TeX or something or just plain printed on something durable. Not on the latest buzzword overloaded piece of obsolescing-at-lightspeed piece of hardware/software.
If we had a war where we lost our chip factories etc. And DVD, CD ROM etc players became temporarily rare it would ALL be lost. It would be like burning the Library of Alexandria all over again.
Books can be decoded if you know how to read. With DVDs you need a high tech industry (assuming you have DeCSS). Therefore, DVDs are only good as beer coasters if you are rebuilding after a war.
Pete
Bitter and proud of it.
There can't be many /.ers who got their hands on this thing, but I did. It was a big ol' honking LD, silver thing the size of an LP, with a big box to play it. It had a beautiful UI where you could click on the map and zoom & move around in in a totally intuitive way. When you got down real close to a town or neighborhood, the explanatory text was all written by fifth-graders in a set of school projects - it was flat and unstylish but very vivid. It was so beautiful that I literally got tears in my eyes the first time I used it.
TeX defines the rendering of the document down to the visible wavelength of light. If two computers format it with a visible difference other than the limitations of the display device, one of them is broken. (A few years ago Slackware made this mistake and got called on it.)
XHTML + CSS do not in practice even render the document the same to the pixel level.
Good point, what if there was a cubic mile of low level radiation? Is that enough to instantly kill someone?
No
It might give them cancer 10 or 20 years down the line, but low-level radiation is still low-lelevl, no matter how big the contaminated area is
The assumptions you make based on such basic information are ridiculous, such as can we now make a pyramid or how many people can make a car. Think firstly for example, when the pyramids were built each took upto (and over) 50 years to be built, most costing thousands or tens of thousands of human lives in the process. Can we do that? Hell no! (we're not barbarians! anymore)
You mentioned the Mayan calander, sure good for them, the Chinees had/HAVE something almost as good. But who invented the Atomic clock?
Im shocked beyond words at most of your claims, it really feels pointless to even argue them! I guess i too was sucked in by such a clever troll!
These people were idiots.
Even in 1986, there were many ways (and formats) for storing computer data that would help ensure longevity. Did they really do all that text entry and then throw away the word processing source files? Let me tell you about MY files from 1986- there's tons of my stuff I still have access to, and none of it was worth £2.5 million.
I've been using a Mac since 1986, and every time I got a new Mac, I copied over the old hard disk contents. The result? I have documents and folders dating back to 1986 on my current computer (a G4 running OSX). Just for fun, after reading this article, I searched for old files. I found an old utility called "Icon Collector" (1985, Sofcom Distributors) and a couple of its docs. I double-clicked my doc, and the ancient utility opened with my icon collection. I selected a 1986 icon, then switched to Photoshop 6.0 and pasted it in. No problem.
Next I found an Adobe Illustrator file from 1987. It opens fine, too. How little I knew about Bezier curves then... I have old MS Word docs, too- they're all fine. Obviously not all Mac software & docs from 1986 still work under OSX, but this is just a bit of perspective. There are some Pagemaker 2.0 docs I can't open, but I thought about that issue 10 years ago and decided it wasn't worth the trouble- plus, if I were *really* motivated, I could still recover those, too.
So you say this thing was too big to sit around on a hard disk? There were things I saved on floppies too. They say that floppies only last a few years, but everything I cared about, I put on two floppies. I've now thrown them all out except for a few souvenirs, but even on floppies I never lost anything I really needed. Once in a while I pop one in my old Mac 8500 for the hell of it, and the old 800k disks are mostly still reading!
Who is this "computer expert" Paul Wheatley? What an idiotic quote: "We could store the data on desktop computers - but they are likely to become redundant in a few years."
If there is some break in civilization (nuclear war, etc), then all bets are of course off. But barring that, we will *always* be able to read web pages and Word docs- even if only in museum archives. Computers just get faster, and dealing with older file formats is computationally trivial. For crying out loud, I can still run 1981 Donkey Kong code in emulation today- through *shareware* (MacMAME). You think that in 2010 we'll magically forget how MS Word worked? ("Shit, guys! It's the Egyptians & mummies all over- we just FORGOT how!")
Idiots!
