“We have a lot of optimistic engineers – but not enough pessimistic engineers,” reckons David Rosenthal. In the 1980s, Rosenthal designed the NeWS windowing system with James Gosling. In the 1990s he was NVidia’s fourth employee, or really the first person the three co-founders hired. But for the past few years Rosenthal has been tackling an issue that’s very close to Register readers’ hearts – we know from your mail.
On Monday we discussed the permanence of digital media – or more accurately, the lack of it in our story, Digital memories: we can forget them for you wholesale!. Why should any of us trust our family albums to digital media such as a web photo service when we can’t guarantee it’ll be around?
In this age of wiki-fiddlers and other careless coders, where the line between marketing hypester and developer has been blurred, the premium that’s placed on data integrity seems to be at an all time low. And the lossiest seem to work in “web services”. Uh, look out!