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Reaper978

Loss of things over time - and where did the future go?

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Has anyone ever noticed the kinds of things that they lose over time, especially things on old computers like passwords, work, saved games, games, downloaded things, etc. How about just forgetting about things and losing them forever? Things you can't remember anymore, but want to remember. Where do these things go? How about old accounts on websites you can't remember anymore. Or something you just signed up for but can't remember the exact it was and can't find it anymore.

Does all of this stuff just float there in internet databases, forever forgotten?

Do search engines only use the old keyword search method? Isn't there a more advanced search method by now, a search that actually uncovers something instead of returning a random list of irrelevent websites? Who can keep track of all the text and buttons on one screen of a website, and comprehend what it all does?

It's madness! What the hell is happening! It's all a chaotic blur of meaningless strings of text and images and advertisements. Isn't it time this changed? It's 2013! Isn't that supposed to be a futurisitic year with cool sci-fi gadgets and hover cars? It's just another year of google searches returning some list of websites based on strings of text, and the same old capitalist advertisements. Still the same old Stop signs, and interstate highways with green signs and police cars driving around, pulling people over for no reason? This is fucking gay.

IS IT GOING TO STAY LIKE THIS?

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Reaper978 said:

This is fucking gay.

not if your idea of the future is ghost in the shell. i love it!

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Reaper978 said:

Do search engines only use the old keyword search method? Isn't there a more advanced search method by now, a search that actually uncovers something instead of returning a random list of irrelevent websites?

It's called PageRank. There are various other things as well - Google's Knowledge Graph is one example. Although I'm biased, I find the performance of modern Google search to be pretty damn impressive at times - today I was searching for a TV series that I couldn't remember the name of (Continuum) and found that "that series with the woman who goes back in time" was enough to find the correct answer. There are many more, similar queries that I've done recently and also got correct answers for.

In the wider sphere, Tim Berners-Lee has been pushing for development of The Semantic Web for some time now. The most powerful example of this I've seen so far is DBpedia, an RDF database gathered from the "side panes" that you see on Wikipedia. Unfortunately the nature of RDF is that you need to learn a special SQL-like programming language to perform the queries.

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Reaper978 said:

Does all of this stuff just float there in internet databases, forever forgotten?

I'm half-convinced Doomworld itself is only around because it's been forgotten on some UGO server...

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Reaper978 said:

How long is it going to take to get like that!?


If certain not-so-optimistic future scenarios come true, this is about the pinnacle of welfare the average citizen of the world is going to ever experience, and it will only go downhill from here due to resource wars, pollution, extreme neoliberalism, etc.

Oh sure, there will still be progress in a lot of areas (mostly those with direct military applications) but most people will be too preoccupied with making ends meet -or simply surviving- to really appreciate them. Imagine a "Soylent Green" or "Street Meat" kind of crapsack world, to be more explicit.

Oh sure, there will still be frivolous products, iPads, capitalist advertising etc. (they even existed in Soylent Green and Street Meat!) but they will be targetted at a dwindling middle class and/or exclusively at an even more isolated economic and political elite.

And the world's more powerful nations will be too busy fighing wars to secure the world's last exploitable resources of oil, gas, uranium etc. to really care about your semantic web dreams...

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There is no free market and innovation is not allowed. Every algorithm has been copyrighted/patented and trickled up to a few centralized idiots with no intention or ability to use them, but simply an agenda to prevent everyone else from using them and use their monopoly to steer technology in evil directions. Don't expect technology to improve because its main function is a surveillance/control grid. I mean how can anything blossom from what stallman calls the amazon swindle, or kindle as in Fahrenheit 451 book burning. Or iphones or facebook or "one laptop for every child" so they can be covertly monitored via webcams. Google is only there so they can look at you. You being able to look for stuff ON google is just a collateral reward given to you to make the virus spread. Its kind of like brood parasitism; a mother bird is rewarded with a big gaping mouth to trigger her feeding behavior, but that baby bird is a parasite. VHS tapes were perfectly fine but they allowed too much freedom; that's how you get innovation. DRM is innovation. Planned obsolescence is innovation. Cellphones are sold cheaper than they're worth, and eventually given away free as "obama phones" because they want you to have them so they can use covert listening device roving bugs and locate you with gps.

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Reaper978 said:

IS IT GOING TO STAY LIKE THIS?

Yes, and none of it is accidental. It's all being done with the sole purpose of irritating you.

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dew said:

not if your idea of the future is ghost in the shell. i love it!