Lest one thinks books are a safe repository of knowledge, do not forget that even these can easily be lost in time. Petrarch (1304-1374) travelled Europe searching libraries and monasteries gathering works that were molding away. Many of Cicero's works were saved by him, hand copied from moldy disintegrating manuscripts that might not have lasted another generation. Many ancient Latin works that helped pave the way to the Renaissance were rediscovered by him forgotten in various monastery libraries.
When he went to the library of Monte Cassino he found many rare and then unknown works, but pages were missing from many of the books, and many had strips torn from their pages. He discovered that the monks had been taking pages of the books to make into psalters and turning strips into amulets to sell.
Hyperbole is the worst thing ever.
Um, hello! I still HAVE my old Pioneer laserdisk player, and about a dozen disks as well. It could stand a tune-up - it's having trouble reading all of Grease 2 and a Linda Ronstadt concert - but it still runs. Far as I know, the thing was supposedly able to do data as well, but I never tried that (could never find any data laserdisks).
I'm sure that I'm not the only one out here. Heck, there was at least one videogame, a while back, that used a laserdisk inside it. Surely some gamer has one of those.
Lemon curry?
The symbol for something from one to the next was clearly different - such that historians now write tomes discussing the various styles of different artists.
Similarly, the methods of writing used by many artists are completely different, so much so, in fact, that historians (and other authors) have written entire texts discussing their various styles. Every form of written communication differs from itself in some way, and that is indeed what is exciting.
Lack of eloquence does not denote lack of intelligence, though they often coincide.
Why do you think it would be so hard for any sufficiently advanced civilization to understand something like a CD?
Of course it all depends on who the archaeologist's are, if they were some post-apocaliptic decendants of us, say from our perspective they would be around middle-ages level or so, then sure it could take them a few hundred years to decifer them, given no frame of reference. But they would eventually figure that the pattern of microscopic pits on one side must represent something.
The same goes for a technologically advanced race, even with absolutly no reference, they would quickly notice the small pits and from there be able to extract the raw data. If a few different CD's were compared you would very easily decifer the data format, and begin to interpret it.
Um, why was this a troll? I do have a $@#$@load of VHS tapes. It is a compulsion my wife and I share. We see a movie we liked (especially if years ago) and we have to own it. Since we have the same compulsion, the purchase is rubber stamped. Now that we have a PS2 we do the same thing but with DVDs (actually, we bought The Matrix on DVD months before we could view it). I also have a fascination with commentary tracks, so a DVD is like getting two whole movies for me (thus worth the half gain in price, but not usually worth repeating a DVD we have as VHS).
Yes, I hate the MPAA for what there are doing to the media. If it weren't for $200 boxes that wipe the macrovision signal I wouldn't concede to these formats, but since there are ways (albeit probably now illegal ways) for me to exercise my fair use rights, I don't sweat it. When I can't, you will bet that I will be bitching loud along with the rest of them. I can also point to a wall of movies and say "what the hell am I supposed to do with those"?
-no broken link
Plus, language is relatively simple and has quite a patterns compared to an encrypted stream that runs through many different circuits before popping out the other end.
I'd have to disagree with you there. An encryption algorithm can be described in a page of text or two lines of perl code; a language can be described approximately by a fat book. An encryption algorithm can be broken by a high school student, languages require large teams to understand.
The shareholder is always right.
Yeesh, calm down. Sure, you're right, but there's no need for ad hominem attacks. A childish insult hidden in pompous language ("whilst"?) is still a childish insult.
I was thinking this very thought the last time that I was in Las Vegas. After an armageddon or something, all data of our civilization would be lost. The nevada sand storms would cover and preserve the Luxor hotel. The future civilization would dig and find the huge pyramid. What would they think went on there? It must have been some sort of religous gathering place for the slaves. And what of the significance of the Sphinx in front of the Luxor? Is it pointing to the other, slightly older Sphinx in what used to be Egypt? This one group of people must have migrated via a frozen channel or something. Or maybe they had aliens helping! What else could explain it? There is no evidence that this ancient civilization had any other high technology. { it is all dust now }
hehehe
Encrypted computer data will lead us into a new dark age of information if people are stupid and decide to archive books and artwork digitally and destroy the originals. Tablets and oil paintings are more effective to document history.
