If some one were to have asked me to do this 25 years ago. I might have recorded the data to a 9 track tape. There are still many tape drives that can read this. Or I could have stored in on a 10MB hard drive. I still have a couple of old computers that us these drives, an old Compaq and a "real" IBM PC (made by IBM) 25 years is not all that long. All you need to do is keep a a couple computers in your garage or attic and then dig them out in 25 years. Most of the same people who burried the recording will still be around in 25 years. They will remember wht to do. Now if you were to want to keep it burried for 500 years that would be a much more "fun" project.
Next. I'm pretty sure I actully have some 25 year old digital music. When did CDs frt come out? About 25 years ago, I think. I bought them when they first came out and still save the CD and they work just like new. 25 years is just not that long.
25 years is not very long. CDs will still be around. CD players will still be around. Had you said 250 then I'd worry. But in 25 only 25 year the same guy who burries the capsule may be the same guy who digs it up and then goes and finds his same old computer to play the disc.
The questions are if the CDs will last that long. They will if they are "pressed". they might i they are archive quality recordable CDs. Just make multiple copies of the same exact CD using the same ISO file and place the CDs in jewel boxes and the boxes in plastic zip lock bags
Filling the can up with inert gas is a great idea. It is cheap at welding suppy places.
250 years would be much harder, computers will have changed a lot by then.
Some companies really do need to keep data for a long time. Banks, insurance, lenders and so on. But maybe even toy companies too. How are they to notify you if they need to recal a product. Maybe that baby toy was found to contain lead based paint?
It is easy to justify keeping data but un-encrypted data on a notebook computer? That is almost the same thing as if an engineer designs a building and gets the structural calculations wrong and it falls down. He's liable.
Yes, when "everything" is labled then nothing is. The law said that all products and locations containing carcinogens must have warning labels. The idea was that manufactures would be highly motivated to get that label removed. But then when you find that sunlight causes cancer what do you do? Post a warning sign on the sidewalk?
They really need to amend the law to rise the threshold so only the worst and highest risk stuff gets the lable
Back to LEDs. Disposal is not such an issue. What is the typical lifetime of an LED light bulb? Likely it will outlast it's owner. Disposing of TV sets and computers is a far worse problem
Let's say this ad campaign works very well and does as good as Microsoft can hope for. What whould happen in that best case scenario? Microsoft might gain another 1% of market share. Big deal they would hardly notice. The problem for a monopoly is that there is no room to grow. I just read that Mac sales were up 43% over same quart last year. There is no way on Earth PC sales could grow like that. There is so little room for it. When you have 90% of the pie how much bigger can your slice get? Microsoft's only way left to grown to to hope that the entire pie grows but that is limited by the world economy which is not under their control. TV ads don't make the pie larger that just effect the slice of the pie you get.
That's pretty much all Microsoft has to point out. That you can buy a PC with Vista for, like $600.00 or a desktop with Vista for $400. That alone will keep PCs outselling Macs 10 to 1.
Yes, I know the $400 Pc is junk but it's $400 and it works well enough.
I have to agree. I have said for years now that Microsoft will keep it's near monopoly for as long as "computer" means a box with big screen, keyboard and mouse attached. Once the box-screen-keyboard-mouse thing is replaced Microsoft become non-relevant. But the same logic applies to Linux on the desktop. When the desktop vanished so will desktop Linux.
But Linux can live on forever inside set top boxes, servers and cell phones and of course software enginerrs will always have their desktop systems and they will want to run the same OS as the devices they are programming. Linux, UNIX or Mac OS.
I would argue that most people stand to gain a lot more by buying a car that costs less up front and less to maintain than they would ever gain in buying just because it's more fuel-efficient. If it's about cost, that's where you can start.
Absolutely right. Car payments are by far the largest cost of owning a car. My paid for pickup truck gets 16MPG. I spend $3,000 on gas per year. If I were to buy a car that got a 32MGP the car payments would have to be $125 per month just to break even. There is no way that replacing my 16MPG Ford Pickup truck could save me money
But some day I'll be forced to replace it. It's got 165,000 miles on it and I figure it's only going to last for another 90,000. That's about 8 more years I think. Them I'll buy an plug-in hybrid.
Damned hard to sell an engineer a new car isn't it? My wife buys new ones just because she likes to, doesn't need a reason.
