Thanks for bringing this up. Very well put, I thought this was interesting.

There’s definitely something missing-when digitizing original products or keeping them there.
It’s very interesting…

@ths

Of course now you open the debate of how our “data” is used to augment our memories and our view of reality. Much like Rachel’s spiders in Blade Runner. If our reference to history is copied and converted, what does it mean for our concept of reality?

reminds me of “blade runner” …

Batty: I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate. All those moments will be lost in time… like tears in rain… Time to die.

well ok, not the last line, but the “lost in time” stuff ;). makes me shiver every time still.

@IceBrain: True, true. I was watching this fascinating documentary one day about building storage vaults for nuclear waste. This stuff has a half-life that is measured in centuries so it is likely to still be deadly long after our culture is forgotten. The problem is – how do we warn the people of the future not to open these crates.

You’d think skull and crossbones, but that’s hardly universal. Skulls do not always symbolize death in all cultures. Also, slapping warning signs all over the place may actually attract archeologists and make them thing there is something important buried there. It is an interesting problem.

That said, you are right. As long as we keep it moving the data will get converted from one popular format to the other.

@Milos: Heh! I know this pain. If I had a penny for every time someone at my company “lost 6 hours of word” because they forgot to save and they accidentally closed Word/Excel window and thoughtlessly hit NO when it prompted them to save the document I would be able to retire by now. :)

Actually Google is but one cloud on the network. You could theoretically treat the whole internet as a super-cloud. If you post something on the internet, and it’s good (or funny, or embarrassing) you don’t need to worry about backing it up. It will be copied, moved, replicated, mirrored and re-posted until it ceases to be useful or loses cultural relevance.

Everything is duplicated, replicated, re-posted, copied, backed up…all the time (except when a faculty of mine loses his/her dissertation which can’t be found anywhere) :( It is important for each of us to be responsible for our own data preservation and that approach will hopefully propagate across digital mediums we all use. And when all else fails, I’m sure that Google will back it up. ;)

Carving in stone isn’t any better: do you really understand the symbols they use?
What we know about them is based on “dictionaries” of symbols that translated it to greek (The Rosetta Stone was the first, AFAIK), so it’s not really any better than ASCII.
But as long as you need to keep moving from physical format to another, re-encoding it shouldn’t be much hard.

In terms of physical formats, why don’t we print bytes in paper? Printing a really small dot for each bit (if we use colors, we could even compress it further) would be very easy to read :P

In a hundred year, yes. In a thousand years – not necessarily. The future civilizations will need to be able to figure out the ASCII table to read plain text. Or unicode… And the correct encoding.

Sigh… Let’s face it – plain text is a mess as well. So are numbers. Will the people of the future know that negative numbers look like really large positive numbers in binary? Or know how to read the Floating point notation in one of it’s many formats?

I think we need to start carving these things in stone like Egyptians did. :P

But yeah, you are right. Plain text has the best chances of survival in the long term. On the other hand though, I believe that the dreaded .doc format will actually outlive Microsoft thanks to projects such as Open Office, Star Office and etc…

This is what makes plaintext such a good format (as you have been posting on recently). Hopefully in a hundred years MSWord will be long dead, but so long as the medium itself isn’t decayed then LaTeX documents will still be perfectly readable, even if there’s no such thing as a LaTeX compiler anymore.