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.
>> 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.
>> 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.
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.
>> 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.
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.
>> 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.
>>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
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/ros et ta.html
>>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.
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.
>> We don't have GOTOs in modern programming languages (should I put one back in so that you can write spaghetti code if you prefer it?).
Every language has a goto that lets you jump to a specific label.
I use goto's all the time to keep from nesting if thens 50 levels deep. Or to jump out of a set of nested loops to a found or not found label. Goto's are one of the best feature of any language, but like any other feature, they are only good if they make the program easier to read and not harder to read.
I think his views on interface design are just as screwy. I hate many of the things on a Mac, but am unable to change them, because the OS won't let me. I prefer to have my min max and close buttons on the right hand side, because they are easier to use that way, when switching between mac, linux and windows. It is annoying to have them on the left hand side. I also hate how applications don't go away when you close their last screen.
--
What I want to be able to do is to make any changes I want to the user interface and save these changes to a web site on the internet. Then I want to goto any computer and set a preference to down load all my settings from the web site. Then I want the OS to always act like I want it to act. No matter what OS it is.
It is time to divorce the behavior of the GUI from the OSes and make that a seperate fully skinnable layer that is fully cross platform and should control even how applications of certain types layout and present their controls. Then I can enjoy the same computing experience that works for me on any system that I am forced to use. Not screwed up system that some self proclaimed GUI designer has decided is best for me.
You just have to run winlite against a windows 9x machine to totally remove IE to see that microsoft is full of crap. An article on this very topic is here.
Actually, it turns out that having a pre-emptable kernel helps with server operations too. When the client request comes in, or the I/O operation completes the pre-empt patch lets the operation be serviced quicker. This makes the server more responsive to client requests and lets it read or write files as quickly as the hardware allows.
This patch has been needed for a long, long time, and with the new O(1) schedualler linux is now as scalable as any other OS in the world. I am really interested in seeing how Linux 2.4.6 will do on an 8 way or 32 way machine. Are there anymore limitations left in scaling linux to high numbers of processors and large amounts of RAM? If so, how hard will it be to fix these issues, without affecting a user on a single processor box?:)
I don't think we need to fork to support both the high end and low end with a single kernel.
Last year, didn't they talk about a raw filesystem mode that skipped the kernel buffering to allow databases to have raw unbuffered access to the hard drives?
And I seem to vaguely recall hearing about a new kind of IP mode to allow a single server to host tens of thousands of connections in a much more efficient manner than TCP allows. This would be useful for instant messanger and peer to peer clients.
Anyone know anymore about either of these two projects? If I remember it right it was from an article about the top Linux people getting together at a linux world and having a couple of days of meetings.
It would be interesting to have a CDROM with a complete history of every computing device, and a simulation, or emulation of each one. Complete with pictures of the machines, the design team and full technical specifications.
The people who did all the design work would all be talked about too. And any publically available writings would be there too.
How cool would it be to browse a history book on computer and actually be able to bring up an emulator of the machine in question? Aren't there emulators for most of these things anyway?
Use a very general purpose emulator that uses a specification file that fully describes the complete machine. The specification file could be in XML so that other programs can mine the config files for data, like a program that will tell you the code for the letter A on every computer ever made. Or tell you every computer ever made that used ascii.
It was very poorly written and does not compile as is. It's a wonder it ran at all.
I dislike the comercial clause, but I wonder how legal a clause like that really is.
As far as I know, copyright is what covers source code, and copyright merely restricts duplication, not use. You can't write a book and put a clause that restricts how the information in the book is used. If Coke published a manual of operation for it's business then someone could start another Cola company based on those procedures, as long as they legally bought the number of copies of the book they needed. They could even publish a seperate book with changes that apply to the first book, as long as the second book didn't violate fair use.
This is why no one has ever taken the GPL to court, because if you won the case and broke the GPL, then you would lose the right to redistribute GPL code. It is a form of legal kung foo, using the oppenents strength against them.
What I am going to do is do the first step of a black box implementation. I will take this code and write up a full spec in the next 2 months. It will fully explain every aspect of operation of a Myth II server. Someone else can then use my work to implement a myth II server that is fully open.
I am wondering if we need to add a new clause to the GPL to make sure that any client that is connected to a GPL'ed server is allowed to access that servers code as well. It seems to me that these.NET services could steal GPL code and run them internally inside the.NET framework with proprietary extensions. Then not release those extensions because they are not distributing the code, only using the code internally.
OK, I find compression interesting... I think that you could use this to compress a 3D video stream, by essentially "seeing" each object as a seperate stream of data in the image and compressing each seperately.
You might be able to actually generate a 360 degree view of the background and encode the distance and angle of the view in each scene, then place the seperate actors into the scene.
The really cool thing about this technique is that it would make it easy to delete or replace any one object in a scene in a video.
>> Open Source software," he continues, "is not per se a guarantee of free competition."
