You make it sound hard, but considering people nowadays slice open completely proprietary computer chips running proprietary code and reverse engineer the thing using a microscope and some simulation software, the CD isn't going to be too hard to do 100 years from now.
You have to remember that it is going to be pretty obvious for anyone that the original use was to play back music. Most likely, they will find them in places where the player is still next to it - even if it doesn't work. Even without the red book spec, there will be loads of cues about how the data might be on there.
And who knows what computing will be up to? Is giving a computer a electron microscope scan of a CD and telling it: "it's supposed to be sound, probably in binary encoding and it will have some error correction data in there" so hard to imagine? I don't think it is if technology keeps advancing like it does now.
Will they do it in a weekend? probably not, but what makes you think that if you can't do it in a weekend, everybody is just going to walk away and say: "not worth it, its too hard". That is not how humans worked a thousand years ago, not how they work now and nor will they in the 23 century.
If you;re uncomvinced go study the maths on auto focusing an pit tracking lasers, not to mention D/A conversion, reed solomon error corection etc. Why would you use such arcane methods a 100 years from now? If they looked closely at the disc, they would see the patterns. Knowing (as they will) that we used to use "binary", they'll quickly assume they represent 1 and 0. Take a quick scan of the entire disc and do the rest in memory. Somehow I doubt they'll have much of a problem with D/A conversion either. (which is so simple, they'll figure that one out too. Understanding the data is supposed to be audio, they'll quickly put two and two together. Most likely, they will actually convert it to the way their computers store sound and let 22nd century A/D converters do the job)
Just because you want the data off the disc, doesn't mean you need to create a player the same way we do now!
Try finding someone now who could build a decent siege engine or longbow that would be good enough to fight a medieval battle. Hell , even finding someone these days who can rebuild steam engines is tough! There seems no shortage of such people on the Discovery Channel!
(Ever tried to get data off an obsolete tape backup There are loads of people that can make this work. The most important thing is having the specs of what is on it, how it was recorded. (even just a few hints and some knowledge of how computer systems in that era might have recorded data is enough) That the machine used is no longer functioning and had an interface that doesn't work with your USB-only modern PC anyway is of no relevance.
Given the media, specifications and some time and money, a trio of engineering, electronics and CS students will make a machine that will read any old tape, punchcard, early HDD, etc. A CD is laughably simple technology, an engineer 100 years from now will build a player (in a way that may not look anything like our current players) in no time at all.
Today's technology is even more well documented and certainly not beyond the capabilities of future generations to make readers for.
If you find an old tape and want to do it in an afternoon, you are out of luck. If you are an historian that really, really wants to get to the data, it is not all that hard.
Guam has some connections at the moment, but this will be the biggest link to it by far - for now. "Google cable" Unity's southern loop will also pass through Guam and then the party really begins.
These are good times; today we have just over 1TB with Southern Cross and AJC combined. With 1TB Pipe/Unity cable, Telstra's 1TB cable to Hawaii and the upgrade of Souther Cross to 2TB all within the next year we will have a four-fold capacity increase.
It might be me, but I feel unlimited DSL accounts coming up later next year.
You are totally right about most other options not being reliable, the worst being HDDs; you need to keep those spinning regularly and replace them every few years.
People are still reading their decades old MO discs that have been left on the shelf.
Lots of organizations have the need to archive their data and currently the only game in town are MO ($10/GB) and UDO (slightly less) with drives costing $3000+.
That makes the TCO of an 18K drive with 50c/GB very, very attractive to this market and that is what this system is competing with.
Now the only thing that needs to happen is for the technology to be licensed to other players because most CIOs are unlikely to put all their eggs in one basket.
Many companies are now blocking web-based email providers.
They usually block not only by known hostname or IP, there are some smart systems that can identify things like SquirrelMail. And an old favourite is also to block based on educated guesses, like "webmail.mydomain.com".
So the best way to get web-based email through is to run your own install, on a host/domain name that does not include "mail" and such. And use HTTPS, that way the proxy can't see you are using SquirrelMail or similar.
