CDs have been commercially available for 28 years, strangely I don't have any problem finding something to read the data. If the format is still in use, the devices to read it will still be available. If the format goes out of fashion then you'll likely migrate your data to the new format and negate the issue (and the only people who will care in the far future - academics and historians - will have departmental budgets to build the tech to read a cache of found cards from hundreds of years ago, it's not difficult, just too costly for the average guy to bother).
The only realistic way that the things could become unreadable would be if SanDisk fucked it up and decided that some sort of uber-proprietary DRM/obfuscation nonsense was absolutely vital...
Even then, this is not data we're burying and hoping to dig up and read in 100 years (indeed, it's only guaranteed for 100 years so unless we're copying it before then we're risking losing the data anyway) - this is likely data we're going to need to access throughout that period, therefore the technology to read them won't disappear while they're still the best format. To address GP's point - the reason we can't find 5.25 floppy readers is because we don't need to - nobody is crazy enough to still be storing data this way, it will have been format shifted if it was important enough (and you're right, for "found" data that wasn't in continual use, it's trivial to build a reader - costly perhaps if the spec is ancient and the parts not being manufactured - but still trivial). The fact is, if this format is around in 100 years in substantial numbers, the tech to read it will be around, if something better comes along then critial data will have been moved to that format already and nobody except historians will care.
Oh, and spot on with the DRM issue - this is a much bigger threat to being able to read the data in 100 years than the storage media.
The knowledge to read this data isn't going to suddenly vanish. We have the technology to read wax cylinders from 120 years ago (albeit the data is often badly degraded, but these disks claim to deal with that issue) and the only reason cheap home solutions for reading wax cylinders aren't ubiquitous today are that there are very few in existence and not enough people care. If enough big government or corporate bodies have their ultra long term storage on these devices then you can be sure there will be companies offering reading services or a device to convert the data to whatever quantum state format we're all on by then.
What's "normal room temperature" right now - it's going to be wildly different between Siberia and the Sahara. I'm sure they'll give a scale that this was tested at, if you're using these for long term storage then installing a system to keep them at a constant temperature isn't really going to be an issue.
Page size seems to be much less relevant than load time. I could put up a 50k page that takes an age to load if it calls in a bunch of scripts on crappy third party ad servers. Similarly I could have a 500k page which uses compression, coding best practices (so the content is delivered before it tries to load in enhancements), good use of caching etc and will give a much more streamlined experience.
You could always use text and then have thumbnails linked to the bigger images. Your site will not only load and rank better, but users who don't want to download 5MB of jpegs when they only came for a snippet of textual information aren't penalised either.
Then you need to learn how tabs work - fire up the first five search results in tabs if you like, and then open the tab of whichever loads first while the others load in the background. Unless you always expect to get the exact information you want on the very first page you open, you'll find in the long run it's a faster approach (and more reliable than expecting Google to deal with the problem for you).
I wouldn't mind a big filter button that said "rank faster sites higher", but defaulting this behaviour into the results does seem like it would skew ranking in favour of big corporations with lots of money to throw behind caching solutions, which seems like it would affect the relevancy of a lot of searches (dumping you on a corporate site trying to sell you products when you're trying to do academic research). I hope this isn't another step away from search relevancy.
We only have their word for it that this even enters into the ranking at all. Maybe they just wanted a faster web so they claim this affects ranking and wait for all the SEO companies to disseminate. The next request may say your site will rank better if you host a video of your CEO wearing a tutu and doing a silly little dance, then they just sit back and wait for nature to take its course...
It also establishes a common method of implementing things - within an environment with more than one developer, it saves a lot of time if you're all building using the same framework rather than having to work out the nuances of each other's bespoke code all the time. For little throwaway projects the time saved in doing clever UI work and in maintenance thereafter in using a framework is massive. For bigger projects the gains are less, but as you mentioned, still worth it for creating a level browser playing field.
