DiscMaster is a new website that is sifting through the CDs and floppy disks in the Internet Archive and making it all into a searchable database. Even more incredibly, it’s taking all of the old file formats and making them viewable in a browser. As of this writing, the archive represents more than 7,000 CDs and 11 million files.
One of the most difficult parts of looking through old files is the formats. In the early Wild West days of the online world there were no standardized file formats, no set way to render a video, no agreed upon audio codec, and no single way to render text.
While it may be easier in general to watch a random video, listen to a random sound file, or view a random document on the modern Internet, it’s not as though there’s a single solution to these problems. I’m sure I could name multiple video, audio, and text formats that are in active use today. The problem isn’t the variety of formats, but the accessibility of tools to read them, which the tool referenced in the article is literally trying to address. The article is good overall, but I took some exception to this particular premise.
I don’t think having the Internet would’ve prevented Apple Corp from turning into the clusterfuck it did. It probably would’ve happened much sooner. Because the Suits still want to exploit the Artists for profit; it’s just that nowadays, more and more Artists seem to’ve learned to TCB on their own in order to control their output. But some have become Suits, and more and more Suits are sympathetic to Artists.
CRD is great for this kind of stuff. He does a good job of placing these things in their proper context, and demonstrating them where he can. There were a fair number of these items that I wasn’t previously even aware existed, like the Polaroid Palette.
The modern version of this is a Switch. I documented one way back in the day. I imagine they are smaller now, but even though electronics in general were smaller at the time, the Switch was the size of 7 refrigerators.
so this is probably the most appropriate thread to put this in.
this morning while I was still having my coffee, I was replying to an email from my Gmail account. I wrote for the recipient to refer to a picture and went up to click the paperclip icon to attach the picture. I pressed it and everything disappeared.
I went back to the email and it said it was sent.
this is the type of paperclip that I clicked:
skeuomorph fail. I mean, ok, I clicked the wrong thing, but damn, use an airplane icon for “send” if you want, but isn’t using a paper airplane mixing metaphors?
