Very wise, owlstead, very wise comment. I'm with you. Street lighting could be cut down -- preferably abolished, too. Ah well, we only have to wait for nonrenewable fuels to run out (for civilians, anyway), I guess.
Ebrahimi has done as much to regress it as Gill did to progress it.
Agree with heroic Hertzfeld (more info in Programmers at Work). I'd add Warnock and also strongly endorse Wolfram (whose invincible iconoclasm is admirable). And PARC should be better represented, I'd cite Adele Goldberg for the under-appreciated Smalltalk-80. At least she gets to contribute to Cringely's Triumph of the Nerds.
Where are Dijkstra and Wirth (who did far more than most people realise - Wirth essentially created a European "Sun Microsystems" at ETH)? Remove the "+10:American" bias - but Knuth should probably be mentioned at least twice.:)
You just made me think of an effective analogy to what is going to shut the behemoths down, and Mom and Pop operations too: the imminent end of fossil fuels (military action notwithstanding). Picture what happens to a machine (say, an engine) when it runs out of oil. That's pretty much what I expect to see happening to the oil-dependent economy in 10-20 years (YMMV). Rivers and rivers of trucks and automobiles, in unsleeping unbroken thousands of kilometres in every city, like those I saw recently in the US did nothing but bring home the reality of staggering, blind dependence on oil.
But I suspect a camera will always take a better picture than a telephone. For the same reason, I go to a restaurant to eat great food instead of catching a plane.
Sounds implausible to me. For one thing, a secret giant space battle station is no threat to detente. For obvious strategic advantage, the Russian military was and is obsessive about secrecy (how else do they manage to keep Chechniya genocide out of Western headlines today).
Surely you do not think the US tells its allies everything? "You can get much further with a kind word and a gun than you can with a kind word alone." --attributed to Al Capone.
The point of this launch may simply have been to demonstrate that the USSR's launch capability exceeded that of the US. The launch itself was broadcast, but the public was told nothing of the real payload.
I prefer this theory: The battle station was fully operational and, had not the Rebels trojan'ed its control software, was on course to Alderaan.
It looks like the US will be the only country to recognize software patents.
Unfortunately, no. The current Australian Government was tricked/persuaded/threatened into accepting the US patent model, this year. Apparently they don't want a local software industry. Even piled upon their other treasonous stupidities, this wasn't enough to get the bastards voted out in this year's election. It's a national embarrassment that will seem eerily familiar to about 50% of Americans...
you can make a thousand copies of a digital archive very quick, and store them in geographically distant places for free; the libraries will be happy to keep a copy safe. If you send a copy to every major library in the world, and encourage them to make copies, it's more unlikely for the digital archive to get destroyed
I fully agree. Google's redundant data centres serve the same purpose. It's common sense, but will it actually happen?
The issues go beyond just destruction of the data, however. NASA's problems included losing the knowledge and/or software to interpret that data. If the library chooses, through misadventure or unscrupulous lobbying, a proprietary or DRM format - even one as apparently harmless as PDF - then we are likely screwed down the track.
Imagine how disastrous it would be if a major digital film archive chose Windoze Mediocre Player as their distribution/archive medium?
But there is plenty to worry about even without meddling monopolists:
'Digital files that were supposed to last for several decades are turning out to have a shelf life of just five to 10 years because of changing formats, obsolete hardware, and deterioration of the medium... "There is still nothing in the digital world like acid-free paper," noted Stewart Brand, president of The Long Now Foundation (see "Marking Time" p. 41). A book or fine art print set on acid-free paper, housed in the proper conditions, will last half a millennium. A pair of eyes and a knowledge of the text or pictures is all that's needed to decipher the material. ' link
'organizations like NASA are so overloaded with data that the backup backlog is pushing the agency to a state of oblivion.... in a few years NASA will fall so far behind that it's unable to copy the tapes before they deteriorate. "It may take 20 years to read all that data," Halem says. "But the lifetime of the tapes is less than 20 years."... Before long, the crisis will hit the next wave of large data-intensive organizations, from the Social Security Administration to banks and insurance companies.... Weather studies from satellites launched in 1979 were placed onto tape that almost immediately became obsolete. It took two years and what Halem calls "a Herculean effort" to save them. They contained... evidence of global warming and the first complete measurements of the 1983 El Niño' link
'In 1999 Dr. Miller asked NASA for the original data on the Viking experiments and was chagrined to find the data was missing. After several months NASA finally turned up the data tapes, but found they were "in a format so old that the programmers who knew it had died,'' according to Miller. Luckily NASA found printed records of the data' link
Yeah, exactly. Ask NASA how frequently they "refresh" their archive, and whether it was enough to save it all (short answer: Not even close.)
Ask Congress in 50 years how "refreshed" they feel. (The paper will still be around then.) It's a full time job just preserving data for 10 years, from my experience. (Did I mention I hate tape? and optical media are hardly better, if anything. The best idea anyone has had are disposable hard drives, a la Google, and even that has risks.)
an undertaking called "We the People," supported by President Bush and Congress to improve the teaching of American history at all levels of education
Yeah that's a great idea. Along Creationist, revisionist lines too, no doubt. Such as how the Viet Nam war was a stunning victory for the US. Why not teach them some world history as well. For instance, about Nazi Germany or Russia under Stalin. Instead of teaching by example...
type faces of printers used before 1836 are too difficult for optical scanners to read
Bollocks. Even if they are trying to OCR this stuff, it's critical that the original page bitmaps remain available, anyway.
