The greatest gift your parents can give you is NOT PAYING FOR YOUR COLLEGE.
Go to MIT. Get loans. They'll have low interest rates. Pay them off as SLOWLY as you can. Having a degree from MIT on your resume will pay for your investment in 10 years or so. You'll get aid, you'll get loans, you'll get a JOB and you'll afford it just fine
Remember that high housing costs mean high labor costs -- which means the hourly you get for labor in Boston will be higher than you expect. Get skilled labor jobs. Avoid working on campus unless the job helps you academically (meaning in the lab of a person you're learning from). Never work for a faculty member who starts off pointing out that working for him or her will get you a great recommendation which will open doors for you. Such people are weasels, and will screw you.
Stop looking to your parents. Stop trying to figure out how some third party will pay for it. Go directly to the school and deal with them. They'll help a lot. The rest you'll either pay for immediately from your wages or loans, and it'll be FINE.
"It seems pretty clear to me that they're going to be in litigation if they don't. Screw 'em."
Umm... are you thinking that because the numbers are demonstrably wrong, that something will come of this? Have you not been paying attention for the last six years?
Don't get me wrong: that would definitely be wonderful, but the odds are against it.
But where's the outliner? OOffice desperately needs an outliner -- not one with a lot of features, but one which works simply, and can be used as a basis to write from. Trying to use the navigator or the auto-numbering system is a nightmare, not a work-around.
On one hand, I love that they're trying to get documents, and the FCC's done a lot of craziness, and nothing excuses them from having to cough up the documents, but I REALLY LIKE 'Martin's persecution of the cable industry, especially Comcast.' Can we hold off for a few weeks before we crucify the guy, until AFTER he tightens the screws on Comcast?
THEN let's crucify him.
Actually, I have this whole Appian way thing in mind, but I doubt congress will even cut down one tree. All metaphorical, of course...
While you can market to wazoo, and you should, following the advice of others, here, you'll always only be half right, because talented people first and foremost recruit other talented people and solicit other talented people for work.
So go to the experts at your current job, the people you REALLY respect, and ask them if they know someone. If they say no, then they're probably LYING, and you just don't have enough to draw their friends. Try to find out why, and fix that. Then those same people you asked will begin suggesting people.
If you don't have experts at your company, cast your web out to all the experts you know, and offer to pay people what they're worth. You may have to pay enough to relocate someone. That can get expensive. Say you'll do it.
This is in conjunction with the advertising of the job, not in lieu of it.
Coming from a background in psychology, I can tell you things don't work out the way you'd expect.
The people Comcast brought in were paid to do something they won't feel good about themselves for. People don't like that feeling, and rationally, you'd expect them to get mad at the person who paid them, but the way this ACTUALLY works is that the people rationalize their misbehavior by siding with the people who paid them.
So Comcast just bought themselves a bunch of irrational supporters. You can guess that 20% of the people they bussed in who actually think about this ever again will be anti-Comcast. The rest who think about it will support them, in a subconscious effort to not make themselves a bad person.
Spend some time there before making any rash decisions. You may pass here, but you won't there, and you'll find some glass ceilings and doors. Japan is surrounded by people who look like them. They know how to tell who's Japanese and who's not.
IANAL, but I think if you tell them -- "Whoa there TSA buddy, there are CDs on there. If you copy them, you're violating the rights of the RIAA and are liable to lawsuit." then it ain't entrapment. They knowingly choose to violate the rights of the RIAA.
It's not just what laptop to bring, but what to carry it in so that you don't look like a rich guy carrying a laptop. I suggest something extremely light, and underpowered, and small. OLPC jumps to mind immediately. But the key is nobody knowing you have it, so that it doesn't a. get you jumped, and b. walk off in the night or when you leave it in your apartment/hotel room/tent, or what have you.
Don't get a laptop bag. Wrap it in a shirt or something and put it in a canvas backpack. If the machine doesn't look like it'll take that abuse, you're asking for trouble on one front or another.
Whatever you get, immediately try to make it look like crap.
I chose the wrong bag when I was in Madagascar, and KNEW it after about a day or so, there. I did pick the right laptop, though -- a cheapo dell. I put stuff on usb memory sticks, so that my data was always both on the laptop and in my room.
I'm tired of this myth. For the LAST TIME: There are NO laser-equipped sharks. All the shark operatives are issued simple wire cutters. Tests with sharks equipped with nuclear landmines were abandoned after it was found that the chickens drown too quickly for the sharks to be maximally effective.