--Jeff
ipv6 is my vpn
I've lost quite a bit of software because it was stored
on copy protected 3.5" floppies. Not to worry. Most
discs gave up before I even discarded the drive. Too
bad I couldn't make a backup.
errr, because we can't read a laser disk that was written in 1986? _That_ is what this entire discussion is about, after all.
-- Never make a general statement.
"Director, we've determined six key events to go back and change with the time-door."
"Yes, good, what are they?"
"Well, according to the latest simulations using Baztansian statistics on all of the financial information we found from the late 20th century, if we make sure that a particular set of four people pay the full balance on their credit cards in April of 1986 and then stop two certain people from joining one of the primitive web boards named Slashdot, then the stability/growth index for the global utopia that could have emerged at the time, but didn't, will be positive."
"Excellent work. Get the boys to work on those changes right away."
(C) Kaki Sain, 2011. By reading this, you have illegally copied my property to your brain.
This is getting more than a little nitpicky, I know, but here's the authoritative version:
Mitchell and Robinson's A Guide to Old English glosses 'dom' as 'judgment' and 'dæg' as 'day' ('dæg' being just the pre-invasion West Saxon spelling of 'day'). '-es' in 'domes' is just the genetive singular inflection for masculine nouns. So "Judgment's Day" is the closest you'll get. 'Domdæg' is actually the original (10th century West Saxon) Old English term, literally translating as "judgment day", in the Mitchell and Robinson text.
A caveat: Because the word 'Domesday' was written post-invasion, it's technically Middle English, but comes directly on the heals of the Old English period and so has more to do with King Ælfred's language than Chaucer's.
...is barely readable. The language and scripting style require expertise to comprehend. It's not like USA today. The comparison is kinda lame.
+++ath0
>> Atlantis is bullshit.
Funny, Troy was bullshit once too.
Strange how the egyptian mummies have the cocaine in them though. Gee, that is a tough one to explain. Unless there was a sea going power that actually allowed trade to happen between Africa and South America. Let's call this unknown country Atlantis for now. Just for fun.
>> Hah. Perhaps below the poverty line. Most, Most, Most...
Yeah, most being 80%, 20% of people _don't_ have cars, don't live anywhere near our piss poor public transportation, would need electric to their hovel in the first place in order to power a TV or Radio. That's if they are lucky enough to not have to live out in the streets, or are forced to live like sex slaves like thousands of women are.
Hell, the house I grew up in didn't have indoor plumbing. And that really sucks.
Like I am saying, you need to go to the bad side of town and talk to some people about life.
1/3 of the adults in the US can't read a newspaper. 90% of americans never attend college. Not even one course. Trade school doesn't count. Hell, 1/3 of americans deny that the hollacost happened, and that was only 55 years ago. When they give public polls 20% of the people don't know who the president is and only about 5% can name the people who are appointed to all the cabinet positions. And we are civilized? I think not.
Just for fun, how many cabinet positions are there? No fair cheating and looking the number up.
>> If you read the Republic that you so happily wave around, you'll notice that Aristotle favored a very strong form of aristocracy.
I did read it, and I don't think that Aristotle _favored_ this form of government at all. He lived in a real democracy after all. I think that he was trying to get a discussion going on governmentaly forms and used this as a tool to compare and contrast against. After all, it wasn't like the other people had seen anything but true democracy at that point either.
And by the way, with the son of a president being appointed president by the supreme court we are damn close to being the government described in the republic.
-- Never make a general statement.
I agree with the point you are making,but look at the big emulator scene ,look at roms ripped from old arcade machines and put up on the net.They have emulators made for them by communities of fans who are often impeded by companies and copy
,(we have the original domesday book),or that we would be prevented from doing so by silly laws,(dmca).
,"think of all the work done *today* that exists only on some transitory digital medium or another...",specificaly in reference to transitory digital medium's,I think that is a real problem with the internet,but what is also o a big problem in my view ,is that there is no cheap long term storage medium for digital media,(>100 years),.cds are affected by light and moisture and magnetic tape is affected by magnetic feilds,while in optimum coditions these formats may last for a while but how many of us keep our cds/magtape in a air tight metal box which allows no light /water / whatever in.The big problem I would say is not being 'able',(ability wise ),to read the mediums but that we will not be able to read them for legal reasons or that we will not have a medium to read?
protection,(capcom).