There's always a trade-off between fast and secure anyway, if you're encrypted all of your traffic, even to your favourite social networking or news sites, just on principal, you're probably aware of and happy with the trade off - for the less paranoid, caching can help a lot, and so can Google's project to host common libraries.
Actually you're dead wrong, because ads don't just track click-throughs, they can also track impressions. If I visit a site with an ad for product X, and then two days later I go buy product X, there is a model which will see the original site owner rewarded, even though there was a disjoint between me seeing the ad and buying the product. The amount will likely be much less than a direct click-through-purchase model, but nevertheless it recognises the cumulative effect of having seen the ad in a few places before deciding to purchase.
Wait, they put up a sign welcoming the whole world to come into their house, and then you're saying it's their moral right to then complain if you don't look at the ads on the walls of their house as payment? There was no contract or agreement in place prior to my entering their house, just an open invitation - if this is a pre-requisite they should display at the very least a click through agreement that this is the understanding. I say this as someone who doesn't disable ads (because I do support a free web and for me it's easy to just ignore ads, I mentally filter them out and if the site gets some benefit by my not physically filtering them out, all power to them), but unless you're making it part of an explicit contract that you will only allow free views in exchange for enabling ads you have no right to complain when someone follows a link to your site with adblock/noscript enabled. If you don't like it, don't accept incoming links, set up a login system and enforce a policy that accounts will be deleted if ads are disabled - then sit back and enjoy your very quiet life on the web...
No soul? Nothing to say about the people? Okay, it doesn't force the sentimentality down your throat like some shows (and that's a good thing IMO), but there are many moving moments - the four leaf clover episode gets me no matter how many times I watch it with subtle overtones of sibling rivalry overruled by brotherly love spread over a thousand years, and with comedic intervention throughout to stop it becoming too cloying. It's an incredibly clever piece of television because of the human insight.
It's easy enough to get all the same elements in place - capturing the same mood is more difficult. For me the movies were way off the pace of the series, I'm still hopeful that that was more to do with the format (25 minutes is more than enough to tell most Futurama stories without filler, it keeps them pacey and more tightly scripted) and not just that we've all moved on and not that trying to do something which was funny years ago exactly the same just won't be as funny today (much as I treasure the original shows). Give Leonardo an easel ten years after the Mona Lisa and ask him to paint it again and you'll get something wholly different, even though all the constituent parts are the same, and that's without taking into account the fact that the audience and the world outside the medium may have moved on too.
They'll never stop The Simpsons
Have no fears
We got stories for years
Like...
Marge becomes a robot
Maybe Moe gets a cell phone
Has Bart ever owned a bear?
Or...
How 'bout a crazy wedding
Where something happens and do-do-do-do-do
Sorry for the clip show
Have no fears
We got stories for years...
My approach is to wait until a show's reached its conclusion and then read around to see if it's worth catching up on - partly because I hate getting invested in a show that gets cancelled or just disappoints after a promising start, partly because I always forget when they're showing and end up missing most of them anyway. Following this approach I've managed to avoid getting attached to any of the big shows that got canned (I only started watching Futurama after it was already dead so I didn't build my expectations, and it's great that it's back but I didn't enjoy the movie format so I might wait another couple seasons before I pick up the new ones) and my viewing tends to be of very good shows - if you're not desperate to talk about the latest shows around the water cooler, I'd highly recommend it!
I think a lot of these shows are also victims to the incredibly long season runs in the US. Most shows have, what, 22 episodes per season? It must be difficult to tell a very tight story in that timeline without throwing in filler, and if you throw in filler the danger is people will dip in and out and lose the thread of the greater arc, so they feel the show lacks depth. In the UK such shows get 6 episodes and that's it - sometimes you wish a show could go on longer (okay Doctor Who gets 13 but that's a rarity), but it does mean you get a very focused story each season - I think Firefly, thus constrained, could have been something special that appealed to a much wider audience (I've only ever caught snippets of the show so I'm a case in point, I never understand what's happening beyond that immediate episode so it feels like it's meandering without a purpose to me, but Serenity I really enjoyed because it told a story which I'm sure existed in the show but wasn't obvious to the casual viewer).
