I would also reapply BIOS in case they found a way to infect it.
Like I said, look at it as an upgrade opportunity. May as well stick the latest bios version on there, if you're coming over to fool with the computer anyway.
The part I don't get is I haven't BIOS upgraded anything in a while, but the board makers fixation used to be only providing a windows app to flash. So you can't install windows or it'll get owned by the flash but you can't upload the flash without installing windows. I'd hope all mfgrs would distribute freedos bootable cdrom/usb images with the boot flasher.exe on the freedos image.
I always found it odd that mfgrs need to be babied and only have a GUI flasher on windows only but the virus writers without even the benefit of NDA docs seem to have no trouble writing their own flasher. Of course they're not so concerned with warantee returns if it doesn't work, but still....
Sounds like the definition of a hobby. I'd strongly suggest OP poke around for fun, but no one wants to help him by telling him "the best free downloadable forensics boot disk as of aug 2012 is...". At most all it'll cost is a blank cdrom disk or unimaginably if he has no spare flash drives laying around it might be $5 at walgreens for a small one. I'm assuming OP is not going to send his dad an itemized hourly bill of his work, so if he Fs around for a couple hours before the reinstall no one is "losing money".
The quality and reliablity make it woth the extra money
That's my fear, lexmark will find a way to value engineer lasers to eliminate laser-style quality and reliability.
Imagine if McDonalds broke into the sushi market, dumped into the market to put all independent sushi shops out of business, them dropped quality to the level of rotten canned cat food to generate a modest financial gain, then got out of the sushi market because no one wants to buy rotten canned cat food anymore.
Probably, "as of August 2012 the best forensic analysis boot disk/usb image is..." and the URL of a web page at SS.gov or maybe some consumer organization most likely titled something like "Your SS number is now public knowledge... what should you do now?"
Some anecdotes of what someone has RECENTLY found in a forensic analysis of something owned like this might be interesting, although not terribly useful.
Given the price of drives and the rate of change, you're better off just buying a new $50 drive and upgrading him. Then take the old drive, stick it in an external enclosure, and play around with it on a linux host. Unless his old PC is so old it can't be easily upgraded. Can you still buy PATA from retail stores or is it all SATA now, for example?
Basically the all the glass cockpit displays are slowly coming to the ipad as apps. primary flight instruments, engine management displays, ADS-B rx, radar displays, you name it.
You can pay $10K to garmin for each dedicated appliance, or $500 to apple for whats officially called a backup device...
I suppose its nothing new. Almost 20 years ago I knew pilots "sneaking" consumer GPS units and handheld air-band radios into their airplane as "backup devices"
It makes sense to me. Every pilot has a nightmare of full electrical failure at night in IFR conditions... so your flight bag has a flashlight or two, hand held gps, hand held radio, and now an ipad and some gadgetry and cables.
Its mostly fear mongering FUD. We aren't exactly suffering from a lack of it. I'm sure we'll invent a new reason.
Another is what amounts to electrical smog makes it irrelevant over the developed world. Yeah, sure, from a EE perspective a microwatt level kindle is a big problem compared to a 100 kilowatt class TV transmitter.
The other thing is assuming you believe in the terrorist behind every tree stump mythos, the problem is intentional radiators are available at power levels 60 to 90 dB higher than your average unintentional radiator. So if you want a chance in hell of operating flight instruments thru an "attack" by someone with a hand held radio transmitter, you are inherently utterly impervious to the 90 dB down levels of any pacifistic consumer device.
I would like to see a new procedure for flying replacing the FUD with a genuine interference FAA and TSA reported emergency light and procedure. So in the infinitely unlikely event someone intentionally or unintentionally caused a problem, they'd track it. Not just untracked voodoo like now "well, we don't know why, but the VOR rx was acting up so we assume it must have been passenger electronics"
I don't want any generation doing that to aother, becase they refuse to die.
Given there's no great hurry if you live forever, I'm thinking geographic segregation might evolve. Think of current day Florida demographics. Imagine a Florida where no one under 100 years old lived there... well we're pretty much there, say under 200 years.
If you have an infinite amount of spare time, escaping to a immigrate into a better land is not quite the priority anymore. So I have to wait for the border guard to screw up and accidentally leave an opening I can run thru. OK so I wait ten years, what do I care I'm immortal. I can personally dig a ten mile long underground escape tunnel under the border, I've got the time...
