I wonder what is going to happen to these three projects?
GCJ will survive because it provides a facility that doesn't exist in the standard JDK (i.e., ahead-of-time compilation).
Kaffe will survive because it's BSD licensed.
Classpath will initially try to survive by copying large amounts of original Java code into itself, but I suspect will eventually become irrelevant as patches for classpath-using applications become available to allow them to use the original Java class library.
Let's hope now Java integrates all the good features of C#, like true generics.
That's easier said than done. A stable binary platform is important to the success of Java, and I suspect implementations of this kind of thing (of which there will be multiple) will result in a forked, fragmented platform with multiple implementations incompatible of interoperating with each other. Then an official Java distribution will pick up new features at probably only slightly faster rates than the current one, and the best of the features will be backported. We'll see slightly accelerated improvements in "official" Java because of the interest, but nothing dramatic, is my guess.
GPL does not prevent forking (and some forks will develop due to $$$)but if the forker abides by the GPL he has to publish his code for the forks, so Sun could have incorporated those changes making Sun java compatible with MS-J.
Not necessarily:
1. GPL doesn't require patent licenses to be granted. 2. Most of the modifications MS made to their Java implementation wouldn't have worked for Sun because they were heavily dependent on features of Windows that aren't present on any other OS. Sun could've easily reimplemented compatible extensions to Java if the only issue was access to MS's code. They didn't because doing so would have violated the spirit of Java as a cross-platform language.
Second, it's compiled and then byte-interpreted, giving it a fairly good speed compared to Python's interpretation.
Python is bytecode-compiled also, although to be fair I believe Python's bytecode is substantially higher level than Java bytecode. There is also a native-code just-in-time compiler (psyco) for x86 platforms that works reasonably well.
IMO, the main problem with Python, performance-wise, is that a variety of operations it supports are defined by the commonly-accepted understanding of the language to be atomic. This includes modifying lists and dictionaries. Because of this, these structures must have all accesses synchronised, which the standard Python implementation achieves by only allowing one thread to execute at once. I don't think I need to point out how horrible this is for scalability to multiprocessor systems.
Just think if Sun had done this in the 90s. There would never have been a GTK/Qt appliactions split because all software would have been written in Java.
You know, the reason why few desktop applications are written in Java has little to do with licensing issues. I mean, Qt was much more commonly used than Java, even when its license was just as bad as Java's was until now.
The point is: Java on the desktop sucks. I blame poor toolkit design, myself, as I've seen some Java apps with alternative toolkits that work really well.
I'm not going to comment on how sensible it would be to plug a UPS into a battery-powered system. No, really. Battery->inverter->rectifier->battery->inverter->d evice. Not going there.
A lot of your numbers don't add up. You say that you need 12 Kw for potential *cooking*? What do you run, a soup kitchen, or a deli?
Most electric stoves, with all four burners and the oven turned on, still won't even hit 30 amps, which is barely half of that figure. Even adding in the microwave, a blender, and a toaster oven, if you need 12 kilowatts to cook with, you must have a *really* serious setup, and you can't really complain that equipment made for people who like to conserve doesn't meet the needs of such an extravagent cook.
To be fair, mine has 1x3.6Kw rings, 2x2.4Kw and 1x1.8Kw, which gives a theoretical maximum usage of not far off the 12Kw that's mentioned. I wouldn't call it an extravagant setup, although it is powerful. The next model up has a 5.4Kw ring. It uses a single supply, so running it off two inverters is infeasible.
Even with a lower-powered 30amp 240V cooker (=7.2Kw), you'll need an extra kilowatt each for kettle and microwave, probably a couple of kilowatts for an oven/grill, and maybe half a kilowatt for a toaster. I make that 11.7Kw total.
That does mean you need to run things at 240 volts. Most computers can. Some other things can. For those things that cannot, you could use a 60+60 volt split phase system [...]
It'd probably be easier to import them from Europe, where everything can.
I don't have any links to show you - but the notion that solar panels "age" is not actually true. (maybe google will find it for you, it was a site on "how to repair solar panels" or something like that).
But when will it become truly affordable for the masses? That's what most of us want to know. Wake me when it's time to disconnect from the petroleum/nuclear fired grid.
