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New Now, I'm ambivalent about DRM
It's clearly a stupid idea, and I think that it'll die horribly, but it's probably not the end of the world as we know it.

However, what really got my goat was that "Senior Editor"'s horrendous misrepresentation of the FSF and utterly idiotic failure to understand what the FSF is.

He's whining about the FSF being a political organisation? Only 21 years too late, you raging dipshit - they've ALWAYS been a political organisation. That's why GNU and FSF are separate.

If that moron doesn't see why wanting to fundamentally alter the mechanisms of the flow of information around our society is a political issue, he should stick to saying that the latest version of Microsoft Whatever Server 2004 XP is brilliant, and leave the serious stuff to the grown-ups.


Peter
[link|http://www.no2id.net/|Don't Let The Terrorists Win]
[link|http://www.kuro5hin.org|There is no K5 Cabal]
[link|http://guildenstern.dyndns.org|Home]
Use P2P for legitimate purposes!
New No no ... Microsoft Whatever Server 2004 XP is BRILLANT [1]
But seriously ...

I like to think that the storage medium and format of my mortgage will still be readable in another [ ... checks watch ... ] 27 years when I finish paying it off. Right now, that's paper. Are there any other formats more complex than .txt or .csv from 30 years ago that are still in use? I've read articles about the digital dark ages, and I'm afraid they're right: In 200 years, there will be no recorded history of the late 20th century, because everything was stored electronically on degradable media.



[1] The [link|http://thedailywtf.com/forums/permalink/40043/40043/ShowThread.aspx#40043|Brillant Paula Bean].
===

Purveyor of Doc Hope's [link|http://DocHope.com|fresh-baked dog biscuits and pet treats].
[link|http://DocHope.com|http://DocHope.com]
New Yes, there are
30 years ago would be 1976. troff was around then and is still in limited use.

TeX is the poster child of a format meant for longevity. It is about 25 years old, and has undergone no change other than minor bug fixes in about 17 years. While it is not a mainstream format, it has some very well established niches and shows no signs of relinquishing them. (One thing that it is valued for is the fact that its specification remains the same down to the visible wavelength of light.)

If I wanted to write an electronic document that would have a long life, personally I'd use TeX. The storage medium that it is on might age, but the format will continue to be supported for a long time to come.

Cheers,
Ben
I have come to believe that idealism without discipline is a quick road to disaster, while discipline without idealism is pointless. -- Aaron Ward (my brother)
New How many documents important to you ...
... do you think are in TeX?



Yes, I know I asked if the format existed. Yes, I'm now asking if there are any in common use. But given the one (and a half) examples you gave, I'll take that as a "no".
===

Purveyor of Doc Hope's [link|http://DocHope.com|fresh-baked dog biscuits and pet treats].
[link|http://DocHope.com|http://DocHope.com]
New Many scholarly works
Tex has its greatest following in academia. Which is where the most enduring documents are created. So this is OK.



[link|http://www.blackbagops.net|Black Bag Operations Log]

[link|http://www.objectiveclips.com|Artificial Intelligence]

[link|http://www.badpage.info/seaside/html|Scrutinizer]
New Yeah, I was just being selfish
I don't want things impotant to me to disappear during my lifetime. But I still think there's a lot of stuff that's going to be hard to find in a hundred years. Things that we think today are important.
===

Purveyor of Doc Hope's [link|http://DocHope.com|fresh-baked dog biscuits and pet treats].
[link|http://DocHope.com|http://DocHope.com]
New Historians 100 years from now will agree with you.
And yes, there are a number of documents that I care about which exist in TeX form. As Todd suggests, they are mostly academic documents of some kind.

Cheers,
Ben
I have come to believe that idealism without discipline is a quick road to disaster, while discipline without idealism is pointless. -- Aaron Ward (my brother)
New It's George Washington's Hatchet all over again.
"You know, it's been restored several times. The handle's been replaced 3 times, and the head's been replaced 2 times, but it's still the hatchet that he used to chop down the cherry tree."

Memories fade, clay tablets turn to dust, papyrus rots, paper degrades, photos fade, vinyl albums warp, tapes stretch, Zip drives get the click of death and die. It's an old problem. Knowledge survives and gets passed down by regularly retranscribing it to new media.

In the late 1980s I was using punched cards with an IBM 1165 (IIRC) to control a Calcomp flatbed plotter. Hollerith patented the cards in 1889. The pace of change is a little faster now, of course.