There's also an interesting analysis where if 1 in X people die in horrific accidents per year, then I don't think you have to concern yourself with a large population over the age of X. So we'll never have million year old people as a majority, simply because its hard to imagine someone living that long without lightning striking them, or car accident, or airliner crashes onto them, etc.
There's a fixation that the only way to live a long time is to come up with a zillion treatments to patch up damage just barely good enough to prevent death in all cases but not the slightest bit beyond barely keeping alive.
No explanation why it wouldn't be cheaper, simpler, and more comfortable to just prevent the aging related degradation to begin with. No one wants a really elaborate and lifelong painful ongoing treatment for pneumonia, we just want a vaccine and forget about it.
No explanation why medical science would magically advance to just barely keep alive and never an inch further.
No explanation why the entire medical field would suddenly change from trying to do the best for every patient to trying to do the absolute minimum.
As for
But limited lifespan because of boredom?
there are some/.ers old enough to imagine a hundred million Archie Bunkers sitting in their chair complaining about minorities for an eternity. You have to have a plan for people who check out of modern society. Maybe a new-age amish like organization for people who want to relive the 2010's forever until eternity or something, etc. Eventually the majority of the population would be "checked out" which might be a bit of an issue.
the life expectancy of Americans, driven by improved hygiene, nutrition, and new medical discoveries and interventions, has jumped from 47 years to almost 80
Talk to a genealogist, its a bogus number. Life expectancy at birth, given that at least half used to die as babies or little kids.
Most birth-death years in my family tree are like 1854-1855 (whoops) or 1853-1930 (a good long while). Not much in between, other than maybe 5% of the women died around childbirth age around a year or so after the last baby. Stereotypical electronics "bathtub curve" plus the danger of giving birth. The main change in the last 200 years or so is if you are born, you'll probably live to age 10, whereas in the olden days if you were born you'd probably die before age 10, but some made it till 80s, just like now.
So, then why not a translation of Gibbon, etc. into modern language?
The problem is there's a long tradition of "translating" Shakespeare into the modern era, in fact about every 5 years we have to suffer thru yet another agonizing utterly awful "Romeo and Juliet, the hip hop years" and "Romeo and Juliet in the 1950s" etc. The pretty accurate stereotype is a translation from a foreign language, say, Plutarch's Lives will be done pretty well, but a "translation" from Ye Olde English into modern american english is just going to be awful.
I have occasionally considered how awesome a really well done Plutarch miniseries could be... and then shrank in horror at how awful it would probably be done. I don't want to see the Jersey Shore / Sopranos re-imagining of the life of Pompey.
Selling a proprietary virtualization empire is, in the long run, about as likely to succeed as writing a text editor
You mean like Microsoft Office, which at its core has a glorified text editor that is one of the cores of Microsoft's profitability?
Thanks that was Exactly my point. The market has space for one big text editor and maybe a couple "one man shop" specialized editors. And thats about it. Sucks to be word perfect or bank street writer or whatever. Not so bad if you're the one guy who won, but what are the odds.
On the other hand there are legions of contractor / consultant / educator / admin / author / designer types doing the "let me help you with MS Word", or pretty much any word processor, really, as long as you're willing to pay for the "help"
If someone can convince the.gov to take your land or money so as to improve that rural property leading to higher property tax revenues, your money/property will be taken by force. Doesn't much matter if you feel we should be rugged individualists, because regardless of feeling thats not the law of the land as it'll be enforced.
I fail to see how rural property tax values could drop by providing internet access. Therefore your money will be taken and land easements will be granted and they'll get service and everyone will end up paying more taxes.
You don't need a big standing army when you have nukes.
You need a "pretty large army" to guard the nukes if nothing else. Not large compared to current enormous USA standards, but pretty large compared to world standards. The US would need a.mil larger than Ireland's army, or Singapore's army, etc.
The other problem is nukes are useless other than as suicide/MAD devices. Say Canada felt like invading and annexing all northern tier states because we make fun of canadian bacon so much because its a silly name for the product, and our endless lunberjack jokes. It would be bad, but not that awful, other than their Canadian music. Their heath care system and government and maple syrup are better than ours, and Canadian women are hot, so the citizens in the annexed states are certainly not going to fight the annexation very hard, and we've got no army to force the issue... So do we wipe the entire country of US and Canada off the map with the nukes, or just let them have the northern states... Repeat until you're like Constantinople toward the end of the eastern roman empire era, pretty much one fortified city and not much else left.
