Hmmmm... it looks like we have to improve our image, and fast. Hmmm.... how about an United Federation of Planets? That way, they can either join us or forever be outcast with other funny-forehead races, and we'll have practically a human-centered monopoly on everything!
You have two entangled particles A and B and send particle B somewhere else. Then you take a reading of A and call this reading X. You don't really know what is the meaning of X - did you observe it first or did someone else observed B first but you do know that if someone observed B next he will certainly get reading X back to him. Thus it's useless for communication.
The only way this seems useful to me is if we need to keep something perfectly identical to something else, but it can't work that way either, since quantum effects don't work on bigger scales (nothing's preventing you from smashing particle B but it won't affect particle A at all, right?)
It's sort of pointless on a bigger scale - tear a piece of paper in the dark, then send one piece in another room, come back to the first one and turn on the light - you can certainly declare the the shape of the tear of the other piece will perfectly match what you have here:) In other words, there's no analogy we can use, at all, for any communication purpose.
MS will not be toppled any time soon. very long term they will, because all companies die at some point.
Ahem, remember IBM? It was founded (though under a different name) in 1896. That it exists now is not only unmatched but actually spooky for a hi-tech company. It's also showing no signs of dying. Yes, it might close down in the longest term, somewhere in the range the Roman Empire took to close down, but it won't be in our lifetimes.
The worst thing that can happen to Microsoft, which was for a long time the most profitable IT company, is to be delegated to the place IBM has now - not very present in the common man arena, but irreplaceable for big businesses.
Actually no, OOo's compatibility with Word documents works upto a point where you start producing documents more complex that Windows Write (tm) could produce. I've done all my work in OOo for about 5 years now, most of it in Linux OOo. The most complex documents I produce are standard two-column academic papers - and it's a lottery if they can be exported without major formatting bugs to.doc. Unfortunately, my professors use Word so occasionally I get embarrassed when they receive a document which looks like it was reordered by a kindergartner. But, while I get graded on the content, business may not be so lucky. I have a longer rant here if anyone's still interested.
I'm sad because of it. I cannot promote OOo among my colleagues because of it. My presentations from OOo look like they were made in the middle of the 1990ies while my Office 2007 using friends have very stylish and flashy presentations (think Apple Keynote imitation). Again, it doesn't really matter in my environment but as for businesses... presentation is probably 80% of a sale.
In short, it all depends on your document complexity. If you have specific templates for contracts, invoices, etc. you should thoroughly check if they can be imported and exported to.doc without errors. If your sales depend on presentations... probably better forget about it now (aside for import-export problems, Impress is very buggy).
How would you feel if you were the owner or a shareholder of one of companies so prominently set to fail? Self-fulfilling prophecies all around. Given how sensitive to subjective perception these things are, it's by now probably enough for a company's name to be mentioned in the same sentence as the word "bankrupt" for it to really do so.
One thing that I've always thought that would make sense is to confine all one's risky operations, such as web browsing, to a virtual machine. But on most host machines the overhead of an entire virtual machine, both in memory and startup time, make it not quite convenient to do so. A much smaller, but still up to date machine might change this.
I don't know for sure but one of the things I read about Intel is that it has a very rigid suit&tie corporate culture, similar or stricter than at IBM.
I met Alan Cox once at a conference and he didn't quite look the type to work in a tightly controlled cubicle - so why choose Intel? OTOH he did look reasonable and adjustable.
There are, in fact, two kinds of users of OpenOffice.org (as with all software): those who just want to create a letter in the default Times New Romsn 12 font with formatting done with tabs and spaces or fill out a form somebody else created, and those who really need to create complex documents not because it's a source of endless fun but because they need to present complex topics.
For the first people, yes, OpenOffice.org is "done" - but for such people WordPad, KOffice and AbiWord are "done" also, and using OpenOffice.org is just bloat in terms of startup time and memory consumed.
For the second people, OpenOffice.org still borders on the unusable.
Some examples from my own usage:
Impress, the PowerPoint-wannabe (while here, who actually knew what "Impress" is before I compared it to PowerPoint?) is a) horribly bug ridden and b) is practically impossible to use to create presentations that are as nice looking as those that users of PowerPoint 2007 receive as generic templates. In Impress, it's still a lottery if you have a fairly complex presentation, that it will look the same when saved and loaded! It saves in a lossy format (not funny)! My presentations crested in OOo 3 are almost unusable in OOo2 despite using the same nominal file format (i.e. it doesn't complain, it just interprets the formatting differently)!
