Microchip offer two devices. The PIC16c765 and PIC16c745. They both offer some A/D convertor & many pin of input (24 for the 16c765 I believe).
You can get them for free in sample from microchip if you find out a good enough idea. I've built some things but the funniest one is the PS2/USB keyboard adapter. Try programming with your friend using 2 keyboard and 2 mice =).
Here it is
Last month, a Norwegian literary museum admitted losing access to their catalogue system after the database administrator died -- taking the password with him. Yesterday, my mother's computer died -- taking two years worth of email with it. The museum in Norway put out a radio call for hackers to help crack the code. My Mum? Well, she just cried into the phone for a while.
It might seem as though these two stories are only slightly related. To me, they both indicate a bigger problem.
Prior to the commercial internet and the arrival of cheap mass storage, computers were mostly used for pumping out paper documents. But with the explosion of email, web publishing and digital media in general, times are changing. Culture as we know it is going digital.
Constructing a history is fairly straightforward: In the physical world, works are tangible and rooted in time and place. Birth, death and marriage records maintained by governments allow us to trace who made what, and when. Mostly, stuff lasts.
Unfortunately, digital works aren't like that. Data is a commodity, stored in bulk on anonymous file systems, duplicated and destroyed by whoever has access. Every day hard drives fail, human-dependent backup systems fail. People die and their computers get wiped or thrown out. Passwords are lost and formats change. Corporate intranets are a mess -- if you've ever had the displeasure of using one, well, let's just say keeping everything is not the same as keeping everything organized.
Digital culture + geeks with attention deficit = uh oh.
In 2000 the University of California, Berkeley published a study showing that printed content represents only 0.003% of the world's total information -- most of the remainder is stored digitally. If that figure is correct, almost our entire output as a society is entrusted to one of several Microsoft operating systems and disks with twelve-month limited warranties.
*cue danger music*
Y2K, another problem brought about entirely by lack of forethought (plus a healthy dose of denial), has not served as a wake up call. Product development decisions continue to revolve around annual earnings. Technology uptake continues to be driven by novelty and the quest for cool. Even in the Open Source world, development is more about cloning commercial products than designing software to last a millennium.
Two hundred years from now, how will historians assess the early twenty-first century? They won't, because scarcely anything will be left to assess. That's right: Welcome, my friends, to the digital dark age.
A step backwards is not the solution, trees being in short supply and all. Besides, librarians and archivists have discovered that the books and papers we print now dissolve much more quickly than books printed a century ago. Paper isn't the answer: Our only viable option is to come up with a digital system that works.
To do this, we need to transform some of our ideas about computing.
Right now, files are stored on individual machines. It's up to the owners of those machines to make copies -- but individuals, until they lose something important to them, do not back up. We can look at P2P file-sharing systems, with multiple redundant copies of almost every file, for inspiration. Why not do the same with personal files, automatically creating mulitple copies of your recipe book across the network? You'd never have to back up again.
This isn't necessarily a new idea: Sun Microsystems is fond of suggesting that "the network is the computer" and the distributed computing concept has been around for a while. But people are understandably hesitant to store their personal files on a central server, much less someone else's personal computer. What of privacy, if your files are scattered all over the world?
That's where identity comes into play. The data and documents you create today are generic and anonymous -- they are not linked to your identity in the municipal records, nor are they proven to be authentically yours. In a lot of cases they aren't even datestamped accurately. This makes your files even on your own computer vulnerable -- a vulnerability that could be overcome by linking them to your official records. If you are going to be storing your files on someone else's computer, you'll want a foolproof way to identify that the files are yours.
It might seem abhorrent to think of some government program tagging and subsequently rifling through your digital stuff. But perhaps the government only needs to give us access to the citizenship records we've already paid them to maintain.
Unbreakable encryption is a viable solution, but only if data isn't locked down permanently. As morbid as it seems, a system that's aware of your death or permanent disablement can make sure those files are unencrypted at the appropriate time. The same system could make sure your files are released to the public domain, protected by copyright, or even deleted from the network for privacy reasons at the time of your demise.
We need a new universal storage mechanism: one that authenticates, protects and manages the data we create. In a future-conscious world, such functions would be a natural extension of the computing experience.