While your mag-stripe system was the dumbest in existence and completely disconnected, most of these RFID systems don't just keep info on these cards, there also is the central system, which is the authoritative repository. This is how they do re-charging over the internet (like you can do with Oyster in London) or replacing lost cards.
A cracked card may well work on disconnected readers that synchronize at intervals but when this sync occurs it will be easy to detect fraud. That can disable the card and while some very savvy people can constantly fake a new one for every trip, there won't be the possibility of selling pre-paid cards with lots of credit to the public at large. Also, the time stamp of when the card was used can be correlated with CCTV footage. Smile!
Somehow I don't think cracked cards are going to be a major hassle for transit systems.
I wouldn't use them for access to secure areas, but then again, the majority of building access is still done by very dumb 125KHz HID Prox cards that are not encrypted at all.
http://cheapdomains.com.au/ does $38 for 2 years. I have mine there and they are perfectly legit, no hidden costs. Just register, enter your name servers (I use http://everydns.net/ and you are good to go.
No, he said it had a reputation, not what that reputation was nor wether he agreed with it.
Congratulations sir. Apple hating Slashdotters' capacity for misquoting for libelous use and getting modded "insightful" for it never ceases to amaze me.
They didn't go into too much detail, just that it was for crew evaluation. Not quite sure if they are allowed to pick on individual pilots.
Mind you, as a passenger, I hope they do! Not that it probably matters - in most cases of a pilot-error accident it seems to be a screw up so bad (running out of fuel with x-feed on while one engine is leaking gallons a second, controlled flight into terrain, etc) that you wouldn't be able to predict it from how rough their average landing is anyway...
It is not just the manufacturers that make that decision - the type of flight data / cockpit voice recorder is an option like most others and airlines can choose which one is installed.
I have no link, but in several episodes of Air Crash Investigations it was made clear that British Airways pays a premium for the more advanced models that record many more parameters than more frugal airlines do. Not sure if they have battery backup. In one episode, a problem occurred twice on 737s of other (US) airlines. But it wasn't until BA's better black box recorded it that they could figure it out and fix all 737s, saving many lives. Fortunately, the BA problem didn't result in a fatal crash.
BA supposedly also regularly takes out the data packs for crew evaluation - too many ILS deviations or rough landings and it's a reprimand and back to the sim for you!
Interesting, Edison (DC) did their best to show Tesla's AC was much more lethal, even electrocuting an elephant to make his point.
But the reason DC is a lot cheaper is that electricity doesn't travel very far at low (safe-ish) voltages. AC is easily and cheaply stepped down from long-distance 10KV+ lines to 120/240 at the end of your street. DC can't be stepped down with a transformer, so the system as a whole ends up costing a lot more. There were a lot of local power plants on Manhattan to be able to get DC to customers!
Ironically, at high voltages, DC is more efficient at long distances, so you will see long distance point-to point transmission lines being done in DC, rather than AC.
- AC vs. DC: Cheaper and better system won - VHS vs. BetaMax: Cheaper, worse system won - 8 Track vs. Cassette: cheaper, better system won. (though 8 Track was so retarded, it would have been hard to lose in any case) - BR vs. HDDVD: More expensive system won, without a real technological/quality advantage.
So what could have been learned? What sony should have learned looking at the first three is "the cheaper always wins" and they should have packed up and left. Instead, Sony made a more expensive system and clobbered Toshiba with marketing. And won.
But read the link I pointed to about ESI. Akamai does more than just server dependencies like images, video, css, js, etc. They actually have an engine that assembles HTML also.
That said, I don't think any more this is specifically about ESI; the patent doesn't really mention it. It just seems to cover the good old image includes.
No matter, back when this was patented, this was far from obvious and certainly a novel idea. I am not the biggest fan of software patents, but I'd say they are far from patent trolls; they have an actual application they are trying to make money off.
I would assume they are talking about Edge Side Includes and not simply about the serving of images.
ESI is like Server Side Includes, except that the included part resides on the Edge servers. So your server would serve a page with only the content personalized to you specifically (like the fact that you are logged in) but a box full of news headlines that everyone sees would be included by the edge server.
