I have to second this particular book recommendation. It was an outstanding read. But the previous poster failed to mention that the book is best read after downing a six pack of Jolt Cola.
My guess is that the only thing they could legitimately open source (verb) is the Loki Installer. Maybe there are a few other auxillary bits (porting tools and whatnot) that they would be able to release. The games are still owned by the original publishers.
+3, insightful? I'd heard rumors that the moderators were smoking crack, but now I have proof.
First point: Everyone and their dog knows that PI does not equal 3. I've argued with many kneejerk biblical fundamentalists, and not one of them was willing to claim that 3 is a more accurate figure for PI than ~3.1415.
Second point: Chronicles is part of the Jewish canon.
Third point: Someone needs to get their irony detector checked.
* Hardened & ruggedized Linux based UNIX kernel
* SMB & AppleShare IP compatible file services
* SMTP, POP3, & IMAP4 mail protocols supported
* WebMail support
[blah blah blah]
So either the general statement doesn't apply in this instance, or the servers also include a copy of NT's kernel for no particular reason.
By the way, how does one "harden and ruggedize" a Linux-based kernel? Expose it to gamma radiation? Take it to see really violent movies? Make it do push-ups?
More interestingly, how does one do this, and then sell it with a computer, without releasing the source? I'm having trouble telling whether this is a "real" computer or an embedded device.
I finally figured out what they mean by "practically random data."
Theoretically, any data set could be stumbled upon by random generation. So they've carefully culled, from the output of a random number generator, certain data sets to compress.
For example:
3.14159265358979323846
or
0123456789012345678901
or
0101010101010101010101
or
0000000000000000000000
As the power of computers increases according to Moore's "Law", larger sets of highly compressible random data will be obtained.
Technically, in such a case, you wouldn't be compressing the data. You'd simply be explaining how to reproduce the data. Otherwise, I could tell you
sum (n=0 to n=infinity) (-1^n)*4/(n+1)
and claim to have achieved "infinite compression."
This formula gives you 4 + 4/3 - 4/9 + 4/27 - 4/81. . . which is one way of calculating PI.
Of course, such things have great uses. Like being able to create a random terrain generator that takes a single seed number and creates a literally infinite amount of information from it.
But * if you wanted to be able to compress any set of, say, terrain points in a similar manner, you would need to create a new set of algorithms for that set of points. It doesn't seem like finding those algorithms would be a computationally trivial thing to do, and some sets of data would be impossible to analyze. For truly random data (not just data like PI whose appearance of randomness is actually governed by a simple, strict algorithm) the rule set you would have to transmit along with the data should be as large as the space it was meant to save.
So in closing, there are some sets of data that, despite an appearance of randomness, aren't.
I take back my earlier claim. The formula for PI really is a compression algorithm. It's just that there are only a limited set of data strings that are compressible by similarly simple algorithms. If you wanted to compress 3.14109265398979..., you would have to throw in an exception for the unPI'ish digit. The less "Pi-like" the data set, the less you would gain by using such an algorithm.
* IANAInformation Theory Expert. Come to think of it, I suck at math, so I hope I haven't mislead anyone.
I hope not everyone is like you. Of course, I'm referring to the Mozilla team (slogan: 1.0 sometime before the sun burns out).
Yes, I am exaggerating for humorous effect. I'm sure that, 7 billion years from now, they'll be very close to releasing Mozilla 3.0.
IE, on the other hand, will be up to IE 73,033,075.1, will take up approximately 300 petabytes of storage, and will have a security flaw which will give hackers root access to your machine before you even pop the CD into the tray.
Intel will be destroyed as a corporation after their experimental 27 quintillion transistor processor goes critical, destroying both their research facility and half of North America. Overclocking enthusiasts will then be rounded up and shot for the safety of mankind.
Funny: Some teen comedies, some Jim Carrey flicks, some recycled out-of-date "Windows is unreliable" jokes.
