The impermanence of our generation
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Reading the pixel versus paper thread below got me thinking about how little history will remember us. Many of us know the frustration of trying to access data in an obsolete file format. If you no longer have access to the software that was used to create it, you may well have lost that data forever. The web makes it easier to search the world for someone who has solved the problem, but that doesn't guarantee the solution will be found. In a similar manner, we depend more and more on web sites to store our data. This concept is extended further by the marketing friendly phrase of cloud computing. However, web sites come and go, as do companies which may be the cloud repository of your data. Not that I consider Facebook important, but consider if you were someone who did. Do you really think that by the time your children are grown and you want to share the experiences of your youth with your grandchildren that Facebook, or your Facebook data, will still be around? As an author, this got me thinking about what I write as well. More and more, people are pushing for electronic books and the death of dead trees (if that's not too much of a double negative for you). Leaving aside the pesky issue of ownership (you don't own a digital book like you do a paper one, you just get "rights"), digital books can literally be here today and gone tomorrow. I'm not talking about the fact that Amazon may decide to delete your purchase right off of your Kindle (Think it can't happen? Just ask George Orwell.) but rather am thinking of the future. A paper book is a physical thing. If a publisher does a few print runs & sells them all, then they're out there in the world. If it was worthy or memorable that book may still exist ten generations down the line, passed down from parent to child, donated to a library, bought and sold second hand many times over, etc. It's a real thing, and it doesn't go away unless you trash it or the Nazis reappear with their book burning machine. Current trends, however, lead me to wonder if the next book I publish can survive. While this matters less for technology books given the fact that they have built in obsolence, I'm moving out of tech / biz and into a more general audience. Even if what I write happens to be worthy enough to be kept around, in a digital world I have little confidence that it will exist decades from now. Authors write to the present generation but dream of writing to the ages. I believe much of that dream is at risk in the fragile electronic future we have been creatin
Yup - reminds me of this: Digital Domesday Book lasts 15 years not 1000 [^] They've (in the 7 years since writing that) managed to retrieve the data off the discs, but sooner or later that technology will be lost too, but the paper books will still be readable. [edit] - yes, irony of ironies can be found at http://www.domesday1986.com/[^] - This used to house an online version of the content of the discs, but the site went down and was lost when the original owner died. more info[^]
Help me! I'm turning into a grapefruit! Buzzwords!
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Reading the pixel versus paper thread below got me thinking about how little history will remember us. Many of us know the frustration of trying to access data in an obsolete file format. If you no longer have access to the software that was used to create it, you may well have lost that data forever. The web makes it easier to search the world for someone who has solved the problem, but that doesn't guarantee the solution will be found. In a similar manner, we depend more and more on web sites to store our data. This concept is extended further by the marketing friendly phrase of cloud computing. However, web sites come and go, as do companies which may be the cloud repository of your data. Not that I consider Facebook important, but consider if you were someone who did. Do you really think that by the time your children are grown and you want to share the experiences of your youth with your grandchildren that Facebook, or your Facebook data, will still be around? As an author, this got me thinking about what I write as well. More and more, people are pushing for electronic books and the death of dead trees (if that's not too much of a double negative for you). Leaving aside the pesky issue of ownership (you don't own a digital book like you do a paper one, you just get "rights"), digital books can literally be here today and gone tomorrow. I'm not talking about the fact that Amazon may decide to delete your purchase right off of your Kindle (Think it can't happen? Just ask George Orwell.) but rather am thinking of the future. A paper book is a physical thing. If a publisher does a few print runs & sells them all, then they're out there in the world. If it was worthy or memorable that book may still exist ten generations down the line, passed down from parent to child, donated to a library, bought and sold second hand many times over, etc. It's a real thing, and it doesn't go away unless you trash it or the Nazis reappear with their book burning machine. Current trends, however, lead me to wonder if the next book I publish can survive. While this matters less for technology books given the fact that they have built in obsolence, I'm moving out of tech / biz and into a more general audience. Even if what I write happens to be worthy enough to be kept around, in a digital world I have little confidence that it will exist decades from now. Authors write to the present generation but dream of writing to the ages. I believe much of that dream is at risk in the fragile electronic future we have been creatin
Christopher Duncan wrote:
Reading the pixel versus paper thread below got me thinking about how little history will remember us.
