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Hey Frank, thanks for reblogging Tantek's interview.

Just wanted to clear up one thing... "writing in the sand" is really about putting data into proprietary formats, or formats whose specifications are not made open or "free". Think about floppy disks... in a couple years it'll be harder and harder to get floppy disk drives (especially the bigger 5.25 disks!) and as such, if the specs for how to read those disks are proprietary, the data stored on them will never be able to be retrieved... hence, it's like building sandcastles or writing in sand... when CDs or DVDs become the de facto standard, all data stored on that old media will essentially be lost or wiped out.

Make sense?

Posted by: Chris Messina | Sunday, January 13, 2008 at 03:08 PM

Hi Chris,

Yes that makes sense. I appreciate you taking the time to clarify. I attempted to say that in the post but I guess the words "wiped out" really should have been "irretrievable" so I made the tweak in the post. I appreciate your help and thanks for producing the video. ;)

Posted by: Frank | Sunday, January 13, 2008 at 04:07 PM

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[Chris Messina]

Hey Frank, thanks for reblogging Tantek's interview.

Just wanted to clear up one thing... "writing in the sand" is really about putting data into proprietary formats, or formats whose specifications are not made open or "free". Think about floppy disks... in a couple years it'll be harder and harder to get floppy disk drives (especially the bigger 5.25 disks!) and as such, if the specs for how to read those disks are proprietary, the data stored on them will never be able to be retrieved... hence, it's like building sandcastles or writing in sand... when CDs or DVDs become the de facto standard, all data stored on that old media will essentially be lost or wiped out.

Make sense?

[Frank]

Hi Chris,

Yes that makes sense. I appreciate you taking the time to clarify. I attempted to say that in the post but I guess the words "wiped out" really should have been "irretrievable" so I made the tweak in the post. I appreciate your help and thanks for producing the video. ;)