"the method of encoding and even the physical mediums change very quickly, in years, or sometimes even months, and when they do change, the new forms are almost always completely different and incompatible with the old. A reasonably intelligent person could probably read, or at least puzzle out, a document written centuries ago, but this digital copy of the Domesday Book, created just 15 years ago, cannot be read by 99.9% of the population in its present form"
I think a more apt discription of the problem is not that we could not puzzle out how to read these old mediums,(I am sure some sort of reader for the domesday book could be jury rigged together and its image copied on to a more recent digital medium),but rather that we would not want to
However I think you realy do have a point when you say
_________________________________________________
>> Also I doubt that the Mayans had time pieces as accurtate as our atomic clocks.
I didn't say anything about clocks. I was talking about a calander. Did you know that using that calendar you can predict every eclipse that will happen for 10,000 years?
>> Hell, we have even been to the Moon.
_You_ are one of the 12 men who went to the moon?
Or is that the royal We?
Or maybe you have a mouse in your pocket and both you and the mouse has been to the moon.
And by the way, this is a really bad example. Going to the moon may have been the pinacle of the united states achievements. We haven't been back to the moon in 27 years. We have no plans on ever going back. It is the high water mark in American history, now comes the long sorry slide into obscurity. Like Greece or a senile old man, living on in our past glories.
>> No you didn't. You gave examples of three advanced civs who have been matched and surpased by our civilization.
Sad how you keep changing your definitions to meet your own need to believe that our current civilization is the epoch of all achievement ever, and that no other civilization before has ever done anything better than what we have now.
>> We would have a hard time constructing the pyramids using Egyptian techniques but using modern tech we probably could though the expense would be prohibative.
First we would have to be smart enough to actually figure out _how_ the pyramids were built. We don't know that yet.
In the second place, there are no modern techniques on building a structure of this scale. It is several orders of magnitude larger than anything else ever made. We would have to design a whole new class of cranes in order to lift the 100 ton rocks that were used to build the pyramids. The millions of 100 ton rocks. All fitted together so tightly that you can't slide a playing card between the seperate blocks.
I very seriously doubt that even if we did all this that we as a people would have the will to carry out a construction project that would take 50 years of hard expensive labor to carry out. Modern civilizations just don't have the will to carry though with things like many older civilizations seem to have had.
-- Never make a general statement.
This isn't the only project out there which has suddenly found their digital data is no longer readable. It is a growing problem, and the Microsoft file format mentality really isn't going to help in the next 5-10 years.
There are other projects out there that aim to help people work aroud them. One of the bigger being Cedars, which is dedicated to helping people plan for their digital data acquisition, formatting, storage and cataloging.
This post will enter the public domain 70 years after my death, unless Disney buys another extension.
>> most costing thousands or tens of thousands of human lives in the process.
This is drivel. Very few people died building the pyramids.
And we killed hundreds of people building boulder dam and the golden gate bridge. Not to mention the 50,000 people who die on our highways every year, just transporting themselves from one place to another.
>> But who invented the Atomic clock?
The atomic clock is not a calander. Your argument is the same as me saying that mayans had apples and you saying "Ah ha! We have oranges."
>> Im shocked beyond words at most of your claims, it really feels pointless to even argue them! I guess i too was sucked in by such a clever troll!
I am not a troll. I fully and 100% believe everything I have said and I have backed up every point with facts.
-- Never make a general statement.
Or even:
BBC / Domesday book: UK
DMCA: USA
Unless Ken Linvingstone is getting a bit ambitious, London isn't a country, its the capital city of England and the UK.
-- This is not a sig. But I'm a liar.
>> So what? We don't have a need to change our calendar.
Err, who said we should change our calander? The "So what" as you witlessly reposted is that another civilization that is long gone did at least _one_ thing better than we do.
>> I wait eagerly for you explanation of how the Egyptians might build the Panama Canal, or the Channel Tunnel, or the Iternational Space Station.
errr, _again_ I used the pyramids as an _example_ of how at least one previous civilization managed to do something that we can't do today. We can't even figure out _how_ the pyramids were built. Or largest heavy lift cranes are not up to the task of moving and placing the enormous stones that make up the pyramids.
For the time the pyramids were a huge billboard that demonstrated the power of the pharoh to the subjects and to any surrounding powers. I too think that it would be a waste of resources to build new ones. Nor did I ever recommend that we do so. Perhaps a reading comprehension course would help you out a little.
