use Perl

I've been sorting through my worldy possesions of late on a kinda "mother of all spring cleans". I have a stack of old floppy disks ( some dating back as far as my atari ST, having parted with my atari 800 stuff some years ago ), and a cd case full of discs containing opensource software and data.

A lot of the material is now pretty obsolete - I don't need suse from 10 years ago, debian cds from 2 years ago, and to be honest would be better using a pen drive to do the ubuntu install I'm embarking on, rather than adding another soon to be obsolete cd to the collection.

Now aside from backups, which I should probably use rewritable cds for, I'm starting to see that in my life, electronic/optical media is starting to become quite irrelevant, as the small collection of audio tapes I seem to keep but never listen to testify.

I like books, and don't envisage that they are going to go anywhere soon ( short of a Blair enacting a Farenheit 451 trick as a leaving present ). I still have audio cds and film DVDs, but increasingly use on demand services for movie watching, and coupled with a hardrive tv recorder I feel less inclined to buy something that I know will be on within 6 months or so.

I think what I'm trying to say is that in this digital age, with increasing storage and bandwidth, not to mention DRM, physical digital media can't have long left in it. I don't think thats particulary revolutionary.

What is interesting though, is the rise of hosted services for the consumer. Once content is freed from media is there any reason why all of our digital content can't be fed over a pipe, making the home computer of the future more like a gas boiler, to be ripped out and changed on a whim without effecting the delivery or consumption of services.

What I do find interesting is the rate of change of how fast this is happening and how far advanced this movement already is.