The digital age is causing history to be lost - OFFICIAL

[JarodRussell]

And then nobody in thousand years will be able to make anything of a JPEG or MPEG file. And beware of copy protection systems. How the fuck are the historians supposed to get the proper key?

If it's a good archive they'll include everything needed to view the file.

It's easy to blame the digital age when physical stuff get's lost but why is it lost in the first place? Because someone lost or misplaced the physical original.

How is that that the fault of the digital age? Isn't it rather fingerpointing by a group who prefer non-digital things and lament that everything is only digital now thus losing something vital to them?

Moral of the story? Don't lose the originals! And when you do don't try to shift blame elsewhere!

What if the "originals" are digital to begin with? I think what you mean is "don't lose the analog masters".

 

[Rarewolf]

Moral of the story? Don't lose the originals! And when you do don't try to shift blame elsewhere!

Originals in many cases take up a lot of space, and are prone to fires, floods, fading etc. It's more a case of make sure you have backups in more than one place.

We did a major job digitising nearly 90 Church books last year, allowing the contents to be accessed online, and taking them out of day to day use, preventing further damage to the originals. They can now be safely locked away. But the customer also wanted a microfilm copy as well.

 

[Rett Mikhal]

DVDs are a fucking terrible medium due to the fact that an incredible small scratch can render the data unreadable.

This was why I was so pissed (and still am) that Blu-Ray was "chosen" to be the next generation of medium for storage. And although I was shown links and sources that claimed Blu-Ray had all kinds of coats of scratch resistant layers, you still can't treat them as poorly as say, a 3 1/2" diskette for example. That was a storage medium that was nearly indestructible. VHS was great, until a VCR got hungry and ate it.

And now what? Half my fucking DVDs have scratches even though I removed them and store them ever so gingerly... and I couldn't find a 3 1/2" diskette reader to save my life!

Yep... I'll go with hardcopies. Print out the very best photos. Put important documents in a file somewhere. Take your most valued digital copies and email them to yourself.

You're so right, and you know what the worst part about it is? Diskettes use the same basic principal. They spin the medium and read it with a floating head. The sliding metal door at the top is to protect it when not in use, and automatically slides out of the way for the head to scan linearly. While maybe someday we'll have scanners that take the whole side of a disc at a time, as it stands the scanner still moves in a line.

So there is no excuse, THERE'S NO EXCUSE, why CDs and DVDs don't have the exact same protective plastic and metal sheath, other than to cut costs. I've been pissed off about this for years. How is a flimsy, stupid DVD case (which you could still have, if you really wanted to) better at protecting it? You know how many of those dumb 'prongs' that hold the disc in have broken in my collection, causing a rolling DVD in the case?

 

[Bob The Skutter]

^From what I remember first generation CDs did come in cartridges, later they became caddies that you put the discs in to then in to the drive, then they got rid of them altogether.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caddy_(hardware)

 

[Rarewolf]

Several makes of DVD-RAM do (or at least did) have caddys a lot like diskettes. Adds quite a bit to the cost. But you could put any DVD (or CD) in there.

 

[FPAlpha]

DVDs are a fucking terrible medium due to the fact that an incredible small scratch can render the data unreadable.

This was why I was so pissed (and still am) that Blu-Ray was "chosen" to be the next generation of medium for storage. And although I was shown links and sources that claimed Blu-Ray had all kinds of coats of scratch resistant layers, you still can't treat them as poorly as say, a 3 1/2" diskette for example. That was a storage medium that was nearly indestructible. VHS was great, until a VCR got hungry and ate it.

And now what? Half my fucking DVDs have scratches even though I removed them and store them ever so gingerly... and I couldn't find a 3 1/2" diskette reader to save my life!

Yep... I'll go with hardcopies. Print out the very best photos. Put important documents in a file somewhere. Take your most valued digital copies and email them to yourself.

You're so right, and you know what the worst part about it is? Diskettes use the same basic principal. They spin the medium and read it with a floating head. The sliding metal door at the top is to protect it when not in use, and automatically slides out of the way for the head to scan linearly. While maybe someday we'll have scanners that take the whole side of a disc at a time, as it stands the scanner still moves in a line.

