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Digital Dark Ages?
angkor writes "The digital dark age--Will all the information from this computer age slowly vanish as our delicate hardrives expire? That's what it looks like. Better start printing everything out."
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for the records, i have the first post!
I was under the impression that the defining characteristics of the dark ages was ignorance, suppression, warfare, famine, strife -- you know, BAD STUFF.
And by that I mean, worse than simply forgetting something you wrote down somewhere.
Sometimes I really wonder about the things you guys elevate to "front-page article" status...
Slashdot quality declines as the number of hot grits posts decreases. - Provolt's Law, Apr-09-2005
Anything that's worth backing up has already been backed up on tape.
You honestly don't think that the contents of your hard drive have any sort of historical importance, do you?
Just because you've saved every free pr0n pic you've ever downloaded and categorized them neatly doesn't mean that some future archeologist is going to find them interesting. I can find them useful immediately. Please send any such collection to me at my hotmail address. Thank you.
I have been pwned because my
Install a web server, publish everything you have, then let Google cache it...
...of losing all that pr0n!
What the hell is that? Anything can be broken. Sure, it might take a lot of time now - but computers in 5 years will do it in a matter of minutes, while serving web pages and mp3's in the background. Come on, nothing is forever.
We probably will enter some sort of digital dark age eventually. I mean, there aren't an infinite number of hard drives in existance. And one day they may start manufacturing only hard drives with hardware DRM in them. Then, one day when the last of the non-DRM hard drives are crashing, we'll either have to not use hard disks (maybe there'll be something new), or get new DRM hard drives. This is actually my one doubt about serial ATA, which otherwise sounds awesome. Can anyone confirm whether or not serial ATA has DRM or not?
The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
Does this include getting your server slashdotted in record time??
They really should warn the people that they are going to be posting a link to their server, and that extremely heavy traffic will arrise.
that's what it reminds me of, asimov's historians on the main planet of the Empire, going through old records that are slowly dilapidating into nothingness. eventually, we forget earth his the 'motherland' too.
of course, i'd rather be the solarians, living forever and a half, screwing everything in sight...
This has been bantered about by practically everyone in any sort of media outlet. You've got librarians trying to figure out how to store all of the supposed 'research' that exists out here. Journals are going out of print because they can publish faster and easier on the web.
;P
You've got photojournalism people shooting digital because it's faster and offers some image structure advantages at high speed- no negatives to keep around for a 50 year retrospective.
And finally, you'll have the home consumer trying to back up all his photos to CD, organize them, and get thru the thousands upon thousands (note- most neg drawers aren't well organized either, but... ) of images that are labeled DCP_00389 or some otherwise useless name.
And then the hard drive crashes
And then it's gone.
Nothing will change until this starts happening. Give it 3 to 5 years, or however long it takes joe and Jane to upgrade their computers and start losing stuff. Then some sense will get back into the world
...is Souls in the Great Machine by Sean McMuller which looks at a world where all computerized records are wiped out in a great war. They are awash in information but can not read any of it, and thus are reduced to a 1600s to 1800s-style society. Good reading and a good point worth considering.
But the only reason these archives can be built and maintained is that it is legal to do so, thanks to the hard work of preservationists like Bob Supnik (see his SIMH "old iron" simulation packages) and Warren Toomey who have secured such licenses. Without such permission, many other archives of historical software that I've assembled myself cannot be distributed to the rest of the world.
Slashdot just ran a story like this two months ago. Michael's neurons must have lost its bits.
MS will make sure you will always have the latest sofware to make sure you won't have any problems...
Maybe it's just me, but whenever it looks like a harddrive is about to die (funny noises, etc. or just getting old) we replace it before it does. Also, we back up critical information, often in more than once place. This sort of practice should, in thoery, prevent this from happening. These things are replacable.
The snow doesn't give a soft white damn whom it touches. -- ee cummings
What would sending them an email do? Give them a chance to say "Oh, uh, sure!", and then watch the server become Slashdoted anyway?
Or were you expecting the owners to rush out and upgrade to an E3 just in time for the traffic to spike?
Apparently this webpage has gone to the digital dark age as well, because the server just got slashdotted by a bunch of hooligans armed with modems.
- tristan
HD's keep getting bigger. Buy a new one, copy everything on the old one to the new one, presto.
A number of posters have noted that most people have little of importance on their hard drives. I'm not so sure. One of the trends in historical research has been to refocus analysis on the lives of ordinary people. As it turns out, this is a problem since ordinary people didn't tend to write in the public record. Often, things that were incredibly popular are virtually undocumented because no one thought them important enough to preserve.
Let me offer one example. When historians want to document the impact that computers and the "information revolution" had on people's lives, there's only so much value in the Wired archives, for example. How did everyday people (not e-publishers or the digital literati) interact with machines and each other? This kind of research depends on many small bits of information, and if there is sytematic bias in which (or whose) information gets preserved then research will inevitably be limited by that bias. In short, don't underestimate the value of large numbers of seemingly unimportant documents.
This raises the question: what can be done to preserve the electronic record created by everyday users? Is any preservation medium cheap and easy enough to become ubiquitous in off-the-shelf systems?
Make cheese not war 8:)
Is anyone else reminded of that whole "Forever Archive" fiasco involving laser discs made in the mid 80's in the UK? The players become obsolete, the discs started falling apart, and no one could locate a working player to transfer the data by the time they realized the extent of the problem last year. Anyone have a link?
Find out about my new childrens book: SS Death Camp Criminal Batallion Go To Monte Carlo For The Massacre
http://www.penny-arcade.com/view2002-07-01rl.html
We do not live in the 21st century. We live in the 20 second century.
No, if your data really has value, carve it in clay and burn it. Or carve it in stone. While those methods are still not completely safe, they are at least reasonably safe.
Given the amount of data to store, we should probably build pyramids again, and carve our data into the stones of the pyramids. Given how long the Egypt pyramids lasted, this seems like a really secure way of storing the data.
Of course, I don't want to be an archaeologist in a few thousand years trying to decipher those strange texts e.g. inside the Linux Kernel Pyramid...
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
Yes, a lot of information will vanish through years; and this is true for all kinds of digital infos (think that an average cd can't' last more than 20 years).
But all digital informations can be easily reproduced, so I think that probaly my todo list for the new project will vanish, but this is not so relevant for the future generations.... all important stuff tends to be replicated and reproduced... think to the abandonware games: they are still alive even if most of the hardware they were based on is gone...
Probably time will only remove a lot of useless stuf... (I hope)
Cheers.
667 The Neighbour of the Beast
This is hardly a new problem. I've heard story about 5 1/4" floppy disks in an archive that were picked up after 10 years or so, they could find a drive, but most of the data was gone. But the same things (though slower) happen to paper, if you don't archive and conserve properly you will be in trouble getting it back. True for digital data as well as for paper, nothing new there...
I think digital data is easier in some way because you can preserve identical copies easily and transfer to an other system is easier as well, try moving/reordering an paper archive.
IMHO, preservation is a major argument for open formats and open source software though. It gives you the change to make sure for yourself you have the format and source to read it preserved with the data. Try getting your hands on Office 95 in, say, 2142...
Computers make it a lot easier to create perfect replicas of any information that you have deemed important. Even if we lose hundred-year-old spam lists, or the more obscure bits of knowledge Jenny from Tunguska has about her pet dog Fluffy (or even most of geocities, for that matter) we will retain anything useful from this era simply because people will keep downloading it and putting it up for others to download.
