[iDC] Shelf-life

[Fatima Lasay]

Trebor,

I checked my subscription, it says:

"We have received some recent bounces from your address. Your current 
bounce score is 14.0 out of a maximum of 25.0"

And I suspect the series of 'net prn' posts were rejected by my systems 
spam-filter. There might be a few others who have had the same problem and 
thus stopped getting postings from the list at that point.

Anyway, I checked the archives, and saw the shelf-life thread, and someone 
mentioned foss.

I have old archives of video in u-matic pal (we are ntsc in the Phils) and 
vhs pal, and the Film Institute no longer have the capacity to play them (I 
requested esp for digital transfer purpose). This is because analog (and 
esp the pal-systems) are no longer being supported by vendors here.

Digital has similar problems. At Queensland State library I asked about 
their digital library/preservation systems, talked to this very 
enthusiastic and efficient person who runs the system. One of their recent 
migration problems had to do with jpeg headers, in particular because 
Microsoft made some changes to their internet explorer browser, thus 
expansive changes had to be done to the jpeg files. I asked why he didn't 
change to foss browsers - he simply said we don't live in a perfect world. 
Funny. I suppose when someone in management says we all use Microsoft 
browsers, then it's hard to convince them of alternatives from the 
computing dept. In other places (like here) it is the 
vendor-trained/oriented programmer who says we use Microsoft or maybe foss.

Anyway, I thought the mention of foss had relevance, particularly vendor 
defined shelf-life.

I wrote a statement about standards and the artist's position at 
http://www.korakora.org/projects/node/228 - and has to do with the proposed 
fast-track adoption of Microsoft's OOXML as an ISO standard (in addition to 
OpenDocument Format, which is alsoready ISO/IEC 26300). I think the US 
voted yes in the first ISO meeting and there will be a ballot resolution 
meeting in Feb next year.

The Philippines voted no without comment (which is odd because comments are 
mandatory, since the ISO process is supposed to address technical 
improvement in the specification). So now Microsoft and CompTIA are trying 
to persuade a change in our vote (as they are doing in other countries that 
voted no). There are numerous reasons why OOXML should not be a standard 
until it addresses voluminous comments on its specs, plus, we can't trust 
Microsoft at all with their anti-competitive behavior.

I thought there might be people here involved in these issues, to see how 
their national standards offices are dealing with standards, the adoption 
of ODF for example is one. And if there are difficulties because of 
blackmail, propaganda, etc. by US-vendor (i.e. Microsoft)?

This is in addition to issues of media physical longevity as previously noted.


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