Setting background fills is particularly clunky and uncertain, but there are bugs in line styles, arrows and animations. The 3.0 release fixed none of the bugs I encountered and introduced at least one more: pasting slides is impossible in the middle of the slide sequence. The vector clipart, the color palette and the bitmap tools are all unusable, mostly because they offer functionality from 1995 (remember MS Office 95?) or such and haven't been upgraded. One annoying item that's lacking is making the bitmaps transparent in a color-key fashion - in MS Office, you can select a bitmap and with a click of the mouse make one of its colours transparent - so, for example you don't have rectangular edges in the graphics of a round marble you pasted (it's pretty nice, I think it also does an anti-alias around the masked region). Still, in 2009, OOo can't do this.
OpenOffice Base was never finished. There's really nothing more to say here. It doesn't have features Access 97 had, and here I mostly mean programming and reporting features that have made Access great for small scale office accounting applications. Its extremely dumb choice of database format prohibits it *by design* from being used by multiple users at the same time, like Access could (yes, early Access had locking problems, but nothing that couldn't be solved by server reboots and a BAT file removing the.lck files).
Office.DOC format compatibility isn't perfect - I had a document yesterday that started significantly diverging in formatting when viewed in OOo and MS Office about in the middle of it. It was nothing fancy, a common two-column scientific paper. Of course, this kind of compatibility may never be perfect but it also means that using both Offices in the same organization isn't possible if the organization produces non-trivial documents.
MD6 (similarity in name to MD5 is entirely intentional) looks very interesting:
Security: MD6 is by design very conservative. We aim for provable security
whenever possible; we provide reduction proofs for the security of the MD6
mode of operation, and prove that standard differential attacks against
the compression function are less efficient than birthday attacks for finding
collisions. We also show that when used as a MAC within NIST
recommendations, the keyed version of MD6 is not vulnerable to linear
cryptanalysis. The compression function and the mode of operation are
each shown to be indifferentiable from a random oracle under reasonable
assumptions.
MD6 has good efficiency: 22.4-44.1M bytes/second on a 2.4GHz Core
2 Duo laptop with 32-bit code compiled with Microsoft Visual Studio
2005 for digest sizes in the range 160-512 bits. When compiled for 64-bit
operation, it runs at 61.8-120.8M bytes/second, compiled with MS VS,
running on a 3.0GHz E6850 Core Duo processor.
MD6 works extremely well for multicore and parallel processors; we have
demonstrated hash rates of over 1GB/second on one 16-core system, and
over 427MB/sec on an 8-core system, both for 256-bit digests. We have
also demonstrated MD6 hashing rates of 375 MB/second on a typical
desktop GPU (graphics processing unit) card. We also show that MD6
runs very well on special-purpose hardware.
While raw speed isn't great (the default single-threaded 32-bit md5sum in Linux can do 325 MB/s on a 2.4 GHz CPU) maybe its multi-core friendly design is the right way to do it right now. The original MD5 will probably not entirely disappear because of its speed.
(OTOH if you're hashing SSL web traffic it's probably worse to have your hash bog down other CPUs that are busy with their own jobs)
Speaking to your criticism directly, I have about half a dozen Logitech mice, spanning a decade, that all work flawlessly. The only reason I have bought more since the first one 11 years ago has been to keep pace with technology (optical, wireless, 2d scroll wheel, laser, etc.)
I think that's about right - you replaced your mouse every 1.5-2 years on average. Not exactly a typical interval for the rest of the IT hardware industry.
Argh, I managed to virtually misplace several orders of magnitude there - FreeBSD Foundation's goal is $300,000 not $300,000,000:/ - please just ignore the last part of the post.
It's just a way to make sure one company (Google in this case) isn't using a charity (Mozilla in this case) for illegal purposes, like plain old tax evasion. If it comes to that, Mozilla simply needs to reduce the amount of money accepted by Google or rally the community to give a significant amount of money in the form of small individual donations, so the ration of Google vs others comes down.
If it seems hard to rally something that will rival Google's $66 million, a useful frame of perspective might be that the FreeBSD Foundation is working with several times the Mozilla's amount: http://www.freebsdfoundation.org/donate/ and they're managing to deal with it. (OTOH FreeBSD itself brings much money to the top donor companies so there's incentive to do it. Yes, FreeBSD developers are happy with this deal that comes from BSDL.)
