(no subject)

[avevale_intelligencer]

Apparently Bill Gates has made a speech somewhere in which he confidently stated that CDs and DVDs are obsolete, and furthermore, that there will be no new physical storage medium to supplant them. He is of the opinion that from now on all music and video will be made available on the net and downloaded straight to people's hard drives via high speed broadband or DSL or whatever. He sees a future in which all our entertainment needs will be provided through the house computer. It seems that his audience thought this was wonderful news.

I admit that I used to think along those lines, back in the days when I thought that, say, being a gypsy was kind of a neat way to live, or that houseboats were a fun idea. I've grown up since. I'm sure Mr Gates is licking his chops at the thought of the future he describes, with everyone absolutely dependent for their entertainment on his software; and I'm also sure that the new version due to be unveiled any year now will provide Microsoft with even more of a stranglehold on our computers, and thus our lives. Let me conjure up an extreme scenario. Mr A, five or ten years from now, has a PC running Windows Second Week In August 2009, or whatever, and gets all his radio, TV, music and video recordings, games and so on online. He doesn't own a single CD, DVD, videotape or cassette, and boy is his house tidy. He's gradually converting all his books to ebooks and clearing the shelves. Then, one night in a fit of frustration at having had to reinstall Windows Just After Lunchtime On Saturday yet again, he mentions in an email to a friend the noticeable resemblance between Microsoft's products and a large pile of poo. Next morning his PC won't boot, Microsoft Technical Support have barred his number, and he has NOTHING. Some text-scanning robot has noted his opprobrious comment and applied an automatic procedure hidden in the software somewhere.

I said it was an extreme scenario. I don't think Gates would be allowed to get away with that kind of stunt (thougb I'm hard put to it to think who would stop him). But the old adage about eggs and baskets applies here. Diversity is good. Redundancy is better. Why have a dog and bark yourself, you might say? What happens when the dog gets laryngitis? So I am hoping that Mr Gates' golden future will keep its distance for a while longer, and while I shall continue to download things off the net, I don't consider I actually have them till I've got the shiny beermat in its pretty box on my shelf. If I can't see it and touch it, it could disappear at any moment. Besides, I'm a magpie. I like collecting things.

Thoughts?

Comments

[keristor.livejournal.com]

There's another point too, which is even more important -- survival of data. I have a number of books which were printed well before I was born, I bet you and most other readers have similar (if not older). Modern media has a planned life of at most a few decades, and that's physical life, never mind the fact that Word 2000 can't even read Word files from 10 years before because all the formats have changed. It depends on backups, and even the adherrents of the "put everything on CD/DVD" school say that you will have to not only back up but also change the format of your data every 10 years or so to the new versions.

Civilisation -- real civilisation, not just "the art of living in cities" (and we don't even seem to do that too happily) -- has depended and does depend on time-binding, learning from past generations. It's what distinguishes us from (most of) the animals, we can look at picures and tell the stories about our ancestors hundreds of years ago and learn from them. If your family photos have a lifetime of only decades, what will the next generation see?

There's another aspect, too. Gates's empire is built around constant 'upgrades'. To an extent this is inevitable, technology changes and sometimes it even gets better. However, a lot of the music industry is also built around 'upgrades' -- the latest cover of a song, rereleases "tidied up" and "remastered", etc. Again, this is not always a bad thing -- until they start changing the material. Do it with books, and, well, a few words might be 'upgraded' each time, until you have "Thou shalt commit adultery" and "Three Hundred and Seven years ago our ancestors said that we should all be slaves". Just a few 'upgrades', rendering things in "modern language" a few times, perhaps, and Hamlet's speach might be "To be loyal to my country, or to be a traitor, that is the question; whether it will pay more to suffer a bit of hardship to thwart the terrorists or to oppose my democratically elected government..."