The current state of the art here is very advanced
on
Digitizing Rare Vinyl
·
· Score: 1
This descibe the current state of the art in pulling sound off old records. Basically they use a microsope and camera to scan the groves. The sound is recovered from the scans. The result is better quality than when the record was new and played on then current players. See the URL below for more info. http://sciencematters.berkeley.edu/archives/volume4/issue30/story1.php
These old wax recording were made with purely mechanical equipment. It's posable to recover very high quality sound, better then the people who made the records would have imagined. All that hiss and clicks came from defects in the media the optical scanner does not pick this up.
Even in theory testing can't find all possible problems. A simple example would be if, let's say some defect caused one of of every ten millions phones to catch fire and explode. One would need to build over a hundred million test phones to detect a trend.
What we've got here is something like this. It seems to an intermitent one in ten thousand type problem. It affects a very few users for a few minutes now and then. The phones are not really broken they just perform poorly when the signal is weak ad seem to work fine when moved.
This is the knind of thing you can't test until you hve millions of phone in the field
You can say it is "more than a matter of degree" But then so is walking on a see-saw. Walking up the beam a foot is just like walking up the beam 13 inches. Until you get ot he balance or tipping point. Many things in science and biology are just a matte of degree until you reach so threshold.
Rockets are that way too. Every one of them will fall back to Earth, until you make one just fast enough and it escapes gravity never falls back. There are many examples. What we'd like to know about humans is when and where that "tipping point" occured. We inched along for 2 million years then bang, took over the planet in only 100,000 years. What caused us to change to quickly?
While other animals do pass on knowlage to their offspring humans crossed some threshold in their ability to do this. Possibly it was the accumulation of knowledge over many generations that forced us to become specialists and divide labor.
"Yeah all you have to do is be dirt poor and all you'd be to afford would be veggies with meat maybe once a month or so on a special occasion. The greens think that's a great thing though so they should all try it themselves."
What happened with gasoline will happen with meat too. One the rest of the world make enough money they too will buy more mmeat and the price will skyrocket. When hamburger costs $30 a pound even Americans will eat less of it.
What's happening is that the world is slowly "leveling". Maybe in another 50 years most people will be middle class. Today most as very poor.
You are right. It is a balance. But there is some built-in stability. A better analogy is that you made a balance scale by placing a ruler over a coffee cup. the pivot point is now wide and the scale can withstand some in-balance. But only so much. We can argue abut the shape of the pivot and how much stability of creates
IBM has been a technology company for over 100 years. The company was founded in 1896, back when information technology was a new idea. I think they learned about "change" long ago. They adapted to the invention of the vacuum tube and every other new technology of the 20th century. How many other tech companies from the late 1800's are still around?
"Put in perspective, if the numbers I'm seeing on websites about iPhone sales are correct, this puts the kindle somewhere on the order of 10-20 days worth of iPhone sales"
iPhones sales are slower then they would be do to very limited supply. Apple has plans to ramp up iPhone production to 800,000 units per week. This means every few days Apple will sell Amazon's entire run of Kindles.
I think the problem with Kindle is that it is a single purpose device. All it does is read books. And not even all books only Amazon's books. What it needs to be is a tablet computer the is specialized maybe to read books. That and it needs to be priced to the the user spends more on books them on the reader
"What makes it illegal for the FBI to request and be given the computers?"
I don't think a library clerk has the authority to give away city property. Same thing as if I walked onto a car dealer's lot and asked someone who worked there. "Can I have this car?" and he said sure and handed me the key. The car is not his to give away.
The reason you study the past is really so you can understand the present. To most of us it's the present that maters. We study the historic past so that maybe we don't repeat those mistakes but learn from them instead.
Understanding the present natural world would be much easier if we had 20 other earth-like planets each slightly different then we could do a comparative study and understand how things like being more hot or colder and more or lass rain affects life. What a boon to environmental science having 20 other Earths would be. But we don't have them. Or do we? Actually we do have them. If we look backwards in the past we have any number of different earths each with it's own set of life and conditions and it's own eco system.
Sun's new file system ZFS uses end to end checksums. Nowthat we have multi-core computers and maybe more processing than we need it makes sense to do this. Sun's software is free and open source. Apple is just starting to use it in Mac OS X now.
