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Digital Domesday Rescued By Emulation
eefsee writes "The BBC announced that the Digital Domesday project which had become unusable has now been revived thanks to the successful emulation of a 1980's era Acorn computer. Folks at Leeds University and University of Michigan did the emulation work. This is just one early indication of how difficult it will be to maintain our digital heritage. Note that the printed Domesday Book, on which the digital project was modeled, is still quite accessible after almost 1000 years."
From the linked BBC article:
BBC Micro was a popular computer in the 1980s (emphasis mine)
So which one is it?
In Soviet Russia, Jesus asks: "What Would You Do?"
See? This is why we need DRM. If there were proper DRM going on then of course it would have been recoverable! We would just need the exact system(nope, can't change the processor, or the video card, or the hard driver) in order to recover it!
See, doesn't DRM help us all?
</sarcasm>
I'm curious as to whether this is technically legal under the DMCA. We all know that emulation is almost always in violation of intellectual property laws (doubly so when it is used to steal video games, as in MAME, Stella, and WINE), and I don't know why this would be any different. The Acorn ROM is probably proprietary. I'd hate to see such a valuable educational resource be marred by the taint of theft. Why don't we just start over and do it right rather than make up for our past errors by stealing?
Karma: Good (despite my invention of the Karma: sig)
how badly DRM driven by capitalist proprietory concerns conflicts so inimically with culture, history and knowledge.
"Academicians are more likely to share each other's toothbrush than each other's nomenclature."
Cohen
Didn't they just save one of those acorn computers? I mean the voltage hasn't changed, so all they had to do was brong that pc out of retirement, find a way to hook it up to a 486 and transfer the files...or is it more complicated than that?
Live for the present, learn from the past, and dream of the future!
It's indeed a good idea - the original hardware can still be kept as a museum piece (the two "indestructible discs", for example), but everybody would be able to access the content via emulation.
I hope that they also make the content available online and that they donate the source and content to the different websites that would be interested (e.g. Project Gutenberg for the text, and emulator websites for the program).
The ENIAC Demo Competition
If you're too lazy or ignorant to use Google:
. ht ml
a y. html
"The first approach to a modern assessment roll or cataster is the well known Domesday Book."
http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/source/domesday1
"The Domesday Book was ordered by William the Conqeror to assess the value of his conquered kingdom 20 years after defeating Harold at the Battle of Hastings."
http://www.villagenet.co.uk/history/1086-domesd
It is spelt "Domesday" It is pronounced "Dooms-Day"
Blame the French.
Well, your ignorance could be pardoned, except that there is a FRIGGIN' LINK TO THE ARTICLE that explains both of your questions. So some people say that there are no stupid questions, but I disagree. R T F A!
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
This is just one early indication of how difficult it will be to maintain our digital heritage.
If something is truly of importance, it will be ported forward to new technologies before the existing technology becomes so out of date that recovering it becomes a Herculian effort, or it will also co-exist in a more future-proof medium. Otherwise it's simply dead data that's more than likely never going to have a need to be accessed again.... not every bit needs to be held forever.
Would the world have stopped turning if this little chunk of history gone unrecovered? No. Are there other forms of media (books, videos, music) from the 1980's that would have answered the same questions about culture and society that the data in this archive answers? Definately.
NO CARRIER
'The software and hardware needed to access the Domesday discs is to be deposited at the Public Record Office once the project is completed.'
This is all fine and good, but it has already introduced the problem we'll face in approximately 2015:
We're going to have to create an emulator for the emulator.
And so on, ad infinitum. What we really need is some universally acceptable method to store digital data that isn't likely to decay or fall out of favor in the next ten years. That, I'm afraid, is a difficult proposition.
I just hope the emulator's emulator works.
The Domesday book was commissioned in December 1085 by William the Conqueror, who invaded England in 1066. The first draft was completed in August 1086 and contained records for 13,418 settlements in the English counties south of the rivers Ribble and Tees (the border with Scotland at the time).
The book has nothing to do with the "doomsday" world-ending yadda, it was mainly set up to inform the king of how much tax monies he should have been receiving.
Find out more.
Your karma pimp wants his money.
Finally, math books without any of that base 6 crap in them.
