Muddiest Point: Lecture 14

We looked at a few different conversion strategies, and I can see how each would be useful in different situations. But are there ever cases where it wouldn't make sense to do some sort of pilot conversion ahead of a full conversion of any other type?

Muddiest Point: Lecture 13

Are some types of encryption more secure than others? Are some types used more often than others? And are the most secure types used the most often?

Week 14 Readings

The article on cloud computing was a bit too technical for me, and all I really took away from it was the promise of large companies selling online storage space and virtual servers to other, smaller companies. The video on the same subject was much more helpful, even if Christopher Barnatt's ceaseless rocking made me seasick after a while. Reducing our dependency on particular gadgets to perform particular tasks could prove a real boon. I especially liked the analogy between the switch from standard computing to cloud computing and the switch from everyone producing their own power to everyone jacking into shared power grids.
The article on the future of libraries brought up a few good points but also a couple of ridiculous ones. I find it especially hard to believe that anyone could think that literacy will be dead by 2050. (Even if schoolchildren were prevented from learning to read, effective tomorrow, there would be older literate people alive for decades past that marker.) I consider it old news that the developed world is moving farther from products and closer to services, but some of the other predictions more directly related to libraries were nice. I'm not entirely sure what a transition from "center of information" to "center of culture" would entail, but I can appreciate the sentiment.