What you've just said is that many people can't ride their bike to work. That's correct. Most are fat and lazy and would never even want to try. Others live to far away and for others the road is not suitable. But it could work out OK for millions of people.
Gas just came down a few cents per galon but the long term trend is upward. Wait 'till gas is $8 per galon. I suspect it is heading there within this decade. OK so we drive eletric cars but that will just drive up demend for eletric power and the price of that.
To use you example of "what if I live 30 miles from work? I can't ride that far" Well that's easy. When cars get expensive enough people will not want to live 30 miles from work. They will either find new jobs or move. The only reason we have 30 mile commutes is because gas used to be cheap.
none of those under $50k planes list engine time. Don't forget to factor another $20k for the engine rebuild.
The typical airplan owners is lucky to log 200 hours a year. Even if the engine is only 1,000 houors left before overhaul that amounts to more than 5 years of use.
You are right about the 172. It's reallt a two person plane with a back seat. Put kids in the back and then you can take only a half load of fuel. So.... By a 150. If you can use the old tail drager version you can get them for under $25K
Sport plan building is kind of a fun hobby. I was looking at several designs that used converted Volkswagen engines (The old air cooled ones from the "bug") these are relatively inexpensive and after conversion quite reliable with dual ignition systems cylinder head temperature and exaust gas temperature readouts and so on. Yes many people lack the skill to build and most lack the skill to fly but it's not hard to learn and you can spread the cost out to $100 a week or so. cancel you cable TV and cell phone. Put the money into flying.
You need to do both. Weight training, (or more accurately "strength training" because you can do it without weights.) will build muscle mass and if you have more muscle mass aerobic traing is be more effective and burn more energy.
The key is to balance it. Even if you stick to just one sport, say bicycling you can use that as your strength training if you spend time doing hills and leveragae your way up using arm and back and leg muscle. Also weights can be used for aerobic trainning if you use lighter weights and move faster.
The goal should be to do a wide range of activity at least 20 minutes a day on average. Don't do just one thing. try not to exercise the same body areas two days in a row. It's durring the recovery period (24 hours after excercise) is when the mass develops. So take a hike (or run depending on ability) one day, swim the next then do the weights. Mix it up. It's better for the body and just as importently mixing it up helps prevent bordom and burnout and quitting.
I find that any of those machines get boring quickly. You are better off finding something you enjoy doing and then just do that. I ride my bike some. I've started going on some Sierra Club hikes (typically 6+ miles and 1,500 feet gains) and my gym has a pool but I only swim there once or twice a week. I scuba dive at least one a week (but that hardly counts as exercise.) Last Sunday I spend about 10 hours up a ladder trimming trees and hauls off the mountain of trimmings. It's Wed. and I'm still sore.
About that rowing machine: I think I'd loose interrest quickly buy I could see myself buying a boat. Rowing a real racing shell out on the water seem a lot more fun than using a machine indoors. Same with stationary bicycles. I like my road bike better.
What I'm saying is that you need to mix it up and do many things. Just keep active about one hour a day on average. If you do things you like you will not think of it as a "chore" or even as "exercise". Like I'm thinking of next Sat. when I get to spend a few hours walking up to the top of this big hill with some "new" people I'm getting to know. Exercise should be the desirable side effect of doing something that you'd do anyways. So just try stuff and see what sticks.
"she'd be more than happy to have these for her 6th grade students."
Many teachers would be happy with machine with those specs. I've even tried to give away stacks of them to schools but there are no takers. The local schools have "minimum specs" and won't take anything less, even if offered free.
The company now just turns older computers over to the re-cycler. Old 1.8Ghz Compaqs just get munched up for scap Schools don't accept them if they are more then three year old.
"...educated to do anything more useful than consume corn syrup and TV shows... they are like big ol' plants..."
Not true. Eventually many do learn skills such as running a cash register in a mall shop or loading or even driving trucks. For every engineer or doctor wee need maybe 50 low skilled, minimum wage worker.
I think this is one of those cases where you get to pick two of three. Do you want (1) Free, (2) first rate typography or (3) Ease of use. Pick any two. You can't have all three at the same time.
If you need fine control over typography then the current industry standard is Adobe's "InDesign". Most of what you read in print is designed with this software. But if you want free and easy to use then you have to use a word processor like Open Office. If you want very good typography and free then I think you are stuck with LaTex.