Most or all of these guys are not republicans. They're the Evangelical Big Business party. You can come up with a better name, I'm sure. If you guys would just split into two parties, you could get some actual Republican platforms to run with. Wouldn't that be great? Then we in the Democratic party could shove a who bunch of "centrist" (who fill the whole left when the Republicans got bought by the VERY big business (as opposed to just pro-business in general) slash televangelists consortium) and we could get some ACTUAL liberal platforms.
I'm not a Democrat. I just vote for them as the slightly lesser of two evils. Wouldn't you like to vote for someone you'd actually want in office?
We need a three-party system and YOU need a three party system.
Bill may be saying something useful here. I'll leave that commentary to others.
But Bill clearly feels breath on his neck. He's trying to change history -- his. I bristle when I read about this petty, win at all costs no matter what it does to others fellow being described as a philanthropist.
I'm sure he doesn't have an agenda to make the world more profitable for Microsoft, anymore. Just 20 years ago, when he was already absurdly rich, absolutely any large sum he gave to any charity would have been ALL about making more money. But he still has an agenda, and I suspect that any time he spends thinking about others is still primarily about profiting his self, just now in an intangible way: He's greasing-up his camel, because he plans to cram it through the eye of a needle.
It's fine to port this to the Mac. Fine. Good. Whoopie.
But they are so DROPPING THE BALL. They have the best voice-rec platform. (You can think it's not good enough, but it's still the best.) What they need is to port it to Linux. Duh! Wake UP!
No, I'm not just saying the usual "Does it run on Linux?" bit. Linux is the now (and coming even more) obvious OS for small devices. When you want to talk to ANY device in your home or car, or your cell phone or PDA, you'll be talking to LINUX. THAT'S where we need a great voice-rec system. We need it ported to Linux and opened for an API. This will catapult this annoying desktop app into a present on almost everything type software device in a matter of a couple of years -- as low power devices provide enough umph to do what the heavy machines of a few years ago do.
Phase One
Real campaign finance reform
Clean up children's television requirements/advertising to children
Mandate debates of candidates
Revoke broadcast rights of violators, pending hearing, making not following the law so frightening that broadcasters will follow with a big smile.
Investigate last administration
Pour money into the NSF, alternative fuels
Mandate military to fund research on manufacturing processes for everything they buy
Cleaner air for cities (increase coal restrictions) to lower asthma/health costs.
Socialized medicine.
Increase Social security payments -- 2% for all income above current cap.
Phase Two
Push prosecution of executive officers for wrongdoing by corporations
Veto any law longer than 15 pages -- budget the only exception. "Just send me as many short laws as necessary."
Establish a pork fund to eliminate waste of pork projects -- just send them the money.
Eliminate all corn ethanol subsidies. Send large subsidies to independent farmers -- loss of ethanol revenue should not lower the yearly income of the independent farmer. No more money to ADM/Conagra.
Phrase Three
Eliminate executive orders. Rescind and publish all previous ones.
More stringently define "State of War" to include congressional declaration thereof.
Push for constitutional amendment to make treaties less powerful than the constitution.
Set up truth and reconciliation commission on torture. Prosecute all who do not confess and attempt reconciliation.
Increase penalties for bribery to life imprisonment.
Set up branch of IRS to audit all elected officials every year.
Phase Four
Clean up electoral college. No declaration of candidates by college members until after election. No term limits for electors.
How can a list of odd keyboards not include the Datahand? Yes, it's been out for a while (years, actually) but all but one of these keyboards attempts to be very close to Bob-standard keyboards, whereas the Datahand is really very different -- Still qwerty, but not the same sort of finger-motions at all.
I don't think they sell many of these things, and they cost too much, but people with RSIs swear by them.
This is the kind of silly religious reaction without testing which has kept this problem going, release after release. You need to try the samples in the bug before commenting. Big tables are Very, VERY slow. 2x is simply wrong -- absurdly so. You didn't try it, you just have a feel based on well-designed apps.
Well designed apps don't have this problem. Internal corporate laundry list apps do. You can write laundry list apps which work fine under IE and walk away. Cost of development is low. You try it under mozilla and find it unusable 10x slowdown is a low approximation. You can either spend more money on the development, or just forget about mozilla. Corporate folks make that decision easily. Further it only takes ONE such laundry-list app to make mozilla impossible for the whole organization. You only need one circumstance where mozilla generates support calls saying the app is down (because it takes 30 second or two minutes or whatever to load). No more mozilla installs. We're an IE shop. Period.
