for those who would make a difference
May 18, 2011
What is We First?
We First is a new way of looking at the world authored by Simon Mainwaring. It’s a personal and professional response to a sea of fears that surround us everyday.
February 4, 2011
When we look at the effects of technology on the future of our militaries we should remember that the past has shown that early adopters and pop media pundits will suffer from optimism bias and exaggerated both the pace and pervasiveness of changes in our society. For our part, our perceptions of the future will be shaped by military cultural and our risk adverse hierarchical environment. History has also shown there are no revolutionary technological changes, just the rapid evolution of those that exist.
The interface between man and machine will improve, allowing us to interact and assimilate information faster than ever. Culturally we will become knowledge nomads, global networkers and sifters of social media, taking threads of news, information and entertainment from the web and weaving it into our own personal data stream. These evolutionary jumps in technological will be fuelled by the symbioses of technology and culture and the paradox that the more technology affects culture the more it will be shaped by our expectations. With each technological advance we need to define and understand the social and ethical implications of using new technologies and their effects on military culture and ethos.
December 22, 2010
The Government of Canada is currently reliant on proprietary file formats and proprietary software applications, which lock it into a licensing bind with a single software manufacturer — Microsoft. There is not only a question of cost — as we pay a monopoly corporation for per-seat licenses to run software that already dominates the market — but more importantly, there is the question of future access to our own data. In this post, I’d like to share my thoughts on both issues.
Before you dismiss the idea of a major institution losing access to its stored data as ludicrous, consider this quote from Natalie Ceeney, chief executive of the UK National Archives:
“If you put paper on shelves, it’s pretty certain it is going to be there in a hundred years. If you stored something on a floppy disc just three or four years ago [2003-04], you’d have a hard time finding a modern computer capable of opening it. Digital information is in fact inherently far more ephemeral than paper. The pace of software and hardware developments means we are living in the world of a ticking time bomb when it comes to digital preservation.”
The UK National Archives includes a collection of 900 years of written material. As of 2007 they estimated that 580 terabytes of their data (the equivalent of 580,000 encyclopedias) was stored in file formats which have since become extinct.