Inability to provide a graduated response means the only available reactions are going to have to be overly extreme, which is probably a bad thing.
tl;dr - Why are folks in rural areas entitled to amenities of cities when they don't have the population density to support them?
Because the city slickers think they're entitled to the amenities of rural areas, like, say, food, and transportation across rural areas via roads.
The other part of the argument is unlike medical and museums, you don't have much of an internet without the monopoly granted easements across rural property for buried fiber...
So we'll make a deal... stop eating our food, rip up the roads between the cities, and rip out the buried optical fiber, and you can keep your internet access to yourselves.
No, if you choose to live where there is no broadband, then why should taxpayers money be spent bringing it to you?
In a centrally controlled economy like ours, everything is interlinked. The idea is likely that to maintain a free market in video delivery, you need the local government granted monopoly inet provider to provide "streaming compatible" speeds.
One exciting problem is TV/satellite is regulated at the federal FCC level yet monopoly cable is regulated pretty much only at the city level and monopoly legacy telecom copper is regulated at all kinds of levels (mostly state, but also some local and some federal). So the "big picture" is that most of the regulation is not going to make much sense as a coherent whole, because there is no coherent whole.
So, lets consider a scheme. Shut off over the air tv broadcasts as obsolete and sell the spectrum. Don't laugh its already happened to UHF channels from "60-something? to channel 83. So to maintain "psuedo-competition" you need to be able to purchase streaming video over your broadband connection.
the easiest way to commercialize is to hand hold and support and project manage.
Selling a proprietary virtualization empire is, in the long run, about as likely to succeed as writing a text editor, so going all "IBM" and moving into services might be a pretty wise move for vmware.
I think we are getting a little too detailed for "the ideal quantum mechanics for the masses one line popular science explanation"
For now I'm sticking with something like this one liner "all kinds of small stuff is not smooth like a ramp, its surprisingly stair steppy, and that leads to behavior that would look pretty weird at large scale, like what amounts to something like negative probabilities, which leads to using complex numbers for amplitudes, which leads eventually to all kinds of complicated math". Beats the heck out of our current popular science quantum definition which is "quantum is the largest most impressive thing possible and leads directly to warp drives, time travel and mystical new age religion". If you guys can come up with a genuine one liner or a better run-on sentence, go for it.
the TCP-influenced algorithm almost exactly matched the ant behavior
How close?
They talking about a full implementation of RFC 5681 with all 4 schemes and all the bells and whistles, or just some trendy popular science stuff with "well, there seems to be ACKs".
I suppose a RFC 5681 loss recovery mechanism would be something like what happens when you step on an ant. ssthresh TCP setting is like how many ants fit thru the hole at once when you agitate the colony with a stick? We could probably have a lot of fun doing "official slashdot ant analogies" instead of the more common "official slashdot car analogies"
That's one reason I favor classical education for schools. Classical education cover the "great books" from the beginning of recorded human history to the modern era, in chronological order. Mortimer Adler, editor of Great Books of the Western World, called it the "Great Conversation".
A conversation that reveals the evolution of human knowledge is comprehensible, interesting in the way drama is, cross-disciplinary, and leads to holistic and lasting knowledge.
Thats pretty much my education, strongly recommend.
You missed mentioning the big problem with that strategy, which is the spectacular impedance jump when you go from modern translations of ancient foreign languages, which are pretty easy reads, to original but very old texts in your own native language (assuming native English reader). For example I know from personal experience a good modern translation of Herodotus makes a hell of a lot more sense than suddenly having a foot of Gibbon dropped in your lap. Gibbon's actually pretty modern compared to Shakespeare. A modern Herodotus is a fun easy read, but Gibbon is like a part time job. A modern english translation of Nietzsche is easy vs John Locke in his 17th century original glory. You get a twisted view of the past where everything made sense until 1600 or so, then its all incomprehensible until 1850 or so, very roughly.
Slashdot Mirror
Why does the article not mention the name of the CPU?
You're probably not buying one at tigerdirect anytime soon, so it doesn't really matter.
It does run linux, which is kinda cool.
http://www.debian.org/ports/s390/
I would also reapply BIOS in case they found a way to infect it.
Like I said, look at it as an upgrade opportunity. May as well stick the latest bios version on there, if you're coming over to fool with the computer anyway.
The part I don't get is I haven't BIOS upgraded anything in a while, but the board makers fixation used to be only providing a windows app to flash. So you can't install windows or it'll get owned by the flash but you can't upload the flash without installing windows. I'd hope all mfgrs would distribute freedos bootable cdrom/usb images with the boot flasher .exe on the freedos image.