It is very much easier to educate a person according to the curriculum you desire if contradictory information is not available, especially regarding the history of a place. The extreme example is that of the Pol Pot regime. But you also see it in a newspaper when they fire all of the old hands who know where the bodies are buried, and only the young bucks are around who can be easily stampeded. No institutional memory.
On another note - if you want to damn a politician to history, make sure to get those stone obelisk and stelli erected with heavy engraving. Make sure some are out in the desert so that they are properly preserved.
Archeologists will come by centuries later and will take what you say as truth. Or at least very seriously. Have a field day.
the digital data will have disappeared, and the testimony on your stone monuments will be one of the few surviving original source records from the era.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
you need to back up regularly, and to a format that is useable by something else. And don't start in proprietary formats. Couldn't access the data for 16 years! Imagine if you had to try and explain that to an IRS auditor.
Why didn't they just go to the Flea Market or the local Community College trash bin? That's where I find all my obsolete equipment...
Sig Sig Sputnik
Let's hear it for preserving our digital heritage! I'm so relieved to know that my descendants will be able to read my blogs centuries from now.
What is truly important to people in 100 years' time is often what seems unimportant to people today. That is why a 16th-century 4-page pamphlet is more valuable than a 400-page leatherbound book of the same date.
The Domesday Project is now officially abandonware...
Rumor has it that MAME 0.7 will support it.
The BBC wanted a micro which they could use in their educational stuff. They went to Acorn, who was a successful manufacturer of the Atom, and basically they agreed that the next generation computer, which was to be called the Proton could be called the BBC Micro. This gave Acorn exposure and extra sales, and the BBC the machine they were looking for. For about a decade, you saw BBC micro's popping up in BBC shows including Dr Who. Acorn later made the Electron, and then the Archimedies, before going bankrupt.
Therefore the BBC do not own the copyright on the ROM's in the BBC micro.
From the site linked : "Also, as many visitors will have noticed, the extracts from Domesday entries that were previously on the site have regrettably been removed for copyright reasons."
Copyright? On a book written nearly a thousand years ago?!
No.. no you didn't RTFA. Because if you had you would have seen this:
And, also this:
So, what it is is an inventory of England. People and culture. Please don't say you RTFAd if you didn't, and then don't ask for more information when you say you don't care.
Dacels Jewelers can't be trusted.
All the more reason to be very careful what storage format you archive your pr0n collection on.
---
"I can't complain, but sometimes still do..." Joe Walsh
Only problem is that devices can age and wear out just sitting on the shelf - electrolytic capacitors can dry out, transformers can leak PCB's, metals can corrode, etc.
A schematic does not contain all of the information needed to build a device, either. Seeing, for example, that a 2N2222 bipolar NPN transistor is required for an amplifier isn't going to be too useful in the year 2100, I would bet. And the paper those semiconductor companies use for those big thick spec books? that crap turns yellow and falls apart in 10 years!
Doomsday is the day that Doom III will be released. This may or may not coincide with the end of the world as we know it. YMMV.
Where does the school board find them and why do they keep sending them to ME?
The book has nothing to do with the "doomsday" world-ending yadda
/. thread for the info, but just click on the link in the main story and read it for yourself. Essentially "Domesday" translates to "Day of Judgements" in modern English.
Excepting that they're the same word, just the language has evolved in the intervening millenium.
I could rape the previous
Good luck getting any non british person to understand your humour mate =)
"Note that the printed Domesday Book, on which the digital project was modeled, is still quite accessible after almost 1000 years."
Not really. I saw one volume of the Domesday book at the White Tower back in 2000. It was sealed under a sealed glass box, and you could only look at the two pages it was turned to. I would have tried to get access to it under the box, but there were these guards that looked quite intimidating and they kept saying "Move along..."
Even then, I could barely make out the cryptic scribbles. Sure didn't look like English to me.
At least with a digital version they can make infinite copies of it and distribute it to anybody interested, unlike the paper version locked up under a glass box.
Oh, that's right, it didn't, and before WINE the term 'emulation' was more generic and didn't create ridiculous non-dictionary distinctions.
--Giving to trolls for the benefit of us all
Acorn Computer
Damn, and I thought the Professor was all that by making a radio out of a coconut. A computer in an acorn? DAMN!