You make some interesting points in your post, but I wanted to disagree with your first sentence. On the contrary, I believe more will be recorded and remembered about history from now going forward than ever before. Sure, a lot will be lost, but much less than in the past when not nearly as much was recorded in the first place. Retrieving old data formats will be a lot less difficult than deciphering dead languages, which historians have also done. Instead, I think it's more important that everyone who has any internet presence whatsoever needs to remember that NOTHING they do will be lost. Especially teenagers with webcams.
He said, "Boy I'm just old and lonely, But thank you for your concern, Here's wishing you a Happy New Year." I wished him one back in return.
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Reading the pixel versus paper thread below got me thinking about how little history will remember us. Many of us know the frustration of trying to access data in an obsolete file format. If you no longer have access to the software that was used to create it, you may well have lost that data forever. The web makes it easier to search the world for someone who has solved the problem, but that doesn't guarantee the solution will be found. In a similar manner, we depend more and more on web sites to store our data. This concept is extended further by the marketing friendly phrase of cloud computing. However, web sites come and go, as do companies which may be the cloud repository of your data. Not that I consider Facebook important, but consider if you were someone who did. Do you really think that by the time your children are grown and you want to share the experiences of your youth with your grandchildren that Facebook, or your Facebook data, will still be around? As an author, this got me thinking about what I write as well. More and more, people are pushing for electronic books and the death of dead trees (if that's not too much of a double negative for you). Leaving aside the pesky issue of ownership (you don't own a digital book like you do a paper one, you just get "rights"), digital books can literally be here today and gone tomorrow. I'm not talking about the fact that Amazon may decide to delete your purchase right off of your Kindle (Think it can't happen? Just ask George Orwell.) but rather am thinking of the future. A paper book is a physical thing. If a publisher does a few print runs & sells them all, then they're out there in the world. If it was worthy or memorable that book may still exist ten generations down the line, passed down from parent to child, donated to a library, bought and sold second hand many times over, etc. It's a real thing, and it doesn't go away unless you trash it or the Nazis reappear with their book burning machine. Current trends, however, lead me to wonder if the next book I publish can survive. While this matters less for technology books given the fact that they have built in obsolence, I'm moving out of tech / biz and into a more general audience. Even if what I write happens to be worthy enough to be kept around, in a digital world I have little confidence that it will exist decades from now. Authors write to the present generation but dream of writing to the ages. I believe much of that dream is at risk in the fragile electronic future we have been creatin
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Christopher Duncan wrote:
Reading the pixel versus paper thread below got me thinking about how little history will remember us.
You make some interesting points in your post, but I wanted to disagree with your first sentence. On the contrary, I believe more will be recorded and remembered about history from now going forward than ever before. Sure, a lot will be lost, but much less than in the past when not nearly as much was recorded in the first place. Retrieving old data formats will be a lot less difficult than deciphering dead languages, which historians have also done. Instead, I think it's more important that everyone who has any internet presence whatsoever needs to remember that NOTHING they do will be lost. Especially teenagers with webcams.
He said, "Boy I'm just old and lonely, But thank you for your concern, Here's wishing you a Happy New Year." I wished him one back in return.
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Christopher Duncan wrote:
Reading the pixel versus paper thread below got me thinking about how little history will remember us.
You make some interesting points in your post, but I wanted to disagree with your first sentence. On the contrary, I believe more will be recorded and remembered about history from now going forward than ever before. Sure, a lot will be lost, but much less than in the past when not nearly as much was recorded in the first place. Retrieving old data formats will be a lot less difficult than deciphering dead languages, which historians have also done. Instead, I think it's more important that everyone who has any internet presence whatsoever needs to remember that NOTHING they do will be lost. Especially teenagers with webcams.
He said, "Boy I'm just old and lonely, But thank you for your concern, Here's wishing you a Happy New Year." I wished him one back in return.
Lots more will be lost, because digital data is much easier to loose. My parents have boxes and boxes of photographs of their parents, grandparents, etc. I have a hard drive full of jpgs, which one day will cease to exist when the all the copies of them die. In 50 years time, anyone can understand the significance of a shoebox full of printed photos. Who knows what someone will think when they find a USB hard drive in a box in 2060!
Help me! I'm turning into a grapefruit! Buzzwords!
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Christopher Duncan wrote:
Reading the pixel versus paper thread below got me thinking about how little history will remember us.