The peer-to-peer file sharing systems out there are like a public-access ftp server, or a wiki, or any of the hundreds of different ways that information will stay alive when people care to keep it. With a hundred million users all trying to collect as much interesting information as possible, you end up with a reasonable, thorough data filter to make backups for every important piece of classical knowledge that you'll need a few decades from now.
"Look at me, I invented the stove!" -- Ben Franklin
20 years from now we go back through our tape archive. . . only to find that nothing plays the format anymore (tapes? what's a tape? Is that like a holocube?). . . and the tapes are physically falling apart with age. . . and that even the tapes that we CAN play, no one can interpret due to a radical shift in computing technology. . . So yes. . . like all long term backups those tapes will SURE last as long as we need them. . .
Find out about my new childrens book: SS Death Camp Criminal Batallion Go To Monte Carlo For The Massacre
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I have been pwned because my
This is exactly the kind of problem that Danny Hillis and the The Long Now Foundation have been pointing out for years. Digital data doesn't last.
"Science historians can read Galileo's technical correspondence from the 1590s but not Marvin Minsky's from the 1960s."
That's why they started the 10k year library project. A part of this project that interests me especially is the Rosetta Project. It's a "near permanent archive of 1,000 languages". It's still a work in progress, so I hope they succeed. In my eyes it's definitely a worthwhile endeavour.
siener's youtube channel
How many kLoC (kilo Library of Congress) do you have?
Here it comes again, another 'knows just enough to be dangerous' technologist 'want a be' suddenly 'discovering' the next big crisis and is sounding the alarm to save the rest of us. Give me a break. Anyone that has been in the computer business for any length of time (I have for 20 years) has had to live though evolving storage formats. At a minimum, every time there is a platform shift, storage media or format has changed and we adapt. We convert what is important and discard what is not. To spout figures like "printed content represents only 0.003% of the world's total information" is TV journalism at its worst. The bulk of the world's information is total crap and what is worth saving is saved. It is backed up, converted, moved with the advances in technology. What percentage of information that was generated 1000 years ago still exists today? Answer, a fraction! Hopefully most of the important stuff but also a few recipes and bills of lading. That is the way it goes. If your information is too important to store on a hard drive with a one year warranty (and who's isn't) then go to RAID storage. There you go, problem solved, until the next shift in storage devices comes along and then you migrate.
I have to use this cause I can't afford a real sig...
Along with data copying, technology is delivering home users progressively better storage mediums. From 5.25" to 2.5" floppies, to hard drives, to CD-Rs, each media lasts longer than the previous. We'll eventually get it to archaeological standards.
Yes, hard drives die, but they've also been getting cheaper by leaps and bounds. In the past few years, I seem to be getting a new system about ever 3 years or so, and a newer, faster and bigger hard drive about every year or so. I migrate my stuff from drive to drive as I suspect most folks do.
If one drive dies, I have copies not only on other hard drives, but on my backup media as well. I'll keep this scheme running until I'm no longer able to do so. Then it will be up to whomever to either save my stuff as valuable, or trash it as dross.
I figure this is the real problem. Hard drives will fail, but the value of your personal records will be next to zero once you are gone. Unless you are famous or your progeny care about what you wrote in your tech blog in the year 2002, you can pretty much kiss it all goombye.
And speaking as someone who has had to deal with the estate of someone who DID print everything out, do yourself and your relatives a favor: Destroy the unimportant stuff. We had to rent a dumpster and a shredder to get rid of all this person's stuff. The paper was stored in a damp basement and so most of the stuff was rendered usless by mold or water damage or both.
When looked upon this way, upgrading a hard drive storage system every two years or so and making backups is FAR more economical and safe.
http://www.coin-o.com/
...and while the sun and moon endure, luck's a chance, but trouble's sure.... -A.E. Housman
I'm sick of being trolled by these idiots. What are the alternatives to Slashdot ?
Try one of these for your data archiving. No software dependencies, long media life, etc.
I just use raid-5 on my fileservers, when a drive dies no data is lost and you don't have to make annoying backups everytime because of this fact. You have to replace the broken drive before another one dies otherwise everything is lost.
Was I still asleep and dreaming or was there an article here about that?
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
For shift.com the dark age has already begun... ./ effect
Do we need to design some backup media for the long term? Sure.
./ effect revenge.. Hmm. Oh, wait i know! Its for the people that reload slashdot every 15 seconds! ;o)
Looks like scare tactics or need for attention to me.
What CD-R and DAT drives are so horrable all is lost?
Sheesh.. Get a grip.
Jeez man slashdot is really getting bad these days. Why the hell did this get posted? Was there nothing more interesting to post? I guess it could be
Talent hits a target no one else can hit; Genius hits a target no one else can see.
The solution to both saving ancient works on paper can work just as well for digital media. Keep copying the work to the latest storage media! None of the original texts that we do have have survied. They are all copies made from generation to generation. Thus with digital media. The best of the web (lets say, research articles) will be preserved and transferred to new storage media as it develops. Your blog about your day at the beach prolly won't.
"Overhead, without any fuss, the stars were going out."
Amen, to that! And more often it's practically a full-time job, just shuffling all of it around, from one over-flowing server to the next.
--Logan
Stuff that matters: circuitbreakers, vacuum-cleaners coffee makers, calculators generators, matching salt+pepper shakers
Which one's more vulnerable, a set of negatives and a single set of prints bent into a camera shop envelope high in my closet, or a digital photo on my hard drive? Sure, hard drives have a designed window before obsolescence, especially in the consumer market. Basically that's because the cost of enhancing their reliability is less than the cost of a whomping new drive that dwarfs the old one every three years. Even so, though -- hey, how many photos do you have from your great great grandparents' trip to Tahoe in the year aught-six?
If we're talking about preserving the works of Aristotle, I'm betting on hard drives to do a better job than monks with feather quills. (Not that the monks didn't draw better pictures in the margins, doodling along the way.)
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
is Here. [google.com]
There are several ways this could go. Obviously, we have to be circumspect, since the U.S. gov't is literally considering copy-control legislation that would make Linux illegal.
You can say it'll never succeed - won't all Linux's rich patrons prevent it? But I would have said the same about quite a few other things that have already happened... and it's in our interests to act as thought it might.
However, assuming something slightly less than the worst, DRM will of necessity be something which you can enable or not. IOW, as long as they'll let you, buy all the fast, new DRM drives you want, and use Linux to run them. Linux will simply ignore the DRM features and use the drive normally.
The problems come when you're forced to use a DRM operating system with your DRM hardware (quite a reversal from the old antitrust days, eh?); you will find it very difficult to take some/all of your data back to Linux/other non-DRM OS.
You can probably see why MS loves this now; DRM technologies, even optional ones, will have the nice effect of preventing interoperability with open source operating systems, thereby locking everyone in even further. Let alone the myriad other possibilities for abuse, censorship, and bottlenecking...
If we allow our government to do this, both in the context of MS's current status as a monopolist, and in the ongoing (anti-) regulation of the media industries, we are doing the gravest disservice to future generations.
We're on the road to Tycho.
Would not the first logical step be to transfer your data to a more stable media type such as DVD or CD? If kept in a fireproof safe, it isn't likely that the data will dissapear before there is a newer, even more stable media type to transfer it to.
This post will be modded down for no particular reason by a sweaty 14 year old who is not allowed out past dark.
I remember reading that conventional memory only lasts ~25 years because of cosmic rays and other radiation. So does that mean that all my nintendo carts will stop working? :(
After reading Memoirs Found in a Bathtub, with that review posted on /. a bit ago, one might instead decide to chisel all information on stone.