If you watched the series, every other episode involves someone getting their brain hacked-in or manipulated.

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Technician said:

If you watched the series, every other episode involves someone getting their brain hacked-in or manipulated.

EGGS ACTLY.

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Reaper978 said:

Has anyone ever noticed the kinds of things that they lose over time, especially things on old computers like passwords, work, saved games, games, downloaded things, etc. How about just forgetting about things and losing them forever?

Sorry man, but I own a 1.33TB external USB hard-drive and it does a mighty efficient job of preventing me from losing my saved games and downloaded files and valuable projects that I've worked on.
In fact, it proved to be a real life-saver by allowing me to transfer applications from the 32-bit WindowsXP environment into the 64-bit Windows8 environment while completely bypassing any installation executables which would've been denied access otherwise...
Am I slick and clever or am I slick and clever? :p

How about old accounts on websites you can't remember anymore. Or something you just signed up for but can't remember the exact it was and can't find it anymore.

Every web-browser which I know of has a special feature called "bookmarks" or "favourites" which allows you to save the addresses of all your frequented places into a file on your hard-drive, and allows you to access those places through a single mouse click without remembering their full address.
Also, there's papers and pens which exist for the purpose of writing such information down for future reference. So take advantage of this outdated method if you're that worried about losing your digital bookmarks.

Does all of this stuff just float there in internet databases, forever forgotten?

I've witnessed servers of websites shutting down, being wiped and rebooted without any traces of old accounts. Loss of data is equally as possible as the preservation of data, and it is all within our control. Your attitude towards handling the data can allow it to either be safely backed up or be recklessly destroyed without a trace.

It's madness! What the hell is happening! It's all a chaotic blur of meaningless strings of text and images and advertisements. Isn't it time this changed? It's 2013! Isn't that supposed to be a futurisitic year with cool sci-fi gadgets and hover cars? It's just another year of google searches returning some list of websites based on strings of text, and the same old capitalist advertisements. Still the same old Stop signs, and interstate highways with green signs and police cars driving around, pulling people over for no reason? This is fucking gay.
IS IT GOING TO STAY LIKE THIS?

Um.... In my 28 years I've seen a lot of new things being invented and still being invented even now. I've lived in 2 different countries with clashing government systems, and I've seen things all around me dynamically changing constantly.

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Are you kidding? I have the exact opposite problem. I have a few QBASIC games I wrote back in the late 90s still bouncing around the Internet. I was in friggin' middle school when I wrote most of those, and I'm nearly 30 now. Granted, I have lost some Doom maps over the years, but I find an odd comfort to know that something I created has lasted so long separated from the tools I used to create it. Shoot, this very Internet identiy I used to convey that thought was created back when I was still in high school, and yet here I am today.

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188DarkRevived said:

Stuff about hard drives remembering everything


You're making the big assumptions that hard drives never fail (wrong) and that all the involved parts (mechanical, electronical, power supply, firmware etc.) will always do their job perfectly (proved wrong everyday).

Some say that they proactively "catch" such errors before they occur and manage to copy stuff over to a new hard disk before it's too late, and so on. Yeah right, do you get a new hard disk every 6 months just to be on the safe side/rotate them? Especially if you keep all of your eggs in one basket (your new 1.33 TB drive, of unknown future reliability), you could lose a lot of data in a single instance.

IMO, it's better to scatter/differentitate backups: in general, only data that I burned to (quality) optical media, scattered/replicated accross multiple machines/hard disks and even floppies survived my changing machines and the at least 4 major hard disk crashes/errors leading to total data loss I've had in the last 6 years. Just ONE drive? Not even close.

188DarkRevived said:

Um.... In my 28 years I've seen a lot of new things being invented and still being invented even now. I've lived in 2 different countries with clashing government systems, and I've seen things all around me dynamically changing constantly.


Actually, we've hit a technology brickwall, at least for semiconductor based digital electronics. That's why most improvements tend to be incremental (e.g. adding more cores or making bigger memory chips), rather than really innovative breakthroughs (e.g. you won't see something akin to going from 1-bit color to 32-bit color today, or inventing a totally new kind of memory, e.g. going from iron core memory to 6-cell registers, or a totally new architecture, like e.g. the Amiga vs single-cpu "dumb" PCs).

On the software front, things aren't getting much better either: most new "killer apps" are mostly mobile apps or their web equivalents with dumbed-down interfaces and an emphasis on heavy database/personal data usage, rather than e.g. bringing something like Doom in a world dominated by 2D platformers, and even modern OSes are trying to follow suit to this trend.