Finally, there is the issue of format. As proprietary data formats give way to XML, and XML gives way to whatever comes five years later, things are going to get lost in the shuffle. Who to call when you need to translate a fifty-year-old Word file? Not to mention the fact that binary storage will sooner or later be replaced with non-binary molecular or holographic storage.
By legislating in the interest of future generations, government could ensure that software companies publish closed formats to a public repository, forming the basis of a "universal file translator." Then, there would be some confidence in the accessibility of even the oldest data.
Regardless of what may or may not happen, nobody wants to be forgotten (at least, I know I don't). That's why a little danger music will hopefully be good for us, to get us thinking about how the storage decisions we make today are likely to affect the people that come afterward. And think about it we must, else what a great shame: To let the dawn of the Information Age turn slowly, and irreversibly, dark.
-----------------
David Emberton is an inventor, writer and musician. He flaunts what he got at emberton.com.
'-> POST COMMENTS: THE DIGITAL DARK AGE
Digital Dark Age
From an archivist's perspective this problem is hideous. Should we be keeping copies of ancient computers and software to access the files we want to keep? What file format will stand the test of time even assuming we can find a medium to preserve it in?
posted by Threnody on July 8, 2002 at 1:31 pm
archivism
You know, I'm kind of conflicted on this issue. I backup my most important files once every couple of weeks, and I've had a few hard drives fail... And in some ways, when they do, it's a mixed blessing. Because by the time my hard drive fails I've accumulated so much shit that I'm happy to see most of it go. Really. I breathe a sigh of relief that I'll never have to sort through all that crap again. At the same time, there are important things that as a society we should keep. Although archivists are encouraging book publishers etc to move to alkaline paper (they have discovered that the acidic paper we've been using for mass production in the past forty or so years degrades much faster than the stuff we were using a century ago, meaning the books we are producing now last only decades, not centuries) the transition is slow and probably too late. If we don't address the digital issues detailed above and the issues with paper stock, we're going to have virtually no records from the 20th-21st century.
posted by chillythekid on July 8, 2002 at 4:59 pm
Slashdot Mirror
Microchip offer two devices. The PIC16c765 and PIC16c745. They both offer some A/D convertor & many pin of input (24 for the 16c765 I believe).
:)
You can get them for free in sample from microchip if you find out a good enough idea. I've built some things but the funniest one is the PS2/USB keyboard adapter. Try programming with your friend using 2 keyboard and 2 mice =).
Anyway, have fun
What if they KNEW you would turn it out ??? =)
Great to see I'm not the only one unable to get over 26.4 ! =)
And yes, I'm from Canada too..
Here it is Last month, a Norwegian literary museum admitted losing access to their catalogue system after the database administrator died -- taking the password with him. Yesterday, my mother's computer died -- taking two years worth of email with it. The museum in Norway put out a radio call for hackers to help crack the code. My Mum? Well, she just cried into the phone for a while. It might seem as though these two stories are only slightly related. To me, they both indicate a bigger problem. Prior to the commercial internet and the arrival of cheap mass storage, computers were mostly used for pumping out paper documents. But with the explosion of email, web publishing and digital media in general, times are changing. Culture as we know it is going digital. Constructing a history is fairly straightforward: In the physical world, works are tangible and rooted in time and place. Birth, death and marriage records maintained by governments allow us to trace who made what, and when. Mostly, stuff lasts. Unfortunately, digital works aren't like that. Data is a commodity, stored in bulk on anonymous file systems, duplicated and destroyed by whoever has access. Every day hard drives fail, human-dependent backup systems fail. People die and their computers get wiped or thrown out. Passwords are lost and formats change. Corporate intranets are a mess -- if you've ever had the displeasure of using one, well, let's just say keeping everything is not the same as keeping everything organized. Digital culture + geeks with attention deficit = uh oh. In 2000 the University of California, Berkeley published a study showing that printed content represents only 0.003% of the world's total information -- most of the remainder is stored digitally. If that figure is correct, almost our entire output as a society is entrusted to one of several Microsoft operating systems and disks with twelve-month limited warranties. *cue danger music* Y2K, another problem brought about entirely by lack of forethought (plus a healthy dose of denial), has not served as a wake up call. Product development decisions continue to revolve around annual earnings. Technology uptake continues to be driven by novelty and the quest for cool. Even in the Open Source world, development is more about cloning commercial products than designing software to last a millennium. Two hundred years from now, how will historians assess the early