I really fail to see the point of this article. Is there really any difference between a messy desk full of letters, pictures ect. and a messy computer containing old text messages, jpeg's, pdf's and gif's? People seem to endow havoc on their computers with a certain mystical quality when in fact it's root cause is the same old mundane stuff that has been causing havoc in their everyday lives for years.
Hey folks take the time to get organized, clean out your desk or should I say directories. No big deal! There are some great archiving tools out their; learn how to use them. And as much as I have virtually no respect for lawyers when it comes to deriving a worthwhile syllogism (yeah I know join the club) most are able to use a word processor. I think you really could have asked Steve Wozniak something a little more mentally scintillating than how to keep your computer tidy. How bout something in regards to a nifteee compression algorithm.
This article raises a serious debate that society is not talking about. This really just offer a different dimension to the internet. Because the question is, who becomes the owner of your material or even your email address when you pass on. Is it your family or the company that you sign up with? I felt this article is just the tip of the iceberg of the kind of moral and legal debate you will see emerge in the near future.
Toronto
This is the mildest of admonitions to Georgie Binks, and The Walrus editorial staff, but give Steve Wozniak his due: rather than the 'iDead', I'm sure he would have hit the market sweetspot with the 'iMortal'.
Ms Binks:
Two points, about the same thing, sort of.
A long time ago I read an interesting booked titled,'The Great Mambo Chicken And The Trans-Human Condition' which posits (amongst many other things) that given we are ourselves binary machines (synaptically-speaking), perhaps we might one day actually be able to 'upload' ourselves onto a computer hard drive. Interesting, that.
This brings me to the second point. Having information, any information stored on a computer doesn't necessarily mean anyone will be able to access, let alone understand it in the future. Consider the availability, or future unavailability, of software capable of decoding the bytes contained therein. No interpretive software makes for useless, informationless files.
Consider too, the hardware, the fact that if your manuscript is on 3.5" floppies it is almost undecipherable already, and if it's on 5" floppies, well it's as good as unreadable.
Old software never dies, it just gets put in a drawer and never gets used again; existing in perpetuity forever waiting for activation.
A genie on a hard drive.
Although don't tell the cheating-husband friend of yours, liars deserve everything they get.
George Dudley Warbeck
Oakville, ON
George has it right.
My 200 year old grandfather clock still keeps the time and my Dad's gramophone still winds up and plays 78's. On a good day the 8mm projector entertains us with my husband learning to walk, but our technological churn rate is so much faster now. Not sure my information overloaded descendants will want to access my carefully archived 'gold' DVDs.
Suspect their idea of dream job may be one that does not require a computer.
Wendy
www.askaround.ca