"Not knowing when the dawn will come, I open every door." - Emily Dickinson
An inventory of what? Lutes? Bear-baiting posts? DIY witchburning kits?
England maps, English people, English buildings.
Which people, and doing what, and for what purpose?
English people, doing English things, to inventory English life.
Ok, its an archive. But an archive of what, and for whom?
English people, doing English things, for English people who want to document English life.
Whatever, mod me down as flamebait again.
I'm $rtbl'd, and there is no -1, Stupid mod so I wouldn't bother.
Just more time spent trying to decipher slashdots crappy report of the BBC's shitty, uninformative coverage.
Have you thought maybe just reading what they write? Maybe... just an idea.
Dacels Jewelers can't be trusted.
When seeing the comment about how computers are becoming tombs for information, I was immediately reminded of the "atomic priesthood" (discussed here and elsewhere) that has sometimes been offered as one way to keep track of another kind of decaying technology, old nuclear fuel dumps and reactor sites. Those can remain deadly for eons, certainly beyond the survival even of the English language (or any other current language). How do you warn people 10,000 years from now that a small hill in an unnamed valley is actually highly radioactive? What is the equivalent of "don't dig here" in the language of 10,000 years hence? One answer seems to be that only commands from G*d are translated with any tenacity (let alone accuracy) such that future generations will know not to dig on ground hallowed by some presumed religious event in the dim past (um...that would be next year for us). If you can overcome the rank cynicism, the implications in all this for the future are troubling to say the least.
=^..^= all your rodent are belong to us
I don't know about you, but not many English speakers can still read/decode old middle English. I haven't tried reading the Domesday book myself, but if it's anything like Chaucer, the spelling is dynamic (i.e. not even consistent within the same document) and obscure by even modern English standards. Let alone the language itself is far different from modern English.
Therefore, saying that the original domesday book is still accessible is like saying the that all my old C64 files are still accessible because I still have the 5.25in floppies. (Note: the C64 floppies had varying number of sectors/track depending how close the track was to the hub ... these floppies can't be read on a DOS machine.)
I hate sigs (especially yours which is a waste of my bandwidth)
IANABrit, and hate to spoil the joke, but is the pun is on the word 'floppy'?
More than mere navel gazing.
I also remember see the finished version in the Natural History museum (or was it the Science museum?). It had one of those Marble Madness balls on the front for navigating - great fun.
If they put this online it will make a good read.
The original is here.
This post contains benzene, nitrosamines, formaldehyde and hydrogen cyanide.
If it's a transcription, exactly, of the original Old English then there is probably no copyright.
If it's a photograph then there's a copyright on the photo.
If it's a translation from Old English to Modern English or another language then there's a copyright on the translation.
But, all in all, yes, it's rather silly.
...if the language is forgotten when the rock itself is found.
:-)
Obviously, it is overly simplistic to assume that you, as long as the physical medium is durable enough, your data will be preserved forever. Look at the difficulties we have interpreting the Rosetta stone, the hieroglyphs, etc today! The data IS there, but what use is it if nobody really understands it? Yes, lots of progress has been made in understanding them - but still, look at the difficulties.
The laserdisc was "decoded" with emulation. Any proposals on how to emulate ancient Egypt?
Screw that, use stone tablets. Big fucking heavy ones, maybe marble or granite. That shit'll last THOUSANDS of years. How long does a CD last, 70 with archive grade media?
What happens if there's some kind of cataclysm and only a handful of people survive, revert to barbarism, then arise as a new advanced culture thousands of years from now? Future historians will find our libraries and data centers and they'll be USELESS due both to limited shelf life of media and inaccessibility of an unknown format.
Big granite slabs are the way to go. But don't make that writing TOO fine, or it'll erode with time. One centimeter letters etched a millimeter into the stone should last a few millenia.
-- Minds are like parachutes... they work best when open.
Didn't Adric use one in 'State of Decay' to realign the radio telescope ? Or am I hallucinating again ?
The real problem is that people don't look any further than right here, right now. All that's required to preserve digital data for future generations to revere or vilify is an effort to keep migrating it onto future media and to publish the method of reading the data along with it. Software formats come and go, there are probably software packages that can't even reliably read data using older versions of that software package.
