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OpenDocument Alliance to Fight Digital Dark Age
OSS_ilation writes "A consortium of vendors and academic institutions -- including IBM, Sun Microsystems and the American Library Association -- has announced today that they are forming the OpenDocument Alliance as part of an effort to promote open file standards worldwide. The group will support the one truly open standard file format, OpenDocument, which is an XML-based file format used saving and exchanging editable office documents such as text documents, spreadsheets and presentations. Sun's Simon Phipps said he believed ODF would allow future generations to view all of today's digital docs and prevent a digital Dark Age from occurring."
Open formats are definitely the standard for which to strive.
It appears Microsoft claims an open format, from the (fine) article:
Can anyone clear up exactly what OpenXML is? When I google it, I get vague references leading me to believe OpenXML is more of a container, and not Microsoft's specific document format. So, this sounds like another canard from Microsoft with the claim "open" obfuscating what is probably not.
Any /.'ers have more info about Microsoft's format?
On the other hand, the consortium (if you will) proposing a universal open document standard sounds more open and the proof will be in the implementation. Still, I'd like to know more specifically what that standard proposal is in detail.
Not being able to read the damn file format isn't the problem. The fact that there is no possible way to store even a tiny fraction of the data being produced for the long term is what will cause a digital dark age.
I mean hell. I've got 1.25 terabytes of online storage at home and probably 250 CDs burned over the last ten years I can't reliabily ensure I'll still have access to in ten years. Half those CDs are probably unreadable now -- from recent experience at least 10% aren't.
If they want to solve the digital dark age problem, they need to figure out how gigabytes or terabytes of PERSONAL information will be saved for future generations, not filtered down government or commercial archives. File formats just aren't that big of a deal. Worst case someone has to reverse engineer it in a hundred years, if you actually HAVE the data in a hundred years.
I somewhat agree with you, although even text/plain format does not guarantee that people will be able to access it 200 years from now.
You see, even this text plain files are based on some conventions, this is, we all "know" that when your machine reads one of those files a 65 means the character A, 67 character B and so on. Thus, the generation that wants the information must be aware of those things.
Now, with digital information is a bit more difficult than with printed paper, as in 200 years people may look at a magnetic plate hard disk and they may be able to read the train of bits, but there is nothing to give you the "protocol" needed in order to decipher that information.
As an example of that difficulty, take the voynich book, even though it is printed and even though it has clear images and clear recognizable characters, it is impossible to decipher as nobody knows the "protocol" to extract the "information" from the data.
What do I propose? well, I have no idea, maybe having a printed copoy of the ASCII table will be enough, maybe I am being dumb enough to think that in 200,300 or 400 years people may (for some reason) completely lose the meaning of ASCII (or UNICODE). Or as someone may think, in 200 years the information that is *relevant* enough would be in a readable form. Of course, there is a lot of non relevant information that our archeologists and historians are trying to understand even now (Mayan or Aztec civilization for example).
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
Of course the true fun is the fact that we are making it much more difficult for them as well with our constant musings. The events that lead up to Gulf War II will probably be important to historians. While the crazy nutcase theories concerning the events flood the internet will only confuse history. You can hardly seperate the truth from the fiction NOW, imagine trying to do so 100 years from now.
Lyx is not the only usable latex editor.
I have found TeXmacs pretty good too.
http://www.texmacs.org
They also have a (beta) version that runs on Windows (I tested it. Works fine.)
There are other commercial editor also.
The Catweasel controller board can read basically any floppy disk format, because it returns the timing between transitions. Whether you can find drivers to decode the data is another matter, but it is possible to write your own. For standard FM and MFM disks, cw2dmk works very well. The main problem with reading old Commodore disks is the crazy copy protection tricks they used, some of which even required 6502 code be downloaded to the floppy drive.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
You could argue that current English is more standardised but there is a significant amount of pop culture that could be baffling. Destiny's Child lyrics come to mind. Personally the Chaucer example above makes more sense to me.
-- Using the preview button since 2005