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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."
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
"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 ?
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.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.
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
My copy of Suzanne Vega's self titled cd that I bought in 1986 still plays perfectly. One would presume that cd making technology has only gotten better since then.
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.
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?
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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.
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
Also, what about text data which is unable to be displayed in ASCII such as scientific equations or charts?
Well, then you design some standard way to represent scientific symbols and equations with ASCII phrases. Given the wide use of TeX among scientists and mathemeticians, I would say this is a solved problem.
However, I agree with your point about foreign languages.
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
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?
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."
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.
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?
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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/
Every 5 years or so, take all the old discs and copy the data files onto new media. If it's a photo album, this would make a good family activity for the holidays.
If the encoding format (e.g. JPEG) is obsolete by that time, then keep the original files but also convert each one as best you can to the current storage format. It would also help to keep a 'changelog' diary describing each conversion, and to include source code for the various conversion utilities that you used. Make sure you also keep off-site backups so that you don't lose everything to fire or theft.
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.
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
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.
ASCII's all well and good, but not everyone uses the roman alphabet.
Then try UTF-8, which is also plain-text, and shows no signs of being obsoleted. (The Unicode Consortium is honestly trying for a standard to last a thousand years, or at least as long as we use digital computers.)
Also, what about text data which is unable to be displayed in ASCII such as scientific equations or charts?
You may not be able to display them, but you can store them in ASCII. For long term data storage, it's more important that they be recreatable with a little work than they be instantly displayable.
And am I the only person fed up of getting apostrophes converted to little boxes when put through various emailers?
Then stop using a proprietary encoding. If you used an encoding that was an open standard, like ASCII or Latin 1, then it would get through without problem. If you use a Windows codepage, well, then of course other people will have problems displaying it correctly. When you use a media proprietary to one company, like Betamax or DivX or CP1252, then you will have problems working with everyone else.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I wonder if that was the idea in Willis' choice of title?
Danny.
I have written over 900 book reviews
"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...
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?
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?
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.
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?
Unicode fails the 'can I read it in notepad' test, so I wouldn't call it legacy yet.
What version of of Windows are you using? NT and I believe recent versions of 95+ will read Unicode.
Unicode has yet to settle down as a format
UTF-8 is pretty universally accepted, and all formats can be interconverted. In practice, you'll see UTF-16 from Windows systems and UTF-8 for Unix systems. It's pretty unlikely you'll mistake one for the other.
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.
That is a good point. The "Big Things" that we deem it most important (or, more likely, most profitable) to save will be kept alive, transferred from one medium to another.
But these "Big Things" are only one piece of our culture. Historians can often learn as much, if not more, about the past from the leavings of ordinary folk as they can from humanity's greater works. A page from a common citizen's diary, or a letter between friends, can reveal far more about a people's culture than some crumbled monument. It's these little bits, that are so small yet give so much insight into our everyday lives, that will be in the most danger from our rapidly changing storage mediums.
Think about this...since the advent of writing, the only substantial thing that has changed about the storage medium, until the last twenty years or so, has been the language used to encode the information. Language changes over time, but it does so very slowly, and it's a very gradual change.
In the digital world, 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. And if no one could, or would, take its present form and convert it to a current medium, in another fifteen years, it would probably be lost for all time. Of course, in this particular case, we have the original 1086 edition to fall back on, but think of all the work done *today* that exists only on some transitory digital medium or another...
DennyK
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.
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.
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
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.
Clearly the italicized poster never saw old versions of Mathematica produce 3D ascii surfaces.
-Paul Komarek
>> 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.
:)
This topic was fueled by the fact that we can't read information from a laser disk that was made in 1986. So, evidently, we won't convert _everything_ to new mediums.
>> there's one critical hallmark of how advanced our civilisations: where are the Ancient satellites?
Once the station keeping fuels ran out, their orbits would decay and they would reenter the atmosphere.
>> 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!
Very few of his concepts are around today, it is such a shame that the library at Alexandria burned. How much knowledge did we lose in that fire? We will never know.
And what about the hundreds of other greek scholars whose works are gone now and we know nothing about them or their views, except for maybe a mention of them in another work.
Or all the Mayan scholars whose ideas and beliefs are gone like dust in the wind.
We aren't as advanced as we think we are. It would just take a year without summer or a year without rain and we would collapse as we ran out of food in about 30 days after the harvest was due. How much knowledge would remain then? Not much. With no electricity, no way to read CDROM's and books printed on paper that turns to powder in 100 years all information would effectively die.
I think we should build time capsules with as much information as we can collect on stainless steel metal plates with a tutorial and a "rossetta stone" built into the capsule. It should be built to last 10,000 years.
It would have been very nice if all the previous civilations had done so. We would be thousands of years more advanced right now if they had done so. Maybe we can help the next civilation that will come after us to get back on their feet much faster than now.
-- Never make a general statement.
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.
>> 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.
And Troy was just a story book city, it never existed. Oh wait, all those schollars were wrong. Troy _did_ exist, they just misplaced it for a couple of thousand years. Misplaced a whole city. Can't imagine how they did that, it must have slipped out of their pockets.
-- Never make a general statement.
>> 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.
>> 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.
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"
Misplaced a whole city.
It's easy to misplace a city. It's physically almost impossible that there was a continent between Europe and America, or even a large island.
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?
and apparently Middle Earth had rings that let you turn invisible, and Naboo had an democratically-elected monarchy.
