20 Mar
2013
20 Mar
'13
2:46 p.m.
On 20/03/13 21:17, David Riley wrote:
On Mar 20, 2013, at 4:24 PM, Chuck Guzis <cclist at
sydex.com> wrote:
I don't believe that people 1000 years from now will put the same value
towards items from today as we put towards items from 1000 years ago.
While preservation of data is important, nowadays we have pretty much
world-wide information coverage (thanks to the Internet and superior
transport). Anything important will be propagated into the future and
unless people of the year 3000 will think they can get anything out of
the C++11 standard to educate them about anything, I think they're wrong*.
The reason why we need such a thing as an archaeologist today is because
people in the past had no means of sharing such information and it was
very easy for it to die out if only a small village somewhere knew about
it. Unless some global-scale catastrophe happens that cuts us off from
the information stream for a very long amount of time happens, I don't
see the need for 1000 year storage. It's very useful for archives to
have as they _are_ the places that propagate data into the future but
it's basically useless as a commercial product.
*It's all just my opinions and I have no expertise in the area past
thinking about it for 30 seconds. Feel free to point out anything I
haven't considered.
--
Mateusz K.
On 03/20/2013 12:30 PM, Fred Cisin wrote:
I was gonna say, who are we saving the data for if not
archaeologists? Digital data is a lot more difficult to
preserve than clay tablets or even parchment; still, unlike
magnetic media, the data at least exists in the visible
spectrum (if not to the naked eye). I don't think there's
a high likelihood of archaeologists finding any of our
flash drives still readable after 1000 years (the charge on
the floating gates will likely have dissipated by then,
especially for low-charge cells like MLC), let alone figure
out how to read them. On the other hand, all my pictures
from France in college that I took on film have a pretty
good chance of boring people far in the future. Optical
media (at least on media that doesn't decay, like some
CD-R dyes) should be likewise preserved, though we've
certainly seen some unexpected failings in shellac records
as well due to binder breakdown.
- Dave
Other than archeologists, in 1000 years, who is going to WANT our data?
The same people who are now interested in Babylonian letters of credit, Egyptian
hieroglyphics, the Dead Sea Scrolls and other such worthless garbage.