>> We have actual flying machines, far more persuasive than the wishful interpretations of credulous fools.
Ah, and once Troy was just the "wishful interpretations of credulous fools." But it turned out that the neigh sayers were right. And I am just repeating what the myths say.
>> You gave nothing more than ill-considered drivel.
Ah, no. Ill-considered drivel is the comment you just gave.
>> By any rational standard
By rational I assume that you mean by some sliding standard that you make up and can change at any time to support your own ill founded beliefes that we live in the best of all possible worlds.
>> Whilst I can but shrink from the spectacle of your masterful command of the language, I must question whether your university really sets the standard for higher, or even base, education.
Whilst? You try to insult my use of the english language and you use the word whilst? That is soooo funny. Give it up, you just aren't good at it.
-- Never make a general statement.
>>It's preposterous that a civilization could have grown as large as ours
I didn't say as large as ours, I said that they exceeded our current technology in at least one way, and then declined.
>> because we've already consumed the resources that were lying around on the surface...
Great point. But who knows how many resources were available to early human ancestors 1 million years ago.
-- Never make a general statement.
It's interesting that mnay people are saying - "Just copy the data to another format if you upgrade" - but the original Domesday book is now almost 1000 years old and we can still read it. Will all these digital books be faithfully copies to the next latest and greates format for the next 1000 years?
That Ananova link is really crap. Bite-sized (or should that be Byte-sized), pre-chewed, over-simplified gibberish. It summarizes, badly, an article from the Observer, and doesn't even publish the link! It simply links to the Observer's main welcome page.
The Ananova scribblers seem to think we all have the attention span of a goldfish. Well, this might come as a surprise, but there are still some of us capable of better than that.
The Observer's article is here.
This article is a little better, but is still unclear as to what the problem is.
For instance:
seems to suggest one or other (or a combination) of the first two cases.
But:
sugests the third case.
Finally:
I fail to see the really difficult problem here... I have heard of technicians using ovens and hair-dryers to prepare 9 and 21 track tapes for reading. The Australian government has a project to migrate vast quantities of mineral-prospection data from obsolete magnetic tape to magnetic disc and database archives. Admittedly, this is a Big Money project; a solution has been found.
Nobody seems to consider this 1986 project to be worth doing properly.
Where there's a will, theres a way... Unfortunately, it seems that the only Will left in England is a hard copy of Shakespeare gathering dust on a library shelf.
Last time I was there, the Science Museum in London had a working setup. All they have to do is figure how to hook it up to a CD burner and problem solved
---- Den ene knappen er powerknapp, den andre er Bender voice knapp "Bite My Shiny Metal Ass"
First we would have to be smart enough to actually figure out _how_ the pyramids were built. We don't know that yet.
: //www.snopes2.com/spoons/fracture/hoover.htmp ://www.si.edu/resource/faq/nmnh/pyramid.htm: //www.manitowoccranes.com/
So we don't know how they were built, but we know exactly how many people died building them, because you pointed out elsewhere that very few people died in the making. Did the Egyptians put up a sign saying "Only four people died in the making of this pyramid"? (You also claim hundreds died in the building of Hoover Dam and Brooklyn Bridge. Actually, 96 died in the building of the Dam, and 27 for the Bridge, making not quite hundreds of deaths.)
It is several orders of magnitude larger than anything else ever made.
A 450 foot tall pyramid is several orders of magnitude larger than a 700 foot tall dam, or a thousand mile long wall. Right.
We would have to design a whole new class of cranes in order to lift the 100 ton rocks that were used to build the pyramids. The millions of 100 ton rocks.
Actually, they were between 2 and 15 tons, and we have cranes that can easily lift that much. Even if they did weigh 100 tons, we still have cranes that can lift that much.
Sources:
http://www.lvdi.net/~iceman/hooverdam.htm
http
htt
http
Very few people died building the pyramids.
And we know this how?
And we killed hundreds of people building boulder dam and the golden gate bridge.
Actually about 130, not really hundreds. (See my other post for the source.)
Not to mention the 50,000 people who die on our highways every year, just transporting themselves from one place to another.