It's probably a mix of everything. Primarily the target audiences for these shows are more net savvy and more likely to download the rips to watch at their leisure and ad-free. Add to that the fact that even if they wanted to watch the show live, the schedules are all over the place meaning they'll likely miss a few and have to resort to downloading anyway (and the fact that this might cause a few people who would have watched it on TV to just switch to always downloading so they can at least guarantee when and where they'll see the show).
I think he was trying to derail a spoiler - I can't say for sure as I haven't watched the shows yet, but if I'm right, you just drew attention to the fact with your comment, thus adding emphasis to the original spoiler and negating his good works in diverting it, you insensitive clod!
One of the key differences between the shows is the level of "resets" of the world from one show to the next. The Simpsons seems to reset much harder - okay there's some linear movement, Maude dying, Apu's babies, etc. but mostly a bunch of crazy stuff happens one week and the next it's like it never did (and in fact one of my favourite visual references is that giant head monument in the Simpson's basement, which I'm sure is a subtle reference to how everything else goes back to factory default every week). The same happens in Futurama but they do have some longer story arcs (the brain attacks, Fry and Leela's relationship, Amy and Kif's). This probably adds to the difficulty for the average person to get into the show, not only is it full of sci-fi and science references they don't understand, but there's at least a little requirement to have watched previous shows, whereas with the Simpsons you can skip ten seasons and pretty much pick up where you left off.
The key part is how to work them into an episode without killing the flow. I can watch an episode of Futurama with my GF, and while I enjoy the show because of the clever in-jokes, she can enjoy it despite the clever in-jokes. So long as the joke's not laboured, everyone wins.
Slashdot Mirror
How many Libraries of Congress would 1GB worth of clay tablets fill?
CDs have been commercially available for 28 years, strangely I don't have any problem finding something to read the data. If the format is still in use, the devices to read it will still be available. If the format goes out of fashion then you'll likely migrate your data to the new format and negate the issue (and the only people who will care in the far future - academics and historians - will have departmental budgets to build the tech to read a cache of found cards from hundreds of years ago, it's not difficult, just too costly for the average guy to bother).
The only realistic way that the things could become unreadable would be if SanDisk fucked it up and decided that some sort of uber-proprietary DRM/obfuscation nonsense was absolutely vital...
Even then, this is not data we're burying and hoping to dig up and read in 100 years (indeed, it's only guaranteed for 100 years so unless we're copying it before then we're risking losing the data anyway) - this is likely data we're going to need to access throughout that period, therefore the technology to read them won't disappear while they're still the best format. To address GP's point - the reason we can't find 5.25 floppy readers is because we don't need to - nobody is crazy enough to still be storing data this way, it will have been format shifted if it was important enough (and you're right, for "found" data that wasn't in continual use, it's trivial to build a reader - costly perhaps if the spec is ancient and the parts not being manufactured - but still trivial). The fact is, if this format is around in 100 years in substantial numbers, the tech to read it will be around, if something better comes along then critial data will have been moved to that format already and nobody except historians will care.
Oh, and spot on with the DRM issue - this is a much bigger threat to being able to read the data in 100 years than the storage media.
The knowledge to read this data isn't going to suddenly vanish. We have the technology to read wax cylinders from 120 years ago (albeit the data is often badly degraded, but these disks claim to deal with that issue) and the only reason cheap home solutions for reading wax cylinders aren't ubiquitous today are that there are very few in existence and not enough people care. If enough big government or corporate bodies have their ultra long term storage on these devices then you can be sure there will be companies offering reading services or a device to convert the data to whatever quantum state format we're all on by then.