We've forseen another dark age. Even worse that media failure are proprietary data formarts! (Did anybody ever stored important text in M$ Word?)
But don't worry the solution is already in the works.
Forget printing everything out. ...
Its better, but in the end it gets brown and disintegrates.
The reason: the chlorine to make the paper white.
Its bad to use in archives
"almost our entire output as a society is entrusted to one of several Microsoft operating systems"
My God, he is right. The Dark Ages is upon us and the the Dark Lord has risen. Only the gallant heroes from the far off land of *NIX and can unleash RAID upon RAID and regain hope for humanity....
"The large print giveth, and the small print taketh away" -Tom Waits
If I remember well, it was Umberto Eco who said that the equivalent of the burning of the Alexandria Library, in our modern age, would be massive implosion of the digital devices we use so much.
Wait... that sounds like a massive DDoS attack on the Internet. Reality is definitely getting ahead of fiction here...
The right to offend is far more important than the right not to be offended. (Rowan Atkinson)
I find this to be interesting, but infinitely unimportant. Who cares about my stupid files? Even I myself don't give a rip. If one of my machines crashes or gets 0wN3d by some malware, I reformat and re-install.
.PNG file of Britney Spears where I added big bushy hair growing on her face and abover her lip) needs to have their futuristic head examined.
200 years from now, anything I did that was worthy of recognition will be ingrained in the fabric of what is then. Anyone that seriously cares about the other stuff I did (like that
Bottom line: who cares about the crap we do now 200 years into the future? The good stuff will persist on its own merits and the trash was meant to be forgotten.
Vortran out
Knowledge is like ignorance.. too much can be just as bad as not enough.
Given the propensity of M$ & others to use proprietary file formats in an effort to lock in the client base and to lock out competition. (And don't tell me about standards like because XML [tagged data storage & transport streams] without DTD [document tag definitions aka data context] is pretty damn useless [the difference betweeen data & information.])
I have quite a few files that I can no longer access except as raw byte streams because the applications that created them no longer exist or because the meta data information that controlled that creation is no longer available.
Even printing sh.., uh, stuff, out is pretty useless because most paper is acid based and turns to ash over a very short time. The inks are not much better.
I have books printed in the 17th century that are still quite readable (high rag content acid free paper,) and a 1901 Sears catalog (acid washed wood pulp paper,) that I accidentally put my thumb through in the late '80s.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
Remember, if you think your being shortchanged by your hard drive's operation life, read the manual!
You're supposed to keep backups, silly!
Redundant copies of the data, on other HDs or tape or any other media, will allow re-dupblication when one of the redundant pieces fails. Keep that up and your only worry is a catastrophic failure that kills all of your redundant pieces at once.
You reduce the chance of that, BTW, by trying to keep your backups in more than one place.
Now I grant you, no one does backups properly. At least, until after the first few times they get burned.
We're on the road to Tycho.
Just a little side note here...
There is an ongoing project in Sweden (swedish), and also one in the U.S.A dedicated to preserving the type of information which would earlier typically have been printed.
Which I guess is the information we really want to preserve; the 1.2 million geocities homepages are probably not going to be of particularly large relevance to people in the year 2200.
My floppy disks from my amiga started to go. All that bbs stuff from the 80-early 90's is disappearing.
Maybe Google will save snapshop of the web.
"Finally, there is the issue of format. As proprietary data formats give way to XML, and XML gives way to whatever comes five years later, things are going to get lost in the shuffle. Who to call when you need to translate a fifty-year-old Word file? Not to mention the fact that binary storage will sooner or later be replaced with non-binary molecular or holographic storage."
that is the real problem!
you can backup your data every day, copy it from one raid-system to another, have 30 backup tapes, have it on cd-r.
an then in 20 years you want to access it and don't have a program to read the file. for example access to old east german stasi files is only possible by using the old east german computer systems again.
anything else would just be way too expensive...
By David Emberton:
| Jul.5.2002 |
Last month, a Norwegian literary museum admitted losing access to their catalogue system after the database administrator died -- taking the password with him. Yesterday, my mother's computer died -- taking two years worth of email with it. The museum in Norway put out a radio call for hackers to help crack the code. My Mum? Well, she just cried into the phone for a while.
It might seem as though these two stories are only slightly related. To me, they both indicate a bigger problem.
Prior to the commercial internet and the arrival of cheap mass storage, computers were mostly used for pumping out paper documents. But with the explosion of email, web publishing and digital media in general, times are changing. Culture as we know it is going digital.
Constructing a history is fairly straightforward: In the physical world, works are tangible and rooted in time and place. Birth, death and marriage records maintained by governments allow us to trace who made what, and when. Mostly, stuff lasts.
Unfortunately, digital works aren't like that. Data is a commodity, stored in bulk on anonymous file systems, duplicated and destroyed by whoever has access. Every day hard drives fail, human-dependent backup systems fail. People die and their computers get wiped or thrown out. Passwords are lost and formats change. Corporate intranets are a mess -- if you've ever had the displeasure of using one, well, let's just say keeping everything is not the same as keeping everything organized.
Digital culture + geeks with attention deficit = uh oh.
In 2000 the University of California, Berkeley published a study showing that printed content represents only 0.003% of the world's total information -- most of the remainder is stored digitally. If that figure is correct, almost our entire output as a society is entrusted to one of several Microsoft operating systems and disks with twelve-month limited warranties.
*cue danger music*
Y2K, another problem brought about entirely by lack of forethought (plus a healthy dose of denial), has not served as a wake up call. Product development decisions continue to revolve around annual earnings. Technology uptake continues to be driven by novelty and the quest for cool. Even in the Open Source world, development is more about cloning commercial products than designing software to last a millennium.
Two hundred years from now, how will historians assess the early twenty-first century? They won't, because scarcely anything will be left to assess. That's right: Welcome, my friends, to the digital dark age.
A step backwards is not the solution, trees being in short supply and all. Besides, librarians and archivists have discovered that the books and papers we print now dissolve much more quickly than books printed a century ago. Paper isn't the answer: Our only viable option is to come up with a digital system that works.
To do this, we need to transform some of our ideas about computing.
Right now, files are stored on individual machines. It's up to the owners of those machines to make copies -- but individuals, until they lose something important to them, do not back up. We can look at P2P file-sharing systems, with multiple redundant copies of almost every file, for inspiration. Why not do the same with personal files, automatically creating mulitple copies of your recipe book across the network? You'd never have to back up again.
This isn't necessarily a new idea: Sun Microsystems is fond of suggesting that "the network is the computer" and the distributed computing concept has been around for a while. But people are understandably hesitant to store their personal files on a central server, much less someone else's personal computer. What of privacy, if your files are scattered all over the world?
That's where identity comes into play. The data and documents you create today are generic and anonymous -- they are not linked to your identity in the municipal records, nor are they proven to be authentically yours. In a lot of cases they aren't even datestamped accurately. This makes your files even on your own computer vulnerable -- a vulnerability that could be overcome by linking them to your official records. If you are going to be storing your files on someone else's computer, you'll want a foolproof way to identify that the files are yours.
It might seem abhorrent to think of some government program tagging and subsequently rifling through your digital stuff. But perhaps the government only needs to give us access to the citizenship records we've already paid them to maintain.
Unbreakable encryption is a viable solution, but only if data isn't locked down permanently. As morbid as it seems, a system that's aware of your death or permanent disablement can make sure those files are unencrypted at the appropriate time. The same system could make sure your files are released to the public domain, protected by copyright, or even deleted from the network for privacy reasons at the time of your demise.