Covering your eyes and lying to yourself won't make this problem go away.
A major hindrance to Firefox's adoption in the corporate world is that it is SLOW on tables. IT departments have to make laundry list applications using tables.
IE depicts these ten+ times faster than Firefox. A page which loads in 3 seconds on IE may take 30 seconds to load on Firefox. That's a complete showstopper.
This is a well-known bug which has existed since the early days of Firefox. And no, Firefox 3 doesn't solve it.
"As an undergrad, what skills should I be trying to attain now to further my employability in the future?"
I'll give you two answers. Both are smart-ass and both a TRUE.
1. Interviewing. Read "Sweaty Palms" by Anthony Melody.
2. Learn how a computer works. Dimes to donuts nobody's made any attempt to teach you this. Read history books on computers. Read about old machines, where systems were simpler. Read older microprocessors spec sheets. Then ask questions about everything you saw. When you understand why people created mercury-delay memory, you'll begin to think about what having memory means, what speed in memory demands, and that will lead you (ultimately) to cache-hit ratios and paging systems. You're probably only learning things which isolate you from how things actually work, and thinking that that's reality. It's not. You'll be interviewing with people who are older than you and they'll know how much you don't. Remember: "Those who do not study history are doomed to not knowing it."
All the projects listed in InformationWeek, where they included numbers have lower bug per line counts than the scanners expected. Generally one FIFTH of what they expected or lower.
What does that say about popular FOSS projects versus commercial stuff?
It'd be interesting to see numbers on much less popular projects. And closed source products, of course.
"Students found it hard to write programs that did not have a graphic interface, had no feeling for the relationship between the source program and what the hardware would actually do, and (most damaging) did not understand the semantics of pointers at all, which made the use of C in systems programming very challenging."
Does that describe bad language choice or bad teaching?
My money's on number 2.
Java doesn't need a GUI. Why are you having students use one? Java VMs are teachable. Why aren't you exploring the VM?
This is looking for a scapegoat. Examine your curriculum, and in particular what you want to get out of the intro to programming class.
On one hand, yes! of course we should do this. It's a no brainer.
On the other hand, this is a problem for everyone who has been granted a copyright of 120 years. We can change them going forward, but it'd be hard to impossible to take them away without compensation.
Lawyers, please PLEASE jump in and tell me why I'm wrong. I'd LOVE to be wrong.
Nope, still absurd. You don't do this math for one movie. Yes, storing a movie or a thousand movies in an analog storage system is cheap -- there's no denying it. (Until you start having to duplicate the films as they begin to deteriorate simply because of time -- remember the "Acetate Can't Wait" era of film preservation, where we were frantically trying to get all those beautiful old acetate-based films put on yucky new film stocks without the nice contrast range of acetate, because cellulose acetate films spontaneously COMBUST?)
But we're not talking about one film here. We're talking about libraries, and the ability to manage many, many films using the same system. The numbers from the study are absurd.
The realities of analog mean that you'll never know if your film is alright without looking at it and imposing some wear and tear on it. (Schroedinger's cat-like, huh?) This is not to say you cannot be PRACTICALLY certain, based on what you did to preserve it, but if there was a defect in the stock you used, or a day when some environmental effect happened that you couldn't control, analog storage media can decay. Recovering from such a disaster, if it even can be recovered from, has astronomical costs.
Digital systems require a simple checksum. If the file was OK when you stored it, it's still OK, now. Yes, you have to replace equipment, but when you do move the files, you can prove that they're all fine. All of them. At once. No defects. ZERO.
Digital is more expensive, yes, but it's predictable, reliable, and cheap enough, in bulk.
Clearly, these guys are taking one film, and saying all the costs of storing that film, including technology changes, are attributed to the cost of storing that film.
Anyone serious about storing the film would give it to someone who stores a LOT of films.
Yes, storing it on redundant arrays in multiple locations in an uncompressed format is expensive. You have to buy the arrays, pay the rent, and pay some guy to make sure the arrays aren't going sown, and replace hard drives. But that's not the cost of storing a film. That's the cost of storing a BUNCH of them! An uncompressed film is 140gig. A several terrabyte array is $15k. Three of those plus rent, plus computers ($6000 for the three) and you're good for five years, at least. And that hold 15 films or so. I make the price of hardware $1k per year on hardware. Labor is almost nothing, since that laborer will be taken as just a few hours a week out of someone doing something else.
And as space scales up, the cost of doing this gets absurdly small.
Slashdot Mirror
The greatest gift your parents can give you is NOT PAYING FOR YOUR COLLEGE.