The specification for the format in which the data is stored is the Rosetta Stone of the 21st century. Make this open and data can live in perpetuity.
Chris Kuivenhoven is a thief, beware
I can see it all now. LUGs getting together to make testimonial stone glyphs testifying to the Ages their opinions of the character of their least favorite politician or software company.
You get the idea. Also applies to politicians.
have a blast. Have it placed on you tombstone or something. or in the side of a cliff.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
I played with this kit for ages when my mother brought one home from the school she worked at. I was just a small kid at the time but was a budding programmer, so was fascinated when I saw the BBC micro (6502 based with 64 or 128Kb of RAM) do things that I hadn't imagined for it. This was because of the video disc player (which was enormous) must have overlayed its output onto the video signal of the computer.
There were a few relevant video clips, e.g. of the Falklands war, but the most interesting content for me was where they had walked round Brecon (in Wales) and taken photos at various intervals and in about eight directions (and then with zooms of interesting features), so the effect was that the user could explore the place. Interaction was via a mouse as I remember and the display quality was far in advance of what the BBC micro was capable of.
All the sections of the content were navigated around in some sort of virtual art gallery (a bit like someone might make with VRML).
Another useful feature was the extensive maps of the whole of the UK that were easily manipulated/zoomed.
Most of the posts here are assuming that the content was protected in some DRM style way, but I don't think that is true. It seems likely to me that the navigation system for the data was encapsulated in the program, and so emulation or rewriting are the only options.
Brian.
What is a more "future Proof" medium. Yes you could argue that Magnetic tape is a bad choice but, then again so are CDRoms, Paper and Stone tablets. All of them tend to break down over time. And, even if you print the whole thing to paper (or film for the videos) you face the fact that over the truly long term such recordings get lost or like old languages (such as Ancient Greek and Algol) we occasionally lose the ability to translate them.
IMHO the first part of your post was more on target, if we want to keep these things around we need to maintain them. We need to be porting them every so often from one format to the next.
Unfortunately the set of all data that we want to save is monotonically increasing. Therefore the cost of storing and maintaining all of the "important stuff" in purpetuity will be increasing as well. So then we have to start deciding what will or will not be kept (in other words what someone wants to pay for) and what gets dropped. What's more important, the original Domesday book or the digital version?
Well, Acorn made the Archimedes (which, despite Apple's claims, was the first home computer to use a RISC processor) and then the RISC PC (a old 202Mhz model is sitting next to me at the moment) - just as they were about to launch the RISC PC II (aka Phoebe), Morgan-Stanley Dean Whitter decided that Acorn's shares in ARM Plc (the designers of a whole range of RISC processors - originally the company was called Acorn Risc Machines, then Advanced Risc Machines) were worth more than the company itself and the split the company up.
Most IP rights and staff went to Element 14, but the rights to the RISC OS operating system were sold to Pace who have sub-licenced the rights to RISC OS Ltd. The "Acorn" name and logo itself were sold off to Acorn's largest distributor Castle Technology.
More information is available.
No - the new software will be rendered useless - the old x86 software will continue to run fine, whether under Wine, or old copies of Win95.
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
An example of the same word/same definition but different context that comes to mind can be had in "solicitor": In England it means a rather different profession than it does in the U.S. (generally speaking =) but the two are pretty unrelated. Except, of course, when they are seen to hire one another, as needed. Ahem.
I think the only way to preserve data over the very long term (thousands of years) is to assume that whoever reads it in the future will be an alien (eg so different from us as to make any assumptions impossibile). Assume nothing about what we may have in common, and start from the basics. Any digital data that wants to be permanent in the same way that cuneaform tablets are permanent must contain not only data, but must begin with a complete description of what it takes to decode the data, starting from establishing a basic mathematical language. Very, very difficult. Perhaps we should be consulting linguists and archeologists when we're looking to put together these kinds of archives? Ask an archeologist, "What would make your job easier if you found it in the beginning of an ancient inscribed stone tablet? What kinds of things would aid you in translating it?" and go from there.
