Comments on: States struggling to deal with digital documents

Minnesota has followed Massachusetts with a bill to adopt open formats, but most states have yet to tackle digital archives.

[mcepat]

open formats of documents

What about the databases that will store these documents? Will they be open too?

open office docs stored in oracle database

seems very open ):

[markdoiron]

Two Problems for Everyone

There are two problems for everyone who stores valuable data as 0s and 1s (yes, the states, businesses, fed's, you, your mom and your kids).

1. Digital formats. It's silly to use anything that isn't a "defacto" standard. .jpg works. .mp3 works. Because of the availability of filters, .doc works (except for that temporary silliness with word 95 a while back), though I'd say "here-here!" to MS opening this up to everyone to use.

2. Media. There will be more loss of valuable 0s and 1s because of media incompatibilties and/or inabilities to retrieve from archaic medias than because of digital formats. Someone will always be bright enough to write filter software for archaic file formats. But no one will make hardware to support archaic storage media. This was a problem in analog days, remains so today, and will continue to be so in the future.

mark d.

[kquickkquick]

Solved

Hardware Emulation is the key to solving the hardware obsolescence problem. Hardware emulation is easy and very effective as is evidenced by orgs like the Amiga users group.
A technology for storing binary files on microfilm that was recently developed and patented by ACS, Inc. solves the media obsolescense problem for 500+ years.
This has been solved.