I always found it odd that mfgrs need to be babied and only have a GUI flasher on windows only but the virus writers without even the benefit of NDA docs seem to have no trouble writing their own flasher. Of course they're not so concerned with warantee returns if it doesn't work, but still....
It's actually time consuming and can be hard.
Sounds like the definition of a hobby. I'd strongly suggest OP poke around for fun, but no one wants to help him by telling him "the best free downloadable forensics boot disk as of aug 2012 is ...". At most all it'll cost is a blank cdrom disk or unimaginably if he has no spare flash drives laying around it might be $5 at walgreens for a small one. I'm assuming OP is not going to send his dad an itemized hourly bill of his work, so if he Fs around for a couple hours before the reinstall no one is "losing money".
The quality and reliablity make it woth the extra money
That's my fear, lexmark will find a way to value engineer lasers to eliminate laser-style quality and reliability.
Imagine if McDonalds broke into the sushi market, dumped into the market to put all independent sushi shops out of business, them dropped quality to the level of rotten canned cat food to generate a modest financial gain, then got out of the sushi market because no one wants to buy rotten canned cat food anymore.
What else were you expecting?
Probably, "as of August 2012 the best forensic analysis boot disk/usb image is ..." and the URL of a web page at SS.gov or maybe some consumer organization most likely titled something like "Your SS number is now public knowledge... what should you do now?"
Some anecdotes of what someone has RECENTLY found in a forensic analysis of something owned like this might be interesting, although not terribly useful.
Given the price of drives and the rate of change, you're better off just buying a new $50 drive and upgrading him. Then take the old drive, stick it in an external enclosure, and play around with it on a linux host. Unless his old PC is so old it can't be easily upgraded. Can you still buy PATA from retail stores or is it all SATA now, for example?
If you think all the pilots are doing is looking at maps, this will blow your mind
http://www.aviation.levil.com/
Basically the all the glass cockpit displays are slowly coming to the ipad as apps. primary flight instruments, engine management displays, ADS-B rx, radar displays, you name it.
You can pay $10K to garmin for each dedicated appliance, or $500 to apple for whats officially called a backup device ...
I suppose its nothing new. Almost 20 years ago I knew pilots "sneaking" consumer GPS units and handheld air-band radios into their airplane as "backup devices"
It makes sense to me. Every pilot has a nightmare of full electrical failure at night in IFR conditions... so your flight bag has a flashlight or two, hand held gps, hand held radio, and now an ipad and some gadgetry and cables.
What's the big deal?
Its mostly fear mongering FUD. We aren't exactly suffering from a lack of it. I'm sure we'll invent a new reason.
Another is what amounts to electrical smog makes it irrelevant over the developed world. Yeah, sure, from a EE perspective a microwatt level kindle is a big problem compared to a 100 kilowatt class TV transmitter.
The other thing is assuming you believe in the terrorist behind every tree stump mythos, the problem is intentional radiators are available at power levels 60 to 90 dB higher than your average unintentional radiator. So if you want a chance in hell of operating flight instruments thru an "attack" by someone with a hand held radio transmitter, you are inherently utterly impervious to the 90 dB down levels of any pacifistic consumer device.
I would like to see a new procedure for flying replacing the FUD with a genuine interference FAA and TSA reported emergency light and procedure. So in the infinitely unlikely event someone intentionally or unintentionally caused a problem, they'd track it. Not just untracked voodoo like now "well, we don't know why, but the VOR rx was acting up so we assume it must have been passenger electronics"
I don't want any generation doing that to aother, becase they refuse to die.
Given there's no great hurry if you live forever, I'm thinking geographic segregation might evolve. Think of current day Florida demographics. Imagine a Florida where no one under 100 years old lived there... well we're pretty much there, say under 200 years.
If you have an infinite amount of spare time, escaping to a immigrate into a better land is not quite the priority anymore. So I have to wait for the border guard to screw up and accidentally leave an opening I can run thru. OK so I wait ten years, what do I care I'm immortal. I can personally dig a ten mile long underground escape tunnel under the border, I've got the time...
There's also an interesting analysis where if 1 in X people die in horrific accidents per year, then I don't think you have to concern yourself with a large population over the age of X. So we'll never have million year old people as a majority, simply because its hard to imagine someone living that long without lightning striking them, or car accident, or airliner crashes onto them, etc.
we would have an ideologically stilted, recalcitrant population of aged and possibly immortal persons halting all forms of social progress.
