> The trick is making the post-it note to make sure that the future curator does not forget this.
If the staff in question is also responsible for painting the walls, keeping small children and dogs out, and taking out the trash, you might have a point. But if your badge says "IS Department-Electronic Document Management" (which is becoming a very common department in modern enterprises, I'm working in one), and your chief responsibilities are data maintenance and migration, you'd have very few excuses when caught with a warehouse full of punched card pallets.
Re:Helium vs. Hydrogen, Americans vs. Germans
on
Zeppelins on Patrol?
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· Score: 2
Not so much cornered as simply were in possession of most natural sources. Practically all He production is a by-product of natural gas processing, and it seems most sources of gas are in the US and Russia. The US simply chose not to share He with the emerging Nazi regime in Germany, especially given Germany's leading expertise in airship technology.
> One break in the migration cycle and you're done for.
In principle you're right, but "one break" is a bit extreme. We can still read most media of the last 30 years or so with relatively little difficulty. But there were odd little formats along the way that would be tough to read nowadays.
> What happens when they don't, and the necessary hardware for data-extraction becomes antiquated
Yes, if you skip several generations of media technology, the data transfer will become increasingly more difficult and expensive. As would probably be the case for punched cards today. But even then, if you have a large and/or valuable enough information store, the cost of building a one-off custom reader would usually be orders of magnitude less than re-digitizing from scratch.
Besides, what we're talking about here is not someone's personal archive of Slashdot articles saved to 3" floppies (remember those?), which definitely would not be worth the effort to recover. We're talking about one of the top museums and one of the largest universities in the world, which together certainly have the interest, motivation and means to periodically update and backup one of their main products.
My point is, if you save your resume onto a CD-R and dig it into the backyard in a time capsule, chances are that in 50 years you won't be able to recover it. But if the information is valuable enough to you, the effort to periodically migrate it onto emerging media is quite minimal.
> what are the odds that in 4 millenia we'll still have the digital versions in a readable format?
The odds of still having readable punched cards are practically zero. However, this is a tired argument that is repeated far too often. The difference between punched cards and clay tablets is that one medium is (easily) machine readable, while the other isn't. Once information is present in machine readable form, its transfer between various media is something that can be highly automated and done in a reasonable amount of time. No monks and centuries of transcription required there.
Even in the case of punched cards, the information can be transfered onto more modern media (e.g. hard drives) in a very reasonable amount of time with a very reasonable amount of effort. With newer media, the effort becomes even more trivial. Once you have the entire Library of Congress on hard drives, the process of transferring their contents to (fewer and fewer) drives (or whatever new technology arrives) every ten years or so can easily become a routine process. You'd like a copy of the LOC? Sure, just pop your holographic crystal into the slot and hit Go.
The real danger with losing the original medium is that of losing what WASN'T visible and obvious. For example, many original parchments are being digitized, and for preservation of the visible information that's perfectly fine. However, closer examination of those parchments has at times revealed hidden information that only becomes visible with special equipment (X rays, UV etc), such as previous texts that had been bleached off to reuse the parchment. That sort of hidden information is forever lost when the originals are gone. In the case of stones or clay tablets, maybe the potential for such information is lesser, but then again, you never know.
Re:Best Jon Katz ever!
on
Disconnecting
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· Score: 2
> Under the FDCPA, your wife may have grounds to take the collection agency to court and collect > statutory damages.
Oh, I know this. But for most real-world situation, taking anybody to court is hardly worth the effort. Neither she nor I have anywhere near the time this would take. That's probably also the main reason why these guys keep getting away with this behavior.
At least he got to talk to meat at the other end
on
Disconnecting
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· Score: 2
I've been trying to cancel Cricket cell phone service for the last two weeks. I mapped out their entire voice menu system, all branches eventually lead to one of two options:
1. Pay a due bill 2. Sign up for new service
No option ever takes you to a real person, and if you stay on the line the voice menu just keeps cycling endlessly. I'm beginning to think the entire company resides on an answering machine in some guy's closet.
Walking into an official Cricket office and asking to have the service cancelled leads nowhere. They say they can't cancel the service from there, you have to call personally. Which leads back to the voice menu dance above. Their website consists of five pages or so (easy to print out and carry around at all times--very handy!), no service related options at all.
I think I will be with Cricket for ever and ever, amen.
Re:Best Jon Katz ever!
on
Disconnecting
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· Score: 2
> I can't believe this happened for real. It's far too Monty Pythonesque to be real...
