Random thoughts thread

[Dadhawk]

Originally Posted by Sarlacc

When someone digs my old floppy disks out of the dirt they will not be able to read a single sentence of the hundreds of pages I wrote.

I've had conversations with "non-computer" people about this as well, and its a hard thing to convey.


I give the example that when my Father passed away (my Mother preceded him) my siblings and I spent hours going through shoeboxes and albums full of pictures, many of events we had long forgotten, and a lot of relatives we did not know or didn't remember. This included photos my parents had handed down to them from my Grandparents that included generations before them.


On the other hand, with the exception of a few photos that were printed out and hung on a wall, I have not taken a "hard" picture since 1995, when my oldest son was about 8 years old. All my photos are organized by year and event, stored on a home media server, and backed up to Amazon, but a hundred (or maybe even 50) years from now no one will know they exist, if they still do.


Now, other than a family historian, no one will care, much like those random photos you see on occasion at an antique store. It's cool but you don't know them, and their memory is lost.


However, as @Sarlacc mentions, the bigger picture is that much of what we know about our past is from "hard copy", from cave paintings to Egyptian carvings to 19th century manuscripts. Even with that these are only small glimpses into the world that was. There is a real possibility there will be huge gaps in future generations knowledge of the current generations. All that will be available is what society chooses to carry forward, there will be no treasures to discover in someone's attic, well at least none that can be deciphered.


Then again, humans are curious animals and like a challenge. If they do discover @Sarlacc's 5 1/4" inch floppies after the zombie apocalypse and the realize the contain information, they just may try to build a machine to read them. You never know.

[Sarlacc]

Originally Posted by Dadhawk

... There is a real possibility there will be huge gaps in future generations knowledge of the current generations...

Exactly. There are national archives dedicated to prevent this, and many of them will succeed within the parameters they have set for themselves.
But the vast majority of all the stuff we are creating is doomed.

I said in an earlier post that I believe 99.999% of our collective creative output will be lost in a 100 years.
At the same time, IBM estimates we now produce 2.5 quintillion bytes of data every single day.
If I'm right (and if I've done my math correctly) that means the historians in 2115 will have over 900 petabytes of data from 2015 to sift through.
Even though most of that probably will be junk data there will surely be something of interest. Quite possibly more than what we have from 1915 today. So it's not all dark :-)

[Tectoniic]

I guess mods are awake now. I was enjoying those threads lol

[Tcoat]

Originally Posted by Tectoniic

I guess mods are awake now. I was enjoying those threads lol

Little doubt there will be more. Have to respect the dude's persistence if nothing else.

[Tcoat]

Holy crap 4 Mods on at 10 AM (my time) and Manny was here just a couple of hours ago. This is getting scary.

[echo419]

is that what that smell is?....

[LOLS2K]

Any word on the new Zik, GTX, or GTZik? Can I type those things without getting a slap on the wrist?

[MisterSheep]

The joys of living in California.... between the couple of hours I was home after work I felt 11 earthquakes.

[Tcoat]

Originally Posted by LOLS2K

Any word on the new Zik, GTX, or GTZik? Can I type those things without getting a slap on the wrist?

Wrist?

[Tcoat]

Originally Posted by MisterSheep

The joys of living in California.... between the couple of hours I was home after work I felt 11 earthquakes.

Well at least it was warm and sunny while they were happening right?

[MisterSheep]

Originally Posted by Tcoat

Well at least it was warm and sunny while they were happening right?

No. Overcast with a slight drizzle. This morning was foggy as hell. But, the 5:30am drive to work was only 60 degrees.

[Tcoat]

Originally Posted by MisterSheep

No. Overcast with a slight drizzle. This morning was foggy as hell. But, the 5:30am drive to work was only 60 degrees.

Well that just plain sucks then!

[Special_K]

Originally Posted by Dadhawk

Then again, humans are curious animals and like a challenge. If they do discover @Sarlacc's 5 1/4" inch floppy after the zombie apocalypse and the realize the contain information, they just may try to build a machine to read it. You never know.

There's a perfect d!ck-joke in here, and I will eventually find it...

[MisterSheep]

Originally Posted by Tcoat

Well that just plain sucks then!

I know. It might be a horrible 75 degrees today. Probably should break out the sweater.