Oct 0828
Whitney Houston sings “Where do broken hearts go?” Me, I have often wondered what becomes of broken or lost Web pages — you know, the URLs that used to work but now display a 404 or file not found error. Are these pages deleted from the servers? Or have they just been unlinked? And what do I do if I really need the information and it’s now gone?
You’ll be glad to know that there is a whole movement devoted to changing the content of the Internet from ephemera to artifacts. Internet libraries are springing up everywhere to catalog and preserve Web pages, images, even audio and video files.
The largest (I think) Internet Library is the Internet Archive, a “nonprofit organization dedicated to building and maintaining a free and openly accessible online digital library, including an archive of Web.” The archive is a collection of snapshots of Web pages from the around the world, taken at various points in time. Read the rest of this entry
Jul 0801
This topic is certainly not new. In fact, I first read about it many years ago, didn’t really believe it, but I must have filed the info in the old brain drive.
Last week, I went to pick up my son from his preschool. As soon as I walked in, the preschool Director came up to me, surprisingly calm for the news she was about to deliver. She said “My computer won’t boot ever since the power outage last week. Can you help?” She had a back-up of her work, but it was not current. (Rule number one: keep a current back-up of your PC and network.)
I told my husband, the “real techie in the family,” about the dead computer and he agreed to look at it. The prognosis was not good. The machine would not even recognize the drive, which was clicking sadly away. A senior network administrator came up with the same, bad news. Diagnostic tests would not revive the hard drive, either.
I was resigned to tell the preschool Director the sad news, when I remembered the urban legend about putting a dead drive in the freezer to revive it. I told my husband, who looked at me funny, but heck, we had nothing to lose.
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