Not funny: Someone who passes judgment on an author whose name he can't even spell correctly, and uses boldfaced type to tell the moderators that he's untouchable.
Barry is simply writing to his audience, the vast majority of whom find computer usage to be a frustrating and intimidating experience. I only found the article to be a bit amusing, but I can easily see how someone with a life^H^H^H^H^H^Hless computer savvy than me would find it to be the height of comedy. For example, regular people don't know why ^H^H^H is supposed to be funny, and certainly haven't seen it so often as to make it the pedestrian cliche that it is on Slashdot.
I'd also point out that he was commenting on the unreliablity of Windows 98, and the problems he was facing in upgrading. Windows 98 *is* unreliable, and upgrading can be perilous, so it's unfair to call the jokes outdated (especially when the majority of American computer owners are still in 98-land).
In conclusion, I would ask that you please introduce me to the person who died and made you The Arbiter of What Is and What Is Not Humor. Maybe we can freeze his brain or get a DNA sample. He was certainly doing a much better job than you are.
I think that the worst thing you could say about Dave Barry is that he's not as funny as he once was. The thing is, his writing style hasn't changed much over the last couple of decades, which is fine. But a lot of people have caught on and copied that style of humor in the intervening decades, so it doesn't come across as fresh as it once did.
I don't think there's anything wrong with that, and I still love reading his columns every week. But he's gone from Booger Joke Hotshot to a quasi-sorta Elder Statesman of modern humor. You can gripe and whine about how he's not as fresh and novel as he was back when he was fresh and novel, or you can enjoy his work for what it is.
Do yourself a favor and read "Big Trouble," which he wrote just a couple of years back. I thought it was one of the funniest books I'd ever read.
I remember reading the article a while back. Scott Adams did a pretty lengthy rebuttal to it (I believe it was in "The Dilbert Future," but don't quote me). He also did a couple of comics making fun of it, but that's to be expected.
The main problem I see here is a user base of 200,000 people all vying for the same love interest. Seriously. We all got Tifa. We all got Rinoa. Same for [insert FF9 girl whose name I can't remember].
You simply cannot have a realistic MMORPG with a "save mankind" storyline. How do you feel about waiting in line on BattleNet so that the team ahead of you can wait for him to respawn? "Oh, you saved the world by banishing the Dark Fiend to the nightmare dimension which spawned him? Me too! Just last week, in fact."
It just stretches one's suspension of disbelief in a way that trumps characters holding their breath for a really long time.
I predict that XI will be a major disappointment (I'm a huge fan of the Final Fantasy series, and I rate my chances of bothering at somewhere around 10%), and that they'll go back to the drawing board for XII to add a single player option. I love Square, but those poor schmucks...
For one, he declares FFVIII "the best game ever made." This is a matter of opinion, but I know that I was so bored and unimpressed with this game that I lost interest after about 20 minutes of playing. Out of the FF games that I've played, VIII was definitely the worst by far.
Twenty minutes? That would just about get you through the really cool opening cut and let you thoroughly explore the Balamb Garden. Maybe time to get killed by a T-rex. Hardly sufficient time to judge the merits of the whole game (unless the Draw command was really that annoying to you).
I can't believe you missed out on the Chocobo decapitation game, Sephiroth's cameo as the young Professor Cid, the heart-gripping plot twist where Sin is revealed to be Squall's father, and the FMV Squall/Quistis shower scene.
FF8 was a pretty cool game, and I don't know why people diss it.
I am now telling the computer exactly what it can do with a lifetime supply of chocolate.
Okay, we need to burn some spare cycles. Lots of them, in fact. I have some ideas. There may even be a couple in here that can be taken semi-seriously.
* SETI@H. . . Why are you looking at me like that? Admittedly, it's cliched, and I'm the impatient type who figured I'd find my first LGM within a week. Or by the end of the year at the very latest. But I still think that it's a pretty cool thing to be doing. Or load up one of the alternatives like Folding@Home.