Acorn later made the Electron, and then the Archimedies, before going bankrupt
Acorn became ARM, who put their knowledge of processors to good effect with their recent designs. They don't manufacture hardware anymore, simply license the designs to third parties. They most certainly didn't go bust, as I know people with stock they've owned since the BBC Micro days, and they still get a healthy return off of it. As far as I can recall, BBC employees got offered Acorn stock back in the eighties - part of the Thatcherite attempts to get ordinary people interested in stocks and shares?
Chris
To be kept available future data archives will need to be copied over and over. They will have to be copied in bulk, there will not be the man power to do specials on anything.
What am I trying to say: this problem will get worse, worse than you can imagine. Well defined, simple Open standards for data is a must for the basics. Well defined, simple Open standards for Open Source applications to implement anything richer - these applications growing gradually over time, but maintaining backwards compatability. I still use troff and can still maintain/print documents that are over 15 years old.
A proprietary future will be much poorer than an Open one. A future that overly controls copying will be much poorer than an open one.
All of the numbers above are probably an underestimate.
Perhaps, but both are succeptible to corrosion; even stainless steel "rusts." Metals are also more likely to succumb to environmental corrosive agents like soil Ph and the like. No, stone is the way to go.
-- Minds are like parachutes... they work best when open.
There was an original Doomsday machine going on e-bay not long ago.
IIRC it was a BBC Master 128 with 2nd processor, SCSI card, video disc player and track ball.
Still worked, although some of the disks were damaged.
What format and storage medium you adopt for truly long term data storage is still a thorny issue. The only medium we know can survive this long, and which has a reasonable data density, is good old fashioned acid-free paper and ink. This was the approach that the Hipparcos Project, a satellite mission to measure the positions and motions of stars to unprecedented accuracy, chose for their long term archive. As well as electronic storage, they published a paper catalog in books using acid free paper, long duration inks, and a font specially designed to make OCR easy, and then made sure that lots of different libraries, scattered over the world, had copies.
We still can't beat paper for durability.
Yes, the domesday book is still readable 1000 years later. This is probably the norm for systems taht have a low rate of change and evolution. However, a feature in evolving systems is that some branchs die out, and the understanding/knowledge/system disappears. If we take a few examples, we can see that it is not so uncommon in to have dead languages too. Egyptian heiroglyphics were undecipherable to western civilisation (and modern egypt afaik) up to and including the early part of the century, after the Egyptian empire dissolved and the written language was lost. Another example of lost languages are Linear A and Linear B; the former was discovered to be a form of greek with different symbols (and some slightly modified rules) for writing; the latter has yet to be decided.
or is it doomsday?
The war with islam is a war on the beast
The war on terror is a war for peace
Iraq's refusal to admit certain nationalities of weapons inspectors might have something to do with the infiltration of the weapons inspection process by US intelligence agents and the subsequent assassination attempts, something not mentioned on the IAEA one-line summary. Another factor not reported was the number of inspectors per visit (5-ish if I remember correctly) agreed upon with the Iraqis and the violation of that agreement on those occasions. They marched 30 weapons inspectors down to the Party headquarters in downtown Baghdad and demanded admittance. Rather inflammatory, wouldn't you say?
The last bit is straight from Scott Ritter's mouth. His 1998 New Republic article is a good read, though a bit dated.
I'm sure you've heard enough twisting of his words by bleeding heart peaceniks that you're sick of his name by now, but honestly, have a read. He's the closest man to the action that's got the cojones to speak up in a frank and straightforward manner. Not bad for a Marine. ;-)
And before you start doubting his credibility, consider that he's already got a FBI and CIA portfolio started against him, and he's been speaking to crowds around the world for months now. If he was lying in his speeches, he'd have been sued/courtmartialed for libel/treason/etc six ways from sunday by now, wouldn't you say? Ergo I'm more inclined to believe him than commercial/governmental news sources who, while they obviously are reluctant to outright lie, will certainly present facts in a biased manner through ommission.
Wah!
Although I'm wary of biology:computer analogies, in the context of "information wants to be alive", storage and data format obsolesence is a good example of natural selection.
Consider: there are finite amounts of human attention, human/machine effort, time, money, bandwidth, and storage. These are all resources for which information competes. Useful information will receive enough of these resources to ensure its survival; it will be copied from old, degrading media and old, obsolete formats onto new ones. Less useful information may not; it may sit on a tape until oxidation renders it unreadable; it may reside in a forgotten file format; it may linger on an optical disk for which no working drives exist.
