I've mulled this occasionally, but I suspect the late 20th century and early 21st century will become a mini-dark ages (at least for personal or family things).
The reasons for this: 1. depressingly high failure rate of hard disks 2. lack of long term storage media 3. obsolete formats
As for tape, DLTtape (invented for the venerable VAX) is supposed to be able to last 25 years in good condition. How many people buy DLTtape drives? They aren't cheap and the tapes are not cheap. They are about the only thing with the capacity to store all your photos and video on one cartridge.
Digital photos and video seem like great things (and are: I'd hate to have to edit my videos the old fashioned way) but there is a sting in the tail that most people won't expect. If I want to look at a photograph my Dad took in 1972, I just pull it out the draw and look at it. No maintenance has had to be done on that photograph - it's just been stored in a cool, dry, dark place.
Digital data on the other hand needs periodic maintenance. If a format you've used becomes obsolete, you have to go through and update your entire library. You have to periodically back it up. You have to periodically cut it to media like CD. How much family history have people lost already due to dead hard disks, and not realising the need to continuously back up and format shift? Even if a DLTtape cartridge is still intact and readable in 75 years time, will there be anything to read it? Will JPEG decoders come with everyone's device to view photos?
I've submitted quite a few somewhat obscure but interesting to the Slashdot crowd stories. I'm sure I was the only submitter too on some of them - they were usually a take on something topical at the time, but not mainstream. The only story I've ever had accepted was a dupe! It wasn't when I submitted it, but someone else's story got the front page. A little later, my sumission was accepted, too (it was the FAT filesystem patent rejection).
Let's look at the supply and demand: apparently only 1 in 20 submissions ever makes it. Therefore, there is a massive oversupply, and it's quite clear that people don't need a link back to their website to be encouraged to submit stories to Slashdot.
Editors shouldn't just selectively remove link backs to a submitter's website - they should not put a link to the submitter at all, except maybe to the user's Slashdot user page (not journal). Perhaps I could understand the need to encourage people to submit stores if there were so few that the queue was almost empty, and every submission had to be posted - but this is clearly not the case.
Finally, I don't think people would have noticed * * Beatles-Beatles if his name wasn't so prominent, for example, if his username had been Johndoe or something else inconspicuous. Same goes for Roland Piquepaille who also has a prominent and eyecatching name that you'll remember the second time you see it - so some of the whole * * Beatles-Beatles controversy and Roland Piquepaille controversy is stirred up merely because their names stick in the mind.
You may be a videophile, but the vast majority of the population is not: they are still content with the quality of VHS, and moved to DVD not because of the quality of DVD but the convenience. I'm sure there will be a market for HD-DVD and Blu-Ray, just as there was a market for Laserdisc - but it will be a long time before any HD-formats become mainstream, especially if the HD-formats remain low volume for a long time (meaning players and discs remain comparatively expensive compared to high volume DVD).
Your data is still not backed up (and now you have the problem of how to back up your data). Although your data may no longer be vulnerable to the failure of a single disk, it is vulnerable to the following (which is by no means exhaustive):
- fire, possibly flood or other physical disasters. - accidental deletion/overwrites - power supply failure (causing damage to disks) - some controller failure modes
But none of them included vandalism which is essentially what this is. You may understand this better if half your day involved beating off internet lusers from your servers.
The waste problem from burning fossil fuels is arguably worse than the waste problem from nuclear power. At least nuclear waste is solid and collectable in a small area - by contrast, the waste from fossil fuel gets spread all over the planet and is essentially impossible to dispose of safely.
The trouble is right now we have no practical means of harnessing this huge source of energy. The 50 years that conventional nuclear will buy may give enough time to better develop this.
Hydrogen has some specialised uses - consider an offshore windfarm: when the wind farm is generating more electricity than demanded, it can store the excess as hydrogen. When the wind is light, the wind farm can make up for the shortfall by passing the stored hydrogen through a fuel cell. (Of course, this isn't without some engineering challenges - elecrolysing straight sea water will result in all sorts of nasty chemicals such as chlorine and sodium hydroxide being released which would be a pollution nightmare).
This luser was trying to set up a DDOS attack (even if it was a feeble one). Additionally, he's not a boy or a kid, he's a man - he's old enough to be married, go to war, fly a plane, father a child. He has adult rights and responsibilities.
