RE: [Leica] paperless???

["Kotsinadelis, Peter (Peter)" <peterk@lucent.com>]

Anthony,

You are speaking to a group that thinks a camera design from 1954 is all the
rage.  Did you think they would embrace the future and a digital world?  I
wonder how many still don;t think color television has been perfected yet?

Peter K
(former Pest in the Ant's Nest better known as the LUG.  Watch out, they all
have RAID)

> ----------
> From: 	Anthony Atkielski[SMTP:anthony@atkielski.com]
> Reply To: 	leica-users@mejac.palo-alto.ca.us
> Sent: 	Tuesday, October 12, 1999 2:45 AM
> To: 	leica-users@mejac.palo-alto.ca.us
> Subject: 	Re: [Leica] paperless???
> 
> 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
> 
>