We need a new universal storage mechanism: one that authenticates, protects and manages the data we create. In a future-conscious world, such functions would be a natural extension of the computing experience.
Finally, there is the issue of format. As proprietary data formats give way to XML, and XML gives way to whatever comes five years later, things are going to get lost in the shuffle. Who to call when you need to translate a fifty-year-old Word file? Not to mention the fact that binary storage will sooner or later be replaced with non-binary molecular or holographic storage.
By legislating in the interest of future generations, government could ensure that software companies publish closed formats to a public repository, forming the basis of a "universal file translator." Then, there would be some confidence in the accessibility of even the oldest data.
Regardless of what may or may not happen, nobody wants to be forgotten (at least, I know I don't). That's why a little danger music will hopefully be good for us, to get us thinking about how the storage decisions we make today are likely to affect the people that come afterward. And think about it we must, else what a great shame: To let the dawn of the Information Age turn slowly, and irreversibly, dark.
first, we need to think logically.. Every bit of information we have discovered that is aincent was discovered by sheer luck and accident. NOONE back in 985 BC set aside the stone tablets thinking that "someone will want to read this in 3000 years. EVERYTHING we find out about the past has been accidental. Nothing has ever been intentional archives preserved for the distant future.... If there were we might have a whole bunch more knowledge than we do today. (we re-invent things every 50 years.. because we lose how it was done 100 years ago.. My great grandfather's workshop was filled with things that were over 100 years old yet I have seen marketed today as "A TOOL BREAKTHROUGH! The Self Ajdusting wrench!")
I take EVERY digital photograph I shoot and burn it to CDROM. nothing ever get's deleted in my photography.... Even the blurry shots of the floor (Hey it might make a good background) Granted, CDROM's will be non-existant in 20 years.. but it's replacement will be here BEFORE it goes away.... so I transfer it... or my kids will or my grandchildren... Just like how I transferred my parent's and grandparents legacy media to current (Film, photos, Encode a Edison phonograph tube to mp3.... etc...)
It takes PEOPLE to make information survive... no magical device or media will.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
IM sure I could pick up 100000 blank CDRs to backup stuff with sweeet asss quality...
besides the determination of hacker is twice that of a 9-5 dweeb in a corporate, and if they ever hire a hacker, he will always make a backdoor to unlock the whole system.
This is not a new problem. . .look at the rainforests and deforestation in general! We won't even be able to print things out in the future if we run out of those resources. . . unless, of course, we further explore the wonders of silicon: the earth's most abundant element, mineral (don't know my periodic table).
Ok, just finished the last page. Now what?
A lot of what we know about things such as the Civil War, and even WWII come from correspondence. and the like.
Historians use this type of personal paperwork to be able to paint a more accurate picture of the times.
An e-mail from Johnny on the Aircraft carrier isn't right up on the list of things to get backed up. This is the type of information that is really at risk of being lost. Not really important to us today, or tomorrow, but could prove useful to historians decades or centuries from now.
Also, proof of prior art for someone that tries to patent the bubble sort 100 years from now, when no one uses it since everyone thinks QuickSort is the greatest sorting routine ever.
I think that one of the biggest problems when it comes to archival is legal. Often, companies don't want their information archived. After they publish a product, they want it to sell, then just go away. This is the issue with abandonware. If a company releases a game, or program, then stop supporting it, they shouldn't stop people from archiving it. If people don't archive it, it will just dissapear. This is what many companies wan't, but is it really the best thing to have happen?
The biggest problem with maintaining archives may be that some people actually want thier information to just dissapear.
Shame on David Emberton for not instructing his
mum in the fine art and absolute neccesity of
making backups!
"Yesterday, my mother's computer died -- taking two years worth of email with it."
However, he does raise an interesting point. There
have been even more spectacular failures than the
Norwegian museum that he refers to; witness the BBC
in the UK's loss of much of their digital archive
due to not having any drives available to read the
optical media any more.
I can see that in 100 years all content that has not
been re-archived onto modern media will cease to exist.
What the long-term solution to this is, I have no idea!
Stone tablets would still seem to be the best way of
recording something for millenia.
A new form of archiving historical data by passing it from generation to generation in the form of humor.
Call it the MPAA or Monty Python Archiving Association. All we need to do is figure out what made this century special and satirize it.
If you don't believe this will work try this experiment: Walk into a technical meeting and say in your best imitation voice "We are the knights who say...."
I guranteed you will get a "Neee!" from somewhere.
With enough people you could probably reconstruct the entire movie, or find one who has the whole thing memorized.
Don't think it will work, well "I fart in your general direction!"...damn, I did it again.
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Have you read the moderator guidelines? Well, have you, PUNK? (and I want a Karma: Gnarly option)
So did the article give any specific reasons why the hardware manufacturers are going to stop producing new hard-drives?
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Let the bygons be bygons. I am waiting day when no-one can ever recompile my old (loaded with bugs) sources to runnable binary. Or quote old bbs/usenet/'/.' posts.
outside usa, ie asia, doesnt exist, that is real freedom unlike the usa will ever know
It's one thing to lose technical data, but what about all that stuff that's much more personal and is (will be in 10+ years) sentimental? Things like (digital) baby photos, personal e-mails, etc.
How many people have grandparents who still have a box full of all of the letters they wrote each other when they were younger? OK, a few people might still write the occasional letter to each other, but this is really a thing of the past. And you can't compare the personal effort that goes into actually writing a letter with an e-mail. Just the fact that someone has actually gone to all the trouble to write the letter out makes it infinitely more satisfying when you read it.
How many people in (say) 20 years will have an actual photo album with real photos in it? How many people do you know now that have a photo album you can't view without turning on a computer?
It think it will be in 20+ years when the current digital-data generation are older that these things will really start to tell.
"Because it's there." - George Mallory, when asked why he wanted to climb Mt Everest, March 18, 1923 (New York Times)
Hardware isn't really a problem. Anything important can be put on a CD-ROM and preserved for eternity with some confidence; except that today the files may largely be in proprietary unpublished formats (e.g., just about any common format you use) that will take significant effort to read fully at an arbitrary point in the future.
The solution is straightforward and well underway, courtesy of the internet and WWW: published open data formats. The only reason for using a proprietary format these days is the effort that software makers put us through to do otherwise. Have you gotten tired of dismissing MS Word's objections to the use of RTF yet?
When we just say no to software that uses anything but open published formats, we'll get the software we need.
ThosEM
Sounds to me like Data Recovery is going to be a rather lucrative job in 20 years.
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Just what does GWB hace to do with ignorance? You must be a flaming homo Democrat.
I hate you, and I want you to burn.
Slashsemicolen, Slashperiod, Slashastervick, Slashcomma, Slashpercentile, Slashapostrophe, Slash.......
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... after mankind has defeated the Matrix or Skynet or whatever, some poor archaeologist will dig up a mug or a shirt that says "ALL YOUR BASES ARE BELONG TO US".
And boy, is he gonna be baffled for the next 50 years...
--- Why are you wearing that stupid bunny suit? | Why are you wearing that stupid man suit?
Actually, historically, a "Dark" age (there have been several... the so-called "Dark Ages" is merely the longest series of them in Medieval times) is a period of time *during* recorded history when the historical record is in pieces or non-existant. While other problems can be applied to a Dark Age, these are usually causes, but what defines a Dark age is the result: reduced historical record.
There were 2 or 3 in the Roman empire, one that I believe lasted about 30 years. Several more cropped up before and after Charlemagne. A much smaller one is happening with books produced in a specific timeframe in the early 20th century (I disremember which). Because of the acid in the paper, they'll deteriorate and fall apart rapidly. Luckily, project gutenberg is making an effort in getting the info out of books this old.
