Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 1999/10/12
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]From: <Summicron1@aol.com> Sent: Tuesday, October 12, 1999 03:20 Subject: [Leica] paperless??? > Anthony, you're a nice guy but this is like shooting > fish in a barrel. Appearances can be deceiving. I've been dismantling arguments like this against digital for years. It's easy to do when most of these arguments have nothing at all to do with digital technology. Most people don't know what "digital" really means, and have no notions of information theory at all, and so their attempts to "prove" that digital is somehow inferior or unworkable invariably fail. It's just a matter of illustrating the fallacies in their arguments. I shall demonstrate: > No you won't. Yes, you will. It has been happening for the past fifty years or so; it's not going to stop happening now. > A Zip disk, and even rewritable CD technology, is not archival. You don't need "archival" media for digital images, because digital images can be copied any number of times without loss. You only need archival media when ever copy introduces a degradation of the image, and this happens only for analog representations, such as film, in which the medium and the information recorded thereon are one and the same. Digital images are independent of the medium upon which they are recorded. This being so, the rest of your argument along these lines is irrelevant. > Any stray electron coming along can screw up the whole works. Virtually no medium used for digital storage is vulnerable to single, stray electrons, so your statement here is incorrect. However, virtually all analog media are vulnerable to such things, because _any_ change in the medium is a degradation, whereas degradations in media used for digital storage are unimportant as long as the digital information can still be read. Again, this derives from the fact that digital representations are independent of the media upon which they are stored, whereas analog representations are not. > uh, slip it into what disk drive? All the 5.25 drives I see > are on 286 and 386 computers at the local thrift store. If you have important information on 5.25-inch diskette drives, then you will either keep a PC around with 5.25-inch drives on it so that you can read them whenever you need to, or you will copy the diskettes to another medium before discarding the equipment needed to read them. You assume that people will keep essential information on obsolete media and then throw out the equipment they need to read those media, which doesn't make sense at all. If you had undeveloped but exposed film in your refrigerator, and for some reason Kodak and other companies suddenly and permanently halted production of developer for the film, would you throw out your last and only batch of developer without developing the film and then complain that film was not an appropriate medium for storing pictures because developer so rapidly became unavailable? That's exactly the same reasoning you are trying to use here in the case of digital imaging. And, as I said, it doesn't make sense. Furthermore, as you yourself point out, 5.25-inch drives are readily available in older computers, which can be had for a song. You can even remove the drives from these computers and install them in new computers. So where's the problem? > In a year, they won't be available any more anywhere. Since they are already 13 years old, I daresay that they will still be around next year, too. > Tell you what, anthony, give me your mailing address and I > will send you an 8-track tape. Your job will be to listen > to it, somehow. Maybe you can make some enlargements of my Disc film shots for me at the same time, eh? Actually, I never used Disc film or 8-track tapes, because both were clearly inferior technologies that were not destined to succeed over the long term. I've never used Mini Discs or quadraphonic LPs, either. > Silver, on the other hand, properly fixed in gelatin, on a copper > plate or on glass, washed and chemically inert, has been sitting > around for 160 years and counting. I'm not impressed. If you want an example of digital recordings with very long lives, visit your local library. Some digital recordings, such as the Dead Sea Scrolls, have been around for thousands of years, and unlike analog recordings of similar age, the information contained in the digital recordings has not been corrupted over time. -- Anthony