World: r3wp

http://www.stuff.co.nz/world/asia/japan-earthquake/4857821/Tsunami-hit-towns-forgot-warnings-from-ancestors


Interesting ... the Japanese had been for centuries creating stone 
tablets warning people not to build below certain points .. and these 
were serving as coastal warnings.  But in modern times they were 
in many cases ignored.

Old technology ... but it did save some who paid heed and built on 
ground above the tablets

Such a lady was on TV. Her house was saved, but she lost all her 
neighbours

And the neighbours had built below the line?

Yes, and her family. I suppose. The tablet story wasn't mentioned, 
but she specifically built her house higher up

I suppose the next generations will leave stone tablets with nuclear 
warning signs...

LOL

Better would be solar powered Geiger-Muller counters embedded in 
concrete posts

NZ suffered a lot as a result of its anti-nuclear stance ...

What use if your children's children are going to ignore them, anyway?

I thought it was a modern Dutch disease to forget about the power 
of the sea, but apparently our fish eating cousins on the opposite 
of the earth have fallen to the same folly

Ah .. just create a new religion that observes the tablets .. there 
are other examples of tablet based religions

Christianity, Mac

All religions are based on such warnings. Problem is, we've forgotten 
what they mean

These tablets were pretty explicit .. warning of tsunamis after earthquakes 
yet people still went home to secure possessions, and died in the 
following tsunamis

Edmund Burke (1729-1797)  "Those who don't know history are destined 
to repeat it."

It doesn't say anything about knowing and ignoring :-/

Burke was a politician ... their statements are always lack clarity

:-)

It takes about three generations for people to forget. Those that 
experience the disaster themselves pass it to their children and 
their grandchildren, but then the memory fades

It would seem we're still living in the oral age of prehistory

There was a TV documentary produced in the 1980s I think that talked 
what would happen to Christchurch in a major quake

It's now on youtube and close to 100% of the predictions came true

Institutional memory and its failings are common problems in many 
spheresl and once an institution starts making a mistake, it tends 
to repeat it every institutional generation or so.
  Military examples: http://hnn.us/articles/45305.html

   college fundraising examples: http://cooldata.wordpress.com/2011/02/22/data-disasters-courtesy-of-mordac/

Decades ago there was an article I think in Byte magazine about a 
method of backing up by printing it in some type of dense data format 
.. and you could purchase a scanner for about $300 to scan it back 
in again.  Anyone remember this?

I guess  it was like some type of continuous 2D bar code if you think 
in terms of today's technology

No. But for e.g. PDF format allows you to have a 2D "barcode", which 
can hold cca 64KB of data, or so I remember ....

64Kb?  the largest I've seen is about 2kb

The bar codes that you can get from Acrobat Pro are the same as used 
for online air tickets

I think it was in the mid 80s

I think Byte did distribute some software that needed a bar code 
to scan in .. perhaps Compute! did as well.  Bit too long ago to 
remember this now

Sure beats sitting for hours at a time typing in program listings!

QR code?
   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QR_Code

QR codes are not very dense

I'm just curious as to how they did it ...  to advocate using paper 
to backup data implies some dense encoding method

http://www.ollydbg.de/Paperbak/index.html

4kb is quite respectable https://www.safeberg.com/en/paperkey

paper is used in this case to archive your private keys

http://vimeo.com/14985024

Interesting ... Paperbak allows for the printing of 3Mb of compressed 
C code onto one page

in Datamatrix definition is written capacity of max 2335 bytes per 
one symbol of size 144x144 pixels, with some inbuilt compression 
it can be 3116 ascii characters (readable chars are ess than 8bit 
encoded), scanner may read mutiple symbols at once. much more importand 
characteristics is using reed-solomon self repairing code to ensure 
readability up to 30% picture damage for each symbol.

easy to read description at www.grandzebu.net together with other 
barcode symbologies

A datamatrix can hold 2K per bar code .. so we would have to create 
a matrix of datamatrices to store the data we need on a page

I simply wont die ;-) New look modern inside..All Amarican build....http://www.commodoreusa.net/CUSA_Store.aspx

http://www.commodoreusa.net/

funny how I am starting to like the guys at comodore usa !  :-o


when I read through the forum on their "fan" site, the guy in charge 
is quite level headed, knows the scene and actually embodies more 
of the spirit that went into the first commodore & amiga.   just 
do it.

he is getting bashed all the time and he replies with a good attitude. 
 I think he just was lucky (had the opportunity and will) about being 
able to license both commodore and amiga from the two different license 
owners at the same time.


If he can give me a better linux experience at a reasonable price 
I might just go and get one.   and yes... having a C64 cased PC *is* 
geeky cool.

the only problem is that they are not using any decent video cards 
in their machines, so that sucks big time.   sorry, but all of the 
intel cards are extremely sucky.   they don't even compare to 4-5 
year old mobile cards from ati and nvidia.

This new C64 caught my attention from a Yahoo! Finance article: http://finance.yahoo.com/family-home/article/112510/new-commodore-64-nyt

Let's see if they can actually ship a new machine.