If you're using Reader, you might ask, why is there a 3D rendering engine in my PDF reader? Or maybe even do something about it.
Because in the engineering and manufacturing world a 3D model is the best, and often only, way to define the design of an object. It's just another form of data that I want to include in my document.
You may as well ask why there should be support for images or fonts in PDF. Isn't plain text good enough for everyone?
"...And I, I walked over to the, to the bench there, and there is, Group W's where they put you if you may not be moral enough to join the army after committing your special crime, and there was all kinds of mean nasty ugly looking people on the bench there. Mother rapers. Father stabbers. Father rapers!"...and streaming infringers.
The USAF is flying is using C-17s to fly in relief supplies. They are not exactly small. Their payload is 170,900 lb (77,519 kg) of cargo according to Wikipedia.
Given the limitations of the airport capacity, this looks like a great opportunity to show the capabilities of the V-22 Osprey. With a range of nearly 900 miles, they could fly from Florida and land in helicopter mode virtually anywhere in Haiti. With aerial refueling, they would not need to take on fuel in Haiti, which is another scarce resource.
The useful bit about this article is the recognition that the format is the key to any hope of understanding digital data over any period of time. Specifically
if it is not being done by a standards body, it will not help us manage the data in the long run
We can save bits forever, but if we don't know what they mean, then its all a waste. Standardized, open formats provide the only real hope of a Rosetta Stone" for data.
He and his wife should do more research. There are standards for Digital data management concepts, technologies and standards, such as the OAIS Reference Model for an Open Archival Information System (ISO 14721:2003). Maybe he's spending all his time looking at rocks.
Whoever was an earl wanted to be a duke, whoever was a duke wanted to be a king, and whoever was a king wanted to be an
emperor. It's just human nature, and it's how the human brain is wired.
Old man wanna be rich
Rich man wanna be king
And the king ain't satisfied til he rules everything
Raytheon (formerly Beech Aircraft) has been been making all composite fuselage business jets for years. What Boeing is doing is scaling up the process to a larger fuselage diameter.
Do you really think that airlines would have purchased over 600 of the 787 without thoroughly investigating the entire lifecycle of the airplane, including repairs? They're not make multi-billion dollar investments without doing their homework. The order book for the 787 says you're wrong.
The U.S. Navy has recruited Gene Simmons, formerly of the band KISS, to join their elite SEAL division. A spokesman says that Mr. Simmons is uniquely qualified for certain data-intensive missions. When contacted at his home in Beverly Hills, Mr. Simmons responded, "Ah cahnth tathk rith nah".
Exactly how is a future archeologist supposed to work out these non-open file formats? They are only described in internal documents by a company that went out of business centuries ago. Simple tricks like searching for ASCII strings will only work on the most trivial, text based formats. What is "strings" going to tell you about a file that represents a photographic image, a sound clip, a hologram, a 3-D model of a protein molecule or a DNA database? Reverse engineering relies on matching patterns in the data to known representations. If the data uses an unknown representation, reverse engineering isn't going to give you an answer. You need documented file formats.
And your point that government records don't tell us anything about society is ill-informed. The National Archive is a treasure trove of data about U.S. history and culture; everything from the Constitution to the Nixon White House tapes to Civil War photographs and World War II records and correspondence. I think future historians will find this kind of data more revealing that some airhead teenager's blog.
Not being able to read the file format is the heart of the problem. Storing piles of bits is not the problem if you are serious about it.
Is your 1.25TB of data your life's work? Or your company's main business asset? If so, you would have redundant hardware, a backup plan, offsite storage plan, disaster recovery plan and you would periodically validate your media to ensure that you could still read it. You would also have a migration plan based on technology changes and to ensure that your precious bits are migrated well before the media they are on is technically obsolete. Keeping the bits is not the problem, it just takes effort and diligence. If you really want your grandkids to read your stuff, you'll have to get serious. Something a bit more than burn a few CDs and throw them in your closet.
Without knowledge of the file format, all you have is the bits. Trying to reverse engineer a complex, undocumented file format is like trying to break an encrypted message without any idea of message content. Every possible message is equally likely. Think about it, in 50 years you have a file named foo.bar and bunch of bits. It could be anything from the lastest Paris Hilton video to a scan of the Magna Carta to a text version of Mom's favorite cookie recipe. Without the metadata to associate the file to a file format and the documentation of the file format there's no way to reverse engineer anything useful.
Open file formats are the *only* hope to retain useful data for long periods of time. Check out the Electronics Records Archive project at http://www.archives.gov/era/ to see people who are serious about archiving data. Their ability to preserve the data independent of hardware and software system can only be achieved with documented, open file formats.
Hardware and media types can be migrated and validated in a straightforward process. It is the format and representation of the data that is the *hard* problem. Understanding how the information is represented in the digital record is the only way one can conceive of a process to migrate it to a more current representation. Unfortunately, many of the representations are proprietary, e.g., MS Office documents. Open standards for the data representations are the only way forward.
Slashdot Mirror
If you're using Reader, you might ask, why is there a 3D rendering engine in my PDF reader? Or maybe even do something about it.
Because in the engineering and manufacturing world a 3D model is the best, and often only, way to define the design of an object. It's just another form of data that I want to include in my document.
You may as well ask why there should be support for images or fonts in PDF. Isn't plain text good enough for everyone?
The real question is what happened after the everyone starting hitting Reply to All?
What about astrologists and alchemists? Don't they deserve protection too?
"...And I, I walked over to the, to the bench there, and there is, Group W's where they put you if you may not be moral enough to join the army after committing your special crime, and there was all kinds of mean nasty ugly looking people on the bench there. Mother rapers. Father stabbers. Father rapers!" ...and streaming infringers.
The answer is neither here nor there.
