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That Which Survives (TuxDeluxe)That Which Survives (TuxDeluxe)Posted Jul 7, 2007 20:17 UTC (Sat) by giraffedata (subscriber, #1954)In reply to: That Which Survives (TuxDeluxe) by jordanb Parent article: That Which Survives (TuxDeluxe)
I have a lot of trouble seeing a problem here to be honest. Document restoration has always been kind of an expensive process. ... If document restoration in 500 years is as expensive as it is today, that's still a problem. Many of the films you're talking about are gone forever, and it would nice if they weren't. Some cost two million dollars to restore and it would be nice if it cost nothing. Archaelogy was a bad example, since it is traditionally expensive. Deciphering a ancient Word document and creating a device to interpret one would be fairly normal archaelogy and would make a great Nova installment. A better example is a historian 25 years from now who can't use the document unless he can access its information within a few days and a few hundred dollars. After all, he doesn't even know if he'll find any useful information in it. And that is a novel problem because for most of history, if you wanted to extract information from a 25 year old document, it was trivial. Today, we can read papers from two hundred years ago with little more effort than we use to read one from last week. I'm not sure the secrecy or obfuscation of the document format is really interesting, because those will be comparatively minor stumbling blocks for historians. But the closedness of the format makes it harder for society to keep the format alive so that programs that read it are readily available to historians 25 years from now.
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