OT: 1000 year DVD storage

On 3/19/13 10:55 PM, "Tom Sparks" <tom_a_sparks at yahoo.com.au> wrote: I can still read books written a thousand years ago. Now THAT'S durable information technology! Media is only a fraction of the problem. There are perfectly good tapes out there that have taken extraordinary effort to read (consider the Lunar Orbiter image data) not because there's anything wrong with them, but because we forgot about them and had to recreate systems. Storage is a system that must be intelligible to... something. I have some lovely multi-disk CDROM readers that don't work, because the laser diodes were fragile. The media is still fine, but the readers failed. Do these lifetime tests include evaluations of the hardware that reads the media? Truth be told, I can still read those CDROMs because other readers recognize the standards - most of the time. I have drives that recognize the 512B sector physical format, but they're becoming harder to find. I have machines that interface with the SCSI standards of those 512-byte-sector readers, but those are beyond-EOL, too. While I agree there are challenges, citing Wikipedia isn't exactly scholarship. :-) There is a large community that is engaged in these questions. The solutions won't be easy, but frankly the issues of copyright are among the thorniest, and have nothing to do with the technology of persistence. Bits we can manage, if we approach the challenges correctly. -- Ian