Lusers like this is why September 1993 has still not ended. He is no better than a spammer or a skript kiddie. I hope he is punished to the extent the law allows for his actions.
He is not a 'kid' or a 'boy'; in most of the world, being 18 means you are an adult - you can vote, you can die for your country, and in most of the western world (execpt of course the United States) you can have a beer. If you are 18, you are responsible for your actions as an adult. It was still an attempt at a denial of service attack and if there are consequences for organizing a DOS attack, he should face them.
I wish operating systems *did not* come with frigging sound tracks. Every morning at work I have to listen to "Ding d'd'ding derr derr" as people log on, and "Ding ding doo ding!" when they go home and all other associated unnecessary sound. It would be nice if these sound tracks were off by default. Mind you, it used to be worse with Windows 95 - dong bllllllooob BING BIng Bing bing...
It's also this ability to steer that allowed me to avoid hitting a sheep at high speed when one darted out of a field straight into the path of my car and froze. ABS meant me, my car, and one ewe are a lot better off today than they might have been (not that there's a shortage of sheep here, there are more sheep than people).
It's probably no coincidence (that during the increase of ABS equipped cars) that the incidence of flipping a vehicle has increased with the incidence of tall vehicles. In my low car with decent handling, if I remained on the road, I don't think I could flip it if I tried (on the other hand, leaving the road and running into divots and ditches - well then all bets are off). I'm not so sure about taller vehicles with higher centre of gravity, which have increased in popularity as ABS has become common.
One thing about "unintended consequences" that particularly rests in the mind is this. The old Austin Mini had a great safety record. No, it wasn't crashworthy at all - in fact it woudln't meet any half modern crashworthiness standard. The thing is you felt VULNERABLE in a Mini, and Mini drivers drove accordingly. That doesn't mean driving everywhere at a snail's pace, but not being reckless.
It is likely that this was not caused by the ABS itself, but an unintended consequence of ABS - people have a car with ABS, therefore feel safer, therefore drive faster or drive more recklessly because they think they can violate the laws of physics because they have ABS. I bet if a driver continues to drive carefully with an ABS equipped car they will be better off.
Vim (VI improved) - I'm pretty certain it's been available for the iSeries for a while now. So what if patches come on 'tapes'? You know what a.tar.gz or.tar.bz2 file is on other operating systems? Yep, it's a compressed tape image. 'tar' stands for 'tape archive'. It's just a format.
This is not a buffer overflow exploit - it's WMF working as it was designed to work - i.e. WMF was a security trainwreck just waiting to be discovered.
On the subject of buffer overflows, the OpenBSD crew have solved that one for x86 - W^X, a secure malloc and free implementation and everything being compiled with ProPolice.
This is exactly what's behind the "hoodie" fashion amongst British teenagers at the moment. A peaked cap with a hood over it can obscure most of the face from CCTV cameras, which are almost universally mounted well above head level.
If the worst comes to the worst, and there's no way of hacking the hardware, simply buy a Region 1 DVD-ROM drive and have two DVD-ROM drives in your system. I know that sort of sucks, but DVD-ROM drives are so cheap now that it's probably a viable solution.
Thanks! I bought my DVD-ROM drive that's mounted in my current PC back in 1999. It has even survived a murder attempt by an exploding power supply (which killed the CD-RW drive, mobo, CPU and graphics card) in the old PC. Plays DVD movies fine.
It's quite simple; if you don't like the way content is encoded then don't buy it. If you don't like the features of an operating system, don't buy it. No one is forcing anyone to install Windows Vista. You can stay with Windows XP, or use an alternative operating system if you want something newer.
I suspect the robot isn't a performance demonstrator, rather, it's just a first step. You could have said in the context of travel about the Wright Flyer too, but there's no denying that powered flying did eventually develop into something useful. This may also develop into something useful even if it isn't now.
Slashdot Mirror
I've mulled this occasionally, but I suspect the late 20th century and early 21st century will become a mini-dark ages (at least for personal or family things).
