Re: ARCHIVAL CDs - 300 YEARS LIFE! Unfortunately, "simplistic" is what you had been advocating...
Now that you are thinking about the problem a bit more, hopefully,
you're starting to realize that this retention issue isn't as trivial
as copying forward 5.25" and 3.5" floppies and so forth.
"Data isn't information any more than fifty tons of concrete is a
skyscraper"
- from "Silicon Snake Oil: Second Thoughts on the Information
Highway";
Clifford Stoll (paperback - 1996), page 194.
True, but irrelevant: how is today's retainer supposed to know what
data is going to be critically valuable to a relative or historical
researcher xxx years from now? The problem is that you're not
differentiating between data and information: we don't know what raw
data we have today that some futurist may want as valueable-to-him
information about how we lived, what things were like, etc.
Take for example, nature photography: photos from 50+ years ago can
tell us how large the tusks were on elephants in a particular country,
and comparing that to data from today, we can infer age, sex, climate,
effects of hunting, poaching, etc. All from one photo that was kept
even though it wasn't a keeper, because in that particular image, there
was something else that was caught in frame that was able to be a
measurement reference (an identifiable vehicle tire, a doorway, etc).
You still need to have a translating application that understands that
format that runs on today's hardware and today's OS. Since the
hardware and OS are constantly evolving, to maintain this application
is a constant resource drain.
Even if you're highly altruistic and write the translation software
code with each OS update and distribute it for free, what will happen
in 75 years when you're dead and gone?
File format is merely one step in the system.
Regardless of if the format is proprietary or open source, in order to
have the application software maintained to support it, it has to be
broadly adopted, and then remain as a very strong candidate for a very
long period of time so that the application is also maintained for a
very long time.
If we want to say that something like 8bit channel color space written
as a TIFF is "it", then what do we do when 16bit channels start to
appear ... like is currently supported in Photoshop and being adopted
by more and more photographers?
You can't rely on the big software houses to do this for you: there's
no money in it for them, which is why the current MS-Office won't open
the file I provided below. Hell, they aren't even interested in making
MS-Word's HTML format compliant with *current* HTML standards!
You have to have ALL pieces of the system survive, not just one or two.
This also applies to film, but film has simply not had the extreme
rate of change that digital has had over the past 20 years.
Ah, but the specific creator application is listed in the file. It is
after a handful of line breaks. From there, the researcher is expected
to go RTFM for that creator application.
BTW, I do see that 6 readers have taken a look at this file. So far,
no one has reported success.
As such, I'll provide a huge useful clue: it is MS-Powerpoint V2 for
Mac. Now you know to rename the file to put a .PPT on the end, and
you can start trying to open it in the correct creator application.
Piece of cake....eh, what do you mean it doesn't work? Gosh, go dig
around on your HD to see if you kept the previous revision of PPT.
Damn, it didn't work either. Go check to see if there's an even older
revision of Powerpoint over on that dusty old PC in the corner. Shit!
For an application still being sold from the biggest software company
in the world, we shouldn't be running into problems like this, don't
you think?
And damn...this file is *ONLY* 15 years old.
Oh, that's useful. Here's a similarly 'readable' digital photo; go
figure out the formatting:
11110011001011001010101101010001010110101001010100101010110011010000010101001010101010101010101010111100100110101010010100101000010100101100110101010100101001011001111110101101010110101011011101010101010101010101010010101010101111100110101010010100101010100101100110101010100101001011001111110101101010110101011011101010101010101010101011001011001010000101101010001010110101010101001010101100110100000101010010101010101010101010101111100110101010010100101010100101100110101010100101001011001111110101101...etc...
Without formatting knowledge, raw data is pragmatically useless.
-hh
-hh
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