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I think a distinction needs to be made between “risk” and “potential inconvenience”. Given that there are free, open source implementations of the JPEG 2000 de
by simondotau 4y ago
I think a distinction needs to be made between “risk” and “potential inconvenience”.
Given that there are free, open source implementations of the JPEG 2000 decoder, There is no plausible preservation risk. Even if, in 150 years, the contemporary version of ImageMagick has dropped support for JPEG 2000, it would be relatively trivial to spin up an ancient virtual machine and run a 100-year-old version of Linux.
Or, you know, pay an intern to port some old code to whatever modern language they’re using then. Rust, probably.
- simonh 4y agoThe article addresses this. The open source implementations are not complete so there are compliant files they cannot render. Also they have rendering bugs which mean some content does not render properly, and worse some files they generate render fine now, but are not compliant and if the code is fixed those portions of the files may stop rendering correctly. Some of these issues only manifest at particular zoom levels, so you are never be sure what you are seeing is correct. This us all part of the problem with the spec being so complex.
- usrn 4y agoSoftware rots man. It can be really hard to run some open source software from the 80s and 90s. This is actually one of the big arguments for Open Source: Access to the software is way less interesting than the support/community/ecosystem around it; there's no reason not to open source your software and not doing it actually harms the users.
- dagmx 4y agoYeah, Pixar literally had to spin up VMs of their old software stack when they had to remaster the Toy Story films because it was less work than getting it running again on their current stack
- simondotau 4y agoActually, it seems to me VMs are an ideal way to preserve things like that. Perhaps it should be standard procedure for the archivists of such big films to build and preserve a fully functioning, self-sufficient rendering environment in the form of a virtual machine.
- tgv 4y agoUntil we switch to another architecture. It's pretty likely the x86 architecture will be gone in a few decades. Rebuilding VM software to run on new hardware is probably harder than fixing bugs in a JPEG decoder.
- adrianN 4y agoBut you only have to rebuild the VM software once to get access to all kinds of software that ran on that architecture.
- fragmede 4y agoA few decades? The IBM System/360 architecture is still being shipped, and that first shipped in 1965!
- tgv 4y agoNobody ships a PDP11 or VAX anymore. 6809? 6502? I think even the one ubiquitous 8080 isn't being produced anymore. And when IBM falls, System/360 will also be gone. There will be a transition period in which everybody scrambles to convert their systems, but after that it's EOL.