So there is no excuse, THERE'S NO EXCUSE, why CDs and DVDs don't have the exact same protective plastic and metal sheath, other than to cut costs. I've been pissed off about this for years. How is a flimsy, stupid DVD case (which you could still have, if you really wanted to) better at protecting it? You know how many of those dumb 'prongs' that hold the disc in have broken in my collection, causing a rolling DVD in the case?

When you compare the actual data disc the diskette was far more delicate because it was just a thin magnetic disc and thus had to have a case for protection.

Current CDs/DVDs have thick layers of protection upon them to protct the actual layer that has the data stored onto it. If a scratch is not too deep a good reader can still extract the information and you can store it elsewhere.

Yes.. it was done to save costs but what isn't done that way today? If we wouldn't look for ways to cut costs while keeping something still working costs of many consumer products would be significantly higher and then many would bitch about the high costs and why no one would take up alternatives that cost less.

 

[Checkmate]

As others have essentially said, the problem has nothing to do with being digital, but everything to do with copyright laws and people being too fucking stupid or scared to make copies and backups.

Guess what, if you only keep one single print of a book around and it gets damaged, bam, that information is gone forever. Is it the book's fault? No. It's the idiot owners of the book who didn't bother to make and/or release widespread copies of it.

Digital is fine. No one copying, sharing, or trading that digital information is the bloody problem.

 

[stoneroses]

...Yes but we now take more photographs than ever before and store them. We write more than ever. There is so much more music out there that everyone can reach.
The real worry is if we die out or somehow lose the internet, then a lot will be lost.

Personally I like paper books a lot more than e-books. For one thing I can drop my copy of 'Shakey, Neil Young's Biography' as many times as I like and it won't break, No one really wants to rob me for it, and if I do lose it I can replace it for £9.99

 

[Checkmate]

The real worry is if we die out or somehow lose the internet, then a lot will be lost.

Yes, and if all the paper in the world were to suddenly go up in flames, a lot would be lost, too.

Again, it's not the medium. It's the people using the medium. People not distributing their works to various locations, creating backups, and otherwise making sure that it doesn't go up in a puff of smoke/corrupted datafile/loss of power/sinking of Alexandria/whatever-other-analogy-you-care-to-think-of... well, that's the only problem.

 

[Professor Zoom]

...Yes but we now take more photographs than ever before and store them. We write more than ever. There is so much more music out there that everyone can reach.
The real worry is if we die out or somehow lose the internet, then a lot will be lost.

I won't feel so bad if, for example, we lose all of the TrekBBS in an internet apocalypse.

Personally I like paper books a lot more than e-books. For one thing I can drop my copy of 'Shakey, Neil Young's Biography' as many times as I like and it won't break, No one really wants to rob me for it, and if I do lose it I can replace it for £9.99

I've dropped my e-reader. It was fine.

And if you have purchased a digital copy, most likely, you can download it again from store. Barnes and Noble, for example, keeps all of your purchases in your "library."

And, what free ebooks I have, I have backed up at home and into the "cloud."

It would be MUCH easier to replace my digital library than my "real" one. And cheaper too.

 

[Mistral]

The real worry is if we die out or somehow lose the internet, then a lot will be lost.

Yes, and if all the paper in the world were to suddenly go up in flames, a lot would be lost, too.

Again, it's not the medium. It's the people using the medium. People not distributing their works to various locations, creating backups, and otherwise making sure that it doesn't go up in a puff of smoke/corrupted datafile/loss of power/sinking of Alexandria/whatever-other-analogy-you-care-to-think-of... well, that's the only problem.

No. Realistically, no matter how bad a disaster(short of race-ending), some paper copies would survive anything, at least for a while. However, 3 or 4 50 megaton high atmosphere nuclear blasts aligned in the right locations could wipe out 90% of the electronics (and data storage) on the planet. It wouldn't even kill anyone during the initial blasts (although the aftereffects would be near-genocidal).

What we need to do is keep written records inscribed on plastic. Some plastics have a shelf life of thousands of years.
It's lightweight and doesn't have to take up a lot of room. With multiple copies spread globally, nothing of importance need be lost.