Oh, I have no problems believing that. My wife once called a collection agency to ask them to stop leaving harrassing voicemail. Five minutes later the same representative called back and said he only called to tell her that he thought she was a real bitch. Click. These phone positions seem to be populated with the strangest elements of society,
> Do you also scoff at litterature, movies, theatre, painting, sculptures and everything else > that is only there to provide entertainment?
Less so than you, apparently. The number of errors in your post alone indicates a very high level of scoffing. You also seem to mistake the need and desire of an artist for self-expression for a need to entertain. Bach and Van Gogh might disagree with you on that one. Then again, the day you cut off your ear and shoot yourself in the side in order to better entertain your audience, I'll graciously defer to you.
> As most coders, I'd eventually like to crack into the gaming industry.
If by "coders" you mean programmers, I don't know where you would get that idea. Maybe amongst your peers. While writing games does indeed require great skills in a lot of areas, many programmers tend to aspire to slightly more lofty goals for their creations than to merely capture the attention of distracted teenagers for brief periods of time.
We're living during the transition time between media technologies, where the computer is coming in and disrupted familiar business models, replacing them with something yet unknown and raising fear in the feeble-minded. This is not unlike the transition to the automobile, where some countries legislated that a person waving a flag has to walk ahead of a self-propelled vehicle which is limited to 4 mph. Sooner or later even the thick minds at TV networks will realize that the era of advertising as we know it is over, and they'll have to come up with new ways of making money. Meanwhile we'll be stuck with the metaphorical flag-waving man in front of our PVRs.
Never mind that it's not much of a review--listing all the features printed on the box and in the manual and making a couple of comments hardly qualifies as a review. But the guy doesn't event know the first thing about LCD monitors. His two main gripes are the dead pixels and the interpolation necessary for lower resolutions.
Dead pixels suck, and a zero-dead-pixels policy is an admirable goal indeed, but not an economic reality. Anyone familiar with the issue would know that and not even bother bringing it up--unless the review sample had 20 dead pixels or something.
Interpolating lower resolutions is a fact of life for discrete pixel devices and will look nasty regardless of how it's done and by whom. Again, not something worth bringing up, unless witnessing a display that can miraculously do it with perfect quality. Using sub-pixel addressing might improve interpolation quality somewhat if done right, and there are better and worse approaches to it, but in the end it's still a hack.
> I do like to keep my 19" monitor at a respectable distance, and 1600x1200 is just on > the edge of overkill
That says more about your eyesight than his common sense. At work I run a 22" NEC at 1600x1200, but at home I have a 19" using the same resolution, and I can comfortably see it from 2 feet away for extended periods. And no, there's no sebum coating my monitors--anybody who deposits skin secretions on my monitors dies.
> It's definitely how I would design an ideal from-scratch FS.
Well, the trend seems to be to make the whole FS a relational database anyway. It will be interesting to watch FS developments over the next five years. Of course, the initial efforts seem to be towards a relational DB FS on top of a legacy FS (seems that's what MS is doing with their SQL IFS), but long-term I guess you would see the FS store the DB straight to the metal.
The approach you describe is a workable solution for existing file systems, but hardly an ideal solution. Every key name/value pair--being a file--will take up one cluster, regardless of how much data it actually contains. This could easily be 2K or 4K just to store a boolean. Besides, you then still have to worry about doing full text indexing if you want to perform meaningful queries on all these "metadata" files. As I said, it's a workable approach for grafting extensible metadata onto an existing FS, but it's not how you would design an ideal from-scratch FS.
> Maybe I'm just unique or weird or something, but when I'm trying to read, movement in my > peripheral vision is very distracting.
Maybe I'm just unique or weird or something, but when I'm trying to read, having 100% of CPU cycles gobbled up by some busy, alpha-blending, scrolling-inhibiting quarter-screen ad is very distracting.
Me too--well, at least I used to take them seriously. But ever since he's playing the highly original game of Two Degrees Of Separation (from 9/11 topics) on anything he touches, I've lost any respect for him. Jon, not EVERYTHING is related to 9/11, and an amazing number of people don't really care all that much anymore, we don't all live in NYC and see Ground Zero every day. Get over it!
> A brand new VHS video will often have better picture quality than a DVD.
Define "quality". Lines of resolution? Color accuracy? Motion artifacting? Sound? With one exception (motion artifacting, which VHS obviously doesn't have, being an analog format), even a just decent DVD will trounce the best VHS material. If you had said laser disc, you could have had a point. But VHS, and not even SVHS? I don't think so.
Slashdot Mirror
> The trick is making the post-it note to make sure that the future curator does not forget this.
