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The Dead Media Project
mrbill writes, "One of the most interesting things I've seen in a long time is
the Dead Media Project
, about forms of information storage that are now 'dead' or
obsolete. Lots of cool stuff; wire records, television in England
in the 20s, pneumatic tube systems, etc." This is pretty nifty; it's inspired by Bruce Sterling's Dead Media Manifesto.
That kitten will be suffering from Post Pnumatic Stress Syndrome. (Oh my god, what a terrible joke.)
-- Give him Head? Be a Beacon?
-- Give him Head? Be a Beacon? :P)
(If you can't figure out how to E-Mail me, Don't.
I've long argued that this newfangled Internet thing won't really take off until a parallel network of pneumatic tubes is in place at every desktop.
The Internet's big flaw is its inability to trransport, say, kittens or french fries. Right now, if you want french fries over the 'net, you need to place an order which is then delivered by a person. Pneumatic tubes would make it possible to eliminate all human interaction.
With efficient digital switching systems in place, today's pneumatic tube networks could be made efficient enough to handle fully-automated person-to-person routing of the cargo cylinders.
Kittens direct to the desktop.
I overheard a funny story at last year's Atlanta Linux Expo. Seems that many years ago this company wanted to rewire the computer room without bringing the system down. So they got to the part of the room where the drums were located and needed to get into the floor panels underneath them. Now, if you've never seen a drum drive, it's similar to a big winchester disk only it uses a large drum spinning at fantastic rpms and the read/write head moves laterally across the face of the drum. We're talking massive amounts of angular momentum. The idea was to pick the whole thing up with a forklift, move it to one side then lift up the floor plates to do whatever they needed do there. (How many of you see this coming?) Now if you've ever done the experiment in physics class with the rotating bike wheel, you'll know that things with lots of rotational intertia don't wanna change axis of rotation very much (think gyroscope). They picked it up just fine, but when the forklift started to wheel around to move the drum off to the side, it promptly started to stand on one leg in order to maintain its rotational axis. Fortunately, the forklift operator saw what was happening just in time and spun back around before the whole thing tipped over and went bouncing around the computer room.
Admit nothing, deny everything and make counter-accusations.
Someone should start a project that should rescue dead formats also. I'm assuming if you're getting some picture off a 20 year old tape, it's not going to be in PNG format. Or what about spreadsheets from old programs? There should be a way to convert this stuff into a new format so we have it available. Is anyone aware of a repository for "current" file formats, such as MP3's, Word97 documents, JPG's, Gif's, Png's all in one location? Gathering this information NOW would be easier than gathering it in 10 years, and will prevent information from becoming lost, even though we have the file.