Why is the possibility of of earth being observed by alien xenobiologists and xenoanthropologists always immediately dismissed? It certainly falls within the realm of possible when compared against our current understanding of physics.
Because most of our sciences have hit some kind of physical scale barrier that won't let us progress much further.
Astronomers are regularly finding extrasolar planets and are, in some cases, able to determine the atmospheric composition.
Even the most advanced conceivable technology of this type can't tell us anything more than approximate (very approximate - we're looking across light years of space dust) composition of the planets' atmosphere or surface. No chance of seeing anything like cities and space craft - it's physically impossible.
Biology is slowly moving toward transgenic creatures, cloning, and cyborgs.
Granted, this field is currently the most interesting and we can't see any nearby limits. But in the long term, All of this is for nothing if we don't go to the stars. Also, where's the cure for cancer?:)
Physics and nanotechnology continually revealing new information about how the universe works. Some of this information is finding practical uses in controlling information and energy.
In the past 100 years, computers have gone from laughably simple to being capable of modeling the climate of an entire planet. It's still innacurate and slow but it's getting faster and better.
Though the idea of nanotechnology is incredibly cool, the fact is that manipulating anything on that scale is extremely hard and inflexible. Sadly, I think that building nanomachines will never get away from early prototypes - something similar to the AI research. Transistor technology has already hit a limit (the GHz limit) which doesn't look like it was going to go away. I wouldn't be surprised if in 20 years the majority of computers still work at close to 3 GHz (though with 512 cores or something). Though it's inconvenient, not all real-world problems can be solved with increasing parallelism (queue joke about 9 women giving birth to a baby).
If it were possible right now, we'd have all kinds of people exploring the galaxy. Within the next 1,000 years, it will be possible to find planets that have a high chance of sustaining higher life forms and deliver some kind of observers to those planets for further study.
What would prevent there from being one or more alien races from undertaking a similar mission of exploration? Why would Earth automatically be disqualified as a target of such a mission?
The energy barrier is huge. It's as simple as that. I haven't heard for any non-SF theories that would allow us to easily get out even to the borders of the Solar Systems. It's 2008 - if the technology progressed as predicted 50 years ago, we should have bases on the Moon and possibly Mars by now (50 years ago, very smart people predicted lunar bases etc. but it simply failed to happen). Queue jokes about flying cars. It's incredibly expensive to put a few kg in the Earth's orbit. Interstellar travel isn't even on the charts of the most forward thinking engineers.
Yes, it can be depressing. On the other hand, the communication revolution resulting from wide-spread use of Internet and cell phones (yes, together) was never predicted and has changed the lives of at least the number of people as Moon bases could have changed. Even if we Space Odyssey 2001 will never happen IRL, The Matrix still can:)
Something that's not there is pulling matter to it? Wouldn't a simpler (at least from a certain point of view) theory be that space is warped at that place so that normal interactions and paths matter takes looks curved to us? (How warped? Dunno. Maybe in a fourth dimension...)
Of course this leaves us with the question - what is warping the space? The only thing we're aware of that has that effect is gravity. Since we think we know gravity well enough to say it's only present/caused by mass, and there's no mass in that region of space, it's either something else, or the space is "just" curved - an artefact of its existence, caused maybe by its expanding during the big bang.
What good is a data center if you don't have any business to run on it? Data centers suck resources like crazy: energy, staff, maintainance, network connections, etc.
So we have a speck of light somewhere between "130 light-years but it can be as far as 11 billion light-years away". It would be exciting if we got a FTL drive so someone can hop over there and take a look - unfortunately all it will remain now is a blip in a picture:(
Ok, the thing about JPEG was a bit over the top. I wasn't thinking about something like xenoarcheology but more practical. For example, if media has deteriorated and is only partially readable, everything one can get from it would be streams of bytes (i.e. if the directories and allocation tables are gone). If it's a plain bitmap, it's easy to see some regularities in it and align it so columns and rows make sense. If it's a chunk of bytes from the middle of a JPEG... not so easy.
Also, almost any data will probably be recoverable in labs specializing in this kind of data recovery (which could be a nice business to go into 20 years from now) but I got the impression the OP wants to recover it himself and not in a lab. A hex editor would allow him to "see" parts of the bitmap.
Learn all you can from the (arguably) failure of the BBC Domesday Project and build from there.