Not entirely obvious, but I am not so sure it warrants patent protection in any case.
The ping time only gives you latency. Latency is mostly interesting for online gaming. The difference between 200 and 400ms isn't going to get noticed by anyone surfing and certainly not for big downloads or streaming. Also, cable length has very little influence on latency, probably being the cause of only 10-20% of it. Light goes at almost 300KM/sec and as you point out the AJC is only 12,700KM long. Much of the latency is caused in TCP/IP level switching. If an ISP ordered a circuit from Sydney to LA via AJC and Unity, this circuit would be switched at a much lower level that ads virtually no latency. (and this hop won't show up in your traceroute either) A good example:
5 pos4-0.bdr1.syd7.internode.on.net (203.16.212.21) 203.835 ms 203.779 ms 203.355 ms
6 pos2-0.bdr1.sjc2.internode.on.net (203.16.213.41) 202.367 ms 202.518 ms 202.337 ms
7 ge-6-20.car3.SanJose1.Level3.net (4.71.112.85) 202.347 ms 202.269 ms 202.844 ms
The trace goes straight from Sydney to San Jose, even though the cable passes through Hawaii and possibly Auckland too. It simply is a direct circuit.
We also do not have several independent links to the US already. The only significant link we have are the two loops of the Southern Cross cable, both of which have landing points very close together and both go through Hawaii - an undersea landslide or other plate moment could easily take both out at the same time. The only significant(-ish) backup we have is the AJC, which is already at capacity. (which is only half of SCC to begin with!) It would keep us connected to the world if SCC goes down for sure, but it won't be fast.
This new cable system however WILL give us the high capacity redundant link. With the new 2Tb PIPE cable to Guam (over twice the capacity of SCC and AJC combined) going live next year and Unity's southern loop going through Guam also in 2010 it will give us an enormous boost in capacity and redundancy. It also gives us much more capacity in the other direction around the globe, making it feasible to go to Europe via the shorter route instead of the US. I was a bit surprised about the PIPE cable because there isn't enough connectivity currently on Guam to fill up 2Tb. The announcement of Unity makes it all clear, however.
This is a much better map of undersea cables also.
Exactly, the modern one made for big internet bandwidth. All the other, older, cables simply don't have anywhere near the capacity needed for current-day internet use. In essence, they are telephone cables more than anything. They are used for calls and low-bandwidth fixed corporate data circuits, but the ISPs don't tend to use them.
There are loads of cables from here into asia too. But again, all of them are too low capacity; the only somewhat useful one for internet traffic is the Perth-Singapore cable.
Well, we could be in luck. In a little over a year, a new 2Tb cable to Guam is coming online. From what I can gather on the internet, part of "Unity" is Pacnet's EAC Pacific cable. This will cover the Southern loop of the system and pass through... Guam!
You laugh about the Kiwis, but we get virtually all our internet here in Oz via the Souther Cross Cable system. A system with NO australian ownership whatsoever. The majority owner? Telecom New Zealand, with a 50% stake.
Yup, if it weren't for the Kiwis we'd still be sending our email by morse code. (The next biggest cable, between Australia and Japan isn't anywhere near big enough and came online several years after the SCC)
Gotta hand it to them; they wanted a big cable for themselves but probably couldn't make it profitable - so they extended it over here and not only are they taking our money via their virtual monopoly, we gladly allow them to do so because no Australian telecom could be f***ed in late 1990s to get us seriously hooked up.
I read the instructions on copyright.gov and I can't find anywhere where it says that you can submit CDs/DVDs to the Library of Congres, which your wording seems to imply. It sounds to me they want prints only.
Personally, I would prefer to send (optical, not inkjet) prints as in the archives of the LoC they will no doubt last longer than recordables.
Slashdot Mirror
You make it sound hard, but considering people nowadays slice open completely proprietary computer chips running proprietary code and reverse engineer the thing using a microscope and some simulation software, the CD isn't going to be too hard to do 100 years from now.