It is, as long as:
a) You can run a large proportion of your equipment off low-voltage DC (e.g. 12v); DC - AC conversion is notoriously wasteful of power b) A high proportion of your power requirement is daytime-only c) You can afford a large up-front investment to pay for the panels in the first place
A lot FUD is spread concerning short lifespan of solar panels. It ain't true. Panels output drops off a little with age, but because of the FUD most calculations of the cost effectiveness of the panels assums you throw them away when their output reaches 90% of original. But you can carry on using them for much longer than that, or simply sell them: second hand panels fetch a good price, which isn't usually factored into the calculations.
Also worth considering is solar-powered water heating. No silicon required, just tubes, mirrors and pumps.
But as happened with DVD, it's possible that a company will produce a player which is 'hackable' to re-enable reading/decoding of both discs content (similar to the early Apex and Sampo players, which could be soft-modded to change the region, be regionless, macrovisionless, etc). At worst, a sequence of keypresses could switch between HD-DVD and Bluray mode.
As I understand it, any simple method of doing so would almost certainly be a violation of one or the other set of patent licenses.
However, a player that allowed firmware updates could have hardware for either (as it seems the hardware is now identical for either standard, only the software will be different), and you could probably upload some kind of "merged" firmware that supports both.
I'm not sure it's worth holding your breath, though. I'm not aware of any standalone DVD players that allow firmware updates.
In 20 years time nobody will be pissing around with C code or Java or or Lisp ( ok maybe lisp) except for historical/maintaince reasons. There will be new higher level constructs leveraging streamlined minimal lower level constructs.
It's now nearly 40 years since somebody invented an effective "new higher level construct" (i.e. object-oriented programming, a feature of Simula67). What makes you think somebody will come up with a new one in the next 20?
Many of the problems defined today by large code bases will be rewritten using less effort and more sophisticated expressive tools.
Perhaps, but I doubt we'll see more than a small percentage improvement (maybe 10-20%) in the expressive power of the tools we use over that time. What language invented since lisp is more powerful than it? All we have are lower-level languages and high-level languages that are easier to read and easier to learn.
In 20 years time there will be 2^20 cores on a chip, perhapps.
I wouldn't be so sure. First off, a million cores is extremely unlikely. That would probably require individual transistor sizes of roughly 2nm[1], or roughly 20 atoms of silicon. Also, the class of problems that benefits from a million sequential processing cores is fairly restricted.
Now if you want to argue that we'll have abandoned the Von Neumann architecture and the notion of an individual processor core in favour of something more flexible and easily parallelised, perhaps I'll be more likely to agree.
I doubt code bits from today will solve those sorts of problems.
As long as we're still programming sequential-stored-program processors, many of the techniques (and consequently the implementations thereof) that are in use today will still be useful.
[1]: I'm assuming 400mm^2 chip size, which is rather large I believe, and that a revolution in processor design will bring the size of a core down to 40Ktransistors. I'm also assuming that gates are roughly square, and that no space is required for interconnects. Both of these assumptions strike me as optimistic.
Actually, the worst software engineer I ever worked with had a PhD in computer science. It tells you nothing about someones understanding about software engineering. For all practical purposes the two are different fields.
There are two different fields within CS, is probably a better way of looking at it. I don't know what Vinge's exact area of study is, but given his writing I'd guess he probably focusses on computational theory and/or AI. This means he's likely to have a very solid foundation in terms of software engineering. This guess fits him in a category along with Donald Knuth.
Other computer scientists study stuff like language semantics, concurrent architectures, mathematical approaches, stuff like that. I'd guess the guy you worked with is one of those.
Articles with offending passages have been stripped of most text. An entire paragraph in Alonzo Clark's entry, for instance, was deleted, leaving the article with the bare-bones: "Alonzo M. Clark (August 13, 1868-October 12, 1952) was an American politician who was Governor of Wyoming from 1931 to 1933."
The original article, Brandt said, was copied from a biography on the Wyoming state government site.
Err... I thought works of the US Government were generally free from copyright...?
Allowing Ultimate/Business to run a second copy in a VM, for instance. XP would require a second license to do that.
