[LargeFormat] OT: digital images

[mark blackman]

> Not archival at all. A CD is good for about 5 years before you have
> to copy it. And in 5 years there probably won't be any CD drives to copy
> it with, so you will probably have to copy it to DVD before then. And
> who knows what will replace DVD, or how long it will last. I have a
> friend who says he has the first 3 years of his daughter's life on a
> crashed hard drive that is sitting on his mantle. Gone.

Firstly, I have no axe to grind about the digital v analogue debate, but I
must correct you on this point. Continually changing storage medium and file
types is very much a feature of the PC (or micro) world.  'Proper' computers
tend to use much more resilient formats that are certainly proven to be
archivable over the past 40 years or so (think mainframe, large Unix boxes,
DB2, Oracle etc).

I'm sure that there will soon be on-line storage services where one can hold
digital images for many years, and in formats that the future
image-manipulating software will be compatible with. Don't ask me what they
will be, but I can assure you that 1/2 inch magnetic tape containing EBCDIC
data are still readable now, though they may have been recorded in the 60s.

Mr Gates may well have convinced the world that his company sets the
standards and is the 'largest' software company in the world, but it just
ain't true!