twenty-first century? They won't, because scarcely anything will be left to assess. That's right: Welcome, my friends, to the digital dark age. A step backwards is not the solution, trees being in short supply and all. Besides, librarians and archivists have discovered that the books and papers we print now dissolve much more quickly than books printed a century ago. Paper isn't the answer: Our only viable option is to come up with a digital system that works. To do this, we need to transform some of our ideas about computing. Right now, files are stored on individual machines. It's up to the owners of those machines to make copies -- but individuals, until they lose something important to them, do not back up. We can look at P2P file-sharing systems, with multiple redundant copies of almost every file, for inspiration. Why not do the same with personal files, automatically creating mulitple copies of your recipe book across the network? You'd never have to back up again. This isn't necessarily a new idea: Sun Microsystems is fond of suggesting that "the network is the computer" and the distributed computing concept has been around for a while. But people are understandably hesitant to store their personal files on a central server, much less someone else's personal computer. What of privacy, if your files are scattered all over the world? That's where identity comes into play. The data and documents you create today are generic and anonymous -- they are not linked to your identity in the municipal records, nor are they proven to be authentically yours. In a lot of cases they aren't even datestamped accurately. This makes your files even on your own computer vulnerable -- a vulnerability that could be overcome by linking them to your official records. If you are going to be storing your files on someone else's computer, you'll want a foolproof way to identify that the files are yours. It might seem abhorrent to think of some government program tagging and subsequently rifling through your digital stuff. But perhaps the government only needs to give us access to the citizenship records we've already paid them to maintain. Unbreakable encryption is a viable solution, but only if data isn't locked down permanently. As morbid as it seems, a system that's aware of your death or permanent disablement can make sure those files are unencrypted at the appropriate time. The same system could make sure your files are released to the public domain, protected by copyright, or even deleted from the network for privacy reasons at the time of your demise. We need a new universal storage mechanism: one that authenticates, protects and manages the data we create. In a future-conscious world, such functions would be a natural extension of the computing experience. Finally, there is the issue of format. As proprietary data formats give way to XML, and XML gives way to whatever comes five years later, things are going to get lost in the shuffle. Who to call when you need to translate a fifty-year-old Word file? Not to mention the fact that binary storage will sooner or later be replaced with non-binary molecular or holographic storage. By legislating in the interest of future generations, government could ensure that software companies publish closed formats to a public repository, forming the basis of a "universal file translator." Then, there would be some confidence in the accessibility of even the oldest data. Regardless of what may or may not happen, nobody wants to be forgotten (at least, I know I don't). That's why a little danger music will hopefully be good for us, to get us thinking about how the storage decisions we make today are likely to affect the people that come afterward. And think about it we must, else what a great shame: To let the dawn of the Information Age turn slowly, and irreversibly, dark. ----------------- David Emberton is an inventor, writer and musician. He flaunts what he got at emberton.com. '-> POST COMMENTS: THE DIGITAL DARK AGE Digital Dark Age From an archivist's perspective this problem is hideous. Should we be keeping copies of ancient computers and software to access the files we want to keep? What file format will stand the test of time even assuming we can find a medium to preserve it in? posted by Threnody on July 8, 2002 at 1:31 pm archivism You know, I'm kind of conflicted on this issue. I backup my most important files once every couple of weeks, and I've had a few hard drives fail... And in some ways, when they do, it's a mixed blessing. Because by the time my hard drive fails I've accumulated so much shit that I'm happy to see most of it go. Really. I breathe a sigh of relief that I'll never have to sort through all that crap again. At the same time, there are important things that as a society we should keep. Although archivists are encouraging book publishers etc to move to alkaline paper (they have discovered that the acidic paper we've been using for mass production in the past forty or so years degrades much faster than the stuff we were using a century ago, meaning the books we are producing now last only decades, not centuries) the transition is slow and probably too late. If we don't address the digital issues detailed above and the issues with paper stock, we're going to have virtually no records from the 20th-21st century. posted by chillythekid on July 8, 2002 at 4:59 pm
Americans are putting dollars sign in front. I know that french canadians are putting it afterward. I don't know about english canadians though ..
I don't think it's the same in all countries..