Ferrari Mailing List: Re: Best car I've driven (A.K.A. Old man rambling on Tuesday)

[Hans E. Hansen (FList]

I've heard of many "oops" moments in modern family photography where
important events were saved from camera to computer hard drive.  Computer
crashes, images lost.  Many people do not do adequate backups of their
digital photos.  My recent trip to Italy resides on the hard drives of 4
computers plus several CDs.  And I'm still paranoid of losing them.  I
guess I could go for archiving online, but the images are many gigabytes.

Hans.

On Wed, Dec 3, 2008 at 12:29 PM, Rick Lindsay <rolindsay [at] yahoo.com> wrote:
> A corollary to this thought is photography.  We can still view ancient 
> tin-type photographs today - but will we be able to read CD-ROMs in 100 
> years?  Yes, the CD may still be viable but will there be hardware to read 
> it?  Almost certainly not.  There are lots of proprietary-format NASA video 
> tapes documenting Mercury, Gemini and Apollo but there is only ONE remaining, 
> operable player for that media!  And that was 50 years ago.  Or witness 
> magnetic audio tape; reel-to-reel, 4-track (yes, FOUR track, preceding 
> 8-track), 8-track, cassette and music CDs.  Already solid-state memory and 
> iPOD-like devices are making even the 100-year-shelf-life CD obsolete.  I 
> predict that our personal photographic history will become the stuff of 
> legends.
>
> regards,
>
> rick
>
>> From: Michael James
>
>> Most of your modern Automotive advances have been
>> Electronic, not entirely mechanical - which, I predict, will
>> all have a very-poor shelf-life.  Imagine trying to repair
>> and source-parts for Ferrari's F1 paddleshift
>> transmissions two decades from now - forget it.  Most
>> electronic-assist machines will be inoperable in 20-30 years
>> simply because automotive electronics do not age well, are
>> disposable/proprietary in the eyes of OEM suppliers, and
>> difficult if not outright impossible for shade-tree
>> mechanics to reverse-engineer without a Masters in Computer
>> Engineering.  Coupled with the dwindling talent pool if
>> REAL automotive mechanics, and most of the newer cars will
>> be forever parked when their ECUs and other electronic
>> engine-management doo-dads fail.
>>
>> M
>
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