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If some one were to have asked me to do this 25 years ago. I might have recorded the data to a 9 track tape. There are still many tape drives that can read this. Or I could have stored in on a 10MB hard drive. I still have a couple of old computers that us these drives, an old Compaq and a "real" IBM PC (made by IBM) 25 years is not all that long. All you need to do is keep a a couple computers in your garage or attic and then dig them out in 25 years. Most of the same people who burried the recording will still be around in 25 years. They will remember wht to do. Now if you were to want to keep it burried for 500 years that would be a much more "fun" project.
Next. I'm pretty sure I actully have some 25 year old digital music. When did CDs frt come out? About 25 years ago, I think. I bought them when they first came out and still save the CD and they work just like new. 25 years is just not that long.
25 years is not very long. CDs will still be around. CD players will still be around. Had you said 250 then I'd worry. But in 25 only 25 year the same guy who burries the capsule may be the same guy who digs it up and then goes and finds his same old computer to play the disc.
The questions are if the CDs will last that long. They will if they are "pressed". they might i they are archive quality recordable CDs. Just make multiple copies of the same exact CD using the same ISO file and place the CDs in jewel boxes and the boxes in plastic zip lock bags
Filling the can up with inert gas is a great idea. It is cheap at welding suppy places.
250 years would be much harder, computers will have changed a lot by then.
Some companies really do need to keep data for a long time. Banks, insurance, lenders and so on. But maybe even toy companies too. How are they to notify you if they need to recal a product. Maybe that baby toy was found to contain lead based paint?
It is easy to justify keeping data but un-encrypted data on a notebook computer? That is almost the same thing as if an engineer designs a building and gets the structural calculations wrong and it falls down. He's liable.
Yes, when "everything" is labled then nothing is. The law said that all products and locations containing carcinogens must have warning labels. The idea was that manufactures would be highly motivated to get that label removed. But then when you find that sunlight causes cancer what do you do? Post a warning sign on the sidewalk?
They really need to amend the law to rise the threshold so only the worst and highest risk stuff gets the lable
Back to LEDs. Disposal is not such an issue. What is the typical lifetime of an LED light bulb? Likely it will outlast it's owner. Disposing of TV sets and computers is a far worse problem
Let's say this ad campaign works very well and does as good as Microsoft can hope for. What whould happen in that best case scenario? Microsoft might gain another 1% of market share. Big deal they would hardly notice. The problem for a monopoly is that there is no room to grow. I just read that Mac sales were up 43% over same quart last year. There is no way on Earth PC sales could grow like that. There is so little room for it. When you have 90% of the pie how much bigger can your slice get? Microsoft's only way left to grown to to hope that the entire pie grows but that is limited by the world economy which is not under their control. TV ads don't make the pie larger that just effect the slice of the pie you get.
That's pretty much all Microsoft has to point out. That you can buy a PC with Vista for, like $600.00 or a desktop with Vista for $400. That alone will keep PCs outselling Macs 10 to 1.
Yes, I know the $400 Pc is junk but it's $400 and it works well enough.
I have to agree. I have said for years now that Microsoft will keep it's near monopoly for as long as "computer" means a box with big screen, keyboard and mouse attached. Once the box-screen-keyboard-mouse thing is replaced Microsoft become non-relevant. But the same logic applies to Linux on the desktop. When the desktop vanished so will desktop Linux.
But Linux can live on forever inside set top boxes, servers and cell phones and of course software enginerrs will always have their desktop systems and they will want to run the same OS as the devices they are programming. Linux, UNIX or Mac OS.
I would argue that most people stand to gain a lot more by buying a car that costs less up front and less to maintain than they would ever gain in buying just because it's more fuel-efficient. If it's about cost, that's where you can start.
Absolutely right. Car payments are by far the largest cost of owning a car. My paid for pickup truck gets 16MPG. I spend $3,000 on gas per year.
If I were to buy a car that got a 32MGP the car payments would have to be $125 per month just to break even. There is no way that replacing my 16MPG Ford Pickup truck could save me money
But some day I'll be forced to replace it. It's got 165,000 miles on it and I figure it's only going to last for another 90,000. That's about 8 more years I think. Them I'll buy an plug-in hybrid.
Damned hard to sell an engineer a new car isn't it? My wife buys new ones just because she likes to, doesn't need a reason.
