Data Formats
One of my dad’s hobbies was photography. Apart from regular photos, he did trick photos and even had a slide projector for slide shows (today’s equivalent technology for that is a Power Point presentation of digital pics projected onto a giant screen). One thing he didn’t do though was to create videos. Camcorders hadn’t come to the market at that stage, I guess. Notice what’s the common theme in the above paragraph? Apart from creating memories, that is? The answer: obsolescence. Camera rolls, analog cameras, slide projectors, camcorders: all dead or dieing or very niche. But nowadays even the format in which content is stored becomes obsolete at unbelievable speed. In the book, This is Not the End of the Book , Jean-Claude Carrière talks about the transition from video to CD-ROM to MP3/MP4’s to streaming (video on demand via the Net): “It may seem as if I’m talking about things that changed over a very long time-span, a matter of centuries. But all this has taken place i...