* Find a buddy with a similar supercomputer, and have them play chess. Or tic-tac-toe billions of times every second (sorry, War Games flashback).
* There are lots of mathematical problems out there just begging to have a few supercomputers thrown at them. I'm not aware of what they are, so consult your local Mathematics department and offer your services.
* If you're not interested in doing video compression or complex scene rendering, you might be able to find someone who was. Some indie film maker who wants to play with the big kids is going to become your new best friend. Be sure to ask for a walk-on.
* Some sort of AI project could be interesting, providing you have some specialized training. Or you just give someone at MIT telnet access.
Man, I don't have the foggiest idea what I'm talking about, and I certainly had no right to go blasting you like that. In fact, the proposed design does go all the way to the ground, and I was stupidly conflating this project with a less ambitious one I'd read about earlier.
I still think that you're insulting Mr. Edwards by saying he wouldn't have taken into account the fact that the cable would have to support its own weight. However, after looking through the PDF, it's not beyond the realm of possibility that the guy is just a kooky graphic design major. He sure didn't provide a whole lot of detail.
Okay, I'm an idiot, and should be moderated accordingly. While I was waiting for the PDF to drip in from my 28.8 modem, I was reading some of the links that the survey author had put up. Most of the reasonable sounding ones were describing relatively small projects a thousand miles in length or so. The PDF itself does indeed go all the way from ground level to geosynchronous orbit.
Not quite. If the counterweight is traveling faster than it should at that orbit, that doesn't mean that it would be launched away from the earth. Climbing the Earth's gravity well sucks away an object's kinetic energy. Unless the counterweight were traveling faster than escape velocity (for its current height above earth), it wouldn't go anywhere.
I got really, really suspicious when the article summary said we could have a space elevator for $40 billion. I said to myself, "Self, there's just no bloody way." And I was right.
What the author of the study is proposing is a small elevator that takes things from the upper atmosphere to a point several hundred miles higher. This small scale is what makes it practical, and what makes it possible to propose such a thing without bringing up ugly images of an equator in flames.
What would be really cool is a series of these small elevators, each pulling cargo up higher. It would be a great deal more fault tolerant and less risky than a single, monolithic elevator. It might also be a logistical nightmare. Further study would be required.
Good analysis. I'm sure that as soon as space becomes more accessible, some sort of "anti-Space" movement would erupt, whether for ecological, religious, or political reasons. Whatever the case, somebody's going to want to bring the thing down.
What I think everyone has been missing so far is that we're not talking about a cable that stretches from sea level to geosynchronous orbit. The proposed project is an itty-bitty, free floating cable only a few hundred miles in length. The extensive security measures you describe would be absolutely necessary for a giant cable, but not for the elevator being proposed.
Man, do you even have the foggiest idea what you're talking about? You keep mentioning 100,000 km of cable. That's not what this guy is proposing. The "ideal cable" stretching all the way from ground zero to geosynchronous orbit is still a sci-fi dream, and you're insulting the guy by saying he's too stupid to realize that.
The cable he's proposing is a much smaller one that would carry payloads from the upper atmosphere to a point a few hundred miles higher. There's no "wrapping itself around the world a couple of times." Just a nice, efficient little elevator for reducing the cost of moving materials into orbit.
The pipeline going down would invariably be smaller than the pipeline going up, and everything sent down the pipeline would end up saving energy, because it would balance a load coming up.
America--and most other countries--will never have its own elevator attached to land, because a land-based one would have to be geosynchronous. Therefore, it'd have to be located on the equator. The one described in the paper is more free-floating, and would most likely either be located over the equator or spend time over most countries. In either case, the thing would be too easy to shoot down.
Philips. The name of the company which ruined that song for me is called Philips. The evil bastards who ruined that song for me are incorporated under the name Philips.
I'm blowing my chance to mod this down as "overrated," but here it goes.