You make some interesting points in your post, but I wanted to disagree with your first sentence. On the contrary, I believe more will be recorded and remembered about history from now going forward than ever before. Sure, a lot will be lost, but much less than in the past when not nearly as much was recorded in the first place. Retrieving old data formats will be a lot less difficult than deciphering dead languages, which historians have also done. Instead, I think it's more important that everyone who has any internet presence whatsoever needs to remember that NOTHING they do will be lost. Especially teenagers with webcams.
He said, "Boy I'm just old and lonely, But thank you for your concern, Here's wishing you a Happy New Year." I wished him one back in return.
I understand what you're saying. However, I'm reminded of a comment an American soldier made to a Rolling Stone reporter during Desert Storm when talking about all the high tech weaponry. "Yeah, it's great stuff but if the batteries ever die this war is fucked." Not the same thing exactly, but I think the sentiment can nonetheless be applied. :)
Christopher Duncan www.PracticalUSA.com Author of The Career Programmer and Unite the Tribes Copywriting Services
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Yup - reminds me of this: Digital Domesday Book lasts 15 years not 1000 [^] They've (in the 7 years since writing that) managed to retrieve the data off the discs, but sooner or later that technology will be lost too, but the paper books will still be readable. [edit] - yes, irony of ironies can be found at http://www.domesday1986.com/[^] - This used to house an online version of the content of the discs, but the site went down and was lost when the original owner died. more info[^]
Help me! I'm turning into a grapefruit! Buzzwords!
An excellent example of what I'm talking about. And this is only 15 years. Imagine what will still be left of today 100 from now.
Christopher Duncan www.PracticalUSA.com Author of The Career Programmer and Unite the Tribes Copywriting Services
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Reading the pixel versus paper thread below got me thinking about how little history will remember us. Many of us know the frustration of trying to access data in an obsolete file format. If you no longer have access to the software that was used to create it, you may well have lost that data forever. The web makes it easier to search the world for someone who has solved the problem, but that doesn't guarantee the solution will be found. In a similar manner, we depend more and more on web sites to store our data. This concept is extended further by the marketing friendly phrase of cloud computing. However, web sites come and go, as do companies which may be the cloud repository of your data. Not that I consider Facebook important, but consider if you were someone who did. Do you really think that by the time your children are grown and you want to share the experiences of your youth with your grandchildren that Facebook, or your Facebook data, will still be around? As an author, this got me thinking about what I write as well. More and more, people are pushing for electronic books and the death of dead trees (if that's not too much of a double negative for you). Leaving aside the pesky issue of ownership (you don't own a digital book like you do a paper one, you just get "rights"), digital books can literally be here today and gone tomorrow. I'm not talking about the fact that Amazon may decide to delete your purchase right off of your Kindle (Think it can't happen? Just ask George Orwell.) but rather am thinking of the future. A paper book is a physical thing. If a publisher does a few print runs & sells them all, then they're out there in the world. If it was worthy or memorable that book may still exist ten generations down the line, passed down from parent to child, donated to a library, bought and sold second hand many times over, etc. It's a real thing, and it doesn't go away unless you trash it or the Nazis reappear with their book burning machine. Current trends, however, lead me to wonder if the next book I publish can survive. While this matters less for technology books given the fact that they have built in obsolence, I'm moving out of tech / biz and into a more general audience. Even if what I write happens to be worthy enough to be kept around, in a digital world I have little confidence that it will exist decades from now. Authors write to the present generation but dream of writing to the ages. I believe much of that dream is at risk in the fragile electronic future we have been creatin
Interesting thoughts. Speaking as a fellow author, however unread, I think I'll be sticking with print for quite a while. Sure, I release my novels (Well, only one so far) in electronic format, but I picked a publisher that uses no copy protection and one of the most standard, albeit still proprietary, formats (PDF)... That said, even if electronic books really take off, the only thing that might keep me from publishing in print would be the monetary cost becoming prohibitive. Since the trend seems to be going in the OTHER direction, with print-on-demand systems, I don't see print books going away anytime soon. If they do, though... I can just see the headlines a hundred years from now... "Hacker breaks into AmazonBNBordersLibraryOfCongressWalmart Co.'s servers, wipes out entire works of Shakespeare. Last print copy of Hamlet sells for 6 gazillion yuan."