The reasons for this:
1. depressingly high failure rate of hard disks
2. lack of long term storage media
3. obsolete formats
As for tape, DLTtape (invented for the venerable VAX) is supposed to be able to last 25 years in good condition. How many people buy DLTtape drives? They aren't cheap and the tapes are not cheap. They are about the only thing with the capacity to store all your photos and video on one cartridge.
Digital photos and video seem like great things (and are: I'd hate to have to edit my videos the old fashioned way) but there is a sting in the tail that most people won't expect. If I want to look at a photograph my Dad took in 1972, I just pull it out the draw and look at it. No maintenance has had to be done on that photograph - it's just been stored in a cool, dry, dark place.
Digital data on the other hand needs periodic maintenance. If a format you've used becomes obsolete, you have to go through and update your entire library. You have to periodically back it up. You have to periodically cut it to media like CD. How much family history have people lost already due to dead hard disks, and not realising the need to continuously back up and format shift? Even if a DLTtape cartridge is still intact and readable in 75 years time, will there be anything to read it? Will JPEG decoders come with everyone's device to view photos?
Oh - and while we are at it, why not a moderation system for actual articles too (especially in the Mysterious Future: -1, Dupe). And I want a pony!
I've submitted quite a few somewhat obscure but interesting to the Slashdot crowd stories. I'm sure I was the only submitter too on some of them - they were usually a take on something topical at the time, but not mainstream. The only story I've ever had accepted was a dupe! It wasn't when I submitted it, but someone else's story got the front page. A little later, my sumission was accepted, too (it was the FAT filesystem patent rejection).
Let's look at the supply and demand: apparently only 1 in 20 submissions ever makes it. Therefore, there is a massive oversupply, and it's quite clear that people don't need a link back to their website to be encouraged to submit stories to Slashdot.
Editors shouldn't just selectively remove link backs to a submitter's website - they should not put a link to the submitter at all, except maybe to the user's Slashdot user page (not journal). Perhaps I could understand the need to encourage people to submit stores if there were so few that the queue was almost empty, and every submission had to be posted - but this is clearly not the case.
Finally, I don't think people would have noticed * * Beatles-Beatles if his name wasn't so prominent, for example, if his username had been Johndoe or something else inconspicuous. Same goes for Roland Piquepaille who also has a prominent and eyecatching name that you'll remember the second time you see it - so some of the whole * * Beatles-Beatles controversy and Roland Piquepaille controversy is stirred up merely because their names stick in the mind.
Oh good god, they've managed to find a word even more annoying than blogosphere: blogozine :/
You may be a videophile, but the vast majority of the population is not: they are still content with the quality of VHS, and moved to DVD not because of the quality of DVD but the convenience. I'm sure there will be a market for HD-DVD and Blu-Ray, just as there was a market for Laserdisc - but it will be a long time before any HD-formats become mainstream, especially if the HD-formats remain low volume for a long time (meaning players and discs remain comparatively expensive compared to high volume DVD).
Your data is still not backed up (and now you have the problem of how to back up your data). Although your data may no longer be vulnerable to the failure of a single disk, it is vulnerable to the following (which is by no means exhaustive):
- fire, possibly flood or other physical disasters.
- accidental deletion/overwrites
- power supply failure (causing damage to disks)
- some controller failure modes
RAID is not a substitute for backups.
Oh, I did stupid thigns alright.
But none of them included vandalism which is essentially what this is. You may understand this better if half your day involved beating off internet lusers from your servers.
The waste problem from burning fossil fuels is arguably worse than the waste problem from nuclear power. At least nuclear waste is solid and collectable in a small area - by contrast, the waste from fossil fuel gets spread all over the planet and is essentially impossible to dispose of safely.
The trouble is right now we have no practical means of harnessing this huge source of energy. The 50 years that conventional nuclear will buy may give enough time to better develop this.
Hydrogen has some specialised uses - consider an offshore windfarm: when the wind farm is generating more electricity than demanded, it can store the excess as hydrogen. When the wind is light, the wind farm can make up for the shortfall by passing the stored hydrogen through a fuel cell. (Of course, this isn't without some engineering challenges - elecrolysing straight sea water will result in all sorts of nasty chemicals such as chlorine and sodium hydroxide being released which would be a pollution nightmare).
Hiring to offset taxes - why? An extra employee costs a LOT more than keeping the money and paying the tax on it.