Do you have statistics on how safe Egyptian travel was? What were the odds that you would get attacked on the roads if you were an Egyptian travelling from Alexandria to Thebes? How would that have changed if the average Egyptian had had a chance to travel from Alexandria to Thebes? Or is this just another meaningless geewiz statistic?
I remember this well, my school had 6 of these Domesday kits, which must of made my school absolutely loaded. In fact they still use one of them, though not for the Domesday disks. They have a disk which has a lesson in social behaviour, a video plays and then stops with teletext style links apearing over the frozen image, typically you get a picture of some people and you use the rollerball to highlight a link to find out more. They still use the system because no one has ever transferred this disk to a more up to date format.
What always made me wonder was why they did not wait another year for the Archimedes computer, it was much more advanced and more compatible with PC's (at least they had point and click), plus their derivatives are still avaialble today despite the death of Acorn.
My school was one of the weird one's which decided to bury a copies of the laser disks along with a school uniform and a load of other 80's things in a time capsule, pity they didn't bury a player also.
We have actual flying machines, far more persuasive than the wishful interpretations of credulous fools.
Our flying machines are made of materials which would corrode to nothing in a fairly short space of time. If our civilisation collapsed (when civilisations collapse then tend to do destructivly, buildings which remain are quite likely to torn down and used for their materials) people in the future would mostly simply have handed down word of mouth. (Quite possibly corrupted to the point of having a legand about an emperor from North America who rode on the back of a giant eagle and cast down death upon their enemies.)
However actual flying machines have turned up in Egyptian tombs, objects which look like (high speed) aircraft have been found in South America and there are many ancient Indian texts refering to both civiian and military use of flying machines.
Think firstly for example, when the pyramids were built each took upto (and over) 50 years to be built, most costing thousands or tens of thousands of human lives in the process.
If this number of people were killed in the construction where are the bodies? Remember that the ancient Egyptians preserved their dead. Whilst there is evidence of people being injured and receiving medical treatment there are not huge numbers of people killed through construction accidents
Can we do that? Hell no! (we're not barbarians! anymore)
Plenty of people were killed in construction of dams, bridges and tunnels in the last 150 years. The death toll building the Panama canal was certainly in this range...
My understanding is that, in this case, Domes'day means home day. As in Domes'tic. I assue that domes nevertheless derives from dom, where 'home' can be defined as 'of the master', one's own place.
On this day, in a similar fashion to that described in the bible around the time of Jesus' birth, people were required to be in their home town for counting.
Alternatively, again, taking the correct meaning of domes as not just one's place of abode, but also one's property (of the master), then Domes'day might be reasonably translated as property day.
The same goes for a technologically advanced race, even with absolutly no reference, they would quickly notice the small pits and from there be able to extract the raw data. If a few different CD's were compared you would very easily decifer the data format, and begin to interpret it.
Not so easy when they don't know if the data is speach, music, video, computer program, etc. Especially if it is compressed and/or encrypted.
This goes through all of the technicalities of signposting things so that people in the future will stay away from them or be aware of dangers into the future.. even if they can't understand English
This only helps much if everything were to be designed this way. Very rarely do archelogists find things specifically intended to be found. More likely they go through some old trash...
Pyramids - any engineer worth his salt could work out how to build the Pyramids, working out how the Egyptians built the pyramids is a different matter. But the ancient Egyptians wouldn't have had a hope of building even the first Aswan Dam.
Actually, he's too good at it for your good. 'Whilst' is an English word. Look it up in a proper dictionary. Just because Americans don't use it, it doesn't mean it's not in the language.
Any file-system can have the same funcionality. Just name a file book.txt and the formatting .book.form or something. As long as the formatting keept track of its position in the file the same way BFS does with its metadata, this should work too. I would prefer a HTML or XML like solution, so one can edit the formatting by hand.
But we could build the pyramids if we wished to. The Egyptians certainly didn't use cranes to lift. As for lift, try actually doing some research - first hit on google for me came up with a floating crane in Hamburg capable of lifting 200 tonnes. The weight of the blocks in the pyramids? 2.5 tonnes each. You don't need massive cranes for that, you need a slipway and about eight men with ropes. 2,300,000 blocks over 20 years would therefore require a minimum of 300 people employed full time.
have a laserdisc player... I think they have a betamax vcr player also...
>> So what? We don't have a need to change our calendar.