This descibe the current state of the art in pulling sound off old records. Basically they use a microsope and camera to scan the groves. The sound is recovered from the scans. The result is better quality than when the record was new and played on then current players. See the URL below for more info.
http://sciencematters.berkeley.edu/archives/volume4/issue30/story1.php
These old wax recording were made with purely mechanical equipment. It's posable to recover very high quality sound, better then the people who made the records would have imagined. All that hiss and clicks came from defects in the media the optical scanner does not pick this up.
"The testing is supposed to find them."
Even in theory testing can't find all possible problems. A simple example would be if, let's say some defect caused one of of every ten millions phones to catch fire and explode. One would need to build over a hundred million test phones to detect a trend.
What we've got here is something like this. It seems to an intermitent one in ten thousand type problem. It affects a very few users for a few minutes now and then. The phones are not really broken they just perform poorly when the signal is weak ad seem to work fine when moved.
This is the knind of thing you can't test until you hve millions of phone in the field
You can say it is "more than a matter of degree" But then so is walking on a see-saw. Walking up the beam a foot is just like walking up the beam 13 inches. Until you get ot he balance or tipping point. Many things in science and biology are just a matte of degree until you reach so threshold.
Rockets are that way too. Every one of them will fall back to Earth, until you make one just fast enough and it escapes gravity never falls back. There are many examples. What we'd like to know about humans is when and where that "tipping point" occured. We inched along for 2 million years then bang, took over the planet in only 100,000 years. What caused us to change to quickly?
While other animals do pass on knowlage to their offspring humans crossed some threshold in their ability to do this. Possibly it was the accumulation of knowledge over many generations that forced us to become specialists and divide labor.
"Yeah all you have to do is be dirt poor and all you'd be to afford would be veggies with meat maybe once a month or so on a special occasion. The greens think that's a great thing though so they should all try it themselves."
What happened with gasoline will happen with meat too. One the rest of the world make enough money they too will buy more mmeat and the price will skyrocket. When hamburger costs $30 a pound even Americans will eat less of it.
What's happening is that the world is slowly "leveling". Maybe in another 50 years most people will be middle class. Today most as very poor.
You are right. It is a balance. But there is some built-in stability. A better analogy is that you made a balance scale by placing a ruler over a coffee cup. the pivot point is now wide and the scale can withstand some in-balance. But only so much. We can argue abut the shape of the pivot and how much stability of creates
IBM has been a technology company for over 100 years. The company was founded in 1896, back when information technology was a new idea. I think they learned about "change" long ago. They adapted to the invention of the vacuum tube and every other new technology of the 20th century. How many other tech companies from the late 1800's are still around?
"Put in perspective, if the numbers I'm seeing on websites about iPhone sales are correct, this puts the kindle somewhere on the order of 10-20 days worth of iPhone sales"
iPhones sales are slower then they would be do to very limited supply. Apple has plans to ramp up iPhone production to 800,000 units per week. This means every few days Apple will sell Amazon's entire run of Kindles.
I think the problem with Kindle is that it is a single purpose device. All it does is read books. And not even all books only Amazon's books. What it needs to be is a tablet computer the is specialized maybe to read books. That and it needs to be priced to the the user spends more on books them on the reader
"What makes it illegal for the FBI to request and be given the computers?"
I don't think a library clerk has the authority to give away city property. Same thing as if I walked onto a car dealer's lot and asked someone who worked there. "Can I have this car?" and he said sure and handed me the key. The car is not his to give away.
The reason you study the past is really so you can understand the present. To most of us it's the present that maters. We study the historic past so that maybe we don't repeat those mistakes but learn from them instead.
Understanding the present natural world would be much easier if we had 20 other earth-like planets each slightly different then we could do a comparative study and understand how things like being more hot or colder and more or lass rain affects life. What a boon to environmental science having 20 other Earths would be. But we don't have them. Or do we? Actually we do have them. If we look backwards in the past we have any number of different earths each with it's own set of life and conditions and it's own eco system.
Sun's new file system ZFS uses end to end checksums. Nowthat we have multi-core computers and maybe more processing than we need it makes sense to do this. Sun's software is free and open source. Apple is just starting to use it in Mac OS X now.