There seems to be a higher priority in "getting it all together/connected" and cobbling together more complex, monstruous, elephantine apps that use a 1000 enterprisey APIs and frameworks just because the incremental hardware upgrades allow it, rather than advancing the state of the art in software design with something truly innovative. Even exploiting multicore/parallel programming is trapped by rigid paradigms and limited by logical constraints (tons of inherently serial stuff which cannot be parallelized).

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There has always been a higher priority in just writing software you need than advancing the state of the art. You just see it more because a large group is writing and promoting software now.

IMO it's not a bad thing for hardware to stop growing its power geometrically for a while. Software is catching up in reliability and efficiency now. Games are the best example of this. A game designed for an Xbox 360 is a lot prettier than one form 2006, even with the same hardware. Meanwhile my PC crashes far, far less often than it did in the late 90s.

Yeah, we get that stuff where everything gets reinvented because it moved to the web or to phones, but improvements still come along. Sometimes they're even do things that are a bit shocking (like that app for my phone that watches my pulse using the camera). The slower change is also good for the less adaptable users.

Then there are the truly neat technologies like the ones I was reading yesterday about encoding large chunks of data in DNA. The estimated data density was something like 2.2 petabytes / gram. This is intended for long-term storage with a limited number of possible recoveries rather than fast, everyday storage.

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Aliotroph? said:

Then there are the truly neat technologies like the ones I was reading yesterday about encoding large chunks of data in DNA.


Uh oh ;-)

As for data density, I think there's an upper limit dictated by the number of atoms in the observable universe and the laws of quantum physics.

Assuming that you can reliably encode 1 bit with one atom, this leaves you with 10^72 to 10^80 bits to play with, or about 2^265 bits = 2^263 bytes maximum data capacity available in the entire universe, exceedable only if you manage to stably encode more states in one atom. With the materials available on earth, about 1.33*10^50 atoms (this includes everything down to the core!) this means that the top limit to physical storage is 2^163 bytes, no matter what technologies are used, if it gets down to 1 bit/atom. If we limit it to the materials readily accessible from the top layers of the earth, the maximum attainable capacity is even less than that, probably 1% (still nearly 2^154, or the equivalent of 2^144 1 TB hard disks...I don't think there's nearly enough metal to build them, though, too much overhead ;-)

Yes, you can exceed 1 bit per atom but it will still be limited by the number of stable states an atom can have, and in any case we're talking about a factor in the order of 10^2.

Exceeding those limits will probably require using more exotic particles, converting energy into matter (thus creating new atoms) or "trapping" information with some other form (e.g. a long stream of electrons or E-M impulses in the vacuum of space, sort of like a giant cosmic data tape, which however will have to be read sequentially, forcibly contained in a region of space and periodically reinforced)

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Maes said:

Yeah right, do you get a new hard disk every 6 months just to be on the safe side/rotate them? Especially if you keep all of your eggs in one basket (your new 1.33 TB drive, of unknown future reliability), you could lose a lot of data in a single instance.
IMO, it's better to scatter/differentitate backups: in general, only data that I burned to (quality) optical media, scattered/replicated accross multiple machines/hard disks and even floppies survived my changing machines and the at least 4 major hard disk crashes/errors leading to total data loss I've had in the last 6 years. Just ONE drive? Not even close.

I admit that in my previous post I was too lazy to elaborate that asides from relying on 1 external hard-drive I also rely on DVD-RW drives to make secondary backups.
Pretty much every single file that I ever copied onto the external hard-drive from my old laptop has also been transferred onto recordable DVDs shortly after being placed on my brand new laptop.
Therefore, I actually have 3 back-ups of my vital media:
1 on the USB drive, 1 on my old laptop, and 1 on a stack of DVDs.
I'm not as shallow or unprepared as people might think. I work hard to ensure survival.

You're making the big assumptions that hard drives never fail (wrong) and that all the involved parts (mechanical, electronical, power supply, firmware etc.) will always do their job perfectly (proved wrong everyday).

I wasn't making a single assumption at all. I was merely lazy to type a humongous novel-sized post for everyone to read. My apologies.

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I backup my shit with the DOOM 4 Sysadmins hack, and store it in the cloud - on Phobos, Deimos, and Hell. Now that's true redundancy!

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I still got files from 2004 on my 2TiB HDD. The only problem is that the files use XZ compression in giant TARs, so finding a specific file outside of a name is hard to do. I'll have to write my own compressed indexing system to properly resort all of my data.

