[XeTeX] Arial and Times New Roman license?

[Mike Maxwell]

Keith J. Schultz wrote:
> I am confused!!  There are paper copies centuries old. Most
> electronic copies do not even last a have a century. try getting
> archive read from a old magnetic tape drive or old spindles. Hard to
> find the hardware for that. Also, what is the life time of a hard
> drive! What is the life time of the software for a document. say
> wordstar or word 2.0 format, WP. ?
> 
> The only way these documents can be conserved is by reformating them
> to the newer technologies. Otherwise you might have a copy, but not
> the technology to display them.

There is a large literature on these issues.  One source is this:
http://www.springer.com/computer/database+management+&+information+retrieval/book/978-3-540-33639-6
I can't vouch for how good or up-to-date that is, but there are 
certainly people worrying about how to solve these problems.

BTW, there are basically two approaches for the hardware aspect of this 
problem:
1) Maintain hardware to read the old tapes, 8" floppies, etc.
2) Migrate the data to new media.
There are also software issues, like how do you read a Wordstar 1.0 
document once you have it from whatever media you stored it on.  Storing 
documents as LaTeX source is one approach, presuming you can do 
something with LaTeX (or at least make sense of the markup) a thousand 
years from now.  In general, though, XML is the currently preferred 
markup for archiving text documents.  (Binary documents, such as images, 
are obviously a much bigger problem.)
-- 
    Mike Maxwell
    What good is a universe without somebody around to look at it?
    --Robert Dicke, Princeton physicist