The volume licensing terms for XP allow for running an extra copy in a VM. All they've done is extend those to effectively all business customers, not just the ones who buy direct.
The (very incorrect) bit about not being able to run certain versions on virtual hardware is one that keeps coming up.
A volume licensing customer can run any version of XP in a VM, or use the "downgrade" option to run any version of Windows prior to Vista in a VM, all without purchasing extra licenses. I haven't seen the volume terms for Vista yet, but if they're similar to the retail terms, this won't apply to home editions of Vista.
Your mention of DirectX 10 reminded me of something I've been wondering for a while. Isn't the Vista transition the perfect time for game developers to jump ship to a platform like, say, the new Mac Pros?
Why would they want to switch to a platform with a lower installed base than their current platform? No, I suspect they'll continue developing for XP until they think most gamers have switched to Vista at which point they'll start targetting Vista, because that's where the money is. Simple really.
Vista appears to aim at using more CPU and graphics resources than ever before. While this may give us some pleasing eye candy, and enhanced security (really) for those browsing the web and using e-mail, what does this overhead do to games?
Probably nothing. The CPU requirements are probably only because a few key components now do stuff that wouldn't be feasible with slower CPUs; Vista is unlikely to do much more stuff in the background than XP because there isn't that much more to do in the background.
The graphics resources are simply because they're painting windows into texture buffers for fast compositing; if you hide all the windows (by starting a full-screen exclusive mode program) that stuff can all be either swapped out to main memory or (more likely) discarded and regenerated when the exclusive mode program exits. Also note that this is exactly the same thing that OSX's "Quartz Extreme" system does, which I understand requires 64MB of video card RAM in order to get the full benefit in the latest version. That's not hugely different from the 80MB that Vista's Aero requires.
Any game developers out there who've considered this and can share their reasons why or why not?
While I'm not a commercial game developer, I know enough about the field to say "because Windows is where the money is" is the answer.
a) The data will be preserved. There is no particular reason why it should.
If people consider it important (and I know that the author of TFA is far from the only person who thinks that it will be an important historical record in the future) then they will preserve it.
CDs and DVDs with sections or complete dumps of the data on it are produced regularly. For all the people who say "but what about the technology to read them?" I say bullshit. Both formats are adequately described in paper publications that are likely to be preserved. There are plenty of people with interest in preserving the data. It will be possible for somebody in the future (assuming they have equivalent technical capability to our own) to follow those descriptions and produce machinery to decode a CD or DVD. Both formats are expected to be capable of being read with normal equipment in a hundred year's time if looked after reasonably well... I'd wager that with advanced kit (e.g. using multiple lasers of substantially shorter wavelength than nominal to produce a detailed 3-dimensional reflectivity map of the disc that can then be reconstructed to ideal state and read in a simulation of a normal player) well-preserved CDs and DVDs will still be readable hundreds of years into the future. That's long enough for the historians of the era to have realised the value of what they have and start making duplicates.
b) The data will be understood. There are many languages of the past that we cannot understand. The same will probably will be true in the future.
Most of Wikipedia is written in English. English is the modern equivalent of Latin; it is the language in which most international commerce is undertaken, in which scientific and philosophic thought is exchanged and in which the vast majority of the world's significant cultural output is produced. These three attributes enabled knowledge of Latin to survive the so-called dark ages, and will likely enable knowledge of modern English to perpetuate thousands of years into the future also. We haven't allowed the language of Virgil to die out; why would we allow the language of Shakespeare to do so?
c) They will have an interest. For us our particular time is interesting, but are we also interested in, say, the political views in the Kassite dinasty in Mesopotamia?. And that period took four centuries, surely many interesting things happened. The quantity of data to analyze in a distant future may make all but big overviews too much for a human mind. Something like "after the Middle-Ages, the so-called Modern-Ages (1500-2500) developed, with humanity developing a primary state of technology, but still lacking a conscience of ecology. The natural resources were depleted and the balance of Earth was tipped a bit too far, ending in the natural disasters that gave birth to the Interregnum (2500-2900)."