Go to MIT. Get loans. They'll have low interest rates. Pay them off as SLOWLY as you can. Having a degree from MIT on your resume will pay for your investment in 10 years or so. You'll get aid, you'll get loans, you'll get a JOB and you'll afford it just fine
Remember that high housing costs mean high labor costs -- which means the hourly you get for labor in Boston will be higher than you expect. Get skilled labor jobs. Avoid working on campus unless the job helps you academically (meaning in the lab of a person you're learning from). Never work for a faculty member who starts off pointing out that working for him or her will get you a great recommendation which will open doors for you. Such people are weasels, and will screw you.
Stop looking to your parents. Stop trying to figure out how some third party will pay for it. Go directly to the school and deal with them. They'll help a lot. The rest you'll either pay for immediately from your wages or loans, and it'll be FINE.
"It seems pretty clear to me that they're going to be in litigation if they don't. Screw 'em."
Umm... are you thinking that because the numbers are demonstrably wrong, that something will come of this? Have you not been paying attention for the last six years?
Don't get me wrong: that would definitely be wonderful, but the odds are against it.
But where's the outliner? OOffice desperately needs an outliner -- not one with a lot of features, but one which works simply, and can be used as a basis to write from. Trying to use the navigator or the auto-numbering system is a nightmare, not a work-around.
On one hand, I love that they're trying to get documents, and the FCC's done a lot of craziness, and nothing excuses them from having to cough up the documents, but I REALLY LIKE 'Martin's persecution of the cable industry, especially Comcast.' Can we hold off for a few weeks before we crucify the guy, until AFTER he tightens the screws on Comcast?
THEN let's crucify him.
Actually, I have this whole Appian way thing in mind, but I doubt congress will even cut down one tree. All metaphorical, of course...
Piddling crap.
While you can market to wazoo, and you should, following the advice of others, here, you'll always only be half right, because talented people first and foremost recruit other talented people and solicit other talented people for work.
So go to the experts at your current job, the people you REALLY respect, and ask them if they know someone. If they say no, then they're probably LYING, and you just don't have enough to draw their friends. Try to find out why, and fix that. Then those same people you asked will begin suggesting people.
If you don't have experts at your company, cast your web out to all the experts you know, and offer to pay people what they're worth. You may have to pay enough to relocate someone. That can get expensive. Say you'll do it.
This is in conjunction with the advertising of the job, not in lieu of it.
Coming from a background in psychology, I can tell you things don't work out the way you'd expect.
The people Comcast brought in were paid to do something they won't feel good about themselves for. People don't like that feeling, and rationally, you'd expect them to get mad at the person who paid them, but the way this ACTUALLY works is that the people rationalize their misbehavior by siding with the people who paid them.
So Comcast just bought themselves a bunch of irrational supporters. You can guess that 20% of the people they bussed in who actually think about this ever again will be anti-Comcast. The rest who think about it will support them, in a subconscious effort to not make themselves a bad person.
A pity. I'd like your scenario a lot better.
Spend some time there before making any rash decisions. You may pass here, but you won't there, and you'll find some glass ceilings and doors. Japan is surrounded by people who look like them. They know how to tell who's Japanese and who's not.
IANAL, but I think if you tell them -- "Whoa there TSA buddy, there are CDs on there. If you copy them, you're violating the rights of the RIAA and are liable to lawsuit." then it ain't entrapment. They knowingly choose to violate the rights of the RIAA.
It's not just what laptop to bring, but what to carry it in so that you don't look like a rich guy carrying a laptop. I suggest something extremely light, and underpowered, and small. OLPC jumps to mind immediately. But the key is nobody knowing you have it, so that it doesn't a. get you jumped, and b. walk off in the night or when you leave it in your apartment/hotel room/tent, or what have you.
Don't get a laptop bag. Wrap it in a shirt or something and put it in a canvas backpack. If the machine doesn't look like it'll take that abuse, you're asking for trouble on one front or another.
Whatever you get, immediately try to make it look like crap.
I chose the wrong bag when I was in Madagascar, and KNEW it after about a day or so, there. I did pick the right laptop, though -- a cheapo dell. I put stuff on usb memory sticks, so that my data was always both on the laptop and in my room.
I'm tired of this myth. For the LAST TIME: There are NO laser-equipped sharks. All the shark operatives are issued simple wire cutters. Tests with sharks equipped with nuclear landmines were abandoned after it was found that the chickens drown too quickly for the sharks to be maximally effective.