The excellent point the AC was making was that the vast, vast majority of the people who are voting on IMDB don't have the grounding to be able to give their opinions the proper framework. He's not saying, "Until you've seen Citizen Kane, you're not allowed to say you enjoyed Lord of the Rings." He's saying that until you've seen Citizen Kane, you're not allowed to say that Lord of the Rings was better than Citizen Kane.
More than that, you have to have a proper understanding of what made the other movies so mind-blowing when they were first released. For the newer ones, you merely have to watch them. But for an old movie like CK, you have to have some--dare I say it--academic understanding of movie history. Most modern viewers find the movie too slow and uninteresting, because it's not what we're used to seeing, and they generally have to be told that the movie was making an unflattering comparison to publisher William Randolph Hearst.
Maybe it's a bit of a snobbish view. But do you really want to live in a world where movie after movie is billed as "The greatest movie of all time?" Titanic is the greatest movie ever! No, now it's The Matrix! Then American Beauty, then Star Wars I, then Harry Potter, then Lord of the Rings! Now Star Wars II is scheduled to be the greatest movie ever made, and it's not even out of postproduction.
The real problem I have is that IMDB is such a huge resource for the modern viewing public. To put it bluntly, their list matters to many people. It's in the best interests of the moviegoers to see the older films and learn to appreciate them as art. It's in the best interests of the major movie studios for people to forget the older movies ever existed and pay the premium ticket prices for the newer ones. With old movies, the best that can be done is to repackage them. The day that every movie in the top ten was made in the last decade, the corporations will have won.
Perhaps they should try blowing up stars next or something;-)
That might be a rather extreme way to go about it.:) Besides, what would they assume was being communicated? I don't think there's any natural way for a star to blow up in the middle of it's life cycle. But if they know something we don't, they may just assume something perfectly natural happened. 'Twould be a waste of a good sun in any case.
Now, in a similar vein, I once heard an interesting concept in interstellar communication: Just dump a few tons of tritium (or some other artificial isotope) into the sun's atmosphere. The emission spectrum given off by the material would show up on any spectrography equipment they might have pointed our way.
Slashdot Mirror
Don't forget that the $5000 buys the whole computer, not just the eight hard drives. So the cost of storage alone is $2.93/Gig.
Between this and dog food that makes its own gravy, we are truly living blessed lives.
I have to second this particular book recommendation. It was an outstanding read. But the previous poster failed to mention that the book is best read after downing a six pack of Jolt Cola.
My guess is that the only thing they could legitimately open source (verb) is the Loki Installer. Maybe there are a few other auxillary bits (porting tools and whatnot) that they would be able to release. The games are still owned by the original publishers.
+3, insightful? I'd heard rumors that the moderators were smoking crack, but now I have proof.
First point: Everyone and their dog knows that PI does not equal 3. I've argued with many kneejerk biblical fundamentalists, and not one of them was willing to claim that 3 is a more accurate figure for PI than ~3.1415.
Second point: Chronicles is part of the Jewish canon.
Third point: Someone needs to get their irony detector checked.
Fourth point: That person would probably be me.
But the iMass software page says:
* Hardened & ruggedized Linux based UNIX kernel
* SMB & AppleShare IP compatible file services
* SMTP, POP3, & IMAP4 mail protocols supported
* WebMail support
[blah blah blah]
So either the general statement doesn't apply in this instance, or the servers also include a copy of NT's kernel for no particular reason.
By the way, how does one "harden and ruggedize" a Linux-based kernel? Expose it to gamma radiation? Take it to see really violent movies? Make it do push-ups?
More interestingly, how does one do this, and then sell it with a computer, without releasing the source? I'm having trouble telling whether this is a "real" computer or an embedded device.
I finally figured out what they mean by "practically random data."
Theoretically, any data set could be stumbled upon by random generation. So they've carefully culled, from the output of a random number generator, certain data sets to compress.