My advice for a time capsule is:
Always include the reader devices of whatever media you're putting in. Don't put in anything with batteries, rely on AC power being there. Assuming we don't return to the stone age anytime soon, household-grade AC power is technologically trivial to create. For example: put in a cheap laptop with a DVD reader and/or an external DVD reader. If you got the money, buy a milspec issue laptop. Try to get as much potted electronics as possible (don't do it yourself - there are heat dissipation problems here). Note that the media in the laptop holding the operating system could also be damaged over time. Make a boot/live CD with everything needed to use the computer and view the data.
Whatever media you choose (quality CDs are probably the best in the long term; anything magnetical could loose its data, especially if you're storing it in a ferromagnetic safe; flash is not proven yet), store multiple copies of the recorded medium. DO NOT rely on cleverness such as cross-medium parity / ECC. DO NOT rely on compression. Redundancy is the only way.
Aim for the most simplest data formats. Avoid compression and complex formats at all costs. Yes, this means uncompressed bitmaps are the safest - if anything, store the most important photographs uncompressed. JPEG and PNG will be readable by the included reader device but if it fails irreparably, some future digital archeologists could have a hard time decoding it (JPEG is actually a very clever and CPU-intensive format; we don't notice it now because hardware is so fast). Don't store text in binary formats. Something simple like HTML or TXT will be best. RTF is too complex. PDF also. If you must use PDF, use PDF/A; don't be clever and try to use PDF as a container format for your images, use it as a normal document format.
Fasten everything inside so it doesn't move. use styrofoam that doesn't spontaneously degrade and doesn't release gases.
Fill the capsule with an inert gas instead of air.
Store it somewhere where there won't be much variation in temperature. Try to get temperature isolation around the safe, both from cold and from hot external influences.
It's tough but it just might be doable. Again, the keywords are redundancy and simplicity. If the data is important, make two identical time capsules and store them in geographically different areas (different tectonic plates are safest but this is probably overkill:) ). It's important that the copies of the time capsule be identical so data lost from one can be restored from the other.
This logic was overturned with the introduction of "green" bars and certificates. Now, judging by the general response of corporations and non-technical users, the normal "yellow" bar is pretty much as unsecure as the white one, so we'd might as well accept self-signed https by default.
Alternatively, how about a lighter-than-current-yellow?:)
The default way of interacting with EEE PC - the application launcher - hides the complexity so much (because there's so many if it) that in doing so it cripples the user experience. There is no balance.
The "Advanced mode" of EEE PC is a normal KDE environment which is complex and inconsistent enough that normal users still return to the application launcher - which IS a toy.
But this just a tiny bit of my post - the UI. What I really meant by "Windows 98 functionality" is the following list:
Drivers, especially multimedia drivers (video, TV, webcam, other cameras, etc., including high-end stuff used by broadcast corporations).
Applications to use those drivers. These are mostly games but also high-end applications like CAD/CAM, interactive scientific applications (not the week-long number cruncher ones)
Codecs. No comment needed.
Integrated development environments similar to VB or Delphi. Personally I think this is the single largest problem here - if developers could easily write applications, users would come and so would the drivers. Of course, a perfect development system is useless here without a way to distribute those applications without needing the users to compile them.
Perfect binary compatibility across distributions or a single hugely dominant distribution. Drivers, user-created applications, etc. are greatly harmed by the need to create them, compile them and test them for every single distribution the author would like to support. As it is demonstrated each passing day, nothing beats the ability of users to download and run setup.exe and have their applications running in 5-10 seconds. No, ultra-mega-huge default package repositories for distributions don't even begin to solve this problem. Again, think of user-created applications. Windows and OS X don't have a package manager so they obviously prove it's not needed. Maybe nice to have but definitely something an OS can do without and still be very useful.
Consistent UI experience. Every time a new version of Gnome or KDE is releases, there are horrible outcries by artistically-inclined people here (and on other sites and blogs). Every time there are crimes against aesthetics like mismatched perspectives on icons, inconsistent lightning on the UI elements, inconsistent styles within a single (usually the default) UI theme/skin, etc. I really have no sense for visual design and my GUI applications tend to have at best a mediocre and usable interface (obviously I prefer command line or no UI at all...) but even I can see UI problems.