You have to remember that it is going to be pretty obvious for anyone that the original use was to play back music. Most likely, they will find them in places where the player is still next to it - even if it doesn't work. Even without the red book spec, there will be loads of cues about how the data might be on there.
And who knows what computing will be up to? Is giving a computer a electron microscope scan of a CD and telling it: "it's supposed to be sound, probably in binary encoding and it will have some error correction data in there" so hard to imagine? I don't think it is if technology keeps advancing like it does now.
Will they do it in a weekend? probably not, but what makes you think that if you can't do it in a weekend, everybody is just going to walk away and say: "not worth it, its too hard". That is not how humans worked a thousand years ago, not how they work now and nor will they in the 23 century.
Just because you want the data off the disc, doesn't mean you need to create a player the same way we do now! Try finding someone now who could build a decent siege engine or longbow that would be good enough to fight a medieval battle. Hell , even finding someone these days who can rebuild steam engines is tough! There seems no shortage of such people on the Discovery Channel!
Given the media, specifications and some time and money, a trio of engineering, electronics and CS students will make a machine that will read any old tape, punchcard, early HDD, etc. A CD is laughably simple technology, an engineer 100 years from now will build a player (in a way that may not look anything like our current players) in no time at all.
Today's technology is even more well documented and certainly not beyond the capabilities of future generations to make readers for.
If you find an old tape and want to do it in an afternoon, you are out of luck. If you are an historian that really, really wants to get to the data, it is not all that hard.
Guam has some connections at the moment, but this will be the biggest link to it by far - for now. "Google cable" Unity's southern loop will also pass through Guam and then the party really begins.
These are good times; today we have just over 1TB with Southern Cross and AJC combined. With 1TB Pipe/Unity cable, Telstra's 1TB cable to Hawaii and the upgrade of Souther Cross to 2TB all within the next year we will have a four-fold capacity increase.
It might be me, but I feel unlimited DSL accounts coming up later next year.
You are totally right about most other options not being reliable, the worst being HDDs; you need to keep those spinning regularly and replace them every few years.
People are still reading their decades old MO discs that have been left on the shelf.
Lots of organizations have the need to archive their data and currently the only game in town are MO ($10/GB) and UDO (slightly less) with drives costing $3000+.
That makes the TCO of an 18K drive with 50c/GB very, very attractive to this market and that is what this system is competing with.
Now the only thing that needs to happen is for the technology to be licensed to other players because most CIOs are unlikely to put all their eggs in one basket.
It is so incredibly easy to cut cables and once someone does it, everybody will and everybody loses.
MAD: Mutually Assured Disconnection
Hence, nobody does it.
A cable gets cut by accident every week of the year. So this time there were a couple grouped a bit closer both in time and geography. Big Deal.
Many companies are now blocking web-based email providers.
They usually block not only by known hostname or IP, there are some smart systems that can identify things like SquirrelMail. And an old favourite is also to block based on educated guesses, like "webmail.mydomain.com".
So the best way to get web-based email through is to run your own install, on a host/domain name that does not include "mail" and such. And use HTTPS, that way the proxy can't see you are using SquirrelMail or similar.
Atheists do not "believe there is no god", instead, Atheism is the absence of belief in any deity.
Not believing something exists and "believing something does not exist" are two very different states of mind.
Wrap your head around that and you will understand atheism.
They do? In most countries, the venue pays. DJs just show up and play what they've got, without direct payment from them to the record companies.
The same goes for live music, on which royalties are payable too.
The way this is done is by fixed fee. The royalties agency determining what songs generally statistically get played and divides the revenue.
Of course that mean that lesser known artists get nothing and 90% of royalties paid goes to 10% of the artists. Nice.
While your mag-stripe system was the dumbest in existence and completely disconnected, most of these RFID systems don't just keep info on these cards, there also is the central system, which is the authoritative repository. This is how they do re-charging over the internet (like you can do with Oyster in London) or replacing lost cards.