For example:
3.14159265358979323846
or
0123456789012345678901
or
0101010101010101010101
or
0000000000000000000000
As the power of computers increases according to Moore's "Law", larger sets of highly compressible random data will be obtained.
Technically, in such a case, you wouldn't be compressing the data. You'd simply be explaining how to reproduce the data. Otherwise, I could tell you
sum (n=0 to n=infinity) (-1^n)*4/(n+1)
and claim to have achieved "infinite compression."
This formula gives you 4 + 4/3 - 4/9 + 4/27 - 4/81. . . which is one way of calculating PI.
Of course, such things have great uses. Like being able to create a random terrain generator that takes a single seed number and creates a literally infinite amount of information from it.
But * if you wanted to be able to compress any set of, say, terrain points in a similar manner, you would need to create a new set of algorithms for that set of points. It doesn't seem like finding those algorithms would be a computationally trivial thing to do, and some sets of data would be impossible to analyze. For truly random data (not just data like PI whose appearance of randomness is actually governed by a simple, strict algorithm) the rule set you would have to transmit along with the data should be as large as the space it was meant to save.
So in closing, there are some sets of data that, despite an appearance of randomness, aren't.
I take back my earlier claim. The formula for PI really is a compression algorithm. It's just that there are only a limited set of data strings that are compressible by similarly simple algorithms. If you wanted to compress 3.14109265398979..., you would have to throw in an exception for the unPI'ish digit. The less "Pi-like" the data set, the less you would gain by using such an algorithm.
* IANAInformation Theory Expert. Come to think of it, I suck at math, so I hope I haven't mislead anyone.
I hope not everyone is like you. Of course, I'm referring to the Mozilla team (slogan: 1.0 sometime before the sun burns out).
Yes, I am exaggerating for humorous effect. I'm sure that, 7 billion years from now, they'll be very close to releasing Mozilla 3.0.
IE, on the other hand, will be up to IE 73,033,075.1, will take up approximately 300 petabytes of storage, and will have a security flaw which will give hackers root access to your machine before you even pop the CD into the tray.
Intel will be destroyed as a corporation after their experimental 27 quintillion transistor processor goes critical, destroying both their research facility and half of North America. Overclocking enthusiasts will then be rounded up and shot for the safety of mankind.
Funny: Some teen comedies, some Jim Carrey flicks, some recycled out-of-date "Windows is unreliable" jokes.
Not funny: Someone who passes judgment on an author whose name he can't even spell correctly, and uses boldfaced type to tell the moderators that he's untouchable.
Barry is simply writing to his audience, the vast majority of whom find computer usage to be a frustrating and intimidating experience. I only found the article to be a bit amusing, but I can easily see how someone with a life^H^H^H^H^H^Hless computer savvy than me would find it to be the height of comedy. For example, regular people don't know why ^H^H^H is supposed to be funny, and certainly haven't seen it so often as to make it the pedestrian cliche that it is on Slashdot.
I'd also point out that he was commenting on the unreliablity of Windows 98, and the problems he was facing in upgrading. Windows 98 *is* unreliable, and upgrading can be perilous, so it's unfair to call the jokes outdated (especially when the majority of American computer owners are still in 98-land).
In conclusion, I would ask that you please introduce me to the person who died and made you The Arbiter of What Is and What Is Not Humor. Maybe we can freeze his brain or get a DNA sample. He was certainly doing a much better job than you are.
I think that the worst thing you could say about Dave Barry is that he's not as funny as he once was. The thing is, his writing style hasn't changed much over the last couple of decades, which is fine. But a lot of people have caught on and copied that style of humor in the intervening decades, so it doesn't come across as fresh as it once did.
I don't think there's anything wrong with that, and I still love reading his columns every week. But he's gone from Booger Joke Hotshot to a quasi-sorta Elder Statesman of modern humor. You can gripe and whine about how he's not as fresh and novel as he was back when he was fresh and novel, or you can enjoy his work for what it is.
