Wow!

Simply amazing!

Globalization

Hat tip: Jim M.

Question: What is the truest definition of Globalization?

Answer: Princess Diana’s death.

Question: How come?

Answer: An English princess

with an Egyptian boyfriend

crashes in a French tunnel,

driving a German car

with a Dutch engine,

driven by a Belgian who was drunk

on Scottish whisky, (check the bottle before you change the spelling)

followed closely by Italian Paparazzi,

on Japanese motorcycles;

treated by an American doctor,

using Brazilian medicines.

This is sent to you by an American,

using Bill Gates’s technology,

and you’re probably reading this on your computer,

that uses Taiwanese chips,

and a Korean monitor,

assembled by Bangladeshi workers

in a Singapore plant,

transported by Indian lorry-drivers,

hijacked by Indonesians,

unloaded by Sicilian longshoremen,

and trucked to you by Mexican illegals…

That, my friends, is Globalization!

My monitor is Japanese, but…heh!

Internet Archive

A friend emailed me commenting about finding something he posted on the Web long ago:

I never imagined that it would still be available 10+ years later. I wonder if our blogs will always be available? Given the vastly distributed nature of the Net, it seems likely that our words will exist until earth doesn’t!

This immediately made me think of the Internet Archive, an interesting resource on the web that I hadn’t visited in a long time. From their “about” page:

The Internet Archive is a 501(c)(3) non-profit that was founded to build an “Internet library", with the purpose of offering permanent access for researchers, historians, and scholars to historical collections that exist in digital format. Founded in 1996 and located in the Presidio of San Francisco, the Archive has been receiving data donations from Alexa Internet and others. In late 1999, the organization started to grow to include more well-rounded collections. Now the Internet Archive includes texts, audio, moving images, and software as well as archived web pages in our collections.

Libraries exist to preserve society’s cultural artifacts and to provide access to them. If libraries are to continue to foster education and scholarship in this era of digital technology, it’s essential for them to extend those functions into the digital world.

Many early movies were recycled to recover the silver in the film. The Library of Alexandria — an ancient center of learning containing a copy of every book in the world — was eventually burned to the ground. Even now, at the turn of the 21st century, no comprehensive archives of television or radio programs exist.

But without cultural artifacts, civilization has no memory and no mechanism to learn from its successes and failures. And paradoxically, with the explosion of the Internet, we live in what Danny Hillis has referred to as our “digital dark age."

The Internet Archive is working to prevent the Internet — a new medium with major historical significance — and other “born-digital” materials from disappearing into the past. Collaborating with institutions including the Library of Congress and the Smithsonian, we are working to preserve a record for generations to come.

Open and free access to literature and other writings has long been considered essential to education and to the maintenance of an open society. Public and philanthropic enterprises have supported it through the ages.

The Internet Archive is opening its collections to researchers, historians, and scholars. The Archive has no vested interest in the discoveries of the users of its collections, nor is it a grant-making organization.

At present, the size of our Web collection is such that using it requires programming skills. However, we are hopeful about the development of tools and methods that will give the general public easy and meaningful access to our collective history. In addition to developing our own collections, we are working to promote the formation of other Internet libraries in the United States and elsewhere.

The Internet Archive started out with a simple idea: to take periodic “snapshots” of the world wide web — the whole thing — and preserve them for eternity. Add to that some search tools, and you’ve got yourself an interesting resource. From the above description, they’ve obviously expanded the scope of their mission.

Before the web, electronic communications were almost universally ephemeral. For ancient and venerable hackers like me, this means that anything we did in electronic form in the 1970s or 1980s is likely gone, and gone forever. Actually in my case there’s one shining exception: a Basic interpreter I wrote in the late 1970s ("Tarbell Basic") has been “rescued” by depraved hobbyists, and the source code is posted now on the web. But that’s very much an exception — all the other things that I did are gone, so far as I know. Work on electronic media, where there are no scraps of paper left over, has this ability to just disappear.

The advent of the world wide web, though, changes things considerably; these changes are aided by cheap storage media. The Internet Archive now has 55 billion pages stored. If I estimate that each page averages 100 kilobytes (including photos, etc.), then that requires a total of 5.5 terabytes to store (without considering compression possibilities). I have over 3 terabytes of storage in my home office (I know, I’m not normal!). I won’t call that a trivial amount of storage, but it’s certainly not expensive — well under $10,000. Think about that for a moment: for under $10,000, anyone could buy enough storage to keep a history of the entire world wide web. Amazing!

But back to my friend’s question… I looked up “www.jamulblog.com” in the Internet Archive, and they did have a few pages archived — but only a very few, and quite old. I’ve submitted a request for them to archive my blog, but a notice I read makes me suspect it won’t work — it seems the Internet Archive won’t attempt to archive “live” sorts of pages. I suspect this exclusion was forced upon them by blogs — especially machine-generated spam blogs, which generate millions of new (and completely worthless) pages every day, just for the purpose of getting Google hits and displaying some ads.

I hate spammers, almost as much as I hate ground squirrels. But at least I can shoot the damned ground sqiurrels!