[extropy-chat] The Digital Dark Age

[kevinfreels.com]

I'm wouldn;t be too concerned with obselesence. Much of the data is crap.
There are many market forces working to preserve the information that is
worth saving. A clay tablet may last thousands of years but language itself
evolves and without something like the Rosetta Stone it's pretty worthless.
As long as civilization itself doesn;t fall, all should be OK. What I am
more concerned with is the millions of "home pages" created in the last 10
years that had useful information on them, but were eventually lost to ISP
changes, lack of interest, forgetfulness, and many other things. How I wish
I had the storage capacity 5-10 years ago to save everythign to a local file
when I was online. (Then again, with dial-up who would take the time to do
such a thing!)


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Emlyn" <emlynoregan at gmail.com>
To: "ExI chat list" <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org>
Sent: Thursday, September 22, 2005 11:00 PM
Subject: [extropy-chat] The Digital Dark Age


> Here's an article about the problem of disappearing information -
> heritage - as the computer age continues, due to records becoming
> digital and then being lost as the machines and software and media
> used go from current to obsolete to completely unusable or gone.
>
>
http://www.smh.com.au/news/technology/the-digital-dark-age/2005/09/22/1126982184206.html
>
> This is an interesting one for extropians, maybe. How do we preserve
> the digital past in a wildly dynamic present and future?
>
> Personally, I think this problem will lessen in the future. These days
> our information is much more likely to be online, interesting stuff is
> more likely to be in duplicate places, a lot of stuff can just stay
> online because storage capacities are so high, so no disappearing into
> dusty old tape archives.
>
> Also, we now have standard formats that could easily survive the
> passage of time, particularly XML. XML is a real retro standard,
> something no one would have tried in the dim distant past of 20 years
> ago, because it's wasteful and dumb. However, it's designed to be
> interoperable by using the most basic lingua franca that we can find
> in the computer world, the string. That *should* make it robust and
> long lived. (question: does anyone know if there is a simple
> compression standard to go with XML? Something that people might still
> be able to work with in 50 years, say?)
>
> When you look at efforts like those of google, or the internet archive
> (http://www.archive.org/), or project gutenberg maybe, things look a
> lot less gloomy.
>
> The biggest problem I see is software. Software tends to be platform
> specific, and those platforms die. Lots of information is locked up to
> be usable only by a specific application. The only real answer that I
> can see here for the long term is open source. If the old open source
> operating system versions all hang around online, and all the layers
> of tools and utilities and extensions and so on stay around, and the
> applications stay around (and because it's free-libre software it can
> stay around), then there is no reason that the apps should become
> inaccessible. If people who care (and it's clear there are such
> people) make sure there are hardware emulators created where
> necessary, things look good.
>
> OTOH, proprietary software is going to always be ephemeral, no way
> around it. Companies die, and their software usually dies with them.
> Closed source is hopeless. Rebel!
>
> --
> Emlyn
>
> http://emlynoregan.com   * blogs * music * software *
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