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More On Data Extinction

Computers

from the so-many-questions dept

Tue, Jan 21st 2003 11:26am — Mike Masnick
There have been a bunch of articles in the past few months discussing the concept of "data extinction". I'm guessing that we've reached the point where we've gone through enough formats and systems that more and more people are "suddenly" realizing that a lot of old data on old machines is unreadable. While this article doesn't discuss solutions as much as past articles, it is still an interesting look at how people assume that digital data will last throughout the ages, simply because you can make a perfect copy. The problem, of course, is that the applications to read that data go away. As more and more of our lives go digital, this becomes a bigger and bigger problem.
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  1. identicon
    Chris, 21 Jan 2003 @ 11:52am

    No Subject Given

    This is the main reason why the paperless office is such a fantasy. We can read documents that were created 2000 years ago and preserved on parchment. Good luck reading a word processing document you created in 1990 (unless you saved a printout!)

    [ link to this | view in thread ]

  2. identicon
    Heard it here first..., 21 Jan 2003 @ 3:35pm

    my-article-seems-to-have-dissapeared-from-your-ind

    You heard it here first . Unfortunately, the link seems to have decayed within the search index.

    [ link to this | view in thread ]

  3. identicon
    Victor Lamberty, 22 Jan 2003 @ 10:36am

    more reasons for open standards

    This article and many others point out the need for the support of open standards that have not changed that much since the start of the computer revlution. If data is in a widly used formant then reading it in the future will not be that much of a problem. You might have to change the storage media.

    [ link to this | view in thread ]


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