Republicans aren't all bad, look at Ron Paul
There's a fixation that the only way to live a long time is to come up with a zillion treatments to patch up damage just barely good enough to prevent death in all cases but not the slightest bit beyond barely keeping alive.
No explanation why it wouldn't be cheaper, simpler, and more comfortable to just prevent the aging related degradation to begin with. No one wants a really elaborate and lifelong painful ongoing treatment for pneumonia, we just want a vaccine and forget about it.
No explanation why medical science would magically advance to just barely keep alive and never an inch further.
No explanation why the entire medical field would suddenly change from trying to do the best for every patient to trying to do the absolute minimum.
As for
But limited lifespan because of boredom?
there are some /.ers old enough to imagine a hundred million Archie Bunkers sitting in their chair complaining about minorities for an eternity. You have to have a plan for people who check out of modern society. Maybe a new-age amish like organization for people who want to relive the 2010's forever until eternity or something, etc. Eventually the majority of the population would be "checked out" which might be a bit of an issue.
If I live to 200, do I spend most of that time with the body of a 30-year-old, or a 90-year-old? If the latter, thanks but no thanks.
30 year old or 90 year old... you talking about yourself or spouse?
the life expectancy of Americans, driven by improved hygiene, nutrition, and new medical discoveries and interventions, has jumped from 47 years to almost 80
Talk to a genealogist, its a bogus number. Life expectancy at birth, given that at least half used to die as babies or little kids.
Most birth-death years in my family tree are like 1854-1855 (whoops) or 1853-1930 (a good long while). Not much in between, other than maybe 5% of the women died around childbirth age around a year or so after the last baby. Stereotypical electronics "bathtub curve" plus the danger of giving birth. The main change in the last 200 years or so is if you are born, you'll probably live to age 10, whereas in the olden days if you were born you'd probably die before age 10, but some made it till 80s, just like now.
So, then why not a translation of Gibbon, etc. into modern language?
The problem is there's a long tradition of "translating" Shakespeare into the modern era, in fact about every 5 years we have to suffer thru yet another agonizing utterly awful "Romeo and Juliet, the hip hop years" and "Romeo and Juliet in the 1950s" etc. The pretty accurate stereotype is a translation from a foreign language, say, Plutarch's Lives will be done pretty well, but a "translation" from Ye Olde English into modern american english is just going to be awful.
I have occasionally considered how awesome a really well done Plutarch miniseries could be... and then shrank in horror at how awful it would probably be done. I don't want to see the Jersey Shore / Sopranos re-imagining of the life of Pompey.
How close?
If only there were some way to know... such as reading the damned article.
I'm scared of bugs, OK ! Nobody visits slashdot to hear me scream like a little girl. Well, not most of you.
Selling a proprietary virtualization empire is, in the long run, about as likely to succeed as writing a text editor
You mean like Microsoft Office, which at its core has a glorified text editor that is one of the cores of Microsoft's profitability?
Thanks that was Exactly my point. The market has space for one big text editor and maybe a couple "one man shop" specialized editors. And thats about it. Sucks to be word perfect or bank street writer or whatever. Not so bad if you're the one guy who won, but what are the odds.
On the other hand there are legions of contractor / consultant / educator / admin / author / designer types doing the "let me help you with MS Word", or pretty much any word processor, really, as long as you're willing to pay for the "help"
Other people can make choices for themselves and nobody has to take each other's money to do it.
You think in a pre-Kelo world. You might not like it, but thats not how the world works anymore:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kelo_v._City_of_New_London
If someone can convince the .gov to take your land or money so as to improve that rural property leading to higher property tax revenues, your money/property will be taken by force. Doesn't much matter if you feel we should be rugged individualists, because regardless of feeling thats not the law of the land as it'll be enforced.
I fail to see how rural property tax values could drop by providing internet access. Therefore your money will be taken and land easements will be granted and they'll get service and everyone will end up paying more taxes.
You don't need a big standing army when you have nukes.
You need a "pretty large army" to guard the nukes if nothing else. Not large compared to current enormous USA standards, but pretty large compared to world standards. The US would need a .mil larger than Ireland's army, or Singapore's army, etc.