A cracked card may well work on disconnected readers that synchronize at intervals but when this sync occurs it will be easy to detect fraud. That can disable the card and while some very savvy people can constantly fake a new one for every trip, there won't be the possibility of selling pre-paid cards with lots of credit to the public at large. Also, the time stamp of when the card was used can be correlated with CCTV footage. Smile!
Somehow I don't think cracked cards are going to be a major hassle for transit systems.
I wouldn't use them for access to secure areas, but then again, the majority of building access is still done by very dumb 125KHz HID Prox cards that are not encrypted at all.
http://cheapdomains.com.au/ does $38 for 2 years. I have mine there and they are perfectly legit, no hidden costs. Just register, enter your name servers (I use http://everydns.net/ and you are good to go.
No, he said it had a reputation, not what that reputation was nor wether he agreed with it.
Congratulations sir. Apple hating Slashdotters' capacity for misquoting for libelous use and getting modded "insightful" for it never ceases to amaze me.
They didn't go into too much detail, just that it was for crew evaluation. Not quite sure if they are allowed to pick on individual pilots.
Mind you, as a passenger, I hope they do! Not that it probably matters - in most cases of a pilot-error accident it seems to be a screw up so bad (running out of fuel with x-feed on while one engine is leaking gallons a second, controlled flight into terrain, etc) that you wouldn't be able to predict it from how rough their average landing is anyway...
It is not just the manufacturers that make that decision - the type of flight data / cockpit voice recorder is an option like most others and airlines can choose which one is installed.
I have no link, but in several episodes of Air Crash Investigations it was made clear that British Airways pays a premium for the more advanced models that record many more parameters than more frugal airlines do. Not sure if they have battery backup. In one episode, a problem occurred twice on 737s of other (US) airlines. But it wasn't until BA's better black box recorded it that they could figure it out and fix all 737s, saving many lives. Fortunately, the BA problem didn't result in a fatal crash.
BA supposedly also regularly takes out the data packs for crew evaluation - too many ILS deviations or rough landings and it's a reprimand and back to the sim for you!
Interesting, Edison (DC) did their best to show Tesla's AC was much more lethal, even electrocuting an elephant to make his point.
But the reason DC is a lot cheaper is that electricity doesn't travel very far at low (safe-ish) voltages. AC is easily and cheaply stepped down from long-distance 10KV+ lines to 120/240 at the end of your street. DC can't be stepped down with a transformer, so the system as a whole ends up costing a lot more. There were a lot of local power plants on Manhattan to be able to get DC to customers!
Ironically, at high voltages, DC is more efficient at long distances, so you will see long distance point-to point transmission lines being done in DC, rather than AC.
Are they really that similar?
- AC vs. DC: Cheaper and better system won
- VHS vs. BetaMax: Cheaper, worse system won
- 8 Track vs. Cassette: cheaper, better system won. (though 8 Track was so retarded, it would have been hard to lose in any case)
- BR vs. HDDVD: More expensive system won, without a real technological/quality advantage.
So what could have been learned? What sony should have learned looking at the first three is "the cheaper always wins" and they should have packed up and left. Instead, Sony made a more expensive system and clobbered Toshiba with marketing. And won.
Who said anything about static? :)
But read the link I pointed to about ESI. Akamai does more than just server dependencies like images, video, css, js, etc. They actually have an engine that assembles HTML also.
That said, I don't think any more this is specifically about ESI; the patent doesn't really mention it. It just seems to cover the good old image includes.
No matter, back when this was patented, this was far from obvious and certainly a novel idea. I am not the biggest fan of software patents, but I'd say they are far from patent trolls; they have an actual application they are trying to make money off.
I would assume they are talking about Edge Side Includes and not simply about the serving of images.
ESI is like Server Side Includes, except that the included part resides on the Edge servers. So your server would serve a page with only the content personalized to you specifically (like the fact that you are logged in) but a box full of news headlines that everyone sees would be included by the edge server.
Not entirely obvious, but I am not so sure it warrants patent protection in any case.
In about 2 billion years the Milky Way could already collide with the Andromeda Galaxy, which will more than likely change earth's cozy equilibrium that enables human life in a sub-optimal way.