So, it's OK to be wrong.
OK how do you back up your photos? How do you keep track of your backups? You want to explain that to your mother?
.... what? yes.... I'll come home for dinner".
"Ok Mom, here's what you do. Get your last CD and compare the file stamp on it to the files on your HD. Copy anything that is newer into a temporary folder. Then fire up the burner program and copy those files into the
No, until it's automated backup/automated recovery, it's gonna be a pain in the ass for anyone.
Most systems have 1 hd 1 cdrom. If you're lucky it has a burner.
Hard drive decay is the least of our problems. Protons are decaying, the universe is flying apart at an ever-increasing rate, in a mere 10^(10^26) years there'll be nothing left but infinte, cold, dark, empty space. We're all doomed. Doomed, I say!
Compared to me, democrats are right wing fanatics.
We do not live in the 21st century. We live in the 20 second century.
Best bet is to transfer the data onto a more stable substrate, such as anything that is neither easily electro magnetically fluxable, nor easily breakable.
Stone like substance scribed via a multitude of devices.
Of course you could scribe upon most anything, just that rock is kinda hard to melt, a property that is obviously usefull.
Cheers,
I should get back to etching granite with piss 8)
Heres a paper on TCPA / Palladium for your viewing pleasure, and The Register has a good collection of articles on CPRM on ATA.
Frankly I'd rather see industry moves toward reliable solid state mass storage. Mechanical means just don't cut it any more as far as I'm concerned, just take a look at my journal to see the reason for my stance on that matter.
But where would we be without a few conspiracy theories?...
Ali
Ph33r m3!!!
Everybody knows that politics are evil. Thats nothing new. No suprise either. Power corrupts. Its been proven. I happen to know personally through my boss... The Darks did have strife and all the other bad stuff, but that isn't what really defined it as a dark age. Just because I have shoes on doesn't mean I am an athelete. Far from it. The dark ages were a called that due to the lack of history and the degeneration of society. Degeneration of society.. Hmm.. unfortunately I think my generation of Americans is the Degeneration. The idea of the computer's memory storage failing and blah blah all that stuff is quite real. Any of us who have owned a computer for more than 5 years know that crap happens to your computer, you cry, and then you get a new one or a new part. Most important data is backed up and unless the people incharge are idiots, that back up is refreshed. Unfortunately in my experiance.. most of the times they are idiots.
~*~Bunny~*~
Perhaps IBM's new storage technology, Millipede, could help stave off the impending "Digital Dark Ages".
0 61 1_millipede.shtml
Millipede is such an incredible technology not only because of its ultra-high density, but because the data actually exists in a physical form, albiet on an incredibly tiny scale, unlike current hard drives, which just toss around magnetic charges. Magnets don't last forever, but you seal up a polymer film in a metal case, and it'll last pretty much forever.
IBM dropped their HDD division, but I don't think they'd even think about dropping millipede. This technology could very well be the future of long-term data storage.
I just hope it comes through in a pure format, and soon (without DRM).
http://www.research.ibm.com/resources/news/2002
Karma: \Kar"ma\, n. [Skr.] (Buddhism) One's acts considered as fixing one's lot in the future existence.
CD-R backup arguement aside...
90% of the crap out there doesn't need saving anyway. However, imagine if the power grid is interrupted, compromised or war destroys the ability to provide AC for all those computers. They will then be useless. That might be a better argument to print out your your digital photos. Of course if power does go out, there are more important things to worry about, but when the dust settles how does the majority of the computer users access a powerless computer?
Generators, solar cells, batteries can help some, but only a small percentage of people can take advantage of these devices.
Last month, a Norwegian literary museum admitted losing access to their catalogue system after the database administrator died -- taking the password with him. Yesterday, my mother's computer died -- taking two years worth of email with it. The museum in Norway put out a radio call for hackers to help crack the code. My Mum? Well, she just cried into the phone for a while.
It might seem as though these two stories are only slightly related. To me, they both indicate a bigger problem.
Prior to the commercial internet and the arrival of cheap mass storage, computers were mostly used for pumping out paper documents. But with the explosion of email, web publishing and digital media in general, times are changing. Culture as we know it is going digital.
Constructing a history is fairly straightforward: In the physical world, works are tangible and rooted in time and place. Birth, death and marriage records maintained by governments allow us to trace who made what, and when. Mostly, stuff lasts.
Unfortunately, digital works aren't like that. Data is a commodity, stored in bulk on anonymous file systems, duplicated and destroyed by whoever has access. Every day hard drives fail, human-dependent backup systems fail. People die and their computers get wiped or thrown out. Passwords are lost and formats change. Corporate intranets are a mess -- if you've ever had the displeasure of using one, well, let's just say keeping everything is not the same as keeping everything organized.
Digital culture + geeks with attention deficit = uh oh.
In 2000 the University of California, Berkeley published a study showing that printed content represents only 0.003% of the world's total information -- most of the remainder is stored digitally. If that figure is correct, almost our entire output as a society is entrusted to one of several Microsoft operating systems and disks with twelve-month limited warranties.
*cue danger music*
Y2K, another problem brought about entirely by lack of forethought (plus a healthy dose of denial), has not served as a wake up call. Product development decisions continue to revolve around annual earnings. Technology uptake continues to be driven by novelty and the quest for cool. Even in the Open Source world, development is more about cloning commercial products than designing software to last a millennium.
Two hundred years from now, how will historians assess the early twenty-first century? They won't, because scarcely anything will be left to assess. That's right: Welcome, my friends, to the digital dark age.
A step backwards is not the solution, trees being in short supply and all. Besides, librarians and archivists have discovered that the books and papers we print now dissolve much more quickly than books printed a century ago. Paper isn't the answer: Our only viable option is to come up with a digital system that works.
To do this, we need to transform some of our ideas about computing.
Right now, files are stored on individual machines. It's up to the owners of those machines to make copies -- but individuals, until they lose something important to them, do not back up. We can look at P2P file-sharing systems, with multiple redundant copies of almost every file, for inspiration. Why not do the same with personal files, automatically creating mulitple copies of your recipe book across the network? You'd never have to back up again.
This isn't necessarily a new idea: Sun Microsystems is fond of suggesting that "the network is the computer" and the distributed computing concept has been around for a while. But people are understandably hesitant to store their personal files on a central server, much less someone else's personal computer. What of privacy, if your files are scattered all over the world?
That's where identity comes into play. The data and documents you create today are generic and anonymous -- they are not linked to your identity in the municipal records, nor are they proven to be authentically yours. In a lot of cases they aren't even datestamped accurately. This makes your files even on your own computer vulnerable -- a vulnerability that could be overcome by linking them to your official records. If you are going to be storing your files on someone else's computer, you'll want a foolproof way to identify that the files are yours.
It might seem abhorrent to think of some government program tagging and subsequently rifling through your digital stuff. But perhaps the government only needs to give us access to the citizenship records we've already paid them to maintain.
Unbreakable encryption is a viable solution, but only if data isn't locked down permanently. As morbid as it seems, a system that's aware of your death or permanent disablement can make sure those files are unencrypted at the appropriate time. The same system could make sure your files are released to the public domain, protected by copyright, or even deleted from the network for privacy reasons at the time of your demise.
We need a new universal storage mechanism: one that authenticates, protects and manages the data we create. In a future-conscious world, such functions would be a natural extension of the computing experience.
