¡Descarga Data Migration and Standardization in Computing: A Call for Open Data Interchange Formats y más Apuntes en PDF de Informática solo en Docsity! FSTV SSTV FAX RTTY PACKET AMTOR OSCAR FM REPEATERS MICROWAVE AND LOTS MORE! pat ib le, except by resorting to lowest-common-denominator user interfaces and st icking by a 640K memory model. Even then, it's never really certain that the program that runs on my PC will run on the PC next door-and getting it to print properly on the system next door is well nigh out of the question . So , what wil l become of those 60 million PC 's, plus the Macs , Am igas, Ataris, and so on? It's sad, but hu manity has been down this road be fore, and we find that horse carts, though they were once as abundant proportionally, simply aren't permit ted on the freeway. Those computers aren't go ing to make it either, though some, notab ly the DOS PC, may well hang on for a long wh ile as windows in some POSIX-OS /2-Windows-DOS Sparc -Mac-PC-Amiga mach ine of the future. (After all, if it were worth the trouble, it wo uldn't be all that hard to simulate an Apple or Commodore 64 of seven years ago on a 486 PC, high-end Mac, or high-end Amiga faster than real timet) And that raises what shou ld be the hottest issue of all, something far more important than ranting and rav ing over doomed PC's versus doomed Macs versus doomed Amigas . The issue is our own data, which we must somehow get out of that DOS window and onto that ma chine of the future-to say noth ing of moving it from one application to an other or to a supercomputer. We have allowed much of our data, en tered laboriously and at tremendous expense , to become embodied in files that are formatted in obtuse, se cret , and unstandardized ways . It is high time that the software manufacturers who practice this are forced to change . They are in effect thieves who have sto len from us what is rightfu lly our property. It is time to insist that all software that we buy have the capabi lity to disgorge our data in full, including such thing s as the coordinates of graphical objects, in an open, pub lished -data-inter change format. As a symbolic dis couragement to theft and extortion by software manufacturers, and to al low third partie s to assist in retrieving the stolen property without fear of lit igat ion, it is t ime to amend the copyright law to explicitly perm it re verse engineering in any program that stores output but won 't provide it in an open format, irrespective of any COMPUTER CLASHES CONTINUED I really do think that Mr. Cheng 's comments in the April " Letters" co l umn went a bit far-and so did Mr. Holtzman 's rep ly. The ent ire ex change brings to mind the old tale about the blind man and the elephant ; it really is tough to discern the big picture through all the fog . As one who has programmed extensively for 80X86 PC's, Am igas, and other com puters , I have more comments than I can fit in a reasonably sized letter. A few wi ll have to do . First , on standardization: As Mr. Holtzman pointed out, the desirable part about standardization is that it facilitates communication. There are two flip sides . One is that many soft ware (as well as hardwa re) supp liers don 't want communication . Supp liers of programs for CAD and music scor ing are especially notorious-they want you locked in tight. The second is that standards are often ages out of date-witness the NTSC te levi sion standard-to the point of st ifling innovation. The niche machines are a paradox. They owe their existence to the fact that in one important sense they are more standardized than PC's . No two PC's are alike, even in suc h funda menta ls as memory organization, vid eo graph ics layout, and interr upt organ ization . As we all know, that causes no end of prob lems . Within the CP U itse lf, the inst ruction set is an unstandardized chaos, havinq on the order of a thousand ind ivid ual qu irks . Even the largest. best-cap italized organ izations have been able to cope with that , so that compiled code tends to be a wretchedly sub optimal joke. The lessons of the old mainframes have yet to be learned. The upshot is that th ings that aren't done often enough to support multi billion-dollar software companies are often best done on niche machines, especially if speed , large memory, or a GUI is desired, or interrupts are needed. 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