The immediate media (memory cards or whatever) are reusable and will be reused, but that's after everything has been copied off of them and has nothing to do with archiving; archiving is never done on the original media for digital photography.
The question is, what will happen to the copy delivered to the newspaper or whoever? I'm doubtful that somebody will take the time to go through it slowly and carefully and actually make editorial decisions. People are too expensive to do that with. I think one of two things will happen: either the whole session will be saved, or just the photos published will be saved. That second case is, um, not good for future historians.
We're just seeing a new wave of compression formats—the wavelet compression programs, including a jpeg follow-on. (I don't think those are new science, but they're certainly new technology). What makes you think we've hit the end of that sort of improvements?
You paint the rosiest possible picture of the progression of a digital archive. I think it's entirely possible to run a digital archive well; and if it is run well, it's perfect. That's the beauty of digital -- perfection.
However, even a few years of inattention can result in the loss of the entire archive. A digital archive is only at all reliable if the media is checked regularly and recopied before deterioration passes the point where error correction can recover the data. Plus of course the additional recopying as file formats or media go out of fashion.
So what I see is that stuff that people see as important will be well-preserved in digital archives. So long as we're prosperous and interested in history. But they wouldn't survive any minor little setbacks at all.
Digital media tends towards all-or-nothing, whereas analog media degrades gradually. No degradation is best, but something is better than nothing. So depending on how the future goes, one or the other is clearly a better choice.
I've had a spambot-trap on my web site for over a year, and while I've had around 10,000 page views each day during that time, I've never gotten one single spam to the email addresses featured in the trapped space.
Or does this mean that the spam bots are sufficiently sophisticated that they recognize my trap for what it is? It's meant to be obvious to humans.
I'm sort-of with you on the need to find a balance between anonymity and accountability; I posted on that earlier today.
But I have to snipe at some details. I'm not clear that most spam email is illegal, for example. Only a few small jurisdictions have clear-cut laws on that that I know of. And while I find spam annoying, it's not as annoying as the paper stuff that arrives in my REAL mailbox; that consumes actual resources to dispose of!
Similarly, web-sites are much harder to run anonymously. They have to be at a fixed IP, and that chain can be traced much more easily than cracking an anonymous remailer, say. It may not be absolutely obvious on the face of it who's responsible, but it can be dug out pretty easily as detective work goes.
Anonymous browsing of web sites, on the other hand, is pretty important.
I see lots of important uses for anonymous speech, of course. But I also see that the online world of discourse works by accountability. People posting anonymously have no accountability. There are no consequences to posting copyrighted material in large volumes to rec.arts.sf.written, to pick an example entirely at random, if you do so anonymously. There's no effective way for the community to express its displeasure.
I see a serious conflict here, which I don't see how to resolve. Anonymity is necessary. Anonymity is destructive to the basic culture of the net.
Your invitation to disprove the stuff on ldolphin is suggesting that any of it should be taken seriously in the first place. The smart people in the world could spend all their time trying to untangle the deliberate obscurantism and definitional games and so forth. It's a fools game, we generally don't play.
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The immediate media (memory cards or whatever) are reusable and will be reused, but that's after everything has been copied off of them and has nothing to do with archiving; archiving is never done on the original media for digital photography.
The question is, what will happen to the copy delivered to the newspaper or whoever? I'm doubtful that somebody will take the time to go through it slowly and carefully and actually make editorial decisions. People are too expensive to do that with. I think one of two things will happen: either the whole session will be saved, or just the photos published will be saved. That second case is, um, not good for future historians.
We're just seeing a new wave of compression formats—the wavelet compression programs, including a jpeg follow-on. (I don't think those are new science, but they're certainly new technology). What makes you think we've hit the end of that sort of improvements?
However, even a few years of inattention can result in the loss of the entire archive. A digital archive is only at all reliable if the media is checked regularly and recopied before deterioration passes the point where error correction can recover the data. Plus of course the additional recopying as file formats or media go out of fashion.
So what I see is that stuff that people see as important will be well-preserved in digital archives. So long as we're prosperous and interested in history. But they wouldn't survive any minor little setbacks at all.
Digital media tends towards all-or-nothing, whereas analog media degrades gradually. No degradation is best, but something is better than nothing. So depending on how the future goes, one or the other is clearly a better choice.
I've had a spambot-trap on my web site for over a year, and while I've had around 10,000 page views each day during that time, I've never gotten one single spam to the email addresses featured in the trapped space.
Or does this mean that the spam bots are sufficiently sophisticated that they recognize my trap for what it is? It's meant to be obvious to humans.
None of the 4 computer desks in the house is in the room with the TV, sorry. Each of us has our computers in our private offices.
But there is a computer in the media room. 200 MHz Pentium. Woohoo!
Nor is it anything new; the first news articles about schools making computers mandatory started appearing, as I remember it, in the middle 80s.
And laptops don't cost thousands more than desktops; lots and lots and lots of laptops cost less than $3000 total.
Shouldn't freenet be on the list for this poll? Their spaces seem to me to overlap significantly.
But I have to snipe at some details. I'm not clear that most spam email is illegal, for example. Only a few small jurisdictions have clear-cut laws on that that I know of. And while I find spam annoying, it's not as annoying as the paper stuff that arrives in my REAL mailbox; that consumes actual resources to dispose of!
Similarly, web-sites are much harder to run anonymously. They have to be at a fixed IP, and that chain can be traced much more easily than cracking an anonymous remailer, say. It may not be absolutely obvious on the face of it who's responsible, but it can be dug out pretty easily as detective work goes.
Anonymous browsing of web sites, on the other hand, is pretty important.
I see a serious conflict here, which I don't see how to resolve. Anonymity is necessary. Anonymity is destructive to the basic culture of the net.
Your invitation to disprove the stuff on ldolphin is suggesting that any of it should be taken seriously in the first place. The smart people in the world could spend all their time trying to untangle the deliberate obscurantism and definitional games and so forth. It's a fools game, we generally don't play.