Talk on LOCKSS Metadata Extraction at IIPC 2013

I gave a brief introduction to the way the LOCKSS daemon extracts metadata from the content it collects at the 2013 IIPC General Assembly. Below the fold is an edited text with links to the sources.

Talk on Harvesting the Future Web at IIPC2013

I gave a talk to introduce the workshop "Future Web Capture: Replay, Data Mining and Analysis" at the 2013 IIPC General Assembly. It was based on my talk at the Spring CNI meeting. Below the fold is an edited text with links to the sources.

Software obsolescence doesn't imply format obsolescence

Tim Anderson at The Register celebrates the 20^th anniversary of Mosaic:

Using the DOSBox emulator (the Megabuild version which has network connectivity via an emulated NE2000 NIC) I ran up Windows 3.11 with Trumpet Winsock and got Mosaic 1.0 running.

This illustrates two important points:

• Tim had no trouble resuscitating a 20-year-old software environment using off-the-shelf emulation.
• The 20-year-old browser struggled to make sense of today's web. But today's browsers have no difficulty at all with vintage web pages.

The fact that the software that originally interpreted the content is obsolete (a) does not meant that there is significant difficulty in running it, and (b) does not mean that you need to use emulation to run it in order to interpret the content, because the obsolescence of the software does not imply the obsolescence of the format. Backwards compatibility is a feature of the Web, for reasons I have been pointing out for many years.

Moore, Kryder vs. SAW

Ashish Sood et al's paper Predicting the Path of Technological Innovation: SAW vs. Moore, Bass, Gompertz, and Kryder is very interesting. They propose a discontinuous model in which technology evolves in steps, separated by periods of stasis they call waits, leading them to dub the model SAW (Step And Wait). They show that it models the evolution of a wide range of technologies better than continuous models such as Moore's and Kryder's laws. Our work on the economics of long-term storage is based on Kryder's law, a continuous model. Below the fold I ask whether we need to change models.

Making Memento Succesful

I gave a talk at the IIPC General Assembly on the problems facing Memento as it attempts the transition from a technology to a ubiquitous part of the Web's infrastructure. It was based on my earlier posts on Memento, my talk at the recent CNI and discussions with the Memento team, and intended to provide the background for subsequent talks from Herbert van de Sompel and Michael Nelson. Below the fold is an edited text with links to the sources.

It isn't just Kryder's Law

The drastic fall-off in PC shipments as demand switches to tablets isn't just affecting the prospects for Kryder's law reducing storage media costs, even for 2.5" drives:

PC sales are in terminal decline thanks to the continued popularity of tablets and there’s nothing an anticipated surge in ultramobiles can do to stop it.
...

Gartner has estimated that this year will see 2.4 billion devices shipped – that’s PCs, tablets and mobile phones combined – growing nine per cent over 2012.

...
The number of PCs sold in 2013 will fall 7.6 per cent compared to 2012, to 315 million units, with the only bright spot being ultramobiles, which will increase 140 per cent to 23 million units.

Tablet shipments will surge 69 per cent to 197 million units, while smartphones will make up an ever-increasing slice of the mobile phone pie. Of the 1.875 billion mobile phones Gartner predicts will be sold in 2013, a whopping 1 billion units are predicted to be smartphones, compared with 675 million units in 2012 (out of 1.746 billion).

 It is affecting the prospects for Moore's law reducing the costs of the servers that drive them:

But with memory prices stabilizing after years of double-digit drops, analysts said that DDR3 DRAM will likely have a longer-than-expected life, which could delay the wide adoption of DDR4 in computers. DRAM prices have stabilized as demand for DDR3 has exceeded supply, and the number of memory makers has also dwindled. ...

The volume shipments of PCs and servers are not enough to justify an early switch to DDR4, analysts said. Also, a lot of focus is now on the fast-growing tablet and smartphone markets, so manufacturers are shifting capacity to LPDDR3 and other forms of mobile memory and storage.

Notes from Spring 2013 CNI

Below the fold are some notes from the sessions I attended at the Spring 2013 CNI meeting.