Finally, there is the issue of format. As proprietary data formats give way to XML, and XML gives way to whatever comes five years later, things are going to get lost in the shuffle. Who to call when you need to translate a fifty-year-old Word file? Not to mention the fact that binary storage will sooner or later be replaced with non-binary molecular or holographic storage.
By legislating in the interest of future generations, government could ensure that software companies publish closed formats to a public repository, forming the basis of a "universal file translator." Then, there would be some confidence in the accessibility of even the oldest data.
Regardless of what may or may not happen, nobody wants to be forgotten (at least, I know I don't). That's why a little danger music will hopefully be good for us, to get us thinking about how the storage decisions we make today are likely to affect the people that come afterward. And think about it we must, else what a great shame: To let the dawn of the Information Age turn slowly, and irreversibly, dark.
-----------------
David Emberton is an inventor, writer and musician. He flaunts what he got at emberton.com.
Quite contrary to this story, the advent of digital data storage and the Internet have led to something never before possible in the history of mankind: near instantaneous massive duplication. It is now possible for digital data to be copied effortlessly and transferred all over the globe. The trick, is doing it.
.zip format.
Our data storage needs have kept pace with data storage ability for some time now. I don't see this ending anytime soon. But it might, eventually. It stands to reason that there will come a time when we will have a want of things to store for all the space we have. I don't count on it in my lifetime, but it could happen.
The trick, then, is getting the data from here to there. How do we do it?
1. The written word is still the most important medium of human communication. Project Gutenberg is doing a bang-up job of digitizing AND distributing written works, and this is a project we should all support. I would also like to see a similar project with scientific journals being digitized (if not already) and widely distributed to universities, who can host them publicly or privately.
2. Someone suggested CDs, but these are impractical. CD-r's have a shelf life of 100 years, and CD-RW has even less. These could work as storage medium, but you would have to be diligent in keeping them up-to-date. What we really need is a physical storage method (like CDs) that have the capacity of magnetic storage media, like HDs.
3. Open file formats. It stands to reason that computers will always understand ASCII (or possibly UNICODE) text. It would not be difficult to append text-only information to the end of even very complex documents, that could be retreived even if the file format itself was no longer known. xml-based file formats do this to a degree, but it depends on the universitality of the
4. All of this is useless if we ourselves are not diligent in keeping up with our digital information. In the Middle Ages, copying an old, worn-out parchment or scroll could take weeks, even months. Now it's possible to do it in a fraction of a second, so there's no reason we shouldn't.
I currently keep my important data (emails, writings, website) in the following locations: My hard drive, a backup file on another hardrive, a CD-RW, a CD-R (which I change/update every six months or so) The server at my school, and the my webserver which is offsite. I personally would like to see off-planet massive storage, but until storage space exceeds storage demand, we will always be faced with the question of "What is important enough to backup?"
Sounds like the old "hard disks die." ad campaign from back in the day.
Free Mac Mini Yeah, it's
If your hard drive 'crashes' in the true sense of the word (heads sagging and touching your platter) it's expensive to recover what little data can be recovered. Backups can take care of this though, but only for important things where it monitarily makes sense. Any other type of hard drive failure (usually electronic or electro-mechaical) can be taken care of for a ever decreasing fee in the growing reality of data recovery. Now for continuance, each new computer/hard drive you buy you slave the old one, copy the stuff. You know the drill, we've been doing it for a few years now. Old pictures and text and database formatting is usually compatable with the new technology, and if it's not some enterprising programmer will write a util to make it happen. There's also optical storage, (realistically speaking) unexpirable storage.
I haven't posted in so long, my sig is out of date.
..Don't *want* everything they've written/thought up/peed into the snow/etc. saved.
;)
Ever read correspondence from famous people in love? *chuckle* I'd like to think that I can write a damn sight better, but I'd cringe to think that any love letters of mine would be floating around two hundred years from now.
I mean, you can't find more cheese in a Kraft factory compared to what some people write when trying to impress the opposite sex.
Then we must be living in the Dark Ages since the information that will be lost is a record of how we lived.
Dark Ages, hm.... doesn't seem so bad when you're living in it.
My most important data on my computer is the pictures from my digital camera. Right now I'm keeping one copy of all the pictures on my hard drive, and as I take more pictures everytime I get ~650 megs worth I burn them onto a CD backup as well. I'd really like to be able to take them off of my hard drive to free up space, but then I hear that CDRs have been known to fail, which would be incredibly upsetting for me. Worse yet would be going back after a couple years have passed and finding that the CDRs have died with age. Of course the worst case scenario would be having my hard drive die in a couple of years, and go back to the CDRs only to find that they died at some unknown point in the past.
As such, does anyone have any recommendations for average people like me out there who have data that is very important to them, but for whom corporate measures like commercial data backup services just aren't practical? Is there a better practice I can do than what I'm doing already? How about specially designed long life CDRs? Does such a thing exist?
Think about it. 98% of what's out on the web is crap. The stuff that's really valuable get's copied, in general. People do mirrors, or download pages. I doubt much of real value will be lost in the long run. I mean, geez, I'm going to be really bummed when my porn collection goes bad, but I downloaded it from others, so it's still out there somewhere.
What makes you think that just because a hard drive crahes you can't get the information off it. The information is still there (mostly) even if the mechanism/electronics of the drive are bust. You can still read the data, you just need to take out the platters and scan them some other way.
this article has some truth to it but who is 300 years is going to really care about your e-mail or moms best bean mix. the point is that we dont have a copy of king tuts finical records but have a general idea of how he lived. the mediveal dark age only happended be cause very few people knew how to write and communicate and this is not the truth in todays society. I am not worried at all about future generations not knowing what happended in this generation.
Then we can relive the dot com boom. This time I am selling short sooner....
Since most hard disks are used in desktop PCs and most PCs run Windows, I guess that about 90% of all files out there are Microsoft binaries!
We are living in the dark age right now!
Brain Tags |
Is this funny because we're laughing at the lack of perspective in this child's post?
Watching Cowboy Bebop in my jammies, eating a bowl of Shreddies.
and the parent of this post was modded up for so clearly being flamebait?
As far as I can understand, DRM can only be related to a particular format of content.
Now if some guy delivers a hm.. let's call it the IVF (Interexchange Video Format), along with an IVF encoder and devoder.. how can DRM be enforced upon that?
The OS won't know what the IVF format is, or what it does.. or whatever.. it is even possible to wrap existing formats into a cloaking format..so.. how will the system know what this huge file that you have on your CDROM is?
I miss my rubber keyboard.(Homepage)
I don't know what sort of configuration you have, but I'm sure that somewhere out there you can find a tape drive for your machine. Tape drives are cumbersome and hard to move data with, but if you want a long term dependable backup system, tape is a good one that I know if.
~ now you know
With our rapidly increasing HD sizes, backup methods and media aren't keeping up. I've already lost 2 large HD's in the last 2 years, and with my shiny new 80 Gig drives, I've got a Raid-1 setup, but still if they both fail within a short amount of time from each other, I'm outta luck.
Moreover, the advancement of HD tech makes it almost certain that when one fails in a year, I won't be able to get an exact replacement to reload it from the RAID.
Does anyone know of a PRACTICAL way to back up 80 Gig's of info? AHSay.com offers online backups, but the initial backup would take weeks through my ADSL modem, and then incrementals would be pretty much useless. I suppose I could use DVD-RW, but at 4.7 Gig a disk, we're talking 20ish disks, at several hours a piece. And doing incremental backups that way is a nightmare. It seems that my only real option is to use something like a MonsterTape backup storage device, but systems with 80Gig capacities and up START at $4000 a piece, and the tapes are 80 bucks a piece. With 80 gig drives available for $129 bucks (Pricewatch), it doesn't seem like a good option.