I'm amazed they still have these archives. One of my favourite people, Nicholson Baker has made a personal crusade, written books on the subject, and put enormous amounts of his own cash, into preserving newspapers that government archives are hellbent on destroying. In particular he attacks two fallacies of document archiving:
Paper does not self-destruct in a short space of time, which was among the flawed rationales for misguided conversion to microfiche:
Microfiche is actually far more vulnerable to destruction than the originals. Decades of archives have been lost because they were microfiched and the originals pulped.
I fully expect digital archives to be even more fragile (as various/. articles over the years, not to mention much research into digital curatorship, attest)
Slashdot Mirror
and instant coffee will be banned
Brian Cohen was, however, the eponymous hero of Monty Python's Life of Brian. Bloody Romans.
What about 13) "I'm bored, let's flame somebody" - the Slashdot moment?
Very wise, owlstead, very wise comment. I'm with you. Street lighting could be cut down -- preferably abolished, too. Ah well, we only have to wait for nonrenewable fuels to run out (for civilians, anyway), I guess.
Skip Myhrvold (wtf?) and put in William Kahan (only the driver of IEEE 754). This list is about comp. sci., not get-rich-quick schemes.
Agree with heroic Hertzfeld (more info in Programmers at Work ). I'd add Warnock and also strongly endorse Wolfram (whose invincible iconoclasm is admirable). And PARC should be better represented, I'd cite Adele Goldberg for the under-appreciated Smalltalk-80. At least she gets to contribute to Cringely's Triumph of the Nerds.
Where are Dijkstra and Wirth (who did far more than most people realise - Wirth essentially created a European "Sun Microsystems" at ETH)? Remove the "+10:American" bias - but Knuth should probably be mentioned at least twice. :)
Chortle. Waiting the statutory 20 seconds...
It's the most advanced equipment for this purpose.
You just made me think of an effective analogy to what is going to shut the behemoths down, and Mom and Pop operations too: the imminent end of fossil fuels (military action notwithstanding). Picture what happens to a machine (say, an engine) when it runs out of oil. That's pretty much what I expect to see happening to the oil-dependent economy in 10-20 years (YMMV). Rivers and rivers of trucks and automobiles, in unsleeping unbroken thousands of kilometres in every city, like those I saw recently in the US did nothing but bring home the reality of staggering, blind dependence on oil.
But I suspect a camera will always take a better picture than a telephone. For the same reason, I go to a restaurant to eat great food instead of catching a plane.
(The word "bad" just doesn't cut it, though.)
Surely you do not think the US tells its allies everything?
"You can get much further with a kind word and a gun than you can with a kind word alone." --attributed to Al Capone.
The point of this launch may simply have been to demonstrate that the USSR's launch capability exceeded that of the US. The launch itself was broadcast, but the public was told nothing of the real payload.
I prefer this theory: The battle station was fully operational and, had not the Rebels trojan'ed its control software, was on course to Alderaan.
There is a theory the lunch failure was intentional. There is nothing I hate more than lunch failure.
The issues go beyond just destruction of the data, however. NASA's problems included losing the knowledge and/or software to interpret that data. If the library chooses, through misadventure or unscrupulous lobbying, a proprietary or DRM format - even one as apparently harmless as PDF - then we are likely screwed down the track.
Imagine how disastrous it would be if a major digital film archive chose Windoze Mediocre Player as their distribution/archive medium?
But there is plenty to worry about even without meddling monopolists:
'Digital files that were supposed to last for several decades are turning out to have a shelf life of just five to 10 years because of changing formats, obsolete hardware, and deterioration of the medium ... "There is still nothing in the digital world like acid-free paper," noted Stewart Brand, president of The Long Now Foundation (see "Marking Time" p. 41). A book or fine art print set on acid-free paper, housed in the proper conditions, will last half a millennium. A pair of eyes and a knowledge of the text or pictures is all that's needed to decipher the material. ' link
'organizations like NASA are so overloaded with data that the backup backlog is pushing the agency to a state of oblivion. ... in a few years NASA will fall so far behind that it's unable to copy the tapes before they deteriorate. "It may take 20 years to read all that data," Halem says. "But the lifetime of the tapes is less than 20 years." ... Before long, the crisis will hit the next wave of large data-intensive organizations, from the Social Security Administration to banks and insurance companies. ... Weather studies from satellites launched in 1979 were placed onto tape that almost immediately became obsolete. It took two years and what Halem calls "a Herculean effort" to save them. They contained ... evidence of global warming and the first complete measurements of the 1983 El Niño' link
'In 1999 Dr. Miller asked NASA for the original data on the Viking experiments and was chagrined to find the data was missing. After several months NASA finally turned up the data tapes, but found they were "in a format so old that the programmers who knew it had died,'' according to Miller. Luckily NASA found printed records of the data' link
Ask Congress in 50 years how "refreshed" they feel. (The paper will still be around then.) It's a full time job just preserving data for 10 years, from my experience. (Did I mention I hate tape? and optical media are hardly better, if anything. The best idea anyone has had are disposable hard drives, a la Google, and even that has risks.)
Trolling the unpalatable Truth since 1969.
I'm amazed they still have these archives. One of my favourite people, Nicholson Baker has made a personal crusade, written books on the subject, and put enormous amounts of his own cash, into preserving newspapers that government archives are hellbent on destroying. In particular he attacks two fallacies of document archiving:
Paper does not self-destruct in a short space of time, which was among the flawed rationales for misguided conversion to microfiche:
Microfiche is actually far more vulnerable to destruction than the originals. Decades of archives have been lost because they were microfiched and the originals pulped.
I fully expect digital archives to be even more fragile (as various /. articles over the years, not to mention much research into digital curatorship, attest)