Most or all of these guys are not republicans. They're the Evangelical Big Business party. You can come up with a better name, I'm sure. If you guys would just split into two parties, you could get some actual Republican platforms to run with. Wouldn't that be great? Then we in the Democratic party could shove a who bunch of "centrist" (who fill the whole left when the Republicans got bought by the VERY big business (as opposed to just pro-business in general) slash televangelists consortium) and we could get some ACTUAL liberal platforms.
I'm not a Democrat. I just vote for them as the slightly lesser of two evils. Wouldn't you like to vote for someone you'd actually want in office?
We need a three-party system and YOU need a three party system.
Bill may be saying something useful here. I'll leave that commentary to others.
But Bill clearly feels breath on his neck. He's trying to change history -- his. I bristle when I read about this petty, win at all costs no matter what it does to others fellow being described as a philanthropist.
I'm sure he doesn't have an agenda to make the world more profitable for Microsoft, anymore. Just 20 years ago, when he was already absurdly rich, absolutely any large sum he gave to any charity would have been ALL about making more money. But he still has an agenda, and I suspect that any time he spends thinking about others is still primarily about profiting his self, just now in an intangible way: He's greasing-up his camel, because he plans to cram it through the eye of a needle.
It's fine to port this to the Mac. Fine. Good. Whoopie.
But they are so DROPPING THE BALL. They have the best voice-rec platform. (You can think it's not good enough, but it's still the best.) What they need is to port it to Linux. Duh! Wake UP!
No, I'm not just saying the usual "Does it run on Linux?" bit. Linux is the now (and coming even more) obvious OS for small devices. When you want to talk to ANY device in your home or car, or your cell phone or PDA, you'll be talking to LINUX. THAT'S where we need a great voice-rec system. We need it ported to Linux and opened for an API. This will catapult this annoying desktop app into a present on almost everything type software device in a matter of a couple of years -- as low power devices provide enough umph to do what the heavy machines of a few years ago do.
Phase One
Real campaign finance reform
Clean up children's television requirements/advertising to children
Mandate debates of candidates
Revoke broadcast rights of violators, pending hearing, making not following the law so frightening that broadcasters will follow with a big smile.
Investigate last administration
Pour money into the NSF, alternative fuels
Mandate military to fund research on manufacturing processes for everything they buy
Cleaner air for cities (increase coal restrictions) to lower asthma/health costs.
Socialized medicine.
Increase Social security payments -- 2% for all income above current cap.
Phase Two
Push prosecution of executive officers for wrongdoing by corporations
Veto any law longer than 15 pages -- budget the only exception. "Just send me as many short laws as necessary."
Establish a pork fund to eliminate waste of pork projects -- just send them the money.
Eliminate all corn ethanol subsidies. Send large subsidies to independent farmers -- loss of ethanol revenue should not lower the yearly income of the independent farmer. No more money to ADM/Conagra.
Phrase Three
Eliminate executive orders. Rescind and publish all previous ones.
More stringently define "State of War" to include congressional declaration thereof.
Push for constitutional amendment to make treaties less powerful than the constitution.
Set up truth and reconciliation commission on torture. Prosecute all who do not confess and attempt reconciliation.
Increase penalties for bribery to life imprisonment.
Set up branch of IRS to audit all elected officials every year.
Phase Four
Clean up electoral college. No declaration of candidates by college members until after election. No term limits for electors.
I don't think they sell many of these things, and they cost too much, but people with RSIs swear by them.
Here's their webpage.
Open the drives by punching holes using a hammer and a heavy screwdriver -- you just need to make a couple of holes, not take it apart.
Drop drives in a bucket of salt water. Let 'em sit for a day.
Pull 'em out and let them sit in the air for a few days before you throw them away. They'll rust enough to not be readable by anyone.
This is the kind of silly religious reaction without testing which has kept this problem going, release after release. You need to try the samples in the bug before commenting. Big tables are Very, VERY slow. 2x is simply wrong -- absurdly so. You didn't try it, you just have a feel based on well-designed apps.
Well designed apps don't have this problem. Internal corporate laundry list apps do. You can write laundry list apps which work fine under IE and walk away. Cost of development is low. You try it under mozilla and find it unusable 10x slowdown is a low approximation. You can either spend more money on the development, or just forget about mozilla. Corporate folks make that decision easily. Further it only takes ONE such laundry-list app to make mozilla impossible for the whole organization. You only need one circumstance where mozilla generates support calls saying the app is down (because it takes 30 second or two minutes or whatever to load). No more mozilla installs. We're an IE shop. Period.