If the staff in question is also responsible for painting the walls, keeping small children and dogs out, and taking out the trash, you might have a point. But if your badge says "IS Department-Electronic Document Management" (which is becoming a very common department in modern enterprises, I'm working in one), and your chief responsibilities are data maintenance and migration, you'd have very few excuses when caught with a warehouse full of punched card pallets.
Not so much cornered as simply were in possession of most natural sources. Practically all He production is a by-product of natural gas processing, and it seems most sources of gas are in the US and Russia. The US simply chose not to share He with the emerging Nazi regime in Germany, especially given Germany's leading expertise in airship technology.
> One break in the migration cycle and you're done for.
In principle you're right, but "one break" is a bit extreme. We can still read most media of the last 30 years or so with relatively little difficulty. But there were odd little formats along the way that would be tough to read nowadays.
> What happens when they don't, and the necessary hardware for data-extraction becomes antiquated
Yes, if you skip several generations of media technology, the data transfer will become increasingly more difficult and expensive. As would probably be the case for punched cards today. But even then, if you have a large and/or valuable enough information store, the cost of building a one-off custom reader would usually be orders of magnitude less than re-digitizing from scratch.
Besides, what we're talking about here is not someone's personal archive of Slashdot articles saved to 3" floppies (remember those?), which definitely would not be worth the effort to recover. We're talking about one of the top museums and one of the largest universities in the world, which together certainly have the interest, motivation and means to periodically update and backup one of their main products.
My point is, if you save your resume onto a CD-R and dig it into the backyard in a time capsule, chances are that in 50 years you won't be able to recover it. But if the information is valuable enough to you, the effort to periodically migrate it onto emerging media is quite minimal.
> what are the odds that in 4 millenia we'll still have the digital versions in a readable format?
The odds of still having readable punched cards are practically zero. However, this is a tired argument that is repeated far too often. The difference between punched cards and clay tablets is that one medium is (easily) machine readable, while the other isn't. Once information is present in machine readable form, its transfer between various media is something that can be highly automated and done in a reasonable amount of time. No monks and centuries of transcription required there.
Even in the case of punched cards, the information can be transfered onto more modern media (e.g. hard drives) in a very reasonable amount of time with a very reasonable amount of effort. With newer media, the effort becomes even more trivial. Once you have the entire Library of Congress on hard drives, the process of transferring their contents to (fewer and fewer) drives (or whatever new technology arrives) every ten years or so can easily become a routine process. You'd like a copy of the LOC? Sure, just pop your holographic crystal into the slot and hit Go.
The real danger with losing the original medium is that of losing what WASN'T visible and obvious. For example, many original parchments are being digitized, and for preservation of the visible information that's perfectly fine. However, closer examination of those parchments has at times revealed hidden information that only becomes visible with special equipment (X rays, UV etc), such as previous texts that had been bleached off to reuse the parchment. That sort of hidden information is forever lost when the originals are gone. In the case of stones or clay tablets, maybe the potential for such information is lesser, but then again, you never know.
> Under the FDCPA, your wife may have grounds to take the collection agency to court and collect
> statutory damages.
Oh, I know this. But for most real-world situation, taking anybody to court is hardly worth the effort. Neither she nor I have anywhere near the time this would take. That's probably also the main reason why these guys keep getting away with this behavior.
I've been trying to cancel Cricket cell phone service for the last two weeks. I mapped out their entire voice menu system, all branches eventually lead to one of two options:
1. Pay a due bill
2. Sign up for new service
No option ever takes you to a real person, and if you stay on the line the voice menu just keeps cycling endlessly. I'm beginning to think the entire company resides on an answering machine in some guy's closet.
Walking into an official Cricket office and asking to have the service cancelled leads nowhere. They say they can't cancel the service from there, you have to call personally. Which leads back to the voice menu dance above. Their website consists of five pages or so (easy to print out and carry around at all times--very handy!), no service related options at all.
I think I will be with Cricket for ever and ever, amen.
> I can't believe this happened for real. It's far too Monty Pythonesque to be real...
Oh, I have no problems believing that. My wife once called a collection agency to ask them to stop leaving harrassing voicemail. Five minutes later the same representative called back and said he only called to tell her that he thought she was a real bitch. Click. These phone positions seem to be populated with the strangest elements of society,
> I mean "come as NO surprise", not "come as a surprise."
Then you'd have a double negation. It's fine the way it was.
> Do you also scoff at litterature, movies, theatre, painting, sculptures and everything else
> that is only there to provide entertainment?
