you can generally rip the raw text out of most word processor formats quite easilly without needing the app that created them. Its messy but you can get the raw information
Prevention is better than cure. We're human beings. Can't we do better than this?:)
This is just a variation on the requirement that source always be available. Nothing new here. (GPL has always required certain trivial "features" such as displaying the license and the no-warranty clause.)
copy it from one media format to the next BEFORE the old one dissapears or keep your data on your hard drives and copy it to your new ones each time you upgrade.
That obvious procedure has been mentioned by other posters, and is commonplace, but it still leaves many possibilities for loss open (see ensuing discussion).
For instance, software obsolescence. On a small scale, this happens frequently today: How many files (e.g. obsolete and/or proprietary word processor and graphics formats) do you have in your archive that your current applications can't open? Likely quite a few, unless you store everything in ASCII text. Do you still have the older applications? Can they be installed on your current hardware and software setup? Will they successfully run? What about in 2 years' time? 5? 10? 30? 100? So you see you have to carry forward the means to interpret that data as well as the means to physically store, read and display it. Not trivial at all.
This issue is also increasingly raised, of course, in connection with statutory requirements for transparency and longevity of government documents (see recent Massachusetts story).
Exactly: The enlightened groups that come to mind when I read that were, of course, the Spanish Inquisition, and witchhunts, and I guess we would also have to include the KKK. Furthermore, it betrays Allchin's revisionist approach to history. Whatever happened to telling it as it happened? Isn't that more important than executive vanity?*
So, we have a bunch of chair-throwers and book-burners at the top tier of M$. Not surprising they keep getting beaten up in the courts... "A fish rots from the head down," indeed.
(*Anyone tempted to reply, "it's a business, they can do what they please," has missed my point, so don't bother.)
Which was more or less my point. "Post-apocalypse" is shorthand for a very long future without power...anywhere. Of course there are shorter interruptions but data retention doesn't enter into them so much (apart from ensuring the hardware isn't destroyed before power is restored).
If they can't power it (post-apocalypse?) then it again might be best to fall back on hardcopies. Which may even last longer than the computer hardware.
This topic has been discussed more thoroughly in older threads; I'm not really an expert on data longevity. I can just see that the problem is much trickier than it looks.:)
hardware is much, ah, *harder* than software
on
The Digital Dark Age
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
I think it's important to bundle each set of data-containing artifacts with either an actual reader device which produces some kind of easily understood output, or schematics for same. For instance if you were going to bury a vault of CD-Rom type discs, it would make sense to put at least a CD-Rom drive in
Yep. That's my worry. It's going to be much tougher to actually find the data and read it than interpret the data. Imagine trying to read a CD-ROM, or hard drive, or NVRAM, anything! in a world where the complete integrated systems aren't available. Even if you had specs to say, and IDE interface, you'd have to do man-millennia of engineering to get at the data. We already know this from the impossibility of recovering data stored during the last 40 years (NASA's Viking probe data is the famous example but there are thousands of other cases). The hardware gets decommissioned and scrapped; and even if the media survives, it has a limited shelf life.
And don't even think about it if this is in a post-technological or post-apocalyptic scenario. That's when you want hardcopy! Old-fashioned printouts and photographs... with all their attendant preservation headaches. That should be in the bunker too.
Writing software or even reverse engineering formats looks much easier by comparison.
if you expect to have to reverse engineer it
on
The Digital Dark Age
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
bmp would be preferable to jpg
Only if you expect to be in the situation of having no software to read JPG, and no specification. That's a slightly extreme scenario? Since your data has been, obviously, carried forward. You could always carry forward source code or specifications too, along with your JPG corpus. Or am I missing something?
This raises interesting questions about how Skype and eBay together will try to avert cyber criminals from using security flaws in either system to their advantage.
What about "how eBay will try to help over-enthusiastic law enforcement deprive users of privacy"?
Nah. Could never happen in a "freedom" loving country!
In one of the articles on the blog, Minimsft says quite plainly:
As for my boss firing me, he's cool as long as I add a disclaimer (done - yes, I had a mini-coming-out party Friday) and while I can write about policy violation if I go and manifest that into reality then I will find myself badge-less in Redmond.