The original Domesday book hasn't survived because paper is such a great storage medium. It's survived because it's interesting. How many other pieces of paper circa 1086 haven't been sufficiently interesting to survive to this day? Almost all of them. Would Shakespeare's work really be extinct if he'd written it on a PC? No. Are the hardcopies of my 1982 high school essays extinct? Hell yes. It's not the medium, it's the message.
Which begs the question: does anybody really care about the BBC Domesday project, or is it only of interest to us because it's a good example of information doomed to extinction not by technology, but by its own worthlessness?
Please donate your spare CPU cycles to help fight cancer and other diseases
EBay has them. I suspect that any mass produced computer or peripheral from the 1970s onward will usually be around for 30-40 years in attics and can be found if people need it desparately enough.
If something is truly of importance, it will be ported forward to new technologies
I have to ask you, what's important? State records of live births on microfilm? Church recods of marriage? Death certificates? Survey maps of property? How about regular family photos?
A government of a modern state with lots of money tried to do what all of us would like to do and failed due to closed and propriatory data standards and the inability to make those copies. Obviously, no one passed the multimilion dollar projects onto new media. What makes you think you will do any better? Do you think your local state office is doing better with their rotting celophane and acid paper? No, I'm afraid that a real promblem has been shown here. The only reason the BBC failed first is because they tried first. They did better than NPR's audio tape disaster because the disks are still here, but failed because no one makes the readers. It's a problem that will get worse as Paladium etc, moves in to make sure that only a few can do so much as read "important" information, much less copy it. Do you have your CDs so well managed that you can actually transfer the information before CD readers are no more?
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
> This is just one early indication of how
> difficult it will be to maintain our digital
> heritage.
No, it's an indication of how easy it will be.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Youre all domed! DOMED it tell you!!!!
"I would say that 99 per cent of what my father has written about his own life is false." - L. Ron Hubbard Jr.
Of course, the DMCA is a US law anyway
True in name.
and neither Acorn nor the BBC fall under its domain.
True pedantically, but false in practice. The United Kingdom has had its own equivalent to the DMCA's circumvention ban since 1988, as section 296 of the Copyright Act.
Will I retire or break 10K?
nobody's going to remember how to decode WMA, MPG, or whatever whiz-bang video format it was last encoded in. But if you stick to a very simple text-based layout
I worry more about English becoming a dead language.
Will I retire or break 10K?
And what medium do you suppose we should use?
"Since a DVD player could never survive impact, diagrams explaining how to build one from scratch will be engraved on the surface of several dozen of the disks".
Will I retire or break 10K?
Not really. Even if I could understand the language, I still can't search it with regular expressions, automatically create indexes, incorporate it in a knowledge base, read it out loud through a speech synthesizer, or anything else useful.
Printed material is nice for reading, but reading alone doesn't imply accessibility.
This usually requires the depiction of alot of damned souls be dragged off to eternal damnation. These need to be shown as they are transforming into beasts, they are getting ripped apart by demons, the usual.
On course, more than one of his critics are depicted there, in various forms of demonic torment. And they are remembered to this day only because they are in the painting
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
Alecto Historical Editions has translated the books from Latin to English and is selling them in printed and electronic form (BTW the translation, not the Latin, is what is copyrighted).
There are two Domesday Books books: Little Domesday (comprising Essex, Suffolk and Norfolk) and Great Domesday (the other English counties).
They have also photographed each folio of the book and scanned them from transparencies at good res (888 folios altogether).
There's also a transcription of the book. (A bloke called Farley typeset the Latin some time in the
18th century. Unfortunately I keep visualising Chris Farley.) This too has now been photographed and scanned.
It's pretty dry stuff, but historically important: basically, it's an 11th century inventory, conducted at the time of Kings Edward and William (the Conqueror). It says who owned what, who lived where, how much money was paid in tax, etc. as well as containing all sorts of social comment. For us plebs the amazing thing is that you can look up a town, read what was there, and still see what remains in real life.