Less so than you, apparently. The number of errors in your post alone indicates a very high level of scoffing. You also seem to mistake the need and desire of an artist for self-expression for a need to entertain. Bach and Van Gogh might disagree with you on that one. Then again, the day you cut off your ear and shoot yourself in the side in order to better entertain your audience, I'll graciously defer to you.
> As most coders, I'd eventually like to crack into the gaming industry.
If by "coders" you mean programmers, I don't know where you would get that idea. Maybe amongst your peers. While writing games does indeed require great skills in a lot of areas, many programmers tend to aspire to slightly more lofty goals for their creations than to merely capture the attention of distracted teenagers for brief periods of time.
We're living during the transition time between media technologies, where the computer is coming in and disrupted familiar business models, replacing them with something yet unknown and raising fear in the feeble-minded. This is not unlike the transition to the automobile, where some countries legislated that a person waving a flag has to walk ahead of a self-propelled vehicle which is limited to 4 mph. Sooner or later even the thick minds at TV networks will realize that the era of advertising as we know it is over, and they'll have to come up with new ways of making money. Meanwhile we'll be stuck with the metaphorical flag-waving man in front of our PVRs.
> Where have this guy been when they handed out the brains?
He asked for a milk shake, extra thick.
Never mind that it's not much of a review--listing all the features printed on the box and in the manual and making a couple of comments hardly qualifies as a review. But the guy doesn't event know the first thing about LCD monitors. His two main gripes are the dead pixels and the interpolation necessary for lower resolutions.
Dead pixels suck, and a zero-dead-pixels policy is an admirable goal indeed, but not an economic reality. Anyone familiar with the issue would know that and not even bother bringing it up--unless the review sample had 20 dead pixels or something.
Interpolating lower resolutions is a fact of life for discrete pixel devices and will look nasty regardless of how it's done and by whom. Again, not something worth bringing up, unless witnessing a display that can miraculously do it with perfect quality. Using sub-pixel addressing might improve interpolation quality somewhat if done right, and there are better and worse approaches to it, but in the end it's still a hack.
> It is worth the extra expense of a piece-o-shit Samsung
Your sledgehammer sarcasm notwithstanding, Samsung makes very decent monitors, and televisions too.
How can anybody complain about too much resolution? That's like complaining about too much money.
> I do like to keep my 19" monitor at a respectable distance, and 1600x1200 is just on
> the edge of overkill
That says more about your eyesight than his common sense. At work I run a 22" NEC at 1600x1200, but at home I have a 19" using the same resolution, and I can comfortably see it from 2 feet away for extended periods. And no, there's no sebum coating my monitors--anybody who deposits skin secretions on my monitors dies.
> It's definitely how I would design an ideal from-scratch FS.
Well, the trend seems to be to make the whole FS a relational database anyway. It will be interesting to watch FS developments over the next five years. Of course, the initial efforts seem to be towards a relational DB FS on top of a legacy FS (seems that's what MS is doing with their SQL IFS), but long-term I guess you would see the FS store the DB straight to the metal.
The approach you describe is a workable solution for existing file systems, but hardly an ideal solution. Every key name/value pair--being a file--will take up one cluster, regardless of how much data it actually contains. This could easily be 2K or 4K just to store a boolean. Besides, you then still have to worry about doing full text indexing if you want to perform meaningful queries on all these "metadata" files. As I said, it's a workable approach for grafting extensible metadata onto an existing FS, but it's not how you would design an ideal from-scratch FS.
Top-of-the-line VAIOs don't exactly fly off the shelves--it's the $800 PCs that do.
It posted as AC, you silly git.
> Maybe I'm just unique or weird or something, but when I'm trying to read, movement in my
> peripheral vision is very distracting.
Maybe I'm just unique or weird or something, but when I'm trying to read, having 100% of CPU cycles gobbled up by some busy, alpha-blending, scrolling-inhibiting quarter-screen ad is very distracting.
> I used to enjoy JonKatz writings.
Me too--well, at least I used to take them seriously. But ever since he's playing the highly original game of Two Degrees Of Separation (from 9/11 topics) on anything he touches, I've lost any respect for him. Jon, not EVERYTHING is related to 9/11, and an amazing number of people don't really care all that much anymore, we don't all live in NYC and see Ground Zero every day. Get over it!
> A brand new VHS video will often have better picture quality than a DVD.
Define "quality". Lines of resolution? Color accuracy? Motion artifacting? Sound? With one exception (motion artifacting, which VHS obviously doesn't have, being an analog format), even a just decent DVD will trounce the best VHS material. If you had said laser disc, you could have had a point. But VHS, and not even SVHS? I don't think so.