Jules wrote:
On Tue, 20 Oct 2009 08:51:37 +0100, Dave Liquorice wrote:


Agreed. I think NT was trying to say that it's a lot easier for people
(after the fact) to understand data that's been stored in a
primarily human-readable format than it is for data stored in a primarily
machine-readable one.


But ASCII is not a promarily human readable form!

That's the whole point.

Only if its printed on paper by a computer that understands it, is it
human readable.

e.g. (to take email as an example) I'd feel a lot happier if the world
used mbox format for message storage rather than some undocumented and
encoded Microsoft (or Sun, or whoever) format that made sense to a
specific email app but nothing else. A few decades down the line, I bet
it's going to be a lot easier to access the data in the former than the
latter, because it's essentially "plain text" and a human could look at
the file contents, figure out how it's put together, and extract
individual messages relatively easily.


Thats not about ascii versus DXF, that's about proprietary versus open
standard.

DXF, ASCII, JPEG - these are essentially open standards, de facto if
not de jure.


Of course to get at the data at that level, you may need to access
individual files. To access individual files, you may need to understand
the filesystem. To understand the filesystem, you may need to understand
how the filesystem is stored on the media as a raw sequence of bits.
(And even then you may need to know how the raw sequence of bits
translates to variations on the media - e.g. flux transitions for
floppies and hard discs). Picking all that apart when presented with some
kind of 'alien' media can be challenging (albeit fun) - which is why it's
sometimes far easier just to access things using the original equipment!

OTOH most linux computers today, given a floppy drive can read any
floppy disk that the drive will read. Whether its ascii, DXF or JPEG
merely determinejs what softwaree you use to print it out or put in
onscreen.

Its NT's strange notion that a text file is somehow different from a DXF
file that bothers me.

Both need programs to read them and hardware to retrieve them.

There is essentially no difference.


cheers

Jules