The Dopester
"Yes, I'm a Karma Whore, but I'm doing it to pay my way through school."
Don't worry, is what I say
I have all my data backed up on zip disks.
(grin)
-CLICK!-
DOH!!!!
Game: Player 'Donald J Trump' now has AI skill level 'experimental'.
1,000 years - is that long enough? We have parchments that are 5,000 years old, we need to match or even exceed that. If civilisation is to come to a thundering catastrophic end, it might not get back up to our level of technology (sufficient to read the disks) for 10,000 years. this is a little better, but I'd like a bit more still.
It is the year 2050. All of human knowledge has been carefully digitized and gathered into a central archive so anyone may browse and study. Then the archive is bought by Microsoft, who send a manager to assay their acquisition. He asks the ancient Gates what to do with it. The answer comes back: "If it is included in Windows 2050, it is redundant. If it is not included in Windows 2050, it is not necessary. Therefore, delete it all."
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
And then the hard drive crashes
And then it's gone.
You know, I think in many ways it's good to loose stuff like this. Sure, it's upsetting for a while, but you get over it.
Memories are just that - in your memory, and whilst photos are good for jogging memories, that's all they do. For anyone who's not actually in the picture, they mean nothing. And really, it's far healthier to look to the future than reminiscing about past events. This might seem heartless, but how often do you actually look at 10-20 year old photos? Maybe with dead family members it's another matter, but if they were really close, you should be able to remember them without a photo.
And it's amazing how much crap you can assimilate over time. After I went travelling for a year with just a rucksack (two pairs of jeans, some T-shirts, a couple of pairs of shorts, etc...) I was horrified when I returned to realise how much junk I had in my parent's house that I'd previously considered important. Most of it went straight in the bin, as I sure as hell wasn't carting it to my next house.
Bringing it slightly back on topic. Yes, I've had hard disk failures. In one case, I even lost about a years worth of mail. But after being initially cross about my mail, I realised that I didn't actually need it anyway. The rest of the stuff I never even missed, as I'd backup up about the 5% that was useful.
For actual important stuff, like source code or documents, you just need to be disciplined enough to copy them somewhere reasonably regularly. I use local CVS for all my own source and just back up the whole tree every couple of days. I download stuff into a folder like '2002-07' for this month, and every month I backup anything to CD that is likely to be useful. Everything else can just be downloaded again, re-MP3'd, etc...
I'm just worried about how long my CD-R's will last...
the issue here isn't so much the lifetime of the media, but how do you read them...?
until now, almost all archaeological artefacts have been human-readable. eg, if i find a photograph from 100 years ago, it's immediately obvious to me what it is.
however, 100 years from now, if my descendants find an ancient cd-r, assuming that they can even read the bitstream, how do they then determine whether it contains images, text, audio etc etc etc?
Having experienced the early personal computer era, in which hard disks were ten or twenty times less reliable than they are today, I formed a major dislike of the things, and retain most of that today. So here is a bit of boring history: Back when I built myself a '486 computer, I rigged it up as a SCSI system that had NO hard disk. Instead it has a 640MB magneto-optical removable-cartridge drive. Data retention is guaranteed for a long long time, and you don't lose it if the drive dies. Don't laugh at the puniness of only 640MB; this machine is only used for DOS and Windows 3.1 stuff, and that amount of capacity is plenty. Also, this machine can be booted either directly to the MO disk (the SCSI controller unfortunately limits me to using 540MB disks if I do that), or it can be booted via floppy disk, to load the special drivers that allows the controller to work with 640MB disks. So, one of my 540MB MO disks contains copies of all my boot-floppy data. As long as they make ordinary 3.5" floppies (and as long as I keep a bunch of new floppies in cold storage), I will have access to all the data that that machine ever processed. More recently, a Windows 98 machine I built has both an ordinary hard disk and a magneto-optical drive. I install operating-system stuff and applications from CD-ROM to the hard disk, but I arrange for all the data-saves to go to a tree of directories located on the MO disk. If the hard drive dies -- which it did a couple months ago! -- I just get a new one and reinstall everything, but my data still exists. Also more modern MO drives can put a few gigabytes on a disk these days, which is fine for almost everything except extreme graphics work. I don't happen to do that kind of work, so it all works fine for me. In closing I might mention that that computer was dual-boot with BeOS, and BeOS had no problem using the MO drive/disks. Linux is another story, however. I won't be happy with Linux until it has full driver support for all MO drives.
Maybe we should let the BBC in on a little secret on where to get all of their media playing needs?
And i think google's caching should take care of the remote, off-site backups anyone would worry about.
I wouldn't bother printing everything out because the cheap, wood pulp paper we use today won't last all that long in any useful condition. Note that most of the really old books that survive today weren't done on cheap materials. They were done on animal hide paper (parchment, vellum), etched in stone, or in some rare cases, rag paper (which is mostly plant fiber but sturdier stuff than wood pulp: hemp and cotton).
Just be sure to wear the gold uniform when you beam down -- you know what happens when you wear the red one.
Now, sure things are stored on HD's, but they are easly copied to new media... such as DVD-roms, etc. Any technology today has to be able to take data currently written to a HD.
But here comes "Digital Rights Management" or DRM. a hardware and software based double punch to our fair use rights. This is what could prevent us from making back-ups, keep us from moving to new forms of media.
It is the beginning of the digital dark age.
--T
http://www.theMediaBunker.com
Go to your public library - to a section of books of interest to you. Note the publication date of a dozen or so and whether the publishing company appears to be still in existance. Now imagine that these books had never been printed in book form but published only on digital media at the time, which was perhaps encrypted and perhaps, like Windows XP, even node-locked to a specific computer.
How many of the "books" would you still be able to read?
How many would you be able to read only by paying a company specializing in copying obsolete media to current media?
How many would you never be able to read without hiring a good "cracker" (whose efforts would probably be illegal under the DMCA)?
This is our future. Spooky, huh?
Important information will be transferred to new drives as people upgrade. When we have the whiz bang drives that store data based on changing isotopes in a hydrogen cell or some such crazy thing with insane density, the important data that is stored on todays magnetic media will be transferred to that.
The Gutenberg Press was probably responsible for other "dark ages" not having occurred since, but (and I freely admit that this is a pet peeve of mine) just think about this for a moment.
Since about 1850, the majority of books, research papers and other documents have been printed on paper made from wood pulp, where the acid content has resulted in a lot of them simply disintegrating. (How many of us own paperback novels from as recently as the '80s which are falling apart?)
I think this will result in a "dark age" on a far vaster scale than the failure of disk drives.
You people are assuming that anything on our Harddrives is even worth saving.
Oh No! I lost all of my pirated mp3's, downloaded movies, gigbytes of pr0n and and my games! Ahhhh the apocalypse!
I think these folks misunderestimate the sheer volume of information we have collected about ourselves. Modern historians have been able to piece together a more or less complete history of the Greek and Roman worlds 2500 years ago using a few thousand written documents and archeological digs. We have more information than we can possibly process for every era of American history for at least 200 years back.
.01% will still probably dwarf the information we currently posess about the world 1000 years from now.
So yes, 99.99% of all information in existence today will probaly be lost 1000 years from now. The remaining
For starters, we still publish about as many books as any other society in history. There are books available on literally every topic available, and most of them have thousands of copies in circulation. So imagine that 99.9% of all books are nuked, chances are the majority of those books will still survive, and historians only need 1 copy to make use of it.