Err, who said we should change our calander? The "So what" as you witlessly reposted is that another civilization that is long gone did at least _one_ thing better than we do
The point you can't seem to grasp is that the calendar we use for commerce does not represent the extent of our capabilities. Timekeeping used by astronomical or other scientific research is far more accurate than that used to measure birthdays. I challenge you to demonstrate that any ancient civilization could match a cesium clock. Remember that we can tell exactly how accurate these ancient calendars are because ours are better.
>> I wait eagerly for you explanation of how the Egyptians might build the Panama Canal, or the Channel Tunnel, or the Iternational Space Station.
errr, _again_ I used the pyramids as an _example_ of how at least one previous civilization managed to do something that we can't do today. We can't even figure out _how_ the pyramids were built. Or largest heavy lift cranes are not up to the task of moving and placing the enormous stones that make up the pyramids
I fail to see where you get the idea that we couldn't build a pyramid if we wanted to. You are working under incorrect assumptions and employing "proof by wild hand-waving"! The stones used in the pyramids were an average of 2.5 tons, not 100 tons. The largest were 20 tons. Of course we do have the ability to move large objects. Cranes with lift capacity of 100 tons or more are not uncommon in shipyards. You might have noticed the shuttle Columbia moving around in Florida--it's far heavier than any rock in any egyptian pyramid, but our technology moves it around on a fairly regular basis. The Nimitz-class aircraft carriers displace 97,000 tons, and they also move around fairly freely. So no, you haven't yet demonstrated any previous civilization that did anything we'd be unable to duplicate. The problem we face is figuring out which of the many theories we have for how to build a pyramid was that employed by the ancients.
Ah, and once Troy was just the "wishful interpretations of credulous fools." But it turned out that the neigh sayers were right. And I am just repeating what the myths say
Sheesh. Most of the myths of Troy have not been validated. The fact that there was once a city of Troy doesn't mean that its walls were built by Poseidon, that there was a heavenly beauty contest, that Achilles was almost invulnerable, etc. Even if a myth has a kernel of truth (such as being set in a non-fictional city) doesn't mean that the bulk is more than fantasy or, at best, allegory. And just how many equines were discussing Troy, back in the day?
given that (at least) 95% of the printed (yes, hardcopy) material produced since 1850-ish is printed on paper with a high acid content, and will inevitably become unreadable as it disintegrates (I hate to think of the number of books I have, even from the mid-eighties that are falling apart)...
I think that in 100 years or so - I'm not planning on sticking around for long enough to find out:-) we will find ourselves in another dark age - unless, of course, Project Gutenberg can cope...
What this actually means is that you can't go to the store and get off-the-shelf parts to read it. Someone invented the LaserDisc the first time, so someone can reinvent it if there is need. It's even easier the second time, because you know it's been done and have some idea as to how.
I dunno about the legal ramifications, but RCA or Pioneer or whoever owns the design would look really stupid bringing suit to stop the reverse-engineering of a product from which they have no intention of ever again making money.
If the computer's the problem, reconstructing the software on some other platform from whatever is left of the design documents should be even easier, as no mechanical engineering or fabrication skills are required.
(Sorry, but I've been bugged by this lazy thinking ever since someone on NPR's "Lost & Found Sound" suggested that wire recordings were on the verge of being lost forever just because nobody sells wire decks anymore.)
>It was, in many ways, an inventory of what he had just gained by beating the Saxons and taking their lands.
which is just what poor old harold's ancestors (danes, not saxons) had themselves done a not-many years earlier what goes around etc...
The tigers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction, but they eat more steak.
Sayith the article, "That means we have to find a way to emulate this data, in other words to turn into a form that can be used no matter what is the computer format of the future. That is the real goal of this project."
How about paper and ink?
At primary school (5-11) and we had to fill in maps of the area with what the shops sold etc.
Upon finding the "PRIVATE SHOP" (sex shop)we asked the teacher under what listing it should go...
So if anyone ever gets to look at the data, you now know what some of those shops marked OTHER sold....
What makes you think Latin is difficult ?
I only did it to high school level and can make a laborious stab at translating most Latin documents, especially if I have a Latin->English dictionary at hand. Latin cases/ tenses are fairly structured and the vocabulary is far more limited than say English.
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
It sounds like you have a fairly good grasp of the mechnical structure of English, as well as current "spoken/written" structure.