What you've just said is that many people can't ride their bike to work. That's correct. Most are fat and lazy and would never even want to try. Others live to far away and for others the road is not suitable. But it could work out OK for millions of people.
Gas just came down a few cents per galon but the long term trend is upward. Wait 'till gas is $8 per galon. I suspect it is heading there within this decade. OK so we drive eletric cars but that will just drive up demend for eletric power and the price of that.
To use you example of "what if I live 30 miles from work? I can't ride that far" Well that's easy. When cars get expensive enough people will not want to live 30 miles from work. They will either find new jobs or move. The only reason we have 30 mile commutes is because gas used to be cheap.
none of those under $50k planes list engine time. Don't forget to factor another $20k for the engine rebuild.
The typical airplan owners is lucky to log 200 hours a year. Even if the engine is only 1,000 houors left before overhaul that amounts to more than 5 years of use.
You are right about the 172. It's reallt a two person plane with a back seat. Put kids in the back and then you can take only a half load of fuel. So.... By a 150. If you can use the old tail drager version you can get them for under $25K
Sport plan building is kind of a fun hobby. I was looking at several designs that used converted Volkswagen engines (The old air cooled ones from the "bug") these are relatively inexpensive and after conversion quite reliable with dual ignition systems cylinder head temperature and exaust gas temperature readouts and so on. Yes many people lack the skill to build and most lack the skill to fly but it's not hard to learn and you can spread the cost out to $100 a week or so. cancel you cable TV and cell phone. Put the money into flying.
You need to do both. Weight training, (or more accurately "strength training" because you can do it without weights.) will build muscle mass and if you have more muscle mass aerobic traing is be more effective and burn more energy.
The key is to balance it. Even if you stick to just one sport, say bicycling you can use that as your strength training if you spend time doing hills and leveragae your way up using arm and back and leg muscle. Also weights can be used for aerobic trainning if you use lighter weights and move faster.
The goal should be to do a wide range of activity at least 20 minutes a day on average. Don't do just one thing. try not to exercise the same body areas two days in a row. It's durring the recovery period (24 hours after excercise) is when the mass develops. So take a hike (or run depending on ability) one day, swim the next then do the weights. Mix it up. It's better for the body and just as importently mixing it up helps prevent bordom and burnout and quitting.
I find that any of those machines get boring quickly. You are better off finding something you enjoy doing and then just do that. I ride my bike some. I've started going on some Sierra Club hikes (typically 6+ miles and 1,500 feet gains) and my gym has a pool but I only swim there once or twice a week. I scuba dive at least one a week (but that hardly counts as exercise.) Last Sunday I spend about 10 hours up a ladder trimming trees and hauls off the mountain of trimmings. It's Wed. and I'm still sore.
About that rowing machine: I think I'd loose interrest quickly buy I could see myself buying a boat. Rowing a real racing shell out on the water seem a lot more fun than using a machine indoors. Same with stationary bicycles. I like my road bike better.
What I'm saying is that you need to mix it up and do many things. Just keep active about one hour a day on average. If you do things you like you will not think of it as a "chore" or even as "exercise". Like I'm thinking of next Sat. when I get to spend a few hours walking up to the top of this big hill with some "new" people I'm getting to know. Exercise should be the desirable side effect of doing something that you'd do anyways. So just try stuff and see what sticks.
"she'd be more than happy to have these for her 6th grade students."
Many teachers would be happy with machine with those specs. I've even tried to give away stacks of them to schools but there are no takers. The local schools have "minimum specs" and won't take anything less, even if offered free.
The company now just turns older computers over to the re-cycler. Old 1.8Ghz Compaqs just get munched up for scap Schools don't accept them if they are more then three year old.
"...educated to do anything more useful than consume corn syrup and TV shows... they are like big ol' plants..."
Not true. Eventually many do learn skills such as running a cash register in a mall shop or loading or even driving trucks. For every engineer or doctor wee need maybe 50 low skilled, minimum wage worker.
I think this is one of those cases where you get to pick two of three. Do you want (1) Free, (2) first rate typography or (3) Ease of use. Pick any two. You can't have all three at the same time.
If you need fine control over typography then the current industry standard is Adobe's "InDesign". Most of what you read in print is designed with this software. But if you want free and easy to use then you have to use a word processor like Open Office. If you want very good typography and free then I think you are stuck with LaTex.