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Monday, July 22, 2002 |
Globalization: Threat or Menace
Get a ticket in New York City, have the processing done in Ghana by someone who is paid $70 in an entire month.
In New York Tickets, Ghana Sees Orderly City [New York Times: Technology]
"We are but a moment's sunlight, fading in the grass"
When I was just starting out in IT, I was at a meeting where someone was trying to sell a librarian on a new recordable media format. I've forgotten what it was; something that sank without a trace, though. The salesguy was trying to convince the librarian that it was a great product because their lab simulations showed that the media would still be good in ten years. The librarian just smiled and pointed out that Gutenberg's original books are still accessible.Librarians have good reason to be suspicious of the promise of new technology. Years ago, my father bought five leatherbound volumes of the New York Herald newspaper that cover the Civil War years, up to Lincoln's assassination at our local library's "discards" sale, after they'd replaced their reference collection of them with microfilm. I wonder if the microfilms are in as good shape now, forty years later, as those newspapers still are. See some of the reviews of and responses to Nicholson Baker's controversial book Double Fold for a recent view of the microfilming controversy.
The problem is made worse when the original material is not created in a long-lasting format like paper: how will future generations of historians be able to access data that was created stored only on now obsolete digital formats?
BBC: "Just as still video camera discs and laser discs have become mere technological curiosities in less than a decade, it's a sure bet than many of the storage media that are used today - cartridges with names like Jaz, Zip, Syquest, Bernoulli, state of the art CD-R and DVD-R discs, and the tiny SmartMedia, Compact Flash, Memory Stick, Secure Digital, Multi Media Card, and MicroDrive storage cards - will be obsolete and hard to access in a few decades' time." [via Scripting News]