What's "normal room temperature" right now - it's going to be wildly different between Siberia and the Sahara. I'm sure they'll give a scale that this was tested at, if you're using these for long term storage then installing a system to keep them at a constant temperature isn't really going to be an issue.
Page size seems to be much less relevant than load time. I could put up a 50k page that takes an age to load if it calls in a bunch of scripts on crappy third party ad servers. Similarly I could have a 500k page which uses compression, coding best practices (so the content is delivered before it tries to load in enhancements), good use of caching etc and will give a much more streamlined experience.
You could always use text and then have thumbnails linked to the bigger images. Your site will not only load and rank better, but users who don't want to download 5MB of jpegs when they only came for a snippet of textual information aren't penalised either.
Then you need to learn how tabs work - fire up the first five search results in tabs if you like, and then open the tab of whichever loads first while the others load in the background. Unless you always expect to get the exact information you want on the very first page you open, you'll find in the long run it's a faster approach (and more reliable than expecting Google to deal with the problem for you).
I wouldn't mind a big filter button that said "rank faster sites higher", but defaulting this behaviour into the results does seem like it would skew ranking in favour of big corporations with lots of money to throw behind caching solutions, which seems like it would affect the relevancy of a lot of searches (dumping you on a corporate site trying to sell you products when you're trying to do academic research). I hope this isn't another step away from search relevancy.
We only have their word for it that this even enters into the ranking at all. Maybe they just wanted a faster web so they claim this affects ranking and wait for all the SEO companies to disseminate. The next request may say your site will rank better if you host a video of your CEO wearing a tutu and doing a silly little dance, then they just sit back and wait for nature to take its course...
It also establishes a common method of implementing things - within an environment with more than one developer, it saves a lot of time if you're all building using the same framework rather than having to work out the nuances of each other's bespoke code all the time. For little throwaway projects the time saved in doing clever UI work and in maintenance thereafter in using a framework is massive. For bigger projects the gains are less, but as you mentioned, still worth it for creating a level browser playing field.
There's always a trade-off between fast and secure anyway, if you're encrypted all of your traffic, even to your favourite social networking or news sites, just on principal, you're probably aware of and happy with the trade off - for the less paranoid, caching can help a lot, and so can Google's project to host common libraries.
Actually you're dead wrong, because ads don't just track click-throughs, they can also track impressions. If I visit a site with an ad for product X, and then two days later I go buy product X, there is a model which will see the original site owner rewarded, even though there was a disjoint between me seeing the ad and buying the product. The amount will likely be much less than a direct click-through-purchase model, but nevertheless it recognises the cumulative effect of having seen the ad in a few places before deciding to purchase.
Wait, they put up a sign welcoming the whole world to come into their house, and then you're saying it's their moral right to then complain if you don't look at the ads on the walls of their house as payment? There was no contract or agreement in place prior to my entering their house, just an open invitation - if this is a pre-requisite they should display at the very least a click through agreement that this is the understanding. I say this as someone who doesn't disable ads (because I do support a free web and for me it's easy to just ignore ads, I mentally filter them out and if the site gets some benefit by my not physically filtering them out, all power to them), but unless you're making it part of an explicit contract that you will only allow free views in exchange for enabling ads you have no right to complain when someone follows a link to your site with adblock/noscript enabled. If you don't like it, don't accept incoming links, set up a login system and enforce a policy that accounts will be deleted if ads are disabled - then sit back and enjoy your very quiet life on the web...
No soul? Nothing to say about the people? Okay, it doesn't force the sentimentality down your throat like some shows (and that's a good thing IMO), but there are many moving moments - the four leaf clover episode gets me no matter how many times I watch it with subtle overtones of sibling rivalry overruled by brotherly love spread over a thousand years, and with comedic intervention throughout to stop it becoming too cloying. It's an incredibly clever piece of television because of the human insight.