Like it or not, we live in interesting times. The development of mass industry, weapons of mass destruction and global near-instantaneous communication have changed the world significantly. We (in the developed countries) are, on a large scale, substantially different from the people of just fifty to a hundred years ago. And unless you expect a Vinge-like Singularity to occur, the rate of change can't really continue as it is. We're living on a rather steep piece of the slope of technological capability, and I expect it will shallow-out in the next fifty or so years. Late-19th to mid-21st century history will likely be a heavily studied period in the future.
I mean, nobody will be particularly interested in what the US thought about the obesity problem, compared to say, what the Germans did, in the beginning of the 21st century.
I don't buy it. In the end, what we're talking about isn't much more complicated than a simple subsitution cipher (the only difference being the use of codes composed of a variable number of individual elements). It should be possible for anyone reasonably competent in the art of cryptography to reverse engineer the encoding format, or at least enough of it to get to the bit that describes the encoding format in detail...
Sure you need all of those things to use wikipedia... but you don't need many of them just to access the data. A working computer, media with the data stored on it, and easily available or rewritten data manipulation tools ('strings' and 'less' are the two I used) are all you need to get access to the raw pages.
The answer I've seen from MS engineers is that Windows will almost certainly crash if you update key components and don't reboot, so they make it reboot to prevent people from complaining about it crashing. Somehow they seem to think a reboot is better than letting you take your chances...
The XSLT is probably there primarily to keep the feed from being ugly in old versions of Firefox.
No, actually it does substantially more than that. It tells you information about the feed that isn't part of the feed data itself. It provides navigation options, like a link to find other feeds from the same organisation. The ability to do this is a useful feature, that has apparently been removed in FF2.
Slashdot Mirror
I wonder what is going to happen to these three projects?
GCJ will survive because it provides a facility that doesn't exist in the standard JDK (i.e., ahead-of-time compilation).
Kaffe will survive because it's BSD licensed.
Classpath will initially try to survive by copying large amounts of original Java code into itself, but I suspect will eventually become irrelevant as patches for classpath-using applications become available to allow them to use the original Java class library.
Let's hope now Java integrates all the good features of C#, like true generics.
That's easier said than done. A stable binary platform is important to the success of Java, and I suspect implementations of this kind of thing (of which there will be multiple) will result in a forked, fragmented platform with multiple implementations incompatible of interoperating with each other. Then an official Java distribution will pick up new features at probably only slightly faster rates than the current one, and the best of the features will be backported. We'll see slightly accelerated improvements in "official" Java because of the interest, but nothing dramatic, is my guess.
GPL does not prevent forking (and some forks will develop due to $$$)but if the forker abides by the GPL he has to publish his code for the forks, so Sun could have incorporated those changes making Sun java compatible with MS-J.
Not necessarily:
1. GPL doesn't require patent licenses to be granted.
2. Most of the modifications MS made to their Java implementation wouldn't have worked for Sun because they were heavily dependent on features of Windows that aren't present on any other OS. Sun could've easily reimplemented compatible extensions to Java if the only issue was access to MS's code. They didn't because doing so would have violated the spirit of Java as a cross-platform language.
I want a GPL'd latte :-(
No need, latte is already distributed under a BSD license, which is GPL compatible.
Second, it's compiled and then byte-interpreted, giving it a fairly good speed compared to Python's interpretation.
Python is bytecode-compiled also, although to be fair I believe Python's bytecode is substantially higher level than Java bytecode. There is also a native-code just-in-time compiler (psyco) for x86 platforms that works reasonably well.
IMO, the main problem with Python, performance-wise, is that a variety of operations it supports are defined by the commonly-accepted understanding of the language to be atomic. This includes modifying lists and dictionaries. Because of this, these structures must have all accesses synchronised, which the standard Python implementation achieves by only allowing one thread to execute at once. I don't think I need to point out how horrible this is for scalability to multiprocessor systems.
And patent-wise? I mean for non-Novell customers, obviously.
Shouldn't be an issue, for the most part. I don't know what Bruce was going on about in that post, but it just reads like FUD to me.
Just think if Sun had done this in the 90s. There would never have been a GTK/Qt appliactions split because all software would have been written in Java.