The USAF is flying is using C-17s to fly in relief supplies. They are not exactly small. Their payload is 170,900 lb (77,519 kg) of cargo according to Wikipedia.
Given the limitations of the airport capacity, this looks like a great opportunity to show the capabilities of the V-22 Osprey. With a range of nearly 900 miles, they could fly from Florida and land in helicopter mode virtually anywhere in Haiti. With aerial refueling, they would not need to take on fuel in Haiti, which is another scarce resource.
The useful bit about this article is the recognition that the format is the key to any hope of understanding digital data over any period of time. Specifically
We can save bits forever, but if we don't know what they mean, then its all a waste. Standardized, open formats provide the only real hope of a Rosetta Stone" for data.
He and his wife should do more research. There are standards for Digital data management concepts, technologies and standards, such as the OAIS Reference Model for an Open Archival Information System (ISO 14721:2003). Maybe he's spending all his time looking at rocks.
Don't you mean the Client 9 telescope?
Whoever was an earl wanted to be a duke, whoever was a duke wanted to be a king, and whoever was a king wanted to be an emperor. It's just human nature, and it's how the human brain is wired.
Old man wanna be rich
Rich man wanna be king
And the king ain't satisfied til he rules everything
Bruce said it so it must be true.
Raytheon (formerly Beech Aircraft) has been been making all composite fuselage business jets for years. What Boeing is doing is scaling up the process to a larger fuselage diameter.
Do you really think that airlines would have purchased over 600 of the 787 without thoroughly investigating the entire lifecycle of the airplane, including repairs? They're not make multi-billion dollar investments without doing their homework. The order book for the 787 says you're wrong.
Great, this will kill my favorite TV show: "House". Every episode will have the same plot line...
Other doctor: "The patient is complaining of chest pain and tingling in..."
Dr. House: "Just run the frickin' DNA test and leave me alone!!"
.
.
.
Rest of the hour filled by witty banter and commercials.
The U.S. Navy has recruited Gene Simmons, formerly of the band KISS, to join their elite SEAL division. A spokesman says that Mr. Simmons is uniquely qualified for certain data-intensive missions. When contacted at his home in Beverly Hills, Mr. Simmons responded, "Ah cahnth tathk rith nah".
Exactly how is a future archeologist supposed to work out these non-open file formats? They are only described in internal documents by a company that went out of business centuries ago. Simple tricks like searching for ASCII strings will only work on the most trivial, text based formats. What is "strings" going to tell you about a file that represents a photographic image, a sound clip, a hologram, a 3-D model of a protein molecule or a DNA database? Reverse engineering relies on matching patterns in the data to known representations. If the data uses an unknown representation, reverse engineering isn't going to give you an answer. You need documented file formats.
And your point that government records don't tell us anything about society is ill-informed. The National Archive is a treasure trove of data about U.S. history and culture; everything from the Constitution to the Nixon White House tapes to Civil War photographs and World War II records and correspondence. I think future historians will find this kind of data more revealing that some airhead teenager's blog.
Wrong!
Not being able to read the file format is the heart of the problem. Storing piles of bits is not the problem if you are serious about it.
Is your 1.25TB of data your life's work? Or your company's main business asset? If so, you would have redundant hardware, a backup plan, offsite storage plan, disaster recovery plan and you would periodically validate your media to ensure that you could still read it. You would also have a migration plan based on technology changes and to ensure that your precious bits are migrated well before the media they are on is technically obsolete. Keeping the bits is not the problem, it just takes effort and diligence. If you really want your grandkids to read your stuff, you'll have to get serious. Something a bit more than burn a few CDs and throw them in your closet.
Without knowledge of the file format, all you have is the bits. Trying to reverse engineer a complex, undocumented file format is like trying to break an encrypted message without any idea of message content. Every possible message is equally likely. Think about it, in 50 years you have a file named foo.bar and bunch of bits. It could be anything from the lastest Paris Hilton video to a scan of the Magna Carta to a text version of Mom's favorite cookie recipe. Without the metadata to associate the file to a file format and the documentation of the file format there's no way to reverse engineer anything useful.
Open file formats are the *only* hope to retain useful data for long periods of time. Check out the Electronics Records Archive project at http://www.archives.gov/era/ to see people who are serious about archiving data. Their ability to preserve the data independent of hardware and software system can only be achieved with documented, open file formats.
When a vendor (Microsoft in this case) says "Open" what they mean is "Open your wallet if you want to use our format".
As Mr. Ballmer would say.
Hardware and media types can be migrated and validated in a straightforward process. It is the format and representation of the data that is the *hard* problem. Understanding how the information is represented in the digital record is the only way one can conceive of a process to migrate it to a more current representation. Unfortunately, many of the representations are proprietary, e.g., MS Office documents. Open standards for the data representations are the only way forward.
Today, Bill Gates was overhead complaining "If I only had a dollar for every spam message I get! Wait a minute, I do!"
They should check out the going-out-of-business sale at Transmeta. Pick up a few dumpsters of low power chips.
Their software may be Windows only but you can create the design in another package and export it to a DXF file that they can import.
What they really need to support is STEP (ISO 10303), an open format for CAD model exchange rather than the proprietary DXF format.
Shouldn't that be Mr. Johnson, from ManGro...
Arividerci Microsoft...
Maglev train 400 km/hr = 240 miles/hr
.85 Mach = 580 miles/hr
Jet airplane
You must like large ballparks. For short trips, not a big difference in travel time but for transcontinental, big difference.
3. Work to bring service nearly to par while undercutting all competition with illegaly earned war chest.
Please, the correct terminology is "Cut off their air supply".
500 quatloos on the newcomers!! (STOS)
I saw this coming. You see I have this small camera secretly installed in their CEO's office...