We don't have to wait for Woodward or Bernstein to die, or anything.
In an interview very reminiscent of that other fool, Ballmer struggles to stay 'on message', repeats his key words and phrases out of context ('Innovation! Innovation! Innovation!') and generally makes a fool of himself.
I see your point, but when it comes to business decisions don't underestimate how hyper-rational, ruthless and hard-headed Jobs can be. That's how he made his billions.
In this case, AMD would have been the "don't be evil" warm and fuzzy choice (see AMD-v-Intel suit). Transmeta would have been the cool-tech choice. Picking Intel was pure cold business rationality.
Jobs doesn't bend other people's reality so much as exercises his power to mould new realities. This is evident in his string of lucrative industry firsts.
(Malone's Infinite Loop is a fairly balanced account of Jobs, rich in background detail, neither hagiography nor a total hatchet-job.)
yes I still don't know how to uninstall a generic packages..like when I download something, untar; make; make install : where can I find out where it put all it's stuff?
There have been de facto standards for this for decades, and standard layouts for Linux for years. If package developers pick random install locations, that's their foolishness. (This applies to any O/S, not just Linux.)
Having a database/registry of where an application put's it's files is a damn good idea.
The poster said 'problems' and not 'security problems'. M$ software suffers from all kinds.
It is true that early UNIX systems were less secure than today's. Those issues have been and continue to be rectified as discovered, leaving us with systems that can be secured to a very high degree. One might remember that UNIX' heritage can be traced back to Multics - a system designed with high security in mind. Windoze was designed with 'getting rich quick' in mind.
There is no excuse for the shoddiness of what M$ ships today and only ignorance can explain why the general public and business customers continue to tolerate it.
one guess who wrote most of the theory and propaganda for it
and talked IBM and Wall Street and the Fortune 500 into buying in
Methinks that over-reaches just a little. Apart from the fact that "propaganda" is a poor choice of word - although it may describe ESR's output - open source pioneers were workingeffectively in principle long before ESR was out of diapers.
Despite ESR's strenuous self-promotion, the fact is that RMS was of course principally responsible for what we know as open source philosophy and its legal framework. ESR is only one of the slightly loopy hangers-on... valuable, but as is usually the case, in inverse proportion to his ego.
And then there is the Second Act, in which he plans to take credit for the inevitable disintegration of M$. Sorry Eric, that's going to take the whole community to achieve, unless you plan to take your arsenal to Redmond...
the biggest test will be whether it can demonstrate the necessary performance and security to function as a data centre server for mission-critical applications
The real question is, can anything ELSE demonstrate the necessary performance and security? (apart from UNIX, of course).
anytime somebody exhibits this sort of behavior, there is something fundamentally wrong with their character.
I heartily agree with this, because I too:
...had a boss in the past that pulled this kind of crap
It should never be tolerated. These anecdotes just serve to remind us that they are nothing more than a bunch of neurotic, grasping criminals. Corporate culture always faithfully reflects the character of those at the top.
Slashdot Mirror
Prevention is better than cure. We're human beings. Can't we do better than this? :)
This is just a variation on the requirement that source always be available. Nothing new here. (GPL has always required certain trivial "features" such as displaying the license and the no-warranty clause.)
That obvious procedure has been mentioned by other posters, and is commonplace, but it still leaves many possibilities for loss open (see ensuing discussion).
For instance, software obsolescence. On a small scale, this happens frequently today: How many files (e.g. obsolete and/or proprietary word processor and graphics formats) do you have in your archive that your current applications can't open? Likely quite a few, unless you store everything in ASCII text. Do you still have the older applications? Can they be installed on your current hardware and software setup? Will they successfully run? What about in 2 years' time? 5? 10? 30? 100? So you see you have to carry forward the means to interpret that data as well as the means to physically store, read and display it. Not trivial at all.
This issue is also increasingly raised, of course, in connection with statutory requirements for transparency and longevity of government documents (see recent Massachusetts story).