I'm sure I could go on if I weren't tired now. The big problem here isn't that Linux and other Unix-like OS-es aren't capable of those things - as Apple demonstrated - but that it's clear now that without Serious Money and a strong hand that dictates the direction, none of the above bullet points will happen. Ubuntu currently has the best chance of achieving some of them, but only if it sheds the die-hard Debian-mindset (or old-fashioned Unix-mindset) developers and does something radical.
I'm a FreeBSD kernel developer. I've pretty much given up on FreeBSD on desktop because the problems I've outlined are all present here and then amplified. It's not like there's no potential here (again, as Apple proves every time its stock climbs) but seriously - expecting a heard of cats to create a consistent user experience, for free, is crazy. (Server stuff is something completely different.)
If anyone wants to repeat Apple's success with OS X, solving the above problems is the direction the project needs to go. (Though it might lead to decline in the usefulness of the OS on the server-side, also just like Apple demonstrated.)
If in three years it doesn't match and surpass the functionality Windows 98 had, it will fade into background without ever actually being in the spotlight. Of course, I'm talking about desktop experience, not the server side.
Yes, people tend to be happy with Linux on their EEE PC-s, but not without regarding it as a toy OS instead of the real deal.
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Hmmmm... it looks like we have to improve our image, and fast. Hmmm.... how about an United Federation of Planets? That way, they can either join us or forever be outcast with other funny-forehead races, and we'll have practically a human-centered monopoly on everything!
You have two entangled particles A and B and send particle B somewhere else. Then you take a reading of A and call this reading X. You don't really know what is the meaning of X - did you observe it first or did someone else observed B first but you do know that if someone observed B next he will certainly get reading X back to him. Thus it's useless for communication.
The only way this seems useful to me is if we need to keep something perfectly identical to something else, but it can't work that way either, since quantum effects don't work on bigger scales (nothing's preventing you from smashing particle B but it won't affect particle A at all, right?)
It's sort of pointless on a bigger scale - tear a piece of paper in the dark, then send one piece in another room, come back to the first one and turn on the light - you can certainly declare the the shape of the tear of the other piece will perfectly match what you have here :) In other words, there's no analogy we can use, at all, for any communication purpose.
Ahem, remember IBM? It was founded (though under a different name) in 1896. That it exists now is not only unmatched but actually spooky for a hi-tech company. It's also showing no signs of dying. Yes, it might close down in the longest term, somewhere in the range the Roman Empire took to close down, but it won't be in our lifetimes.
The worst thing that can happen to Microsoft, which was for a long time the most profitable IT company, is to be delegated to the place IBM has now - not very present in the common man arena, but irreplaceable for big businesses.
Actually no, OOo's compatibility with Word documents works upto a point where you start producing documents more complex that Windows Write (tm) could produce. I've done all my work in OOo for about 5 years now, most of it in Linux OOo. The most complex documents I produce are standard two-column academic papers - and it's a lottery if they can be exported without major formatting bugs to .doc. Unfortunately, my professors use Word so occasionally I get embarrassed when they receive a document which looks like it was reordered by a kindergartner. But, while I get graded on the content, business may not be so lucky. I have a longer rant here if anyone's still interested.
I'm sad because of it. I cannot promote OOo among my colleagues because of it. My presentations from OOo look like they were made in the middle of the 1990ies while my Office 2007 using friends have very stylish and flashy presentations (think Apple Keynote imitation). Again, it doesn't really matter in my environment but as for businesses... presentation is probably 80% of a sale.
In short, it all depends on your document complexity. If you have specific templates for contracts, invoices, etc. you should thoroughly check if they can be imported and exported to .doc without errors. If your sales depend on presentations... probably better forget about it now (aside for import-export problems, Impress is very buggy).
How would you feel if you were the owner or a shareholder of one of companies so prominently set to fail? Self-fulfilling prophecies all around. Given how sensitive to subjective perception these things are, it's by now probably enough for a company's name to be mentioned in the same sentence as the word "bankrupt" for it to really do so.
And thus we are witnessing the birth of the "One pair of shoes per child" project :) (OPSPC)
Also, reading the developer blogs is fun and informative!
There are official Java packages for FreeBSD available.
Hmmm... Java browsers anyone?
I don't know for sure but one of the things I read about Intel is that it has a very rigid suit&tie corporate culture, similar or stricter than at IBM.
I met Alan Cox once at a conference and he didn't quite look the type to work in a tightly controlled cubicle - so why choose Intel? OTOH he did look reasonable and adjustable.
Maybe the pay raise is nice...