You don't need to look too far into history to find a constitutional monarchy which actually did elect monarchs. It's kind of hard to miss a chain of volcanic islands in the middle of the Pacific...
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...
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...
Bottom line is that I doubt you'll find any MS software where CP-1252 is not labeled as such.
_Any_ MS software that spit out CP-1252 to the net prior to 2000 was buggy, as it wasn't registered as a valid Internet characater set with IANA until then, and even then anything that didn't use windows-1252 (i.e. used cp1252 or the like) was invalid, as those aren't valid aliases for windows-1252.
Furthermore, you may not believe it, but there is a lot of CP-1252 out there mismarked as ISO-8859-1. Recent versions may not spit out mismarked CP-1252, but older versions did all the time.
Furthermore, if you want to communicate with the rest of the English speaking world, use ASCII, or barring that, ISO-8859-1, because those are the standard character sets for English. If you feel that windows-1252 is standard enough, I hope you won't mind me responding in hp-roman8 or ibm285, equally "standard" character sets, and blaming any failure to understand on your side.
I'll assume "Hao Can" means good, or something. I don't speak the mandarin. Actually I've found the VCD for sale (under the name Taipei Sex Scandal) as a VCD, somebody probably just ripped and converted it to Windows Media.
I'm sure it seemed just awful for her in Taiwan, but now that it's become a worldwide phenomenon it crosses over from sad to hilarity. She ought to critique the film - give us the humorous play by play. After all, it's only sex. Well, I'm glad she's getting to make some money with her tell-all, the roommate that screwed her went to jail, and life goes on.
---If you can't trust a nerd, who can you trust?
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.
I never said that atlantis is a continent, or that it was in any one location. I actually believe that atlantis is a conglomeration of myths about many previous advanced civilizations that streach back into the mists of time.
-- Never make a general statement.
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 never said that atlantis is a continent, or that it was in any one location. I actually believe that atlantis is a conglomeration of myths about many previous advanced civilizations that streach back into the mists of time.
Nice. Completely undisprovable - it's clear that a mere lack of evidence isn't going to stop this one. And you can claim any new evidence about any civilization as proof of your claim!
Copyright in the USA now runs the lifetime of the author + 75 years, or 95 years for corporate works. And unless the Supreme Court intervenes with a definition of "limited time" (Constitutionally, Congress may establish copyrights and patents for a limited time), or bribery under guise of campaign contributions becomes illegal, it looks like Congress will continue to tack on 20 years every time the first Mickey Mouse film nears expiration, and nothing since 1928 will ever go into the public domain.
A single backup copy arguably comes under fair use, although I don't think this has been definitely established in law for books and movies. However, it takes a lot of labor to copy or scan bound books, so it doesn't often make sense when all you can make is one copy. And with the older movies, in many cases no library or private party ever had access to the film -- it just rotted away in some company storage vault, or may even have been incinerated. (Nitrate film must burn spectacularly!)
Libraries have sometimes cut apart bound books to feed them through a microfiche camera for more compact storage. It's expensive, so it only happens for books they recognize as valuable; many of the older books wind up in landfill. However, microfiche decays too, faster than all but the worst paper, and so these libraries are now losing their older collections.
Acid-free paper will last for many centuries if properly stored, but I'm not sure about photocopier toner, and copying and storing books that way would be quite costly. Only a few of the tens of thousands of books published every year can be saved that way, and it's rather unlikely that we're picking the right ones from the viewpoint of historians in 2500 CE.
The best prospect for indefinite data storage is probably something like Project Gutenberg: put it on-line and invite others to mirror it. For text files (books and source code), chances are storage is going to be so cheap that they'll mirror everything forever rather than trying to evaluate what's worth keeping. But before this happens, it's got to enter the public domain, and quite often they'll be too deteriorated to scan before the copyrights expire.
Long copyrights are breaking the social contract implicit in the roots of Intellectual Property, and made explicit in our Constitution: copyrights are issued for a limited time to encourage the authors. No one has an inherent right to IP. Now, to the extent that money motivates writing (and it's not necessarily the main reason), it's usually the immediate payoff that counts: the fee when a magazine article is published, the advance from a book publisher, etc. If 20 years later the book gets turned into a movie, that's a nice bonus, but it wasn't why the author wrote it, and I certainly hope he didn't have to wait that long to make a living from his writing. Surely no one writes a book in the anticipation that, 75 years after one is dead one's great-grandchildren can retire on the royalties. Nor does it seem to be a good idea to put Disney, Inc., in the position where they can stop making new movies and stay rich forever just by re-selling Mickey Mouse and Snow White -- with threats that, if you don't buy the DVD now, you won't have another chance in your lifetime. (Disney has actually run advertisements saying that.)
So, I think about 40 years ought to be the limit. (Life of the Author discriminates against the elderly and the unhealthy, a fixed term is better.) Also, I think that if you think your work is important enough to have copyright running more than a few years, you should pay to ensure that it is available to mankind forever. That is: an original work is automatically copyrighted for five years. (This differs from the present law only in shortening the term.) Most books and software are gone from stores long before then. If you want copyright to run longer, you must register it, including paying to etch it in platinum (or maybe just copper) and store it in a vault at stable temperature and humidity.
There also should be a provision that you lose copyright if the work goes out of publication for more than five years.
Maybe we should also allow a less expensive option for authors who want to retain rights to movies, etc., but don't want to go to much expense: put the text on-line, allowing free copying as-is, but retaining the rights to derivative works.