Offer him SUPPORT?
This luser was trying to set up a DDOS attack (even if it was a feeble one). Additionally, he's not a boy or a kid, he's a man - he's old enough to be married, go to war, fly a plane, father a child. He has adult rights and responsibilities.
Lusers like this is why September 1993 has still not ended. He is no better than a spammer or a skript kiddie. I hope he is punished to the extent the law allows for his actions.
Why are people supporting this idiot?
He is not a 'kid' or a 'boy'; in most of the world, being 18 means you are an adult - you can vote, you can die for your country, and in most of the western world (execpt of course the United States) you can have a beer. If you are 18, you are responsible for your actions as an adult. It was still an attempt at a denial of service attack and if there are consequences for organizing a DOS attack, he should face them.
I wish operating systems *did not* come with frigging sound tracks. Every morning at work I have to listen to "Ding d'd'ding derr derr" as people log on, and "Ding ding doo ding!" when they go home and all other associated unnecessary sound. It would be nice if these sound tracks were off by default. Mind you, it used to be worse with Windows 95 - dong bllllllooob BING BIng Bing bing...
It's also this ability to steer that allowed me to avoid hitting a sheep at high speed when one darted out of a field straight into the path of my car and froze. ABS meant me, my car, and one ewe are a lot better off today than they might have been (not that there's a shortage of sheep here, there are more sheep than people).
It's probably no coincidence (that during the increase of ABS equipped cars) that the incidence of flipping a vehicle has increased with the incidence of tall vehicles. In my low car with decent handling, if I remained on the road, I don't think I could flip it if I tried (on the other hand, leaving the road and running into divots and ditches - well then all bets are off). I'm not so sure about taller vehicles with higher centre of gravity, which have increased in popularity as ABS has become common.
One thing about "unintended consequences" that particularly rests in the mind is this. The old Austin Mini had a great safety record. No, it wasn't crashworthy at all - in fact it woudln't meet any half modern crashworthiness standard. The thing is you felt VULNERABLE in a Mini, and Mini drivers drove accordingly. That doesn't mean driving everywhere at a snail's pace, but not being reckless.
It is likely that this was not caused by the ABS itself, but an unintended consequence of ABS - people have a car with ABS, therefore feel safer, therefore drive faster or drive more recklessly because they think they can violate the laws of physics because they have ABS. I bet if a driver continues to drive carefully with an ABS equipped car they will be better off.
Vim (VI improved) - I'm pretty certain it's been available for the iSeries for a while now. .tar.gz or .tar.bz2 file is on other operating systems? Yep, it's a compressed tape image. 'tar' stands for 'tape archive'. It's just a format.
So what if patches come on 'tapes'? You know what a
This is not a buffer overflow exploit - it's WMF working as it was designed to work - i.e. WMF was a security trainwreck just waiting to be discovered.
On the subject of buffer overflows, the OpenBSD crew have solved that one for x86 - W^X, a secure malloc and free implementation and everything being compiled with ProPolice.
This is exactly what's behind the "hoodie" fashion amongst British teenagers at the moment. A peaked cap with a hood over it can obscure most of the face from CCTV cameras, which are almost universally mounted well above head level.
If the worst comes to the worst, and there's no way of hacking the hardware, simply buy a Region 1 DVD-ROM drive and have two DVD-ROM drives in your system. I know that sort of sucks, but DVD-ROM drives are so cheap now that it's probably a viable solution.
I have a 2004 Powerbook, and it can't play out of region disks regardless of the software I use.
Thanks! I bought my DVD-ROM drive that's mounted in my current PC back in 1999. It has even survived a murder attempt by an exploding power supply (which killed the CD-RW drive, mobo, CPU and graphics card) in the old PC. Plays DVD movies fine.
It's quite simple; if you don't like the way content is encoded then don't buy it. If you don't like the features of an operating system, don't buy it. No one is forcing anyone to install Windows Vista. You can stay with Windows XP, or use an alternative operating system if you want something newer.
I suspect the robot isn't a performance demonstrator, rather, it's just a first step. You could have said in the context of travel about the Wright Flyer too, but there's no denying that powered flying did eventually develop into something useful. This may also develop into something useful even if it isn't now.