[K12OSN] Making K12LTSP 'school friendly'

[Les Mikesell]

On Wed, 2005-02-09 at 09:28, Julius Szelagiewicz wrote:
> Les,
>  you are so optimistic, so into the bright future :-)
> 
> I've got some 40+ years old computer tapes. Want to read them and tell me
> what they contain?

If the contents mattered, you could easily have copied them every 10
years onto media that cost 10% of the previous iteration and takes
10% of the space.  I'd venture a guess that all the tapes you've
saved wouldn't fill a 5 gig DVD that costs about a dollar today.  And
if you had it on a DVD now, the next copy would only take a few
minutes.  

>  Clay tablets survived in readable form more than 400
> generations. We have computerized data that can not be read within the
> same generation!

Only a few tablets have survived that long - generally everything
degrades eventually.  Would you rather fund the next generation of
scribes to chisel away or just put your ipod on it's base and have
60 gigs (this generation) squirt over the firewire automatically
for a new, non-degraded copy.  If there is an argument here it
is against the technology of the bad old days when we didn't have
cross-platform networking.  

>  Books will be remembered as biodegradable nmatter (take a
> look at perfevctly preserved newsprint in the landfill - 4 generations),
> computers may get forgotten because they require a functioning
> infrastructure specifically geared to the technology, and technology
> changes quickly.

If people don't bother with the (now) easy process of copying data
from technology on its way out to the currently cheaper replacement,
it is probably because no one wanted the content.  I've kept about
everything I've typed into a computer since the early 80's (haven't
bothered with the CD->DVD step for the really old stuff yet...) but
I can't find notes I wrote on a paper a week ago.   There is a
danger in non-standard data formats, but those can be avoided.  In
fact it would be good if cross-platform computer use in education
made that issue obvious to everyone.

-- 
  Les Mikesell
   les at futuresource.com