The ping time only gives you latency. Latency is mostly interesting for online gaming. The difference between 200 and 400ms isn't going to get noticed by anyone surfing and certainly not for big downloads or streaming. Also, cable length has very little influence on latency, probably being the cause of only 10-20% of it. Light goes at almost 300KM/sec and as you point out the AJC is only 12,700KM long. Much of the latency is caused in TCP/IP level switching. If an ISP ordered a circuit from Sydney to LA via AJC and Unity, this circuit would be switched at a much lower level that ads virtually no latency. (and this hop won't show up in your traceroute either) A good example:
5 pos4-0.bdr1.syd7.internode.on.net (203.16.212.21) 203.835 ms 203.779 ms 203.355 ms
6 pos2-0.bdr1.sjc2.internode.on.net (203.16.213.41) 202.367 ms 202.518 ms 202.337 ms
7 ge-6-20.car3.SanJose1.Level3.net (4.71.112.85) 202.347 ms 202.269 ms 202.844 ms
The trace goes straight from Sydney to San Jose, even though the cable passes through Hawaii and possibly Auckland too. It simply is a direct circuit.
We also do not have several independent links to the US already. The only significant link we have are the two loops of the Southern Cross cable, both of which have landing points very close together and both go through Hawaii - an undersea landslide or other plate moment could easily take both out at the same time. The only significant(-ish) backup we have is the AJC, which is already at capacity. (which is only half of SCC to begin with!) It would keep us connected to the world if SCC goes down for sure, but it won't be fast.
This new cable system however WILL give us the high capacity redundant link. With the new 2Tb PIPE cable to Guam (over twice the capacity of SCC and AJC combined) going live next year and Unity's southern loop going through Guam also in 2010 it will give us an enormous boost in capacity and redundancy. It also gives us much more capacity in the other direction around the globe, making it feasible to go to Europe via the shorter route instead of the US. I was a bit surprised about the PIPE cable because there isn't enough connectivity currently on Guam to fill up 2Tb. The announcement of Unity makes it all clear, however.
This is a much better map of undersea cables also.
Exactly, the modern one made for big internet bandwidth. All the other, older, cables simply don't have anywhere near the capacity needed for current-day internet use. In essence, they are telephone cables more than anything. They are used for calls and low-bandwidth fixed corporate data circuits, but the ISPs don't tend to use them.
There are loads of cables from here into asia too. But again, all of them are too low capacity; the only somewhat useful one for internet traffic is the Perth-Singapore cable.
It will have a big impact, see my other comment.
In short: we are getting a 2Tb cable to Guam in 2009 and Unity's Southern loop will go through there too.
Well, we could be in luck. In a little over a year, a new 2Tb cable to Guam is coming online. From what I can gather on the internet, part of "Unity" is Pacnet's EAC Pacific cable. This will cover the Southern loop of the system and pass through ... Guam!
Finally, we won't be solely dependent on the Southern Cross Cable our Kiwi friends gracefully provided us with, or the woefully inadequate Australia-Japan cable.
You laugh about the Kiwis, but we get virtually all our internet here in Oz via the Souther Cross Cable system. A system with NO australian ownership whatsoever. The majority owner? Telecom New Zealand, with a 50% stake.
Yup, if it weren't for the Kiwis we'd still be sending our email by morse code. (The next biggest cable, between Australia and Japan isn't anywhere near big enough and came online several years after the SCC)
Gotta hand it to them; they wanted a big cable for themselves but probably couldn't make it profitable - so they extended it over here and not only are they taking our money via their virtual monopoly, we gladly allow them to do so because no Australian telecom could be f***ed in late 1990s to get us seriously hooked up.
I read the instructions on copyright.gov and I can't find anywhere where it says that you can submit CDs/DVDs to the Library of Congres, which your wording seems to imply. It sounds to me they want prints only.
Personally, I would prefer to send (optical, not inkjet) prints as in the archives of the LoC they will no doubt last longer than recordables.