On Thu, 28 Oct 2010, Christopher Samuel wrote:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2002/mar/03/research.elearning
I've already lived through whole generations of this process from as far back as 1979. I have chunks of code (mostly very old fortran) that I carefully preserved from punched cards through disk packs on IBMs through disk packs on a Harris 800 minicomputer and only floppy drives on an IBM PC, onto bigger/newer floppy drives and hideously expensive hard disks, onto a Sun 386i, a Sparcstation 2, a Linux PC with dual Pentium Pros (and simultaneously propagating through several generation of Sun servers in the department) until, eventually, they made their way to the laptop where I'm typing this, backed up in the department. I've gone back to the well to look at the algorithms for generating e.g. 3j, 6j, 9j coefficients in angular momentum coupling theory, ported them to C, and written whole new programs using the crumbs of that work. I've also failed. I had for a long time a QIC for the IBM 5100 with Mastermind written in APL on it. I'd kill to be able to get to the code for a variety of reasons, not the least of which being that because I mentioned it once on this very list I was for a while accused of being this dude you claimed to be a time traveller on uunet. They other is that it would be fun to port the result to C under subversion, given that the version I wrote in Fortran and the version I wrote in Basica have also fled. I have a 9 track tape reel with LCAO code from the dark ages (maybe 1978?) that I don't think I will ever be able to play even if the tape hasn't degraded over 32 years. I've lost stories I've written on paper, and a really cool poem that I wrote with a pen popular in the 70's that turned out to have ink that faded to clear over 20 year, with or without the help of ambient UV. I have spiral notebooks from graduate school with barely visible orange lines that might or might not once have been figures and words and equations. I've tried to rescue old wordstar and old word documents -- the latter by going in and chopping the ascii out of the corrupt binary (early word and many other early WPs used the 8th bit as a kind of markup delimiter), with some success but it is like breaking a code or solving a puzzle. And yes, I'm very, very concerned about things like od formats that do the RIGHT thing -- save everything as straight up ASCII inside pure XML markup that one can always write filters to decode even if XML itself and the WP that created it is long gone -- and then COMPRESS the document, producing a result that might as well be encrypted (compression IS a kind of encryption) unless one knows the algorithm used to do the compressing. I've salvaged gradesheets the hard way years after the open source tool I used to produce them has disappeared only because they DIDN'T do this -- they basically stuck the data in a sort of custom ascii human readable markup where one can "see" how to get it back out again without anything but a straight up text editor. The "Microsoft Word" problem at this point is huge. There are an enormous number of documents that were written with old versions of Word (and Works) and are now all put impossible to retrieve (if only their owners realized it). Important stuff. Oops. One reason Europe as largely endorsed XML-only document encodings, one reason MS "suddenly" made Word and Office XML-compliant (and hence, to their chagrin, impossible to jerk around they way they'd jerked Office around for a decade or so previously). For me, I now write every single thing I write using jove (an absolutely trivial, wonderful, text only editor), and with the exception of email, if it is important enough to preserve it is in a version control system on a solidly backed up server, with multiple cloned images of the repository on my person machines in different places. Nuclear war, I lose it. A really bad solar flare or magnetic storm or terrorist EMP attack on campus, I MIGHT lose it (although our server room is deep in the bowels of the physics building, the building is full of steel and the basement like a faraday cage as far as e.g. cell phones etc are concerned) and some of the disks or backups might survive). And with all of that, if I died in the next ten minutes, what of all of the gigabytes of text I've generated over the last decade or three would survive a decade more? Maybe a few tens of megabytes. Maybe. Probably not, though. Who is going to be able to keep them, move them along through format changes, update the media they are stored on? Who will care? In a few centuries, even my actual publications will be most unlikely to survive. Thus cries the humble cell contemplating its own inevitable death as the vast superorganismal being of which it is a very tiny part lumbers on to ITS inevitable destiny, no different on the macroscale from the cell's fate on the microscale. In time all of the marvelous structure and information that is us, our thoughts, our civilization, our knowledge, will succumb to entropy, to processes that are always more likely to take one from a state of relative organization to a much more probable state of disorganization. Sad indeed, but there it is. rgb Robert G. Brown http://www.phy.duke.edu/~rgb/ Duke University Dept. of Physics, Box 90305 Durham, N.C. 27708-0305 Phone: 1-919-660-2567 Fax: 919-660-2525 email:[email protected] _______________________________________________ Beowulf mailing list, [email protected] sponsored by Penguin Computing To change your subscription (digest mode or unsubscribe) visit http://www.beowulf.org/mailman/listinfo/beowulf
