discord wrote:or they could ask alex to look over the wreckage and assemble a working computer with installed OS.....just thinking out loud here....
Sure, but that's past the point we're at right now. The discussion is about what might have been done in the time between chapters.
anticarrot wrote:Alex quite clearly said he'd been stuck in there for a week, or I quite clearly used the phrase 'intact e-reader'. If all you need to do is find the 'play' button, you don't need to worry about codecs.
You DO however need to know the language, watching movies won't get them that much since they'll all probably be in English with a smattering of native languages. Plus they'll need any passwords, and I doubt that there's much there that isn't password protected.
Whether Beryl has the training or not, if she's in charge of talking to the alien, and spotting interesting slipups, she'll have seen the cliff notes versions of those that do understand such things. She'll need the context. Something as simple as a working light fixture will tell you things about what conditions humans finds most comfortable. The Loroi can work things out by looking at human nuts and bolts, and they will be looking, because they don't know what's important. On long system transists, there's also little else to do.
Light bulbs won't help with decoding files. Beryl probably doesn't have much, if any, training for first contact situations given her station. Chances are the only person with such training on the ship is Tempo, and even then it's highly unlikely she's trained to re-construct file formats or reverse-engineer data transfer interfaces.
And by all means, what's your suggestion about why she hasn't spoken to Alex for a week?
Stillstorm isn't allowed to fuck with Alex directly, so she does what she can by isolating him as much as she is allowed to.
Also, Arioch wants to move the story forward but doesn't want to skip a bunch of conversations and doesn't want to get to the next major event at roughly the heat death of the universe.
anticarrot wrote:But it becomes easier if you have multiple files. With two or three the top and tail of the file become easy to identify, and the remainder is large number of bits which is a multiple of three, and then a limited range of other numbers.
Which still doesn't help if you aren't a programmer. It's doubtful that the average Loroi soldier has programming skills, if any of them on the Tempest do they are probably second-tier programmers or hobby programmers who've never re-constructed compressed file formats from scratch before.
SETI has actually put quite a bit of thought into this problem. Many human security agencies have as well. I'm sure the Loroi have as well.
The Loroi NSA will probably be able to take care of this in a reasonable timeframe. The technical division of the Loroi NSA probably doesn't have anyone on board Tempest.
There's also the possibility that the ship was carrying a very rugged 'rosetta stone' to aid in first contact.
Probably. Hidden behind several layers of encryption. After all, if there's no humans alive to unlock it why would we want them to have it? Consider the preposterous situation where a diplomatic vessel is attacked by an unknown entity (Impossible I know), would we want the perpetrator of that act to be easily able to read the files contained onboard? Of course not. It would be a massive security failing if there wasn't full-drive encryption on every device on the Bellarmine.