You know, the reason why few desktop applications are written in Java has little to do with licensing issues. I mean, Qt was much more commonly used than Java, even when its license was just as bad as Java's was until now.
The point is: Java on the desktop sucks. I blame poor toolkit design, myself, as I've seen some Java apps with alternative toolkits that work really well.
I'm not going to comment on how sensible it would be to plug a UPS into a battery-powered system. No, really. Battery->inverter->rectifier->battery->inverter->d evice. Not going there.
A lot of your numbers don't add up. You say that you need 12 Kw for potential *cooking*? What do you run, a soup kitchen, or a deli?
Most electric stoves, with all four burners and the oven turned on, still won't even hit 30 amps, which is barely half of that figure. Even adding in the microwave, a blender, and a toaster oven, if you need 12 kilowatts to cook with, you must have a *really* serious setup, and you can't really complain that equipment made for people who like to conserve doesn't meet the needs of such an extravagent cook.
To be fair, mine has 1x3.6Kw rings, 2x2.4Kw and 1x1.8Kw, which gives a theoretical maximum usage of not far off the 12Kw that's mentioned. I wouldn't call it an extravagant setup, although it is powerful. The next model up has a 5.4Kw ring. It uses a single supply, so running it off two inverters is infeasible.
Even with a lower-powered 30amp 240V cooker (=7.2Kw), you'll need an extra kilowatt each for kettle and microwave, probably a couple of kilowatts for an oven/grill, and maybe half a kilowatt for a toaster. I make that 11.7Kw total.
That does mean you need to run things at 240 volts. Most computers can. Some other things can. For those things that cannot, you could use a 60+60 volt split phase system [...]
It'd probably be easier to import them from Europe, where everything can.
I don't have any links to show you - but the notion that solar panels "age" is not actually true.
(maybe google will find it for you, it was a site on "how to repair solar panels" or something like that).
You're possibly thinking of this one.
But when will it become truly affordable for the masses? That's what most of us want to know. Wake me when it's time to disconnect from the petroleum/nuclear fired grid.
It is, as long as:
a) You can run a large proportion of your equipment off low-voltage DC (e.g. 12v); DC - AC conversion is notoriously wasteful of power
b) A high proportion of your power requirement is daytime-only
c) You can afford a large up-front investment to pay for the panels in the first place
A lot FUD is spread concerning short lifespan of solar panels. It ain't true. Panels output drops off a little with age, but because of the FUD most calculations of the cost effectiveness of the panels assums you throw them away when their output reaches 90% of original. But you can carry on using them for much longer than that, or simply sell them: second hand panels fetch a good price, which isn't usually factored into the calculations.
Also worth considering is solar-powered water heating. No silicon required, just tubes, mirrors and pumps.
But as happened with DVD, it's possible that a company will produce a player which is 'hackable' to re-enable reading/decoding of both discs content (similar to the early Apex and Sampo players, which could be soft-modded to change the region, be regionless, macrovisionless, etc). At worst, a sequence of keypresses could switch between HD-DVD and Bluray mode.
As I understand it, any simple method of doing so would almost certainly be a violation of one or the other set of patent licenses.
However, a player that allowed firmware updates could have hardware for either (as it seems the hardware is now identical for either standard, only the software will be different), and you could probably upload some kind of "merged" firmware that supports both.
I'm not sure it's worth holding your breath, though. I'm not aware of any standalone DVD players that allow firmware updates.
'Cause it's a board for Intel CPUs?
It seems in the majority of benchmarks that any lead this new mainboard had was very slight.
Which is the best you can hope for in an incremental motherboard improvement. What were you expecting, doubled frame rates?
No, the best thing about this is that it means that 590-based boards are likely to become a little cheaper in the near future.
The real reason to buy a DSLR is that it won't play a badly-sampled sound file of a camera click when you take your picture, it'll actually click.
In 20 years time nobody will be pissing around with C code or Java or or Lisp ( ok maybe lisp) except for historical/maintaince reasons. There will be new higher level constructs leveraging streamlined minimal lower level constructs.
