Need some email/colo service -- recommedations?

[david at thekramers.net (David Kramer)]

On Tuesday 02 March 2004 11:28 am, Chris Devers wrote:
> I'd just *love* to know what historians will think of this era 500 or 1000
> years from now. On one hand, we seem to be accumulating data more
> voraciously than any previous generation; on the other hand, we're storing
> almost all of it in formats that we can't guarantee will be around just a
> few decades from now, nevermind centuries.
>
> Is anyone interested in transferring all this stuff over to whatever will
> happen to be the hip new format 30 or 60 years from now? I doubt it.

I beg to differ.  In the past, when things were stored on big metal shells 
holding very thin slices of dead trees, the data was in a format that was 
universally readable no matter what technology came along, but you couldn't 
make a perfect copy of it, certainly not multigenerational ones.

Now that data is stored digitally, if your data is important enough, you could 
copy it every year onto fresh media for decades, and the copy your 
granddaughter makes will hold exactly the same data that you stored.

Remember that, yes, data/storage formats change, but it's not like Bush, 
Cheney, and Rumsfeld get together and mandate that nobody can use DAT tapes 
anymore.  There's always years of overlap where you have plenty of 
opportunity to copy the data over to the new format if it's still that 
important.

Case-in-point: I was an early adoptor of PDA's with serial ports.  I owned a 
crappy old Casio Boss; the cheapest unit that offered that.  But there is 
currently data on my Linux-based PDA that started out on that Casio BOSS (I 
know which data because it's all upper-case), ported to my HP-100LX, ported 
to my Psion 5mx, then ported to my Zaurus.  From the HP-100LX on, I was able 
to port the email addresses to my pine address book, and from the Zaurus I'm 
now also outputting to KMail.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------
DDDD   David Kramer         david at thekramers.net       http://thekramers.net
DK KD  Remember that you write code for three audiences:
DKK D  The computer, for whom it must be correct, your muse, for which it 
DK KD  it must be elegant, and the poor schmuck who has to modify it, 
DDDD   for whom it must be comprehensible.           Daniel R. Killoran,Ph.D