reply to post by Eddy_P
So I don't believe any of that crap, but just for fun here's what I know.
First off, in the second video he puts up a picture of the eight witnesses holding a CD jewel case and says the picture is from the 1830's. I tried
to check into it and I can't find any information about that picture. Where it came from and so forth.
However, nowhere have I seen that picture posted did they say it was an actual photo of the event. As far as I know, no known photo of that actual
event exists. Any information about what that picture actually is would be helpful. I think he's trying to pass that off as the real thing when it's
not.
Now get this. as for the gold plates. First off, CDs are silver, not gold. Burnt CDs are usually blue or green, usually.
However, I'm old. Back around 1995 when this CD was actually made, blank CDs sometimes were gold color. Sometimes they still are. However, gold
colored blank CDs were actually a little more common back then.
In other words if this crackpot is actually right, and the gold plates were actually CDs given to him by a time traveler, they weren't the actual CDs
in Smith's case. They were probably burnt copies made from the originals instead.
Another claim in the first video is when he says there's a file on the CD that's 143,442 bytes and rounded up that's the 144,000 number from the
Bible. But that claim could be more complicated than that.
The writers of the Bible would most likely have written exactly what they had seen. They would have written 143,422 and not 144,000. Why would they
have written 144,000 instead? Well, here's where it gets good if you're a geek.
The first thing you have to learn about is disk sectors. Your hard drive is divided up into a whole bunch of sectors. When you save a file to disk the
file is divided up into chunks that can be stored in these sectors.
Sometimes those chunks of the file are smaller than the sector they're stored in. However, each sector can only store data from one file. That means
the rest of the sector gets wasted if you don't use it all.
That means even if the file is 143,442 bytes, once you add in the wasted unused space from the sectors it may actually take up a bit more space sector
wise on the disk than the file actually needs.
When you right click on a file in Windows and go to properties it tells you the actual size of the file and also gives you the size on disk number.
The size on disk number is how much space a file actually takes up on disk once the wasted sector space is accounted for.
Now get this. Different operating systems and storage drives have different sector sizes meaning two files the same size can take up different amounts
of actual disk space depending on which disk it's stored on.
Hard drives that your OS runs off have sector sizes of 512 bytes where an optical CD-ROM has sector sizes of 2048 bytes.
Now, I did a little experiment. I created a text file that was exactly 143,442 bytes in size. Not kilobytes like he says in the video. If you look at
the bottom of the file manager in the video it shows 22 files that are 1.56 megs in size. So the 143,442 should be in bytes not kilobytes cause that
many kilobytes would be more than a meg. About 140 megs actually. So it has to be bytes.
I checked on my Windows 7 machine with the NTFS file system that uses 512 sectors and guess what? The actual size on disk for the file is exactly 144
KB.
Some file managers may show the size on disk number so it might be a clue as to which file manager they were using, or which options they had set in
the file manager. But I have no idea which file manager that could be. All the ones I know of show the file size, not the size on disk unless you go
looking for it yourself.
But perhaps that's what they would have seen if the file was on a hard drive with 512 byte sectors is that the file was 144,000 bytes, not
143,442.
But there's a problem. The file wasn't on a hard drive. It was on a CD. CDs have sector sizes of 2048 bytes messing up the calculation. For example
I burnt my file to CD and on a CD the file only takes up 142 KB actual sector bytes on the disk. Since the sectors are bigger you don't need as many
of them, so you don't waste as much space.
So, why would the writers write 144,000 and not 142,000? Here are some theories.
First, they really did just round the number up.
Another theory is the files had been copied off the CD onto the hard drive.
But another theory is they were using an old file manager or old operating system. Maybe the programmer of it didn't know CDs and hard disks had
different sector sizes. Most people aren't aware of that. They just assumed that all file systems used 512 byte sectors like the HD does so the
program does the calculation wrong producing the 144,000 number.
So, for more research from a geek point of view one could go check out old file managers from the time and see if any report actual disk usage with
wasted sectors counted in instead of just the file size and see if any of them have a bug that calculates files on CD as if the CD used 512 byte
sectors.
[edit on 16-3-2010 by tinfoilman]
[edit on 16-3-2010 by tinfoilman]