There are, in fact, two kinds of users of OpenOffice.org (as with all software): those who just want to create a letter in the default Times New Romsn 12 font with formatting done with tabs and spaces or fill out a form somebody else created, and those who really need to create complex documents not because it's a source of endless fun but because they need to present complex topics.
For the first people, yes, OpenOffice.org is "done" - but for such people WordPad, KOffice and AbiWord are "done" also, and using OpenOffice.org is just bloat in terms of startup time and memory consumed.
For the second people, OpenOffice.org still borders on the unusable.
Some examples from my own usage:
MD6 (similarity in name to MD5 is entirely intentional) looks very interesting:
While raw speed isn't great (the default single-threaded 32-bit md5sum in Linux can do 325 MB/s on a 2.4 GHz CPU) maybe its multi-core friendly design is the right way to do it right now. The original MD5 will probably not entirely disappear because of its speed.
(OTOH if you're hashing SSL web traffic it's probably worse to have your hash bog down other CPUs that are busy with their own jobs)
Speaking to your criticism directly, I have about half a dozen Logitech mice, spanning a decade, that all work flawlessly. The only reason I have bought more since the first one 11 years ago has been to keep pace with technology (optical, wireless, 2d scroll wheel, laser, etc.)
I think that's about right - you replaced your mouse every 1.5-2 years on average. Not exactly a typical interval for the rest of the IT hardware industry.
Argh, I managed to virtually misplace several orders of magnitude there - FreeBSD Foundation's goal is $300,000 not $300,000,000 :/ - please just ignore the last part of the post.
It's just a way to make sure one company (Google in this case) isn't using a charity (Mozilla in this case) for illegal purposes, like plain old tax evasion. If it comes to that, Mozilla simply needs to reduce the amount of money accepted by Google or rally the community to give a significant amount of money in the form of small individual donations, so the ration of Google vs others comes down.
If it seems hard to rally something that will rival Google's $66 million, a useful frame of perspective might be that the FreeBSD Foundation is working with several times the Mozilla's amount: http://www.freebsdfoundation.org/donate/ and they're managing to deal with it. (OTOH FreeBSD itself brings much money to the top donor companies so there's incentive to do it. Yes, FreeBSD developers are happy with this deal that comes from BSDL.)
They've:
There's hope yet :)
Why is the possibility of of earth being observed by alien xenobiologists and xenoanthropologists always immediately dismissed? It certainly falls within the realm of possible when compared against our current understanding of physics.
Because most of our sciences have hit some kind of physical scale barrier that won't let us progress much further.
Astronomers are regularly finding extrasolar planets and are, in some cases, able to determine the atmospheric composition.
Even the most advanced conceivable technology of this type can't tell us anything more than approximate (very approximate - we're looking across light years of space dust) composition of the planets' atmosphere or surface. No chance of seeing anything like cities and space craft - it's physically impossible.
Biology is slowly moving toward transgenic creatures, cloning, and cyborgs.
Granted, this field is currently the most interesting and we can't see any nearby limits. But in the long term, All of this is for nothing if we don't go to the stars. Also, where's the cure for cancer? :)
Physics and nanotechnology continually revealing new information about how the universe works. Some of this information is finding practical uses in controlling information and energy.
In the past 100 years, computers have gone from laughably simple to being capable of modeling the climate of an entire planet. It's still innacurate and slow but it's getting faster and better.
Though the idea of nanotechnology is incredibly cool, the fact is that manipulating anything on that scale is extremely hard and inflexible. Sadly, I think that building nanomachines will never get away from early prototypes - something similar to the AI research. Transistor technology has already hit a limit (the GHz limit) which doesn't look like it was going to go away. I wouldn't be surprised if in 20 years the majority of computers still work at close to 3 GHz (though with 512 cores or something). Though it's inconvenient, not all real-world problems can be solved with increasing parallelism (queue joke about 9 women giving birth to a baby).
If it were possible right now, we'd have all kinds of people exploring the galaxy. Within the next 1,000 years, it will be possible to find planets that have a high chance of sustaining higher life forms and deliver some kind of observers to those planets for further study.
What would prevent there from being one or more alien races from undertaking a similar mission of exploration? Why would Earth automatically be disqualified as a target of such a mission?