If it's important information that needs to last for decades, or if someone cares about it, then it probably needs to be transferred to new media every 5 years or so. Since Google (and others) have shown that money is to be made from information of all sorts, I expect that someone will keep doing the transcription for a long time to come. Baring some catastrophe, I don't expect a digital dark age.

Cheers,
Scott.
(Who still had a couple of boxes of Hollerith cards less than 10 years ago.)
New I wrote and edited a newspaper in the mid 90s
A couple of years ago, I decided I'd like to put my columns up on my website for posterity (vanity). The floppies I had them on were worthless. The paper copies were yellow but perfectly readable. The sheer volume of "stuff" we have on magnetic media guarantees that not all of it is going to be refreshed every five years.

And even if it is, are we going to run it through import/export filters to keep it in a fresh format? I worked in an office in the late 90s where we wanted some of the document templates the secretary used. It turned out they were all in a format for a word processor that only existed on her hard drive ... which she had wiped on her last day on the way out the door. The new secretary spent the next two weeks manually recreating the ones we thought we'd need.
===

Purveyor of Doc Hope's [link|http://DocHope.com|fresh-baked dog biscuits and pet treats].
[link|http://DocHope.com|http://DocHope.com]
New Back in the DOS days there was a backup utility
called Fastback Pro or Fastback Plus or some such nonsense. They used to come out with a new version on a regular basis. They were not huge proponents of backward compatibility. You couldn't have 2 different versions on your machine. As soon as our idiot but fearless leader upgraded backup versions, we had no older backups. Pure genius: what better way to insure that we get it right the first time.
The old days weren't necessarily better. <shudder>
New You have to work at maintaining that stuff
just like anything else. I'll wager the Beatles master tapes get shuttled (rewound onto a new reel) every year or so (magnetic tape that is not shuttled develops "print through" - a pre-echo bleed through from adjacent winding).

I just spent a few weeks transferring the music I wrote in the 80's to a hard drive (along with some CD backups). The original sequences were done with an Ensoniq ESQ-1 sequencer/synth and then data dumped as sysex messages to the floppy drive of a Mirage sampler. I still have the Mirage and the ESQ-1 and recently found my floppies in a box after the move. The Mirage is getting pretty twitchy and is clearly on its last legs so I babied it until I got all the data transferred.

The process involved loading 1/3 of a floppy into Mirage memory (this constitutes a full sequence memory dump) while running a special version of its OS, then patching its MIDI in to ESQ-1's MIDI out and vice versa. Telling ESQ to request sequence data over MIDI. Rebooting Mirage into performance OS. Repatching MIDI cables into a star config with ESQ-1 out feeding all MIDI in's including the computer sequencer (Digital Performer), editing ESQ track settings to echo all internally patched tracks to MIDI channels, slaving the computer to external sync and hitting record, hitting play on ESQ and "transferring" the sequence by "recording" the data in real time one segment at a time. Then recreating the arrangement/song sequence in DP, along with entering patch info and notes for each track.

Repeat for each of 30ish songs. I can get through a song in about 2 hours once I get into the groove.

The good news is I now have original performances captured as DP files on my Mac. The bad news is I'll probably have to do something similar 5 years from now.

Expect the same amount of work for your music lib, DVD's etc. Disk drives are getting cheaper and I see no reason not to have 3 HD's with full copies of all your media. For me its an external hard drive, my lap top, and a desktop server (ancient 400 MHz G4 with enlarged disk) that are all mirrored - plus judicious use of burned DVD's for particularly precious stuff.

Get used to it.



[link|http://www.blackbagops.net|Black Bag Operations Log]

[link|http://www.objectiveclips.com|Artificial Intelligence]

[link|http://www.badpage.info/seaside/html|Scrutinizer]
     Infoworld Journo in "Is Idiot And Shithead" Shocker! - (pwhysall) - (12)
         And transparently so - (drewk) - (11)
             Now, I'm ambivalent about DRM - (pwhysall) - (10)
                 No no ... Microsoft Whatever Server 2004 XP is BRILLANT [1] - (drewk) - (9)
                     Yes, there are - (ben_tilly) - (4)
                         How many documents important to you ... - (drewk) - (3)
                             Many scholarly works - (tuberculosis) - (2)
                                 Yeah, I was just being selfish - (drewk) - (1)
                                     Historians 100 years from now will agree with you. - (ben_tilly)
                     It's George Washington's Hatchet all over again. - (Another Scott) - (3)
                         I wrote and edited a newspaper in the mid 90s - (drewk) - (2)
                             Back in the DOS days there was a backup utility - (hnick)
                             You have to work at maintaining that stuff - (tuberculosis)

Impossible.
100 ms