Almost a year ago, Google Executive and “Internet Pioneer” Vint Cerf was quoted with this prediction.
Is he correct?
—Peter.
Almost a year ago, Google Executive and “Internet Pioneer” Vint Cerf was quoted with this prediction.
Is he correct?
—Peter.
Prosophos 
I believe Mark Ewanchuk (“Mr. Canada Film”: http://iftimestoodstill.net/ ) and Bijan Sabet (“Mr. USA film”: http://bijansabet.com/ ) have the least to worry about.
I’m okay-ish.
LOL…Unless the vast dusty piles of negatives on my desk suddenly melt.
🙂
Thanks for the reference, and the vote of confidence Peter.
I’ve often thought about this…like what if there was a massive and properly placed EMP pulse one day? (GoldenEye style…)
Sure, it’s the stuff of Science Fiction…but probably the most certain way to incapacitate our modern-day society.
Imagine the outcome…we would literally BE back in the dark ages.
On a much more finite scale, a neighbor of ours recently replaced her computer, and had her iPhone stolen. Because she didn’t have a recent sync, her entire life was basically lost.
Back up your data! (…And steer clear of secret Soviet-era satellites!!!)
-M.
Mark, was that neighbour (note the proper Canadian spelling) of yours… you?
Of course digital prints will not be lost, nor printed out important emails and other documents… at least not by the same cause.
True. Printing anything adds a layer of security beyond digital 1s and 0s.
Nothing lasts forever.
For the record I am not concerned about losing my images — not because I don’t think it can happen (I certainly do) — because as Antonio quite correctly points out, nothing lasts forever.
In fact, I’m even more lackadaisical about this than most people would suspect. My friend Nick admonishes me for never saving my RAW files (I don’t). All the images I’ve ever created and processed are saved as final JPGs and the original RAW files are deleted… I have no way of going back.
Of course he is right. Pretty much every paper and project I did in College is effectively lost because its not worth the effort to find the 5.25″ floppy drive necessary to recover them. I expect that data and images in the cloud will continue to exist (barring an event that takes down the internet), but the original creators will loose track of it. Centuries from now historians may be able to access it, but without any of the context that helps them piece together the past.
Vint Cerf, a “father of the internet”, says he is worried that all the images and documents we have been saving on computers will eventually be lost.
It sounds childish. Like a kind of cataclysm prediction.
Of course they will be one day as readable as vinyls today.
So what.