This is true, microsoft embraces and extends open source software all the time. BSD socket code and kerberos come to mind. But never anything with a GPL license.
It is so hilarious that they are claiming to be discriminated against, after all those years of Microsofts anti-competitive behavior. I bet a lot of companies complained that microsofts tactics were unfair too. And the courts agreed. Microsoft is a convicted criminal, on 7 counts that are just short of the same charges that they use to put away mob bosses for life.
Microsoft should just consider this to be an innovative method of competition. Open standards, learn them and love them.
Fully open file formats and compliance with non encumbered open standards is the future. Microsoft has already proven time and time again that proprietary software with hidden code is not secure. It is more expensive and it just isn't as flexible. Every other piece of computer equipment got 10 times cheaper and 100 times more powerful over the past 10 years, but the software is no faster now than then. And it costs more, it is now the most expensive single part of a computer system.
Of course there was a reaction to this inequitable pricing and the illegle tactics required to enforce the monopoly. Free software. The vast majority of open source software is written by highly experienced computer experts who are sick and tired of dealing with computers that look pretty but constantly crash and lose work.
Look for computer science to begin rapidly advancing with open sharing and improvements to be made with total comunications in the precise languages used to communicate our intentions to computers.
I am very thankful that Linus finally "saw the light" and started using a source code control system.
I really like the new change logs, I have always hated the old change logs as being too uninformative. One of the really interesting things for me about a source code control system is that it preserves a lot more of the history of the source code than the tar balls do.
It is also really cool how it branches the source for every patch and checks in the code with the users name as the one who checked it in and the body of the email as the comment. If Linus can find a way to also check in his rejected comments on a patch then that will also be very useful. It would be interesting to capture a little bit of the why instead of just the how in the kernel development process.
To apply a patch you just have to merge the branch that contains the patch back into the main development branch, fix any conflicts, compile, fix it so it works right and then commit.:)
And Linus will never lose another patch again, they will be saved for all time in the source tree under a seperate branch.
Once Linux lets his inner sanctum of kernel developers all start merging approved patches into his main branch then we will see the kernel development really speed up.
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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.
>>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.
>> 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.
>> 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.
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.
>> 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.
>> 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.
>> 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.
errr, because we can't read a laser disk that was written in 1986? _That_ is what this entire discussion is about, after all.
Good point, what if there was a cubic mile of low level radiation? Is that enough to instantly kill someone?
>>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
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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
>>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?
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.
>> We don't have GOTOs in modern programming languages (should I put one back in so that you can write spaghetti code if you prefer it?).
Every language has a goto that lets you jump to a specific label.
I use goto's all the time to keep from nesting if thens 50 levels deep. Or to jump out of a set of nested loops to a found or not found label. Goto's are one of the best feature of any language, but like any other feature, they are only good if they make the program easier to read and not harder to read.
I think his views on interface design are just as screwy. I hate many of the things on a Mac, but am unable to change them, because the OS won't let me. I prefer to have my min max and close buttons on the right hand side, because they are easier to use that way, when switching between mac, linux and windows. It is annoying to have them on the left hand side. I also hate how applications don't go away when you close their last screen.
--
What I want to be able to do is to make any changes I want to the user interface and save these changes to a web site on the internet. Then I want to goto any computer and set a preference to down load all my settings from the web site. Then I want the OS to always act like I want it to act. No matter what OS it is.
It is time to divorce the behavior of the GUI from the OSes and make that a seperate fully skinnable layer that is fully cross platform and should control even how applications of certain types layout and present their controls. Then I can enjoy the same computing experience that works for me on any system that I am forced to use. Not screwed up system that some self proclaimed GUI designer has decided is best for me.
that the RIAA and the MPAA aren't the same small group of people? Gee, you have a lot to learn.
You just have to run winlite against a windows 9x machine to totally remove IE to see that microsoft is full of crap. An article on this very topic is here.
Actually, it turns out that having a pre-emptable kernel helps with server operations too. When the client request comes in, or the I/O operation completes the pre-empt patch lets the operation be serviced quicker. This makes the server more responsive to client requests and lets it read or write files as quickly as the hardware allows.
:)
This patch has been needed for a long, long time, and with the new O(1) schedualler linux is now as scalable as any other OS in the world. I am really interested in seeing how Linux 2.4.6 will do on an 8 way or 32 way machine. Are there anymore limitations left in scaling linux to high numbers of processors and large amounts of RAM? If so, how hard will it be to fix these issues, without affecting a user on a single processor box?
I don't think we need to fork to support both the high end and low end with a single kernel.
Last year, didn't they talk about a raw filesystem mode that skipped the kernel buffering to allow databases to have raw unbuffered access to the hard drives?
And I seem to vaguely recall hearing about a new kind of IP mode to allow a single server to host tens of thousands of connections in a much more efficient manner than TCP allows. This would be useful for instant messanger and peer to peer clients.