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I still have working CDs from 97-98, and they were an almost complete backup of my 1,7 GB hard drive back then.

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Aliotroph? said:

Then there are the truly neat technologies like the ones I was reading yesterday about encoding large chunks of data in DNA. The estimated data density was something like 2.2 petabytes / gram. This is intended for long-term storage with a limited number of possible recoveries rather than fast, everyday storage.


Indeed. Apparently they recently converted some hard drive data in genetic code and retrieved it with 100% accuracy.

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/80beats/?p=42546#.UQUtt_JC_q5

Also Nanomagnets.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/01/130123133618.htm

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One of the reasons why new technology seems to arrive slower than we want it to is because the current monopolists of industries such as oil rigs are afraid of losing their wealth and are doing everything in their power to delay the advent of the innovations which will rob them of their profits. That's why we still use gasoline for our cars even though we could be using some other source such as an electric battery or a solar panel or something else.
Money talks too damn much and makes the elite selfish. That's the problem.

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188DarkRevived said:

That's why we still use gasoline for our cars


Maybe we're simply using it (and diesel...and kerosene...) because it provides a decent energy density so that you don't need to recharge a car after 100 km, or so that aircraft can stay aloft longer than 5 minutes? I don't care how "clean" something is when using it or producing it, if it cannot be packed in a format (both size and weight-wise- matching -at least- fossil fuels at energy parity content, it will always be a niche/toy application. Good for RC cars and aircraft, not for real ones ;-)

Actually, even if you could power a Jumbo Jet from batteries that weigh just as much as the Jet-A fuel it needs to carry (nearly half the weight of any modern airliner is its fuel!), it would be a very bad idea: as it flies, the jet gets lighter, and that is taken into account when planning range or maximum takeoff weight (you can load somewhat more cargo than it would be safe to land with). A huge, constant weight of explosive batteries that can't be dumped in an emergency while retaining control? No thanks...

Unless of course, all the formulas and reaction energies published in chemistry books are false, as they are, obviously, part of the conspiracy ;-)

Oh and the usual troll gadfly question for all those that think electric vehicles are the future: how/where will their electricity be produced?

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I just tell everybody trains are the future. Alberta being "Texas North," (the land of cows, oil and pickup trucks) a lot of people get pissed off at me or just don't believe trains are at all useful. Those fools have never been to Japan. And how do I think those will be powered? Nuclear! Canada has lots of fuel for that. (I mean the grid that powers the trains, not nuclear trains of course.)

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Aliotroph? said:

And how do I think those will be powered? Nuclear! Canada has lots of fuel for that. (I mean the grid that powers the trains, not nuclear trains of course.)


Actually, electric trains (as well as trams, trolleybuses etc.) in general work just as well with the existing infrastructure for three reasons:

  • There aren't a lot of them, compared to private cars and trucks.
  • They are more energy-efficient per passenger compared to any other means of transportation, except maybe walking and bicycles (trolleybuses are a weird case however, as they are wheeled and have to cope with normal traffic).
  • They can use technologies like regenerative braking etc., so they waste much less energy when braking.
If however electric locomotion is extended down to private vehicles, I agree in that nuclear (and coal) is the only viable short-term option to keep them rolling, as the demand for energy under the form of electricity will increase dramatically.

The net overall energy consumption may even be lower due to increased efficiency, but this time all the energy that was generated inside each vehicle separately will have to come from the power grid, which will need to be scaled up accordingly, both the lines and generators... seeing how little energy density renewables have per land unit (a real estate/land use nightmare, unless you believe in "Let's cover the Sahara/world's deserts in solar panels and wind turbines!" scenarios), if such a pressuring demand for electricy is created, the only solution will be to build new traditional power plants...most of which will be coal-powered (easy, mature, and still cheap solution) or nuclear. Of course, nuclear has its own problems, technical, military/strategical and political.

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Reaper978 said:

IS IT GOING TO STAY LIKE THIS?

Where are all the time travellers from the future?

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DoomUK said:

Where are all the time travellers from the future?

If they do indeed exist then they're obviously deliberately keeping a low profile, because most definitely they're some kind of secret-service government agents with a "prime directive" for not doing anything which would catastrophically change their desired course of history into something that they don't desire.

I mean, if I was a time-traveller, I wouldn't exactly want to disclose myself to others who might jeopardize my plans and distract me with their curious questions, you know.

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