So, we have a bunch of chair-throwers and book-burners at the top tier of M$. Not surprising they keep getting beaten up in the courts... "A fish rots from the head down," indeed.
(*Anyone tempted to reply, "it's a business, they can do what they please," has missed my point, so don't bother.)
Which was more or less my point. "Post-apocalypse" is shorthand for a very long future without power...anywhere. Of course there are shorter interruptions but data retention doesn't enter into them so much (apart from ensuring the hardware isn't destroyed before power is restored).
If they can't power it (post-apocalypse?) then it again might be best to fall back on hardcopies. Which may even last longer than the computer hardware.
This topic has been discussed more thoroughly in older threads; I'm not really an expert on data longevity. I can just see that the problem is much trickier than it looks. :)
And don't even think about it if this is in a post-technological or post-apocalyptic scenario. That's when you want hardcopy! Old-fashioned printouts and photographs... with all their attendant preservation headaches. That should be in the bunker too.
Writing software or even reverse engineering formats looks much easier by comparison.
Only if you expect to be in the situation of having no software to read JPG, and no specification. That's a slightly extreme scenario? Since your data has been, obviously, carried forward. You could always carry forward source code or specifications too, along with your JPG corpus. Or am I missing something?
What about "how eBay will try to help over-enthusiastic law enforcement deprive users of privacy"?
Nah. Could never happen in a "freedom" loving country!
They're not going as far as XHTML.
We don't have to wait for Woodward or Bernstein to die, or anything.
The proof! There is no stupid "classic mode" in Office XII!
In an interview very reminiscent of that other fool, Ballmer struggles to stay 'on message', repeats his key words and phrases out of context ('Innovation! Innovation! Innovation!') and generally makes a fool of himself.
(Neil Blender cited this blog on the earlier M$ story.)
In this case, AMD would have been the "don't be evil" warm and fuzzy choice (see AMD-v-Intel suit). Transmeta would have been the cool-tech choice. Picking Intel was pure cold business rationality.
Jobs doesn't bend other people's reality so much as exercises his power to mould new realities. This is evident in his string of lucrative industry firsts.
(Malone's Infinite Loop is a fairly balanced account of Jobs, rich in background detail, neither hagiography nor a total hatchet-job.)
Point 4 is arguably ad hominem; point 3 isn't.
There have been de facto standards for this for decades, and standard layouts for Linux for years. If package developers pick random install locations, that's their foolishness. (This applies to any O/S, not just Linux.)
Having a database/registry of where an application put's it's files is a damn good idea.
Having standard places is equally important.
The poster said 'problems' and not 'security problems'. M$ software suffers from all kinds. It is true that early UNIX systems were less secure than today's. Those issues have been and continue to be rectified as discovered, leaving us with systems that can be secured to a very high degree. One might remember that UNIX' heritage can be traced back to Multics - a system designed with high security in mind. Windoze was designed with 'getting rich quick' in mind. There is no excuse for the shoddiness of what M$ ships today and only ignorance can explain why the general public and business customers continue to tolerate it.
They'd never ever use it. ...
Clinton wasn't actually impeached. Maybe you were thinking of Nixon.
And yes, the rest of the world shares your hope that somebody - anybody - in the US will wake up and get rid of your current administration.
Methinks that over-reaches just a little. Apart from the fact that "propaganda" is a poor choice of word - although it may describe ESR's output - open source pioneers were working effectively in principle long before ESR was out of diapers.
Despite ESR's strenuous self-promotion, the fact is that RMS was of course principally responsible for what we know as open source philosophy and its legal framework. ESR is only one of the slightly loopy hangers-on... valuable, but as is usually the case, in inverse proportion to his ego.
And then there is the Second Act, in which he plans to take credit for the inevitable disintegration of M$. Sorry Eric, that's going to take the whole community to achieve, unless you plan to take your arsenal to Redmond...
The real question is, can anything ELSE demonstrate the necessary performance and security? (apart from UNIX, of course).
Yep - That's the Australia I remember.
To run my VAX-11/750 (up to 2700W).
I also have a Sun 3/160, like the parent's, with a PSU rated at 850W. Sounds like a jet aircraft powered up, and has fans to match...