Amazon.co.uk: Amazon Customer’s review of Bulletproof Ajax (Voices That Matter)
This is definitely the best review of any of my books.
Link archive: May 3rd, 2017
The Lost Picture Show: Hollywood Archivists Can’t Outpace Obsolescence - IEEE Spectrum
There are three parts to digital preservation: format, medium, and licensing. Film and television archives are struggling with all three.
Format:
Codecs—the software used to compress and decompress digital video files—keep changing, as do the hardware and software for playback.
Medium:
As each new generation of LTO comes to market, an older generation of LTO becomes obsolete. LTO manufacturers guarantee at most two generations of backward compatibility. What that means for film archivists with perhaps tens of thousands of LTO tapes on hand is that every few years they must invest millions of dollars in the latest format of tapes and drives and then migrate all the data on their older tapes—or risk losing access to the information altogether.
Licensing:
Studios didn’t see any revenue potential in their past work. They made money by selling movie tickets; absent the kind of follow-on markets that exist today, long-term archiving didn’t make sense economically.
It adds up to a potential cultural disaster:
If technology companies don’t come through with a long-term solution, it’s possible that humanity could lose a generation’s worth of filmmaking, or more.
Build a Better Monster: Morality, Machine Learning, and Mass Surveillance
So what happens when these tools for maximizing clicks and engagement creep into the political sphere?
This is a delicate question! If you concede that they work just as well for politics as for commerce, you’re inviting government oversight. If you claim they don’t work well at all, you’re telling advertisers they’re wasting their money.
Facebook and Google have tied themselves into pretzels over this.