Many US public schools did not teach mechnical English during the 1980s and early 1990s, due to the predominence of the whole languague method. Thus you've got a lot of American 20-somethings who can't name the english tenses, describe what different parts of a sentence are, or parse a sentence. Most of them are actually fairly decent readers and writers, because the "feels right" approach works okay with your native tongue. You know intuitively what structures are "right" and "wrong" and are correct a majority of the time. You can communicate.
But the method breaks down when you attempt to learn a foreign language, since those are usually taught in a mechnical format. How can you understand what a subordinate clause is in Spanish, when you don't consiously know what it is in your native languauge?
Latin is so dependant on its formal rules that if you don't understand (other than intuitively) the formal rules of language/grammar, you're going to find it extremely difficult. You're not only learning the language--you're trying to learn what language/grammar *is*. If you've never formally considered the different cases/tenses English contains, even the basics of Latin are difficult. Those which are mainly obsolete in English are almost nonsensical. If you're not trained to think about any language formally, trying to learn another one through formal methods is going to get you nowhere fast.
You're right. If you look at the demonstrations in that article, many of them don't look *that* menacing.
Take the Pyramids.. they could have been filled with radioactive waste or anything. The pyramids look imposing enough, but it didn't stop us going and opening them up.
mogorific carpentry experiments
I have graphics files I drew around 1985. In those days, they were NeoPaint files on an Atari ST. Now they're PNG files on a Mac. I have documents from the early 80s too.
Each time I upgraded my computer, I transferred my data across and translated into a new open file format. Nobody thought the Domesday project was worth transferring? So be it.
Right now, I'm archiving all my photographs as PNG files on ISO9660 gold CDs. I expect that by the time I'm done in a few years, some new open standard storage medium will be available, and I'll be able to transfer my 40 or 50 CDs onto a single disc -- and make copies to give to the family. Looking at it that way, the 200 year lifespan expected from the CDs is overkill, but they're only 40 cents each anyway, so why cut corners?
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
Yeah, forgive me. I had it typed out correctly the first time, but typed it too quick (19 seconds) so the lameness filter confused me and I retyped it wrong.
I meant England, my bad.
//FIXME: Bad
I think you're right. The OP mentioned that Jon had a clue as to what was on the DVDs.
Fascism starts when the efficiency of the government becomes more important than the rights of the people.
Funny, Troy was bullshit once too.
OK, if they find Atlantis, then we'll stop calling it bullshit. But I wouldn't hold my breath if I were you.
but English is a very difficult language to learn because it is informal and breaks the rules almost as often as it follows them; Latin on the other hand is much more structured [in general]. English is made difficult by the fact it has assimilated words from just about every other language to give it flexibility and is possibly the most complicated modern language there is in terms of concepts. Other modern languages have some degree of complexity but are far less tainted and more formalised than English is.
Latin on the other hand, is much more structured and formal, especially in classic prose such as Virgil. Computer geeks probably would have no difficulty picking up Latin because:
* despite being an old language it has our alphabet (almost)
* it has a set of rules which it does obey - see John Cleese in Life of Brian for the perfect example!
</offtopic>
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
so someone can reinvent it if there is need. It's even easier the second time, because you know it's been done and have some idea as to how.
Cool. Why don't you go off and read some data from Edison's original drum recordings then tell us how easy it was?
Da Blog
I don't live in the USA, so what might seem obvious to you might not be obvious to me. Are you saying that 1) Books have time to decay before copyright expires, due to extended copyright laws. 2) Nobody can make their own copies of books before copyright expires. 3) This means that the books decay before anybody can legally make backup copies of them. ? Isn't there 'fair use' in the US-American copyright laws? Can't people make copies of a book or music CD for personal use? Can't libraries make backup copies on, for instance, microfiche?
Ancient Egyptians did not preserve _all_ their dead. Otherwise there would be hundreds of thousands of mummies! Only the rich and powerfull had such privelige, and you can be assured the 'grunt' working on building a pyramid were not rich, the word is expendable.
There is a big difference between modern day construction accidents where paid workers die for whatever reason, compared to the deaths of hundreds and thousands of SLAVES who mostly did the hard and dangerous work back in 5000BC.
If you can't see the difference, then there is no point argueing.