The Cuneiform Tablets of 2015 [pdf]
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Re: The Cuneiform Tablets of 2015 [pdf]
#2> The Computer History Museum, run by “hardware guys,” has an extensive and impressive collection of vintage hardware of all kinds and from all eras, but it sits there as a collection of lifeless beige boxes.
And yet The Centre for Computing History in Cambridge has its exhibits powered up - including a collection of several Domesday Machines.
Re: The Cuneiform Tablets of 2015 [pdf]
#3Searchable online version of the BBC Doomsday data:
Re: The Cuneiform Tablets of 2015 [pdf]
#4> The Computer History Museum, run by “hardware guys,” has an extensive and impressive collection of vintage hardware of all kinds and from all eras, but it sits there as a collection of lifeless beige boxes. And yet The Centre for Computing History in Cambridge has its exhibits powered up - including a collection of several Domesday Machines.
I think this is the point of the Living Computer Museum - http://www.livingcomputermuseum.org/
Re: The Cuneiform Tablets of 2015 [pdf]
#5As someone who doesn't care about proprietary 80s laserdiscs but does care about software produced in 2016, 'depend on the oldest still-used technology' is an interesting (non-horrible) design choice.
The python PEP for universal linux binaries advises building on an ancient version of fedora for ABI compatibility.
If you think about it, supporting many different deployment targets is kind of like time travel.
Re: The Cuneiform Tablets of 2015 [pdf]
#6The other day I was thinking about what would be required to preserve all scientific knowledge. There are a great deal of papers that have been made available by hackers, but the filesize is quite large. Many of them are scanned documents.
Raw text itself is pretty compressible, but pdfs record everything about the layout and typesetting, font choice, small smudges on the page, etc. You could maybe run OCR on them and get the text (if the OCR is reliable enough.) But then you lose equations, figures, unusual symbols, and other important info.
Re: The Cuneiform Tablets of 2015 [pdf]
#7They mention Lincos, there's another project inspired by it that attempts to transmit Scheme called CosmicOS: https://cosmicos.github.io/
Re: The Cuneiform Tablets of 2015 [pdf]
#8...and that's why I like to shoot film. It seems improbable that JPG or TIFF will go obsolete any time soon, but—someday—they will. The RAW files from my digital cameras are far less likely to be readable ten years from now.
But a negative or a positive image? Not a problem. Never gonna be unreadable. There's a time and place for both formats, just like there is a time and a place for both a Kindle book and a real paper book, and it's important that we make a point of thinking carefully about which the circumstances dictate: convenience or long-term survival.
Re: The Cuneiform Tablets of 2015 [pdf]
#9Somehow my brain turned off for the logo & the authors and I just started reading the main text. So somewhere in section 5, I started thinking, "Wow, this is great, it's like several talks I've heard from Alan Kay. ... ... Wait a minute..." Yep, he's the coauthor.
Re: The Cuneiform Tablets of 2015 [pdf]
#10They mention Lincos, there's another project inspired by it that attempts to transmit Scheme called CosmicOS: https://cosmicos.github.io/
As a sidenote, I like the (A B | C | D) and $A ideas from it, it would be some nice syntactic sugar for an actual lisp that we use today.