I really should work in archives. The Internet is my area of
concern. I watch information disappear constantly. Things that
used to findable or available are just *poof* - gone. Finding
ANYTHING before 2008 on the 'net? Good luck on that. I've been
here since 1989 and watched the vanishing and it's painful. I
save what I can that's important to me. I'm EXTREMELY grateful
to Internet Archive and other efforts like that for the
preservation though. I am, however, concerned with the Cloud.
Not inherently wrong, but placing your data with corporations
that are subject to takeovers and upgrading, all guarantees are
words on paper... wait, well, checkboxes on an HTML form. You
have to perform your own backups, even when you use the cloud
and other Internet infrastructures. Regarding media, I've been
slowly putting my cassette tapes onto the computer. Years of old
piano playing recorded. I've got a good portion of it. Already
there's degrading, although not too bad yet, as the earliest I
have only goes back to the early 1980s. -- In fact, that's
reminding me - I want to get all of those old kid me piano
playing and stick them up on Internet Archive. They let
everybody upload anything to there. smile emoticon One of the
things that made Usenet very powerful was its distribution
methodology; many copies of the same thing. Very robust. Git and
other somewhat more complicated systems are more or less doing
the same thing but for application development. I never dove
into that but I know it works for those who use it. -- yeah,
it's a passion I try to subdue. I think 50-100 yrs in the
future. Example: Where will our conversation here be? You and I
typing right now? The year is 2285 and there's something
CRITICAL that happened between Brian Hobbs and Kenneth Udut that
has great historical significance. They won't be able to find
it. Facebook will be long gone by then. I think of those things.
That's why I try not to think about it tongue emoticon