It's now nearly 40 years since somebody invented an effective "new higher level construct" (i.e. object-oriented programming, a feature of Simula67). What makes you think somebody will come up with a new one in the next 20?
Many of the problems defined today by large code bases will be rewritten using less effort and more sophisticated expressive tools.
Perhaps, but I doubt we'll see more than a small percentage improvement (maybe 10-20%) in the expressive power of the tools we use over that time. What language invented since lisp is more powerful than it? All we have are lower-level languages and high-level languages that are easier to read and easier to learn.
In 20 years time there will be 2^20 cores on a chip, perhapps.
I wouldn't be so sure. First off, a million cores is extremely unlikely. That would probably require individual transistor sizes of roughly 2nm[1], or roughly 20 atoms of silicon. Also, the class of problems that benefits from a million sequential processing cores is fairly restricted.
Now if you want to argue that we'll have abandoned the Von Neumann architecture and the notion of an individual processor core in favour of something more flexible and easily parallelised, perhaps I'll be more likely to agree.
I doubt code bits from today will solve those sorts of problems.
As long as we're still programming sequential-stored-program processors, many of the techniques (and consequently the implementations thereof) that are in use today will still be useful.
[1]: I'm assuming 400mm^2 chip size, which is rather large I believe, and that a revolution in processor design will bring the size of a core down to 40Ktransistors. I'm also assuming that gates are roughly square, and that no space is required for interconnects. Both of these assumptions strike me as optimistic.
Actually, the worst software engineer I ever worked with had a PhD in computer science. It tells you nothing about someones understanding about software engineering. For all practical purposes the two are different fields.
There are two different fields within CS, is probably a better way of looking at it. I don't know what Vinge's exact area of study is, but given his writing I'd guess he probably focusses on computational theory and/or AI. This means he's likely to have a very solid foundation in terms of software engineering. This guess fits him in a category along with Donald Knuth.
Other computer scientists study stuff like language semantics, concurrent architectures, mathematical approaches, stuff like that. I'd guess the guy you worked with is one of those.
Articles with offending passages have been stripped of most text. An entire paragraph in Alonzo Clark's entry, for instance, was deleted, leaving the article with the bare-bones: "Alonzo M. Clark (August 13, 1868-October 12, 1952) was an American politician who was Governor of Wyoming from 1931 to 1933."
The original article, Brandt said, was copied from a biography on the Wyoming state government site.
Err... I thought works of the US Government were generally free from copyright...?
Allowing Ultimate/Business to run a second copy in a VM, for instance. XP would require a second license to do that.
The volume licensing terms for XP allow for running an extra copy in a VM. All they've done is extend those to effectively all business customers, not just the ones who buy direct.
The (very incorrect) bit about not being able to run certain versions on virtual hardware is one that keeps coming up.
A volume licensing customer can run any version of XP in a VM, or use the "downgrade" option to run any version of Windows prior to Vista in a VM, all without purchasing extra licenses. I haven't seen the volume terms for Vista yet, but if they're similar to the retail terms, this won't apply to home editions of Vista.
Your mention of DirectX 10 reminded me of something I've been wondering for a while. Isn't the Vista transition the perfect time for game developers to jump ship to a platform like, say, the new Mac Pros?
Why would they want to switch to a platform with a lower installed base than their current platform? No, I suspect they'll continue developing for XP until they think most gamers have switched to Vista at which point they'll start targetting Vista, because that's where the money is. Simple really.
Vista appears to aim at using more CPU and graphics resources than ever before. While this may give us some pleasing eye candy, and enhanced security (really) for those browsing the web and using e-mail, what does this overhead do to games?
Probably nothing. The CPU requirements are probably only because a few key components now do stuff that wouldn't be feasible with slower CPUs; Vista is unlikely to do much more stuff in the background than XP because there isn't that much more to do in the background.
The graphics resources are simply because they're painting windows into texture buffers for fast compositing; if you hide all the windows (by starting a full-screen exclusive mode program) that stuff can all be either swapped out to main memory or (more likely) discarded and regenerated when the exclusive mode program exits. Also note that this is exactly the same thing that OSX's "Quartz Extreme" system does, which I understand requires 64MB of video card RAM in order to get the full benefit in the latest version. That's not hugely different from the 80MB that Vista's Aero requires.