Covering your eyes and lying to yourself won't make this problem go away.
A major hindrance to Firefox's adoption in the corporate world is that it is SLOW on tables. IT departments have to make laundry list applications using tables.
IE depicts these ten+ times faster than Firefox. A page which loads in 3 seconds on IE may take 30 seconds to load on Firefox. That's a complete showstopper.
This is a well-known bug which has existed since the early days of Firefox. And no, Firefox 3 doesn't solve it.
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=352367
"As an undergrad, what skills should I be trying to attain now to further my employability in the future?"
I'll give you two answers. Both are smart-ass and both a TRUE.
1. Interviewing. Read "Sweaty Palms" by Anthony Melody.
2. Learn how a computer works. Dimes to donuts nobody's made any attempt to teach you this. Read history books on computers. Read about old machines, where systems were simpler. Read older microprocessors spec sheets. Then ask questions about everything you saw. When you understand why people created mercury-delay memory, you'll begin to think about what having memory means, what speed in memory demands, and that will lead you (ultimately) to cache-hit ratios and paging systems. You're probably only learning things which isolate you from how things actually work, and thinking that that's reality. It's not. You'll be interviewing with people who are older than you and they'll know how much you don't. Remember: "Those who do not study history are doomed to not knowing it."
All the projects listed in InformationWeek, where they included numbers have lower bug per line counts than the scanners expected. Generally one FIFTH of what they expected or lower.
What does that say about popular FOSS projects versus commercial stuff?
It'd be interesting to see numbers on much less popular projects. And closed source products, of course.
"Students found it hard to write programs that did not have a graphic interface, had no feeling for the relationship between the source program and what the hardware would actually do, and (most damaging) did not understand the semantics of pointers at all, which made the use of C in systems programming very challenging."
Does that describe bad language choice or bad teaching?
My money's on number 2.
Java doesn't need a GUI. Why are you having students use one?
Java VMs are teachable. Why aren't you exploring the VM?
This is looking for a scapegoat. Examine your curriculum, and in particular what you want to get out of the intro to programming class.
On one hand, yes! of course we should do this. It's a no brainer.
On the other hand, this is a problem for everyone who has been granted a copyright of 120 years. We can change them going forward, but it'd be hard to impossible to take them away without compensation.
Lawyers, please PLEASE jump in and tell me why I'm wrong. I'd LOVE to be wrong.
Nope, still absurd. You don't do this math for one movie. Yes, storing a movie or a thousand movies in an analog storage system is cheap -- there's no denying it. (Until you start having to duplicate the films as they begin to deteriorate simply because of time -- remember the "Acetate Can't Wait" era of film preservation, where we were frantically trying to get all those beautiful old acetate-based films put on yucky new film stocks without the nice contrast range of acetate, because cellulose acetate films spontaneously COMBUST?)
But we're not talking about one film here. We're talking about libraries, and the ability to manage many, many films using the same system. The numbers from the study are absurd.
The realities of analog mean that you'll never know if your film is alright without looking at it and imposing some wear and tear on it. (Schroedinger's cat-like, huh?) This is not to say you cannot be PRACTICALLY certain, based on what you did to preserve it, but if there was a defect in the stock you used, or a day when some environmental effect happened that you couldn't control, analog storage media can decay. Recovering from such a disaster, if it even can be recovered from, has astronomical costs.
Digital systems require a simple checksum. If the file was OK when you stored it, it's still OK, now. Yes, you have to replace equipment, but when you do move the files, you can prove that they're all fine. All of them. At once. No defects. ZERO.
Digital is more expensive, yes, but it's predictable, reliable, and cheap enough, in bulk.
Clearly, these guys are taking one film, and saying all the costs of storing that film, including technology changes, are attributed to the cost of storing that film.
Anyone serious about storing the film would give it to someone who stores a LOT of films.
Yes, storing it on redundant arrays in multiple locations in an uncompressed format is expensive. You have to buy the arrays, pay the rent, and pay some guy to make sure the arrays aren't going sown, and replace hard drives. But that's not the cost of storing a film. That's the cost of storing a BUNCH of them! An uncompressed film is 140gig. A several terrabyte array is $15k. Three of those plus rent, plus computers ($6000 for the three) and you're good for five years, at least. And that hold 15 films or so. I make the price of hardware $1k per year on hardware. Labor is almost nothing, since that laborer will be taken as just a few hours a week out of someone doing something else.
And as space scales up, the cost of doing this gets absurdly small.
Dumb study.