Do yourself a favor and read "Big Trouble," which he wrote just a couple of years back. I thought it was one of the funniest books I'd ever read.
I remember reading the article a while back. Scott Adams did a pretty lengthy rebuttal to it (I believe it was in "The Dilbert Future," but don't quote me). He also did a couple of comics making fun of it, but that's to be expected.
The main problem I see here is a user base of 200,000 people all vying for the same love interest. Seriously. We all got Tifa. We all got Rinoa. Same for [insert FF9 girl whose name I can't remember].
You simply cannot have a realistic MMORPG with a "save mankind" storyline. How do you feel about waiting in line on BattleNet so that the team ahead of you can wait for him to respawn? "Oh, you saved the world by banishing the Dark Fiend to the nightmare dimension which spawned him? Me too! Just last week, in fact."
It just stretches one's suspension of disbelief in a way that trumps characters holding their breath for a really long time.
I predict that XI will be a major disappointment (I'm a huge fan of the Final Fantasy series, and I rate my chances of bothering at somewhere around 10%), and that they'll go back to the drawing board for XII to add a single player option. I love Square, but those poor schmucks...
I can't believe you missed out on the Chocobo decapitation game, Sephiroth's cameo as the young Professor Cid, the heart-gripping plot twist where Sin is revealed to be Squall's father, and the FMV Squall/Quistis shower scene.
FF8 was a pretty cool game, and I don't know why people diss it.
I am now telling the computer exactly what it can do with a lifetime supply of chocolate.
Okay, we need to burn some spare cycles. Lots of them, in fact. I have some ideas. There may even be a couple in here that can be taken semi-seriously.
* SETI@H. . . Why are you looking at me like that? Admittedly, it's cliched, and I'm the impatient type who figured I'd find my first LGM within a week. Or by the end of the year at the very latest. But I still think that it's a pretty cool thing to be doing. Or load up one of the alternatives like Folding@Home.
* Find a buddy with a similar supercomputer, and have them play chess. Or tic-tac-toe billions of times every second (sorry, War Games flashback).
* There are lots of mathematical problems out there just begging to have a few supercomputers thrown at them. I'm not aware of what they are, so consult your local Mathematics department and offer your services.
* If you're not interested in doing video compression or complex scene rendering, you might be able to find someone who was. Some indie film maker who wants to play with the big kids is going to become your new best friend. Be sure to ask for a walk-on.
* Some sort of AI project could be interesting, providing you have some specialized training. Or you just give someone at MIT telnet access.
And it shall be called. . . Earth!
Man, I don't have the foggiest idea what I'm talking about, and I certainly had no right to go blasting you like that. In fact, the proposed design does go all the way to the ground, and I was stupidly conflating this project with a less ambitious one I'd read about earlier.
I still think that you're insulting Mr. Edwards by saying he wouldn't have taken into account the fact that the cable would have to support its own weight. However, after looking through the PDF, it's not beyond the realm of possibility that the guy is just a kooky graphic design major. He sure didn't provide a whole lot of detail.
Okay, I'm an idiot, and should be moderated accordingly. While I was waiting for the PDF to drip in from my 28.8 modem, I was reading some of the links that the survey author had put up. Most of the reasonable sounding ones were describing relatively small projects a thousand miles in length or so. The PDF itself does indeed go all the way from ground level to geosynchronous orbit.
Did I mention I'm an idiot? Okay, just checking.
Not quite. If the counterweight is traveling faster than it should at that orbit, that doesn't mean that it would be launched away from the earth. Climbing the Earth's gravity well sucks away an object's kinetic energy. Unless the counterweight were traveling faster than escape velocity (for its current height above earth), it wouldn't go anywhere.
I got really, really suspicious when the article summary said we could have a space elevator for $40 billion. I said to myself, "Self, there's just no bloody way." And I was right.