Proud to have finally moved to the A-Ark. Which one are you in? Author of Guardians of Xen (Sci-Fi/Fantasy novel)
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Interesting thoughts. Speaking as a fellow author, however unread, I think I'll be sticking with print for quite a while. Sure, I release my novels (Well, only one so far) in electronic format, but I picked a publisher that uses no copy protection and one of the most standard, albeit still proprietary, formats (PDF)... That said, even if electronic books really take off, the only thing that might keep me from publishing in print would be the monetary cost becoming prohibitive. Since the trend seems to be going in the OTHER direction, with print-on-demand systems, I don't see print books going away anytime soon. If they do, though... I can just see the headlines a hundred years from now... "Hacker breaks into AmazonBNBordersLibraryOfCongressWalmart Co.'s servers, wipes out entire works of Shakespeare. Last print copy of Hamlet sells for 6 gazillion yuan."
Proud to have finally moved to the A-Ark. Which one are you in? Author of Guardians of Xen (Sci-Fi/Fantasy novel)
Ian Shlasko wrote:
"Hacker breaks into AmazonBNBordersLibraryOfCongressWalmart Co.'s servers, wipes out entire works of Shakespeare. Last print copy of Hamlet sells for 6 gazillion yuan."
:laugh: Hilarious, and yet all too possible!
Christopher Duncan www.PracticalUSA.com Author of The Career Programmer and Unite the Tribes Copywriting Services
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Reading the pixel versus paper thread below got me thinking about how little history will remember us. Many of us know the frustration of trying to access data in an obsolete file format. If you no longer have access to the software that was used to create it, you may well have lost that data forever. The web makes it easier to search the world for someone who has solved the problem, but that doesn't guarantee the solution will be found. In a similar manner, we depend more and more on web sites to store our data. This concept is extended further by the marketing friendly phrase of cloud computing. However, web sites come and go, as do companies which may be the cloud repository of your data. Not that I consider Facebook important, but consider if you were someone who did. Do you really think that by the time your children are grown and you want to share the experiences of your youth with your grandchildren that Facebook, or your Facebook data, will still be around? As an author, this got me thinking about what I write as well. More and more, people are pushing for electronic books and the death of dead trees (if that's not too much of a double negative for you). Leaving aside the pesky issue of ownership (you don't own a digital book like you do a paper one, you just get "rights"), digital books can literally be here today and gone tomorrow. I'm not talking about the fact that Amazon may decide to delete your purchase right off of your Kindle (Think it can't happen? Just ask George Orwell.) but rather am thinking of the future. A paper book is a physical thing. If a publisher does a few print runs & sells them all, then they're out there in the world. If it was worthy or memorable that book may still exist ten generations down the line, passed down from parent to child, donated to a library, bought and sold second hand many times over, etc. It's a real thing, and it doesn't go away unless you trash it or the Nazis reappear with their book burning machine. Current trends, however, lead me to wonder if the next book I publish can survive. While this matters less for technology books given the fact that they have built in obsolence, I'm moving out of tech / biz and into a more general audience. Even if what I write happens to be worthy enough to be kept around, in a digital world I have little confidence that it will exist decades from now. Authors write to the present generation but dream of writing to the ages. I believe much of that dream is at risk in the fragile electronic future we have been creatin
Yeah I'm always skeptical of cloud stuff as websites can suddenly vanish and you lose everything on them. I don't think old file formats are much of a problem though. You've always got virtualization and emulation if you want to run an old OS to run an old program that supports an old format and its usually possible to find a way to convert things. If there's a lot of data then it's probably not too difficult to automate the conversion.
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Lots more will be lost, because digital data is much easier to loose. My parents have boxes and boxes of photographs of their parents, grandparents, etc. I have a hard drive full of jpgs, which one day will cease to exist when the all the copies of them die. In 50 years time, anyone can understand the significance of a shoebox full of printed photos. Who knows what someone will think when they find a USB hard drive in a box in 2060!
Help me! I'm turning into a grapefruit! Buzzwords!
benjymous wrote:
In 50 years time, anyone can understand the significance of a shoebox full of printed photos. Who knows what someone will think when they find a USB hard drive in a box in 2060!
50 years isn't that long... I still have floppies over 20 years old (hard to believe) that still work. And floppies were the least reliable media I've ever used. This stuff is so widespread right now that it will take a long, long time before it is difficult to recover. Now, after our robot slaves rise up and kill us all (only to die out themselves when they realize they don't know how to recharge), and after the few stragglers that survive and rebuild civilization in 10,000 years discover our ancient ruins, yeah, it may take them a while to rebuild a corrupt RAID array.
He said, "Boy I'm just old and lonely, But thank you for your concern, Here's wishing you a Happy New Year." I wished him one back in return.
