Vanished Persian Army Said Found in Desert (news.discovery.com) |
Vanished Persian Army Said Found in Desert (news.discovery.com) |
Also consider, will future generations even be able to figure out how to read our digital formats? What if 1000 years from now, data is stored in a completely different way than we have currently ever imagined, and has been stored that way for so long that nobody remembers digital storage? Will a future person look at a DVD and know they need to bounce a laser beam off of it to be able to read it? Will they know that it has tracks of pitting patterns that need to be transliterated into bit patterns that then need to be decoded into semantic data? Will they know that CDs are different from DVDs are different from Bluray? At least with text-on-paper, you can immediately see with the bare eyes that something is there, and the only task left is the decoding to semantic data.
Even if we can make sure we are storing our data properly, we store so much more data now, will they be able to find anything of interest within the deluge? I get so many emails in a single day that I can't find important emails from as little as 3 days ago, I absolutely depend on search in order to get to them. Not only that, but how will future people differentiate between the important historical data--who did what and when--from the mundane logging information?
http://209.85.229.132/search?q=cache:TkDETpNVMu0J:dsc.discov...