NASA photographic record of Manned Moonlanding:Is there evidence of fabrication?

[ka9q]

The big problem with digital storage is longevity. Will archaeologists in 2000 years be able to decipher our culture?

This is a serious concern. Vint Cerf, one of the "grandfathers" of the Internet, was just saying this recently in some news articles. He advises people to print things out, but this is simply impractical for all but a tiny fraction of your data.

A major problem especially with e-books is DRM, which I call "digital restrictions management". The file formats are difficult to read by design, and you can't use your own tools to read them. I generally avoid e-books for just this reason, though I do patronize a few enlightened publishers like O'Reilly that eschew DRM in favor of open, standard formats (e.g., pdf) for which there's a lot of software support.

Another, more general problem is physical storage. I do have some old tapes and disks that I'd like to read someday, mostly for nostalgia, but I'd need to find a working drive first. This problem may be easing somewhat now that we no longer have media per se but media encapsulated with electronics that presents a standardized electrical interface, e.g., USB, SD or SATA. Even then  there can be problems as old interfaces (e.g., PATA, Firewire, compact flash) are phased out.

What has generally saved me so far is periodically replacement of my hard drives as storage capacity rapidly increases. It's been easy each time to just copy everything from the old drives to a small part of my new drives and leave it there. (As my former boss and I once agreed, the best way to preserve old data is to "keep it spinning", i.e., online somewhere on devices you're still using and maintaining. Preferably with internal redundancy such as RAID). Interface changes (e.g., from PATA to SATA) are fairly easy to handle when the computer you're using at the time supports both. It gets a lot harder if you wait until after you've replaced your computer a few times and the old interfaces are no longer available.

But increases in hard drive storage capacity seem to be slowing down, so there's less incentive to periodically swap out my hard drives for bigger ones. If I want more room, I'll have to buy more drives and find room for them. I currently have four 4 TB drives in a RAID-1 configuration, and the array is currently 86% full. So it's either 1) find a new box with room for additional drives or 2) put some old drives on a shelf and risk not being able to read them in the future.

[Tedward]

So much to lose on one device failing nowadays as well. I cannot print 30,000 odd images so rely on storage. I spread it around in the hope one of the drives will last. And the cloud will not blow away, and the DVD will last (checking the 40 or so on occasion in small batches).

Books, I bank on printed versions for the electronic copies I have still being around. I have a small room that I use for a library (the ubiquitous UK bedroom sold as such despite the size being more of a Tardis in reverse). That is nigh on full and I do not like throwing books away. I do use audio books a lot. Some are copies of the printed versions, some not.

Back to the images. I found one folder where I had tried to capture a blow how on the coast as the tide came in. I failed. But took 300 or so RAW images. One or two interesting ones but should I delete them..... of course I should, there is no real subject, but, well, you know......

[raven]

I am a pretty poor person. I am not ashamed to admit I get most of my books from used bookstores, thrift stores and library discards. Many of those books are simply not available in digital form, most often out of print in print form as well. I have things like a 4rth geography textbooks from the 30's, a book on Eugenics from the 20's, a collection of translated plays of a Medieval Chinese playwright. As a scrounger, the joy of the of the hunt or of chance discovery is part of the joy of books for me. Many a book I have found by picking it up  off the  shelf and going 'Ooh, that looks interesting!' I doubt flicking through a list of related books would give me quite the same thrill.

[Count Zero]

It sounds to me like you are rich indeed! 

[raven]

It sounds to me like you are rich indeed! 

Yeah, in backpain come moving day, but it's worth it!

[nomuse]

Meh. I find books _more_ searchable (in some categories). Probably because of how my brain is wired. And also because of how my computers are wired...not always very fast, internet connections worse, and not everything is right there on the hard drive.

For some subjects I find it easier to navigate around with my mental map of the physical book. And I find it much, much better when I'm trying to juggle multiple locations of data that may be across several books. pdfs and ebooks and (worst of all) web pages just feel so linear by comparison.

[nomuse]

I am a pretty poor person. I am not ashamed to admit I get most of my books from used bookstores, thrift stores and library discards. Many of those books are simply not available in digital form, most often out of print in print form as well. I have things like a 4rth geography textbooks from the 30's, a book on Eugenics from the 20's, a collection of translated plays of a Medieval Chinese playwright. As a scrounger, the joy of the of the hunt or of chance discovery is part of the joy of books for me. Many a book I have found by picking it up  off the  shelf and going 'Ooh, that looks interesting!' I doubt flicking through a list of related books would give me quite the same thrill.

So much this!

I rant a lot about the Amazon problem, the creation of ghettos built around "let us help you find a book exactly like the one you just read." More and more of the electronic media and social structure seems to be aimed towards figuring out what your "tastes" are (laughable concept) and then making sure you only encounter more of the same.

[Echnaton]

I rant a lot about the Amazon problem, the creation of ghettos built around "let us help you find a book exactly like the one you just read." More and more of the electronic media and social structure seems to be aimed towards figuring out what your "tastes" are (laughable concept) and then making sure you only encounter more of the same.

Much like the death of the printed newspaper leads to reading opinions that support what we already  believe.  We are moving into the millennium of abundance.  A low friction economy creates abundance by connecting people and allowing them to form disintermediated communities.   One sees this in the rejection of intermediaries everywhere from the craft brewing movement, to "organic" produce, to  the growth of "farmers markets."  Disintermediation is in my view, the strongest aesthetic movement of the millennium.

Abundance is a strange thing.  It isn't necessarily more materially efficient nor does it make us happier.  But imposing limitations on abundance is practically guaranteed to be inefficient and make us very unhappy.