Any game developers out there who've considered this and can share their reasons why or why not?
While I'm not a commercial game developer, I know enough about the field to say "because Windows is where the money is" is the answer.
That supposes that
a) The data will be preserved. There is no particular reason why it should.
If people consider it important (and I know that the author of TFA is far from the only person who thinks that it will be an important historical record in the future) then they will preserve it.
CDs and DVDs with sections or complete dumps of the data on it are produced regularly. For all the people who say "but what about the technology to read them?" I say bullshit. Both formats are adequately described in paper publications that are likely to be preserved. There are plenty of people with interest in preserving the data. It will be possible for somebody in the future (assuming they have equivalent technical capability to our own) to follow those descriptions and produce machinery to decode a CD or DVD. Both formats are expected to be capable of being read with normal equipment in a hundred year's time if looked after reasonably well... I'd wager that with advanced kit (e.g. using multiple lasers of substantially shorter wavelength than nominal to produce a detailed 3-dimensional reflectivity map of the disc that can then be reconstructed to ideal state and read in a simulation of a normal player) well-preserved CDs and DVDs will still be readable hundreds of years into the future. That's long enough for the historians of the era to have realised the value of what they have and start making duplicates.
b) The data will be understood. There are many languages of the past that we cannot understand. The same will probably will be true in the future.
Most of Wikipedia is written in English. English is the modern equivalent of Latin; it is the language in which most international commerce is undertaken, in which scientific and philosophic thought is exchanged and in which the vast majority of the world's significant cultural output is produced. These three attributes enabled knowledge of Latin to survive the so-called dark ages, and will likely enable knowledge of modern English to perpetuate thousands of years into the future also. We haven't allowed the language of Virgil to die out; why would we allow the language of Shakespeare to do so?
c) They will have an interest. For us our particular time is interesting, but are we also interested in, say, the political views in the Kassite dinasty in Mesopotamia?. And that period took four centuries, surely many interesting things happened. The quantity of data to analyze in a distant future may make all but big overviews too much for a human mind. Something like "after the Middle-Ages, the so-called Modern-Ages (1500-2500) developed, with humanity developing a primary state of technology, but still lacking a conscience of ecology. The natural resources were depleted and the balance of Earth was tipped a bit too far, ending in the natural disasters that gave birth to the Interregnum (2500-2900)."
Like it or not, we live in interesting times. The development of mass industry, weapons of mass destruction and global near-instantaneous communication have changed the world significantly. We (in the developed countries) are, on a large scale, substantially different from the people of just fifty to a hundred years ago. And unless you expect a Vinge-like Singularity to occur, the rate of change can't really continue as it is. We're living on a rather steep piece of the slope of technological capability, and I expect it will shallow-out in the next fifty or so years. Late-19th to mid-21st century history will likely be a heavily studied period in the future.
I mean, nobody will be particularly interested in what the US thought about the obesity problem, compared to say, what the Germans did, in the beginning of the 21st century.
No? How people ate in the past is a serious area of study now... why should it not be in the future?
I don't buy it. In the end, what we're talking about isn't much more complicated than a simple subsitution cipher (the only difference being the use of codes composed of a variable number of individual elements). It should be possible for anyone reasonably competent in the art of cryptography to reverse engineer the encoding format, or at least enough of it to get to the bit that describes the encoding format in detail...
Sure you need all of those things to use wikipedia... but you don't need many of them just to access the data. A working computer, media with the data stored on it, and easily available or rewritten data manipulation tools ('strings' and 'less' are the two I used) are all you need to get access to the raw pages.
The answer I've seen from MS engineers is that Windows will almost certainly crash if you update key components and don't reboot, so they make it reboot to prevent people from complaining about it crashing. Somehow they seem to think a reboot is better than letting you take your chances...
The XSLT is probably there primarily to keep the feed from being ugly in old versions of Firefox.
No, actually it does substantially more than that. It tells you information about the feed that isn't part of the feed data itself. It provides navigation options, like a link to find other feeds from the same organisation. The ability to do this is a useful feature, that has apparently been removed in FF2.