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Yeah I'm always skeptical of cloud stuff as websites can suddenly vanish and you lose everything on them. I don't think old file formats are much of a problem though. You've always got virtualization and emulation if you want to run an old OS to run an old program that supports an old format and its usually possible to find a way to convert things. If there's a lot of data then it's probably not too difficult to automate the conversion.
Dave Parker wrote:
I don't think old file formats are much of a problem though. You've always got virtualization and emulation if you want to run an old OS to run an old program that supports an old format and its usually possible to find a way to convert things. If there's a lot of data then it's probably not too difficult to automate the conversion.
You're right, of course, and this is pretty sensible stuff when you look back to the early PC days of 1985. However, I wonder how this scenario will look even a mere 100 years in the future rather than just 25, particularly given the continually accelerating rate of new technologies. Will anyone in 2085 even know what DOS was, let alone care about emulating it? Unthinkable though it may be, the same fate might even befall Windows, *nix and Mac OS. And 100 years may a long time for us mortals, but it's a mind boggling eternity from technology's point of view. Imagine archeologists digging up 500 year old relics to try and better understand the life we live today. When most of the people we know today (including a large number of us geeks) couldn't lay their hands on a 5 1/4" floppy drive if their lives depended on it, what do you figure the odds are of those fedora wearing, bullwhip packing adventurers deciphering anything about us that was stored digitally? For all we know, even if they could find an ancient PC (let alone the drivers, etc.), chances are good the world won't be running on the same kind of electricity in 2510 that powers it today. :)
Christopher Duncan www.PracticalUSA.com Author of The Career Programmer and Unite the Tribes Copywriting Services
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Reading the pixel versus paper thread below got me thinking about how little history will remember us. Many of us know the frustration of trying to access data in an obsolete file format. If you no longer have access to the software that was used to create it, you may well have lost that data forever. The web makes it easier to search the world for someone who has solved the problem, but that doesn't guarantee the solution will be found. In a similar manner, we depend more and more on web sites to store our data. This concept is extended further by the marketing friendly phrase of cloud computing. However, web sites come and go, as do companies which may be the cloud repository of your data. Not that I consider Facebook important, but consider if you were someone who did. Do you really think that by the time your children are grown and you want to share the experiences of your youth with your grandchildren that Facebook, or your Facebook data, will still be around? As an author, this got me thinking about what I write as well. More and more, people are pushing for electronic books and the death of dead trees (if that's not too much of a double negative for you). Leaving aside the pesky issue of ownership (you don't own a digital book like you do a paper one, you just get "rights"), digital books can literally be here today and gone tomorrow. I'm not talking about the fact that Amazon may decide to delete your purchase right off of your Kindle (Think it can't happen? Just ask George Orwell.) but rather am thinking of the future. A paper book is a physical thing. If a publisher does a few print runs & sells them all, then they're out there in the world. If it was worthy or memorable that book may still exist ten generations down the line, passed down from parent to child, donated to a library, bought and sold second hand many times over, etc. It's a real thing, and it doesn't go away unless you trash it or the Nazis reappear with their book burning machine. Current trends, however, lead me to wonder if the next book I publish can survive. While this matters less for technology books given the fact that they have built in obsolence, I'm moving out of tech / biz and into a more general audience. Even if what I write happens to be worthy enough to be kept around, in a digital world I have little confidence that it will exist decades from now. Authors write to the present generation but dream of writing to the ages. I believe much of that dream is at risk in the fragile electronic future we have been creatin
Not so many years ago, when the electronic copy of an MS was unimportant, I went through a series of ad-hoc word-processing machines ("portable" computers weren't very portable, but there were plenty of notebook-sized word processors). Because I knew I still had the source files for everything, I rarely took care of hard copies the way I had to when it was all typewritten, and eventually found myself in the position of having piles and piles of memory cards that only fit machines that no longer worked, diskettes that were formatted in weird ways, and tapes of binary data that nothing I still possessed could read. And no hard copies. The biggest problem is that I can't remember what machines half the storage thingummies went with, so huge amounts of text (which, granted, would probably make me cringe, if reading it now) are still unaccessible to me. And I'm notoriously bad at labeling discs and what-have-you, so I have no idea what is on most of this stuff (if it isn't all white noise, by now). Sucks to be me, sometimes.
