Slashdot Mirror
Archive.org Deploys Macromedia Software Titles
Jon-Erik Hexum writes "Now at the internet archive, the new software section contains over 10,000 CD-ROM titles donated by Macromedia. In an interesting discussion, the Software Archive is struggling with deciding on the best method for preserving CD-ROM images for the long term."
The best way to preserve this media would be over a distributed network. People sign up to voulenteer space on their computers and then download only the media they want to archive. To retrieve the information, have a simple search client that will show you who has that information...Oh wait, that's just a P2P network.
Jason
ProfQuotes
Not a bad plan, though. Though I would go one step further and convert any data still readable into a format that includes a description of itself. This would mean that every video/audio/image should have it's own decoder attached. HTML files would have the HTML spec. This may seem like a huge waste of space, especially on smaller files, but it is worth it for the time saved reading files later on. Of course, you need something that can always read the description, but one standard program could function for all files in this format instead of countless files. Now, this doesn't help for executables (currently, anyway) but could improve data retention.
As storage availabilities and requirements rise, an encoder/decoder for many formats would become trivial, notable exceptions being made for massively integrated applications (*cough* Office *cough*)
After all, how do you think Star Trek managed to take 50,000 year-old data crystals and read the files stored on them, or interface with Borg computers? : )
That what was all this school was for... to teach us how to solve our own problems. -- janeowit