The other problem is nukes are useless other than as suicide/MAD devices. Say Canada felt like invading and annexing all northern tier states because we make fun of canadian bacon so much because its a silly name for the product, and our endless lunberjack jokes. It would be bad, but not that awful, other than their Canadian music. Their heath care system and government and maple syrup are better than ours, and Canadian women are hot, so the citizens in the annexed states are certainly not going to fight the annexation very hard, and we've got no army to force the issue... So do we wipe the entire country of US and Canada off the map with the nukes, or just let them have the northern states... Repeat until you're like Constantinople toward the end of the eastern roman empire era, pretty much one fortified city and not much else left.
Inability to provide a graduated response means the only available reactions are going to have to be overly extreme, which is probably a bad thing.
tl;dr - Why are folks in rural areas entitled to amenities of cities when they don't have the population density to support them?
Because the city slickers think they're entitled to the amenities of rural areas, like, say, food, and transportation across rural areas via roads.
The other part of the argument is unlike medical and museums, you don't have much of an internet without the monopoly granted easements across rural property for buried fiber...
So we'll make a deal... stop eating our food, rip up the roads between the cities, and rip out the buried optical fiber, and you can keep your internet access to yourselves.
No, if you choose to live where there is no broadband, then why should taxpayers money be spent bringing it to you?
In a centrally controlled economy like ours, everything is interlinked. The idea is likely that to maintain a free market in video delivery, you need the local government granted monopoly inet provider to provide "streaming compatible" speeds.
One exciting problem is TV/satellite is regulated at the federal FCC level yet monopoly cable is regulated pretty much only at the city level and monopoly legacy telecom copper is regulated at all kinds of levels (mostly state, but also some local and some federal). So the "big picture" is that most of the regulation is not going to make much sense as a coherent whole, because there is no coherent whole.
So, lets consider a scheme. Shut off over the air tv broadcasts as obsolete and sell the spectrum. Don't laugh its already happened to UHF channels from "60-something? to channel 83. So to maintain "psuedo-competition" you need to be able to purchase streaming video over your broadband connection.
He misses the point that in
How do you commercialize
the easiest way to commercialize is to hand hold and support and project manage.
Selling a proprietary virtualization empire is, in the long run, about as likely to succeed as writing a text editor, so going all "IBM" and moving into services might be a pretty wise move for vmware.
I think we are getting a little too detailed for "the ideal quantum mechanics for the masses one line popular science explanation"
For now I'm sticking with something like this one liner "all kinds of small stuff is not smooth like a ramp, its surprisingly stair steppy, and that leads to behavior that would look pretty weird at large scale, like what amounts to something like negative probabilities, which leads to using complex numbers for amplitudes, which leads eventually to all kinds of complicated math". Beats the heck out of our current popular science quantum definition which is "quantum is the largest most impressive thing possible and leads directly to warp drives, time travel and mystical new age religion". If you guys can come up with a genuine one liner or a better run-on sentence, go for it.
the TCP-influenced algorithm almost exactly matched the ant behavior
How close?
They talking about a full implementation of RFC 5681 with all 4 schemes and all the bells and whistles, or just some trendy popular science stuff with "well, there seems to be ACKs".
http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5681 (not a rickroll, I promise)
I suppose a RFC 5681 loss recovery mechanism would be something like what happens when you step on an ant. ssthresh TCP setting is like how many ants fit thru the hole at once when you agitate the colony with a stick? We could probably have a lot of fun doing "official slashdot ant analogies" instead of the more common "official slashdot car analogies"
Dropbox ...said last month
What, a month long NDA, because release date is today, or what is the story on the delay?
That's one reason I favor classical education for schools. Classical education cover the "great books" from the beginning of recorded human history to the modern era, in chronological order. Mortimer Adler, editor of Great Books of the Western World, called it the "Great Conversation".
A conversation that reveals the evolution of human knowledge is comprehensible, interesting in the way drama is, cross-disciplinary, and leads to holistic and lasting knowledge.
Thats pretty much my education, strongly recommend.
You missed mentioning the big problem with that strategy, which is the spectacular impedance jump when you go from modern translations of ancient foreign languages, which are pretty easy reads, to original but very old texts in your own native language (assuming native English reader). For example I know from personal experience a good modern translation of Herodotus makes a hell of a lot more sense than suddenly having a foot of Gibbon dropped in your lap. Gibbon's actually pretty modern compared to Shakespeare. A modern Herodotus is a fun easy read, but Gibbon is like a part time job. A modern english translation of Nietzsche is easy vs John Locke in his 17th century original glory. You get a twisted view of the past where everything made sense until 1600 or so, then its all incomprehensible until 1850 or so, very roughly.