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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Reading the pixel versus paper thread below got me thinking about how little history will remember us. Many of us know the frustration of trying to access data in an obsolete file format. If you no longer have access to the software that was used to create it, you may well have lost that data forever. The web makes it easier to search the world for someone who has solved the problem, but that doesn't guarantee the solution will be found. In a similar manner, we depend more and more on web sites to store our data. This concept is extended further by the marketing friendly phrase of cloud computing. However, web sites come and go, as do companies which may be the cloud repository of your data. Not that I consider Facebook important, but consider if you were someone who did. Do you really think that by the time your children are grown and you want to share the experiences of your youth with your grandchildren that Facebook, or your Facebook data, will still be around? As an author, this got me thinking about what I write as well. More and more, people are pushing for electronic books and the death of dead trees (if that's not too much of a double negative for you). Leaving aside the pesky issue of ownership (you don't own a digital book like you do a paper one, you just get "rights"), digital books can literally be here today and gone tomorrow. I'm not talking about the fact that Amazon may decide to delete your purchase right off of your Kindle (Think it can't happen? Just ask George Orwell.) but rather am thinking of the future. A paper book is a physical thing. If a publisher does a few print runs & sells them all, then they're out there in the world. If it was worthy or memorable that book may still exist ten generations down the line, passed down from parent to child, donated to a library, bought and sold second hand many times over, etc. It's a real thing, and it doesn't go away unless you trash it or the Nazis reappear with their book burning machine. Current trends, however, lead me to wonder if the next book I publish can survive. While this matters less for technology books given the fact that they have built in obsolence, I'm moving out of tech / biz and into a more general audience. Even if what I write happens to be worthy enough to be kept around, in a digital world I have little confidence that it will exist decades from now. Authors write to the present generation but dream of writing to the ages. I believe much of that dream is at risk in the fragile electronic future we have been creatin
Excellent point about Facebook, but books? It will be a long time before plain text dies out - I can get books from the 19th century easier off Project Gutenberg. You know, books that are hard to find, banned or no longer sold in my country, or simply out of print.
Cheers, Vikram. (Got my troika of CCCs!)
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Reading the pixel versus paper thread below got me thinking about how little history will remember us. Many of us know the frustration of trying to access data in an obsolete file format. If you no longer have access to the software that was used to create it, you may well have lost that data forever. The web makes it easier to search the world for someone who has solved the problem, but that doesn't guarantee the solution will be found. In a similar manner, we depend more and more on web sites to store our data. This concept is extended further by the marketing friendly phrase of cloud computing. However, web sites come and go, as do companies which may be the cloud repository of your data. Not that I consider Facebook important, but consider if you were someone who did. Do you really think that by the time your children are grown and you want to share the experiences of your youth with your grandchildren that Facebook, or your Facebook data, will still be around? As an author, this got me thinking about what I write as well. More and more, people are pushing for electronic books and the death of dead trees (if that's not too much of a double negative for you). Leaving aside the pesky issue of ownership (you don't own a digital book like you do a paper one, you just get "rights"), digital books can literally be here today and gone tomorrow. I'm not talking about the fact that Amazon may decide to delete your purchase right off of your Kindle (Think it can't happen? Just ask George Orwell.) but rather am thinking of the future. A paper book is a physical thing. If a publisher does a few print runs & sells them all, then they're out there in the world. If it was worthy or memorable that book may still exist ten generations down the line, passed down from parent to child, donated to a library, bought and sold second hand many times over, etc. It's a real thing, and it doesn't go away unless you trash it or the Nazis reappear with their book burning machine. Current trends, however, lead me to wonder if the next book I publish can survive. While this matters less for technology books given the fact that they have built in obsolence, I'm moving out of tech / biz and into a more general audience. Even if what I write happens to be worthy enough to be kept around, in a digital world I have little confidence that it will exist decades from now. Authors write to the present generation but dream of writing to the ages. I believe much of that dream is at risk in the fragile electronic future we have been creatin
The problem actually predates electronic storage. In the 40's through the 70's the state of the art was to photograph everything and store it on various forms of microfilm. A few large organizations still maintain working readers but the majority of information committed to microfilm is unreadable because the readers have failed.