[Disclaimer: I know this stuff not because I'm a history buff but because for a while know we've been working on putting it all on CD-ROM for them. By coincidence the gold masters went out today. If I have to pnmrotate one more sodding 250MB image I'll kill someone.]
As the GNU project says, "source code" is the preferred form for modification of a work. For this project, the source code for the display program might be BASIC or assembler, but that's not important. What's important is the text/image/video/audio content, and the source form for that content might be XML PNM (no lossy compression), uncompressed AVI and WAV files.
Converting the original, BBC-Micro specific program into a modern source format will eliminate the need for a special or unique system to access that content.
Furthermore, distribution costs on the Internet approach zero, so that work can be made widely available to everybody, not just a few schools or visitors to a museum.
Over time our popular formats such as JPEG and AVI files will become obsolete, so the work must be converted into that newer form in future, possibly ad-infinitum. At least those future conversions will occur from one well-known and popular format into another.
They haven't really learned from their efforts, have they?
So here's the new reason to use open source: It is important to preserve our digital heritage, and using source code is the best means we have of making works accessable and compatible with the computers of the future.
I work at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center.
Back in the day(TM) before RDBMS were a commodity, SLAC used the SPIRES database written at Stanford running on an IBM Mainframe. Well, as these things go, the IBM Mainframe was getting long in the tooth, but there was a ton of data in this SPIRES database. SPIRES wasn't going to get ported to anything modern. I forget who exactly, but one engineer just up and decided to write an emulator for the IBM mainframe in practicly no time at all.
Now the SPIRES database is still running. However, it now runs on Solaris using a home-brewed IBM Mainframe emulator. Even though it's in emulation, it runs faster than it ever used to on the real deal (Moore's Law and all).
As a side note, the first truly useful web site was here at SLAC when George Crane and Paul Kunz hooked up a web front end to the SPIRES database so the High Energy Physics community could easily get at other's papers.
The whole place is full of Brits! Grab yer muskets (or your gun if you don't have a firearm). Remember, it's one if by LAN and two if by HTTP . . . I think that's how it worked. :)
They still own the "copyright", which is really the right to _forbid_ others to make copies.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
I worked at the Interactive Television Unit (the BBC department that was founded for the Domesday Project) for the last 3 months of its existence in 1989 before it was spun out into the MultiMedia Corporation in Jan 1990 (I then worked at MMC until 1997, when it bacame a shell company owned bythe stockbrokers, but that's another story).
When we left the BBC, they had all the original Video data on Broadcast quality masters, and all the digital data preserved on VAX tapes. They must have thrown those out in the intervening 12 years (which wouldn't surprise me).
I know of two former MMC directors who have CD-ROM backups of the digital data and working Domesday systems.
Which is not to decry the work in emulating it - that si the real long-term answer. The Church-Turing thesis is the ultimate refutation of DRM too.
A frisbee is a circular object that flies through the air by spinning - it is also a kids toy. It is used in the game ultimate. What's the American term? The laser disks (as far as i can remember) are large and silver and circular, much like a frisbee. Now we have the data they are probably only useful as frisbees, rather dangerous frisbees. (OK maybe not, they would probably keep them for achival / posterity purposes). I admit it was a bit one of those "you had to be there" jokes. * sigh
On a more serious note - someone working on the project says this...
The main problem with converting the data to another format and making it publicly available was that all the information was copyright the people who sent it in in the first place - lots of school kids.
I live in LA. We have earthquakes on a regular basis. Stone tablets won't stand a chance here.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
What we need to be concerned about is the marketing hype that will surround "trusted computing."
For an analogy, I recall a line from a web site I read years ago about XML:
"Q: What can XML do? A: Anything your boss tells you to do with it."
We're going to see infomercials and targeted advertising at corporate executives (Microsoft's most lucrative market gateway) about how "trusted computing" can ensure the safety of your data. (Complete with rear-view video of a someone typing away at a keyboard, in a dark room with the outline of the person only visible by reflection from the CRT.)
At the point when data in "trusted" portions of computers can only be transferred to other computers with such "trusted" data storage capabilities, the necessity of having such a PC at home will become vital for anyone who wants to work at home with any data some hair-brained exec decides is important enough to encrypt.
So people start buying computers with these trusted regions, with the only operating system that can access these regions already installed.
