Vint Cerf: Data That's Here Today May Be Gone Tomorrow 358
dcblogs writes "Vinton Cerf is warning that digital things created today — spreadsheets, documents, presentations as well as mountains of scientific data — may not be readable in the years and centuries ahead. Cerf illustrates the problem in a simple way. He runs Microsoft Office 2011 on Macintosh, but it cannot read a 1997 PowerPoint file. 'It doesn't know what it is,' he said. 'I'm not blaming Microsoft,' said Cerf, who is Google's vice president and chief Internet evangelist. 'What I'm saying is that backward compatibility is very hard to preserve over very long periods of time.' He calls it a 'hard problem.'"
We're at an interesting spot right now, where we're worried that the internet won't remember everything, and also that it won't forget anything.
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:DRM and the digital black hole (Score:5, Interesting)
What about online-only games? Will historians in 100 years be able to play WoW and see what the game was like?
No different than cars (Score:5, Interesting)
We're still able to restore cars from the 80s and earlier as the cars were fully mechanical or hydraulic. No computers.
Fast forward to 20yrs from now, nobody's going to be carrying the computer boards for a 2004 Toyota Pruis or a 2013 Tesla.
However, you'll still be able to restore your grandfather's '57 Chevy...
Code should accompany data (Score:5, Interesting)
I presented a solution [blogspot.com] to this long-standing problem last year to the Denver HTML5 Meetup.
Code should never be separated from data. This is possible with HTML5, JavaScript, and open source.
In the presentation, I steal and repurpose Hofstadter [wikipedia.org]'s analogy of DNA to an LP vinyl record, which is an information bearer, but useless without its information retriever (the record player). Like the cell of an animal, which contains both DNA and the means to "play" it, I ask why not the same with software?
My maxim is: data should always carry the code with it to play itself. It was inspired from the field I've spent 50% of my career in: non-destructive testing where, for example, X-Rays and ultrasounds are performed on safety-critical industrial parts with 50-year service lives. If one of those parts fails and kills someone, you're going to want to go back into the old data and find the earliest indication of the flaw or fault and reinspect every other part in the world like it that is still in service. And maybe you need to go back 50 years. Under such a context, not providing the code with the data could be considered an act of gross neglect.
In my presentation, I use the 1990's era trick of embedding XSL into an XML file, with the addition of the XSL now being able to use HTML5/JavaScript. Sadly, I've only gotten it work with Firefox -- the other browsers consider it a security violation.
Re:emulation / virtualization (Score:4, Interesting)