Lost Content: "A Digital Dark Age"

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Lost Content: "A Digital Dark Age" - 2/15/2015 4:44:28 PM

dcnovice

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Vint Cerf, a "father of the internet", says he is worried that all the images and documents we have been saving on computers will eventually be lost.

Currently a Google vice-president, he believes this could occur as hardware and software become obsolete.

He fears that future generations will have little or no record of the 21st Century as we enter what he describes as a "digital Dark Age".

http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-31450389

This story has been "trending" on Facebook, so I gave it a look/listen. Cerf makes an awfully good point about lost content. I know huge chunks of my work are gone forever. (I also know English literature will survive that.

)

How "digital vellum" would work isn't entirely clear to me, but I'm glad the need to preserve history is on someone's radar screen in Silicon Valley. It is darkly amusing that, after all the dizzying technological shifts just in my lifetime, the best way to preserve content may well be on paper.

Thoughts, anyone? How do you preserve content/work you want to keep?

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RE: Lost Content: "A Digital Dark Age" - 2/15/2015 5:11:08 PM

Gauge

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I had read that article the other day and found it an interesting possibility... albeit a remote one.

Backward compatibility is definitely a problem, however there is an exceedingly simple solution... STOP CHANGING SHIT THAT WORKS!

With that off my chest, I will continue.

Preserving digital content is what we have been told that the "cloud" does... which is why I simply do not buy into that bullshit. Someone is going to make a metric fuckton of money figuring out how to preserve antiquated formats, archive operating systems so folks don't lose their shit.

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"For there is no folly of the beast of the earth which is not infinitely outdone by the madness of men." Herman Melville - Moby Dick

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RE: Lost Content: "A Digital Dark Age" - 2/15/2015 7:00:19 PM

MercTech

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The cloud... marketing hype way of saying it is sitting on a server you have no clue as to the location of and of who is looking over your stuff.

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