And for those few who still say DRM won't be enforced by Palladium and the like: All the record company has to do is release the digital version of an audio file in the "protection" region of memory, and you're now subject to the whims of the licensing arrangements devised for that file.
Perhapse the worst part: Even inadvertently recording such data that was played through someone's speakers will be a violation of the DMCA.
What's this Submit thingy do?
Copyright? On a book written nearly a thousand years ago?!
Stupid Sonny Bono...
Friends help you move. Real friends help you move bodies.
I think he meant PCB as in printed circuit board, not poly whatsit gives-you-cancer PCB. Then again, if it was made in a place where PCBs are still in use (are there any such places?), lord knows what could be in there.
Crown copyright may be infinite. I have seen discussion which indicates that the King James version of the Bible (commissioned by the crown, as was the Domesday Book) has an infinite copyright.
I wonder whether that would change if Britain became a republic?
Slashdot - the place where you can look like a genius by restating the obvious
Is the emulator publicly available, does anyone know?
A translated hardback version of the original Domesday Book is in the shops right now.
How accessible is that?
I was able to look up the Norman record of the village where I grew up.
"Information wants to be paid"
No, ARM was an independant company, originally wholely owned by Acorn, then floated off.
First off, I am not too superior to look up the information, which you could have done. I'd be willing to bet that you didn't try to look up the information until after you posted your question. It was originally posted at 2:35, and your post went up 6 minutes later. Not hardly enough time to put forth any effort in answering the question yourself.
Second, I never said you were stupid - I said your question was. It was a stupid question because you could have just as easily found the information yourself. Why can't you just admit that you didn't even bother to look up the info first? Why are you so superior that you are above asking a stupid question? I ask stupid questions sometimes, but in conversation where it is more free-flowing. Here, you have to consciously type it out, and click Submit. Therefore, you should put a little more (or at least some) thought into it. I don't think that is asking too much, and I don't think there is anything wrong with pointing it out.
It turns out that one of the sidebar links [bbc.co.uk] on BBC had more information, but other /. posters -- instead of assuming I was stupid, chose to politely answer the questions and even provide more background.
Why didn't you follow that link? Do you really think that the other /. posters know about this topic off the top of their heads, or maybe that they looked up the information themselves?
This just illustrates the point that people are lazy and want to be force fed their information. Even with something like Google around, where you don't have to really do much researching at all, people will still be lazy and refuse to do anything for themselves.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
I'd assumed they were all intelligence agents. Or at least engineers trained in a lot of the techniques. If your getting into sensitive sites, you don't send folk who won't take advantage of that.
The point I meant to make is that the weapons inspection process had been inflitrated by US intelligence agents that were reporting back information on Saddam's Presidential Guard to the States for the purpose of assassinating him. Remember those cruise missile strikes? The Clinton administration admitted as much at the time. (see link in my previous post)
The point I was trying to make was that Iraq, while by no means in the right, certainly has reasons for its reluctance to admit weapons inspectors, particularily US ones.
Wah!
Unless semiconductors themselves go out of style (like vacuum tubes), I don't see a reason for not being able to buy a 2N2222-compatible part (or a 555 chip, or anything that widely popular, etc) in the year 2100.
I have a secondhand copy of the fifth edition of the Motorola Semiconductor Data Book, copyright 1970. Most diodes and transistors (basically any 1N or 2N part) that I can buy today are listed there. It lists every physical and electrical characteristic of the 2N2222 I could possibly want to know. The paper is quite white and no pages have fallen out or been ripped. It has received no special care.
So not only would semiconductors have to go out of style but all copies of those data books (and any other work that includes the JEDEC reference data) would need to be destroyed.
Heck, if it's really that important, we can still make a vacuum tube, even if the last one of a particular type is destroyed.
Now, that PROM in your doohickey that lets you unencrypt your thingamabob so it can bootstrap your DRM-compliant whatchamacallit that got a bit too much ultraviolet light over the years... you may be out of luck, especially if there's no chip markings.
I think if I had one testament to carve for a future generation that wishes to reconstruct my digital data and try and emulate the system, it would be "hey, :x to save and quit"
Phillip.
Property for sale in Nice, France