IMHO

Tuesday's New York Times article available on CNBC.com talks about needing at least 3 years to get the economy back to “full throttle.”

Full throttle? Are we assuming that where we were before this economic calamity was full throttle? If you define full throttle as redlining an engine, then absolutely, but even people who are not gear-heads understand that running an engine at redline for too long is asking for trouble.

A while back I asked Christian Renaud of Technology Intelligence Group about an article I read regarding the problems Hollywood were having archiving their digital media. The article discussed how celluloid has a lifespan, and studios had been spending big money on recovering some of their treasured moving picture artifacts. The point of the article, however, was that digital media – all of the films shot in Hollywood over the past ten years, really – comes with an even greater cost. The article noted that the cost per year for archiving films shot, edited, mastered and stored digitally was five to 10 times the cost of films shot, edited, and mastered on actual film. That's a big deal.

Technologists love to tout how easy and transportable digital media is. There are no film reels to manage and store. Storage devices continually get smaller and smaller. Editing a film in a digital state is far easier to manipulate than physically cutting and pasting strips of film stock. Yes, the creation of a film in a digital medium is easier, but what about after it's created? And beyond Hollywood films, what about all of those digital photos you have on your computer? What about that novel you wrote in college, or that collection of poetry, or your address book?