Even today we can try to make some sense of ancient civilisations from small chapters and pages of words and stories written 1000 years ago. Can only image what will be left of the current
/next generation of history in another 1000 years.
In Australia, if the PM or govt department posts something it generally gets stored in the NAA or the state equivalent. They have the same issues about media but also business systems. Like can you imagine needing to reverse engineer a database from the 80s that runs on an obscure database to convert it to something readable? The paper/physical stuff at least has 50 years of experience in working out how to deal with mold, light degradation etc. Library/Archiving now requires much more computer science than ever. If experts are struggling with these smaller sets, I can't imagine doing it with the amount of media we now.
For DVDs in Australia, the ACCC ruled that region locking is illegal and so players sold in Australia either have to be region 0 (so can play all DVDs) or they need to provide the code to change it to Region 0.
It still depends on the Manufacturer since some don't actually care what the ACCC says. Big W will sell you an unlocked DVD player for like $37 though.
Even today we can try to make some sense of ancient civilisations from small chapters and pages of words and stories written 1000 years ago. Can only image what will be left of the current
/next generation of history in another 1000 years.
Great article!
There is the Internet Archive https://archive.org/about/ and the Archive Team https://wiki.archiveteam.org/ that do that kind of work.
Specifically Just Solve the File Format Problem about preventing the loss of data stored in obsolete file formats. http://fileformats.archiveteam.org/
In Australia, if the PM or govt department posts something it generally gets stored in the NAA or the state equivalent. They have the same issues about media but also business systems. Like can you imagine needing to reverse engineer a database from the 80s that runs on an obscure database to convert it to something readable? The paper/physical stuff at least has 50 years of experience in working out how to deal with mold, light degradation etc. Library/Archiving now requires much more computer science than ever. If experts are struggling with these smaller sets, I can't imagine doing it with the amount of media we now.
For DVDs in Australia, the ACCC ruled that region locking is illegal and so players sold in Australia either have to be region 0 (so can play all DVDs) or they need to provide the code to change it to Region 0.
I actually didn't know that the ACCC had done that! Hot diggety dog, maybe I'll try to import that movie after all. There's some on eBay, I think.
It still depends on the Manufacturer since some don't actually care what the ACCC says. Big W will sell you an unlocked DVD player for like $37 though.