What the author of the study is proposing is a small elevator that takes things from the upper atmosphere to a point several hundred miles higher. This small scale is what makes it practical, and what makes it possible to propose such a thing without bringing up ugly images of an equator in flames.
What would be really cool is a series of these small elevators, each pulling cargo up higher. It would be a great deal more fault tolerant and less risky than a single, monolithic elevator. It might also be a logistical nightmare. Further study would be required.
Good analysis. I'm sure that as soon as space becomes more accessible, some sort of "anti-Space" movement would erupt, whether for ecological, religious, or political reasons. Whatever the case, somebody's going to want to bring the thing down.
What I think everyone has been missing so far is that we're not talking about a cable that stretches from sea level to geosynchronous orbit. The proposed project is an itty-bitty, free floating cable only a few hundred miles in length. The extensive security measures you describe would be absolutely necessary for a giant cable, but not for the elevator being proposed.
Man, do you even have the foggiest idea what you're talking about? You keep mentioning 100,000 km of cable. That's not what this guy is proposing. The "ideal cable" stretching all the way from ground zero to geosynchronous orbit is still a sci-fi dream, and you're insulting the guy by saying he's too stupid to realize that.
The cable he's proposing is a much smaller one that would carry payloads from the upper atmosphere to a point a few hundred miles higher. There's no "wrapping itself around the world a couple of times." Just a nice, efficient little elevator for reducing the cost of moving materials into orbit.
The pipeline going down would invariably be smaller than the pipeline going up, and everything sent down the pipeline would end up saving energy, because it would balance a load coming up.
America--and most other countries--will never have its own elevator attached to land, because a land-based one would have to be geosynchronous. Therefore, it'd have to be located on the equator. The one described in the paper is more free-floating, and would most likely either be located over the equator or spend time over most countries. In either case, the thing would be too easy to shoot down.
Philips. The name of the company which ruined that song for me is called Philips. The evil bastards who ruined that song for me are incorporated under the name Philips.
:)
Hope this answers your question.
I'm blowing my chance to mod this down as "overrated," but here it goes.
The excellent point the AC was making was that the vast, vast majority of the people who are voting on IMDB don't have the grounding to be able to give their opinions the proper framework. He's not saying, "Until you've seen Citizen Kane, you're not allowed to say you enjoyed Lord of the Rings." He's saying that until you've seen Citizen Kane, you're not allowed to say that Lord of the Rings was better than Citizen Kane.
More than that, you have to have a proper understanding of what made the other movies so mind-blowing when they were first released. For the newer ones, you merely have to watch them. But for an old movie like CK, you have to have some--dare I say it--academic understanding of movie history. Most modern viewers find the movie too slow and uninteresting, because it's not what we're used to seeing, and they generally have to be told that the movie was making an unflattering comparison to publisher William Randolph Hearst.
Maybe it's a bit of a snobbish view. But do you really want to live in a world where movie after movie is billed as "The greatest movie of all time?" Titanic is the greatest movie ever! No, now it's The Matrix! Then American Beauty, then Star Wars I, then Harry Potter, then Lord of the Rings! Now Star Wars II is scheduled to be the greatest movie ever made, and it's not even out of postproduction.
The real problem I have is that IMDB is such a huge resource for the modern viewing public. To put it bluntly, their list matters to many people. It's in the best interests of the moviegoers to see the older films and learn to appreciate them as art. It's in the best interests of the major movie studios for people to forget the older movies ever existed and pay the premium ticket prices for the newer ones. With old movies, the best that can be done is to repackage them. The day that every movie in the top ten was made in the last decade, the corporations will have won.
That might be a rather extreme way to go about it.
Now, in a similar vein, I once heard an interesting concept in interstellar communication: Just dump a few tons of tritium (or some other artificial isotope) into the sun's atmosphere. The emission spectrum given off by the material would show up on any spectrography equipment they might have pointed our way.