Here you go, Ray:
> Sometime ago I wrote about bit rot....The problem is serious.
And not new nor newly recognized. Here's a paper from 1999:
http://besser.tsoa.nyu.edu/howard/Papers/sfs-longevity.html
One factor (among many that Besser covers) is that many digital
assets are not owned but "licensed". Personally, I reject this notion
as total ohyyfuvg and treat what I have in the same way that I treat
books. OTOH, I don't use (or have) Windoes or any related, putatively
licensed software and I don't download movies or pop music.
Nevertheless, it's a problem for institutional entities.
So anyhow, Ray, what do you think we should do? Stuff rots, entropy
rules. What should we preserve and how? Lots of old but classic film
has flaked away to near or total unrestoreability. Nothing to do
with digital.
I'm not a proper cinephile but I've been quite taken with Kurosawa.
But when I watched The Idiot, I didn't get it. It seemed not to match
his usual quality. Then Wikipedia told me that the studio cut 99
minutes from the original 256. There is no extant copy of those
minutes.
Write on parchment, print on archival paper, cut in stone,
analog-record on monel or stainless (is that possible?).
When I finally got Linux up and running over a decade ago, I finally
made a complete cut with CP/M. Anything that didn't get copied from
200K 5-1/4" floppies to Linux is gone along with the 8 Osborne I
computers. I don't think it would be so easy now to abandon
everything. I have hardcopy of all my CP/M-era correspondence. Not so
200M email archive -- just a periodic backup to another HD.
And I've already lost something I kinda valued. I once wrote an
implementation of W. Ross Ashby's "Homeostat" in XLisp with
ASCII-graphics display. Not a big deal but, for me at least, a cool
achievement. Seems to be gone.
OTOH, I have tools -- real, analog steel tools -- I made 30 years or
more ago. They serve as a sort of archive of how it was that I did
some odd job, solved some unique problem. Kept just, y'know, in case
that same problem should turn up again. I have such tools made before
was born, some of which are forever mystery tools.
Write on parchment, print on archival paper, cut in stone,
analog-record on monel or stainless. Forge it in iron. Cast it in
bronze.
> Sometime ago I wrote about bit rot on the list and no one seemed to
> have heard of it.
So: heard of it. Not in a position to do much about it. Bruce
Sterling, the archiving of whose papers apparently prompted the NYT
article, has an I'm-out-of-here piece from 2008 on his Viridian
project home page.
http://www.viridiandesign.org/
I've only read that hastily but I gather that he's opted for what I
might call an ephemeral life-style. Does an ephemeral life-style mean
that the traces it leaves are themselves intrinsically transient and
ephemeral? Will Bruce just let what he leaves behind bit-rot like
smoke in an animated cartoon? Huh. I have paper copies -- some
hardbound -- of his novels. But he's living (I gather) out of a
suitcase or maybe just a small tote-bag.
Shpx! Where does he put his anvil? Where does he grow his tomatoes?
Much of what he says I can get with. OTOH, I have this feeling, my
appreciation of his fiction notwithstanding, that he may have turned
into a pathological technofetishist dork, otaku. He *did* contribute
to an art piece of some kind (I haven't seen it) called "Embrace the
Decay".
Ephemeral. Look. I was never here. Is it supposed to be some other
way?
--
Michael Spencer Nova Scotia, Canada .~.
/V\
[email protected] /( )\
http://home.tallships.ca/mspencer/ ^^-^^
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