Melting Away www.deals-house.com www.innovative--concepts.com
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Reading the pixel versus paper thread below got me thinking about how little history will remember us. Many of us know the frustration of trying to access data in an obsolete file format. If you no longer have access to the software that was used to create it, you may well have lost that data forever. The web makes it easier to search the world for someone who has solved the problem, but that doesn't guarantee the solution will be found. In a similar manner, we depend more and more on web sites to store our data. This concept is extended further by the marketing friendly phrase of cloud computing. However, web sites come and go, as do companies which may be the cloud repository of your data. Not that I consider Facebook important, but consider if you were someone who did. Do you really think that by the time your children are grown and you want to share the experiences of your youth with your grandchildren that Facebook, or your Facebook data, will still be around? As an author, this got me thinking about what I write as well. More and more, people are pushing for electronic books and the death of dead trees (if that's not too much of a double negative for you). Leaving aside the pesky issue of ownership (you don't own a digital book like you do a paper one, you just get "rights"), digital books can literally be here today and gone tomorrow. I'm not talking about the fact that Amazon may decide to delete your purchase right off of your Kindle (Think it can't happen? Just ask George Orwell.) but rather am thinking of the future. A paper book is a physical thing. If a publisher does a few print runs & sells them all, then they're out there in the world. If it was worthy or memorable that book may still exist ten generations down the line, passed down from parent to child, donated to a library, bought and sold second hand many times over, etc. It's a real thing, and it doesn't go away unless you trash it or the Nazis reappear with their book burning machine. Current trends, however, lead me to wonder if the next book I publish can survive. While this matters less for technology books given the fact that they have built in obsolence, I'm moving out of tech / biz and into a more general audience. Even if what I write happens to be worthy enough to be kept around, in a digital world I have little confidence that it will exist decades from now. Authors write to the present generation but dream of writing to the ages. I believe much of that dream is at risk in the fragile electronic future we have been creatin
This has already happened to me. I have multiple home video tapes that have some great film on them that I would like to keep, but the video camera doesn't work, and the only way to get that video off of the tapes it to use a camera, which you can't find anymore because it is so old. So I have probably 20 some odd tapes just laying around that I have no way of watching :((
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Reading the pixel versus paper thread below got me thinking about how little history will remember us. Many of us know the frustration of trying to access data in an obsolete file format. If you no longer have access to the software that was used to create it, you may well have lost that data forever. The web makes it easier to search the world for someone who has solved the problem, but that doesn't guarantee the solution will be found. In a similar manner, we depend more and more on web sites to store our data. This concept is extended further by the marketing friendly phrase of cloud computing. However, web sites come and go, as do companies which may be the cloud repository of your data. Not that I consider Facebook important, but consider if you were someone who did. Do you really think that by the time your children are grown and you want to share the experiences of your youth with your grandchildren that Facebook, or your Facebook data, will still be around? As an author, this got me thinking about what I write as well. More and more, people are pushing for electronic books and the death of dead trees (if that's not too much of a double negative for you). Leaving aside the pesky issue of ownership (you don't own a digital book like you do a paper one, you just get "rights"), digital books can literally be here today and gone tomorrow. I'm not talking about the fact that Amazon may decide to delete your purchase right off of your Kindle (Think it can't happen? Just ask George Orwell.) but rather am thinking of the future. A paper book is a physical thing. If a publisher does a few print runs & sells them all, then they're out there in the world. If it was worthy or memorable that book may still exist ten generations down the line, passed down from parent to child, donated to a library, bought and sold second hand many times over, etc. It's a real thing, and it doesn't go away unless you trash it or the Nazis reappear with their book burning machine. Current trends, however, lead me to wonder if the next book I publish can survive. While this matters less for technology books given the fact that they have built in obsolence, I'm moving out of tech / biz and into a more general audience. Even if what I write happens to be worthy enough to be kept around, in a digital world I have little confidence that it will exist decades from now. Authors write to the present generation but dream of writing to the ages. I believe much of that dream is at risk in the fragile electronic future we have been creatin
This is kind of a lame example of what you are talking about. I am learning to play the mandolin/bouzouki and there was a fantastic fan web site for Andy Irvine that had all kinds of information and music. It was a fine resource and I kept it bookmarked and went to it quite often. There was also an instructional video on Youtube that I was using all the time as well. Less than 6 months ago the web site went gone! And the Wayback machine doesn't want to work with the graphics (a lot of the sheet music were gifs). Also the Youtube clip that I was using as reference has been "removed by user". Poo :( I print everything now!! Screw the trees they will grow back!! :-D
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benjymous wrote:
In 50 years time, anyone can understand the significance of a shoebox full of printed photos. Who knows what someone will think when they find a USB hard drive in a box in 2060!