The energy barrier is huge. It's as simple as that. I haven't heard for any non-SF theories that would allow us to easily get out even to the borders of the Solar Systems. It's 2008 - if the technology progressed as predicted 50 years ago, we should have bases on the Moon and possibly Mars by now (50 years ago, very smart people predicted lunar bases etc. but it simply failed to happen). Queue jokes about flying cars. It's incredibly expensive to put a few kg in the Earth's orbit. Interstellar travel isn't even on the charts of the most forward thinking engineers.
Yes, it can be depressing. On the other hand, the communication revolution resulting from wide-spread use of Internet and cell phones (yes, together) was never predicted and has changed the lives of at least the number of people as Moon bases could have changed. Even if we Space Odyssey 2001 will never happen IRL, The Matrix still can :)
Something that's not there is pulling matter to it? Wouldn't a simpler (at least from a certain point of view) theory be that space is warped at that place so that normal interactions and paths matter takes looks curved to us? (How warped? Dunno. Maybe in a fourth dimension...)
Of course this leaves us with the question - what is warping the space? The only thing we're aware of that has that effect is gravity. Since we think we know gravity well enough to say it's only present/caused by mass, and there's no mass in that region of space, it's either something else, or the space is "just" curved - an artefact of its existence, caused maybe by its expanding during the big bang.
What good is a data center if you don't have any business to run on it? Data centers suck resources like crazy: energy, staff, maintainance, network connections, etc.
So we have a speck of light somewhere between "130 light-years but it can be as far as 11 billion light-years away". It would be exciting if we got a FTL drive so someone can hop over there and take a look - unfortunately all it will remain now is a blip in a picture :(
:)
Ok, the thing about JPEG was a bit over the top. I wasn't thinking about something like xenoarcheology but more practical. For example, if media has deteriorated and is only partially readable, everything one can get from it would be streams of bytes (i.e. if the directories and allocation tables are gone). If it's a plain bitmap, it's easy to see some regularities in it and align it so columns and rows make sense. If it's a chunk of bytes from the middle of a JPEG... not so easy.
Also, almost any data will probably be recoverable in labs specializing in this kind of data recovery (which could be a nice business to go into 20 years from now) but I got the impression the OP wants to recover it himself and not in a lab. A hex editor would allow him to "see" parts of the bitmap.
Learn all you can from the (arguably) failure of the BBC Domesday Project and build from there.
My advice for a time capsule is:
It's tough but it just might be doable. Again, the keywords are redundancy and simplicity. If the data is important, make two identical time capsules and store them in geographically different areas (different tectonic plates are safest but this is probably overkill :) ). It's important that the copies of the time capsule be identical so data lost from one can be restored from the other.
This logic was overturned with the introduction of "green" bars and certificates. Now, judging by the general response of corporations and non-technical users, the normal "yellow" bar is pretty much as unsecure as the white one, so we'd might as well accept self-signed https by default.
Alternatively, how about a lighter-than-current-yellow? :)
The default way of interacting with EEE PC - the application launcher - hides the complexity so much (because there's so many if it) that in doing so it cripples the user experience. There is no balance.
The "Advanced mode" of EEE PC is a normal KDE environment which is complex and inconsistent enough that normal users still return to the application launcher - which IS a toy.
But this just a tiny bit of my post - the UI. What I really meant by "Windows 98 functionality" is the following list:
I'm sure I could go on if I weren't tired now. The big problem here isn't that Linux and other Unix-like OS-es aren't capable of those things - as Apple demonstrated - but that it's clear now that without Serious Money and a strong hand that dictates the direction, none of the above bullet points will happen. Ubuntu currently has the best chance of achieving some of them, but only if it sheds the die-hard Debian-mindset (or old-fashioned Unix-mindset) developers and does something radical.
I'm a FreeBSD kernel developer. I've pretty much given up on FreeBSD on desktop because the problems I've outlined are all present here and then amplified. It's not like there's no potential here (again, as Apple proves every time its stock climbs) but seriously - expecting a heard of cats to create a consistent user experience, for free, is crazy. (Server stuff is something completely different.)
If anyone wants to repeat Apple's success with OS X, solving the above problems is the direction the project needs to go. (Though it might lead to decline in the usefulness of the OS on the server-side, also just like Apple demonstrated.)
If in three years it doesn't match and surpass the functionality Windows 98 had, it will fade into background without ever actually being in the spotlight. Of course, I'm talking about desktop experience, not the server side.
Yes, people tend to be happy with Linux on their EEE PC-s, but not without regarding it as a toy OS instead of the real deal.