Chad Smith wrote:
On 10/28/05, Ian Lynch <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Also vulnerable to catastrophic loss as in the libraries of Alexandria.
Difficult to have a complete back up of all the paper and be sure it
won't get destoyed by fire or flood.
But it's easy to do that to computers - right? Which could also be taken out
by electromagnetism or "extreme" temps like -10 or 200 F, or being dropped
to hard... And computers store a lot mroe info in a smaller space - so
losing one could be like losing a whole library of paper.
Multiple copies are needed to help prevent against such loses, no matter
what format it's in.
Copying machines are all over the place, as are printers.
-Chad Smith
You are so correct. Now this is where digital data is so powerful.
You make a digital copy. You purchase a few HD's and now you have
multiple copies. Burn some DVD's and more copies exist. And it is so
easy to make digital copies and store them all over the place. Try
that with books.
Reading in the news just today, both your beloved Microsoft and Google
are planning on scanning almost every document that they can get their
hands on. They are talking about petabytes of data.
PetaByte = 10^15Bytes
Giga = 10^9Bytes
1PetaByte = 1,000,000 GigaBytes.
I wonder how many buildings it would take to put all those books into.
It would take about 20,000 dual layer Blue-Ray DVD's to store 1
petabyte of data.
I prefer paper over digital data but electronic paper is coming out
and this will make it harder to decide.
Now as a researcher, I prefer to search through digital data as much
as possible. I can search 1000's of documents in seconds. Not
possible in paper.
Remember Microsofts Encarta (sp?)? One CD with almost a whole
encylepedia. Alot better than the two shelves that Britanicia used to
take. And alot cheaper to.
--
Robin Laing
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