50 years isn't that long... I still have floppies over 20 years old (hard to believe) that still work. And floppies were the least reliable media I've ever used. This stuff is so widespread right now that it will take a long, long time before it is difficult to recover. Now, after our robot slaves rise up and kill us all (only to die out themselves when they realize they don't know how to recharge), and after the few stragglers that survive and rebuild civilization in 10,000 years discover our ancient ruins, yeah, it may take them a while to rebuild a corrupt RAID array.
He said, "Boy I'm just old and lonely, But thank you for your concern, Here's wishing you a Happy New Year." I wished him one back in return.
David Kentley wrote:
only to die out themselves when they realize they don't know how to recharge
No, they figure out a way (watch "The Matrix").
David Kentley wrote:
after our robot slaves rise up and kill us all
Well, maybe not if they do that.
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Dave Parker wrote:
I don't think old file formats are much of a problem though. You've always got virtualization and emulation if you want to run an old OS to run an old program that supports an old format and its usually possible to find a way to convert things. If there's a lot of data then it's probably not too difficult to automate the conversion.
You're right, of course, and this is pretty sensible stuff when you look back to the early PC days of 1985. However, I wonder how this scenario will look even a mere 100 years in the future rather than just 25, particularly given the continually accelerating rate of new technologies. Will anyone in 2085 even know what DOS was, let alone care about emulating it? Unthinkable though it may be, the same fate might even befall Windows, *nix and Mac OS. And 100 years may a long time for us mortals, but it's a mind boggling eternity from technology's point of view. Imagine archeologists digging up 500 year old relics to try and better understand the life we live today. When most of the people we know today (including a large number of us geeks) couldn't lay their hands on a 5 1/4" floppy drive if their lives depended on it, what do you figure the odds are of those fedora wearing, bullwhip packing adventurers deciphering anything about us that was stored digitally? For all we know, even if they could find an ancient PC (let alone the drivers, etc.), chances are good the world won't be running on the same kind of electricity in 2510 that powers it today. :)
Christopher Duncan www.PracticalUSA.com Author of The Career Programmer and Unite the Tribes Copywriting Services
Christopher Duncan wrote:
I wonder how this scenario will look even a mere 100 years in the future
Assuming they can still read text files, I'd say XML formats are a pretty safe bet. ;P
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Dave Parker wrote:
I don't think old file formats are much of a problem though. You've always got virtualization and emulation if you want to run an old OS to run an old program that supports an old format and its usually possible to find a way to convert things. If there's a lot of data then it's probably not too difficult to automate the conversion.
You're right, of course, and this is pretty sensible stuff when you look back to the early PC days of 1985. However, I wonder how this scenario will look even a mere 100 years in the future rather than just 25, particularly given the continually accelerating rate of new technologies. Will anyone in 2085 even know what DOS was, let alone care about emulating it? Unthinkable though it may be, the same fate might even befall Windows, *nix and Mac OS. And 100 years may a long time for us mortals, but it's a mind boggling eternity from technology's point of view. Imagine archeologists digging up 500 year old relics to try and better understand the life we live today. When most of the people we know today (including a large number of us geeks) couldn't lay their hands on a 5 1/4" floppy drive if their lives depended on it, what do you figure the odds are of those fedora wearing, bullwhip packing adventurers deciphering anything about us that was stored digitally? For all we know, even if they could find an ancient PC (let alone the drivers, etc.), chances are good the world won't be running on the same kind of electricity in 2510 that powers it today. :)
Christopher Duncan www.PracticalUSA.com Author of The Career Programmer and Unite the Tribes Copywriting Services
Not to mention the cost. I used to develop Mac based software back in the early 90's. I did a project for Rockwell automation back in 96 and I had all of my source files burned to CDs. They were all burned on a Mac. I couldn't open them on my PC and my old 7100 is full of sawdust down in the basement/woodshop! :-O Customer calls me last year 13 years later and is looking for source files. I had already delivers the source with the product so I wasn't obligated to do anything for them, since they wanted to "modify" some stuff "in-house". I couldn't open the CDs and I wasn't about to spend too much time or any money to retrieve the data off of them (and I'm not even mentioning some other source I have stored on Mac formatted Jazz Drive cartridges)!! In the end I bought a program online called MacDisk for $50 and I sent the customer a bill for my time and the software along with the source files they were looking for. Needless to say I never got paid. I guess the point of all of this is that to virtualize an OS to retrieve data can be costly so only very valuable data will be retrieved. If someone finds a hard disk 100 years from now they won't know what is on it and probably won't bother trying to get data off of it. At least a printed book has a cover telling you what the content is! :)