Anyone know anymore about either of these two projects? If I remember it right it was from an article about the top Linux people getting together at a linux world and having a couple of days of meetings.
It would be interesting to have a CDROM with a complete history of every computing device, and a simulation, or emulation of each one. Complete with pictures of the machines, the design team and full technical specifications.
The people who did all the design work would all be talked about too. And any publically available writings would be there too.
How cool would it be to browse a history book on computer and actually be able to bring up an emulator of the machine in question? Aren't there emulators for most of these things anyway?
Use a very general purpose emulator that uses a specification file that fully describes the complete machine. The specification file could be in XML so that other programs can mine the config files for data, like a program that will tell you the code for the letter A on every computer ever made. Or tell you every computer ever made that used ascii.
I was noticing this too. Blaise Pascal and Ada Lovelace did all their work before 1900.
Weren't there also french looms in the late 1800's that ran from punch cards?
The timeline they have up doesn't even start until 1945. Maybe they should rename it the "Digital" Computing Museum?
You gave some great links there! Thanks!
It was very poorly written and does not compile as is. It's a wonder it ran at all.
.NET services could steal GPL code and run them internally inside the .NET framework with proprietary extensions. Then not release those extensions because they are not distributing the code, only using the code internally.
I dislike the comercial clause, but I wonder how legal a clause like that really is.
As far as I know, copyright is what covers source code, and copyright merely restricts duplication, not use. You can't write a book and put a clause that restricts how the information in the book is used. If Coke published a manual of operation for it's business then someone could start another Cola company based on those procedures, as long as they legally bought the number of copies of the book they needed. They could even publish a seperate book with changes that apply to the first book, as long as the second book didn't violate fair use.
This is why no one has ever taken the GPL to court, because if you won the case and broke the GPL, then you would lose the right to redistribute GPL code. It is a form of legal kung foo, using the oppenents strength against them.
What I am going to do is do the first step of a black box implementation. I will take this code and write up a full spec in the next 2 months. It will fully explain every aspect of operation of a Myth II server. Someone else can then use my work to implement a myth II server that is fully open.
I am wondering if we need to add a new clause to the GPL to make sure that any client that is connected to a GPL'ed server is allowed to access that servers code as well. It seems to me that these
OK, I find compression interesting... I think that you could use this to compress a 3D video stream, by essentially "seeing" each object as a seperate stream of data in the image and compressing each seperately.
You might be able to actually generate a 360 degree view of the background and encode the distance and angle of the view in each scene, then place the seperate actors into the scene.
The really cool thing about this technique is that it would make it easy to delete or replace any one object in a scene in a video.
>> Open Source software," he continues, "is not per se a guarantee of free competition."
This is true, microsoft embraces and extends open source software all the time. BSD socket code and kerberos come to mind. But never anything with a GPL license.
It is so hilarious that they are claiming to be discriminated against, after all those years of Microsofts anti-competitive behavior. I bet a lot of companies complained that microsofts tactics were unfair too. And the courts agreed. Microsoft is a convicted criminal, on 7 counts that are just short of the same charges that they use to put away mob bosses for life.
Microsoft should just consider this to be an innovative method of competition. Open standards, learn them and love them.
Fully open file formats and compliance with non encumbered open standards is the future. Microsoft has already proven time and time again that proprietary software with hidden code is not secure. It is more expensive and it just isn't as flexible. Every other piece of computer equipment got 10 times cheaper and 100 times more powerful over the past 10 years, but the software is no faster now than then. And it costs more, it is now the most expensive single part of a computer system.
Of course there was a reaction to this inequitable pricing and the illegle tactics required to enforce the monopoly. Free software. The vast majority of open source software is written by highly experienced computer experts who are sick and tired of dealing with computers that look pretty but constantly crash and lose work.
Look for computer science to begin rapidly advancing with open sharing and improvements to be made with total comunications in the precise languages used to communicate our intentions to computers.
I am very thankful that Linus finally "saw the light" and started using a source code control system.
:)
I really like the new change logs, I have always hated the old change logs as being too uninformative. One of the really interesting things for me about a source code control system is that it preserves a lot more of the history of the source code than the tar balls do.
It is also really cool how it branches the source for every patch and checks in the code with the users name as the one who checked it in and the body of the email as the comment. If Linus can find a way to also check in his rejected comments on a patch then that will also be very useful. It would be interesting to capture a little bit of the why instead of just the how in the kernel development process.
To apply a patch you just have to merge the branch that contains the patch back into the main development branch, fix any conflicts, compile, fix it so it works right and then commit.
And Linus will never lose another patch again, they will be saved for all time in the source tree under a seperate branch.
Once Linux lets his inner sanctum of kernel developers all start merging approved patches into his main branch then we will see the kernel development really speed up.
Thanks!
hmmmm, kidnapping/cyborg replacement _does_ explain Miguel de Icaza suddenly wanting to rewrite Gnome in .NET.