It's easy enough to get all the same elements in place - capturing the same mood is more difficult. For me the movies were way off the pace of the series, I'm still hopeful that that was more to do with the format (25 minutes is more than enough to tell most Futurama stories without filler, it keeps them pacey and more tightly scripted) and not just that we've all moved on and not that trying to do something which was funny years ago exactly the same just won't be as funny today (much as I treasure the original shows). Give Leonardo an easel ten years after the Mona Lisa and ask him to paint it again and you'll get something wholly different, even though all the constituent parts are the same, and that's without taking into account the fact that the audience and the world outside the medium may have moved on too.
*Applauds* - love the reference, oh for mod points.
They'll never stop The Simpsons
Have no fears
We got stories for years
Like...
Marge becomes a robot
Maybe Moe gets a cell phone
Has Bart ever owned a bear?
Or...
How 'bout a crazy wedding
Where something happens and do-do-do-do-do
Sorry for the clip show
Have no fears
We got stories for years...
My approach is to wait until a show's reached its conclusion and then read around to see if it's worth catching up on - partly because I hate getting invested in a show that gets cancelled or just disappoints after a promising start, partly because I always forget when they're showing and end up missing most of them anyway. Following this approach I've managed to avoid getting attached to any of the big shows that got canned (I only started watching Futurama after it was already dead so I didn't build my expectations, and it's great that it's back but I didn't enjoy the movie format so I might wait another couple seasons before I pick up the new ones) and my viewing tends to be of very good shows - if you're not desperate to talk about the latest shows around the water cooler, I'd highly recommend it!
I think a lot of these shows are also victims to the incredibly long season runs in the US. Most shows have, what, 22 episodes per season? It must be difficult to tell a very tight story in that timeline without throwing in filler, and if you throw in filler the danger is people will dip in and out and lose the thread of the greater arc, so they feel the show lacks depth. In the UK such shows get 6 episodes and that's it - sometimes you wish a show could go on longer (okay Doctor Who gets 13 but that's a rarity), but it does mean you get a very focused story each season - I think Firefly, thus constrained, could have been something special that appealed to a much wider audience (I've only ever caught snippets of the show so I'm a case in point, I never understand what's happening beyond that immediate episode so it feels like it's meandering without a purpose to me, but Serenity I really enjoyed because it told a story which I'm sure existed in the show but wasn't obvious to the casual viewer).
It's probably a mix of everything. Primarily the target audiences for these shows are more net savvy and more likely to download the rips to watch at their leisure and ad-free. Add to that the fact that even if they wanted to watch the show live, the schedules are all over the place meaning they'll likely miss a few and have to resort to downloading anyway (and the fact that this might cause a few people who would have watched it on TV to just switch to always downloading so they can at least guarantee when and where they'll see the show).
I think he was trying to derail a spoiler - I can't say for sure as I haven't watched the shows yet, but if I'm right, you just drew attention to the fact with your comment, thus adding emphasis to the original spoiler and negating his good works in diverting it, you insensitive clod!
One of the key differences between the shows is the level of "resets" of the world from one show to the next. The Simpsons seems to reset much harder - okay there's some linear movement, Maude dying, Apu's babies, etc. but mostly a bunch of crazy stuff happens one week and the next it's like it never did (and in fact one of my favourite visual references is that giant head monument in the Simpson's basement, which I'm sure is a subtle reference to how everything else goes back to factory default every week). The same happens in Futurama but they do have some longer story arcs (the brain attacks, Fry and Leela's relationship, Amy and Kif's). This probably adds to the difficulty for the average person to get into the show, not only is it full of sci-fi and science references they don't understand, but there's at least a little requirement to have watched previous shows, whereas with the Simpsons you can skip ten seasons and pretty much pick up where you left off.
Just like my car starts behaving erratically when it's down to a quarter tank of fuel.
The key part is how to work them into an episode without killing the flow. I can watch an episode of Futurama with my GF, and while I enjoy the show because of the clever in-jokes, she can enjoy it despite the clever in-jokes. So long as the joke's not laboured, everyone wins.