Finally, this article massively underestimates how easy it is to preserve digital information. 10 years from now, terrabyte hard drives will be commonplace, and no doubt second-generation DVD-R's will hold tens of gigabytes of data. All you have to do is copy those files en masse to the latest format every 10 or 20 years, and you've preserved the information. One person can do that in his spare time quite easily. Furthermore, file formats aren't *that* hard to reverse-engineer. Even if the world forgot what a Microsoft Word document looked like (which is extremely unlikely) they should be able to look at the raw data and figure it out well enough to at least read the plaintext. And I doubt we'll ever forget what ASCII means.
As for people losing their personal correspondance-- perhaps 99.99% of people will lose their email correspondance at some point in their lives. So in a nation of 300 million people, that leaves only 30,000 complete email correspondances for future historians to peruse. Imagine how much we'd know about Greek or Roman times if we had the complete correspondance of 30,000 average Greek or Roman citizens...
In conclusion, I think quite the opposite is true. Historians 1000 years from now will have more material than they can possibly process about the early 21st century. The trick will be in assimilating all that information into something useful, not finding enough to work with.
On the internet scale?
Something along these lines?
Blearf. Blearf, I say.
IF the current "Age of Progress" seems more like the Dark Ages to you-
THE CHURCH OF THE SUBGENIUS
could save your sanity!
I understand the issue, However this is sort of a case of Historical Darwanism.
When ever a new media format comes up people naturally migrate what is important to them to the newer media. When DVD Came out my Photo CD's get converted to Photo DVD's. The documents that I felt were important got consolidated and upgraded from the old media, Just like the data on my 5 that was important got moved to 3.5 Inch which them moves to CD etc.
I understand that are books which will never get converted to a digital format and there are film and negatives that will not get converted, However I believe that digitial documents should not suffer the same fates if people think they are important enough to preserve.
Yes of course We dont have to dig any more
anyway it seems some can even think of it
I wonder why Y2K didn't serve as a wake-up call? Maybe it's because basically nothing bad happened? Yes, it cost a ton of money to correct the problem, but there were no huge catastrophes like segments of the media had predicted.
In the same way, yes, hard drives will crash, and people will lose stuff. But this is nothing new! The idea of a "digital dark age" where hard drives start crashing left and right, and history starts going down the drain, is absurd. It ranks up there with the pre-Y2K hype about society crashing and people roaming the streets in search of food. But hey, your story is a success if people will read it and take the hype to heart, right?
"I am a cipher, a cipher, wrapped in an enigma, smothered in secret sauce" -Jimmy James
Is this TCPA propaganda or what?
I once lost my entire porn collection when a hard disk
died. Sadly, it was years of collection that will
be lost forever. I've been trying to rebuild the collection
but haven't gotten anywhere to where it once was,
and probably never will. This is something we should
all work to preserve.
It is interesting that at the same time we have a problem with e-mail and documents we want to delete not really being deleted because it is archived somewhere on a server and we have a problem with e-mail and documents we want to keep being destroyed by hard drive failures.
I guess everything is a matter of point of view and the current situational needs.
Really hard drive failure is a digital equivelent of a fire in your work area. There are solutions and the people that will put in the work to implement and maintain those solutions will have their data preserved, those that don't (for what ever reason) won't.
I just wanted to say I love your sig. There are times I wish I could tattoo it on some people's foreheads...
jred
I'm not a mechanic but I play one in my garage...
Has anyone ever wondered if; assuming further developements in computing; none of this will matter? Its entirely possible that an artificial intelligence running on molecular scale hardware could have a thinking speed millions or billions of times faster than a human being. A network of these could in one year do more thinking than all human beings in all history. They would create as much or more new knowledge and information in that time period. Essentially, all achievements humans have ever made would be as important as the mating habits of dinosaurs. While its difficult to say whether these AIs would have any interest in our history, the information would hardly be relevant. I do not find this possibility frightening. I have no doubt that the AIs we create will require teaching much like a small child. They will learn everything we pass on to them. Essentially, while humans might eventually become extinct, most of our knowledge and culture would be passed on to some extent. It would be no different than generation changes with biological children. YOU won't live on forever, but your descendents might. Some of what you pass on to your children might last a very long time. That is one of the few legacies we leave behind in this life. In a similar manner, we would leave similar knowledge to artificialy intelligent descendents. They would quickly grow beyond us, much as biological children might become taller and more educated than their parents, but such is the nature of change.
The world is supposed to come to an end by 2050 or so anyway, at least according to the WWF...
Big deal, most digital information is completely unimportant drek. (Like this comment for instance).
Important stuff gets backed up to CDs or DVDs or something a little more permanent.
I'm not going to cry over the loss of emailed baby pictures from people I hardly know. If those pictures were physical, I would have discarded the ones I didn't care about, or they would be slowly burning themselves away in a shoebox in the closet.
If a historian found a bean mix receipe from 300 years ago that a regular person from New England ate he would shit his pants in excitement. The list of ingredients would tell the historian a huge amount about what the average person of the time would have access to. Most of us could give a crap what kings ate, kings had things shipped to themselves from everywhere in the world, they were rich. Most historians care about what the normal people ate, and how they lived and want to know everything about those people.
Imagine if vanilla was on the list of ingredients? This would tell us that New England had regular trade with south america. Imagine that an item was listed with several substitutions... This would tell the historian that some items were not available all the time.
This is just stupid. This is the kind of story I would expect on AP or Reuters.
Only the most expensive books were produced on acid-free paper. They had a shelf life of maybe a couple hundred years, at best. Witness a book a friend of mine loaned me (mcgrew.info/gem). Yellowed and crumbling with the first nine pages missing, this is afaik the only copy of this book in existance.
Except the one I am posting on my hard drive and the internet. This book was in grave danger, but as soon as it is posted it is more or less permanent.
Warantee of one year? WTF, don't any of you back up your data?
Well, data backups are easy now. Fifty years ago data were stored in filing cabinets. All it took was a fire in a single facility to destroy decades of records, like the fire in St. Louis in the early 1970s that destroyed the military records of thousands of WWII vetrans.
No, computers aren't endangering our heritage, they can protect it. What is endangering our heritage is digital rights management. Lock up your art and throw away the key... real smart move, guys.
Steve
theFragfest.com
If a giant rock hits the planet killing all the humans but leaving all the hard drives then we might have trouble. As it is, valuable information will continue to be transferred to newer better technology, much more so than any other time in history.
Hello Cruel World
Relative to the point being made, Appleworks native formats aren't any better (or ThinkFree office or AbiWord, which just says there is no real improvement since XYwrite and Wordstar). MS AND its imitators are the problem, or most of the industry, which has failed to give us a working document format for the WWW.
Seeing the value in open formats is not a toilet training issue. Its the *default* format of a word processor that should be an open format.
The point is not to encode things digitally and then keep the code a secret (and the users hostages). Any code can be opened when the key is published, which is all one can ask of public domain documents.
ThosEM
I thought the article read very much like an advertisement for Palladium. "You can store all of your data on someone else's computer and it will be SECURE! Think of the benefits!" Microsoft will, thankfully, protect us from the Digital Dark Ages. (Bleh!)
I also have all of my important data backed up on at least two harddrives scattered around my house. I worry not about this. Myopia....
---Bruce
I've heard this complaint so many times and it just doesn't ring true.
If digital storage was like paper storage this would be an issue but the truth is digital storage is unique in 2 ways:
1. You can make infinite perfect copies
2. The storage capacity grows exponentially over time.
I still have papers I wrote 15 years ago. The 20 Meg 5.25" harddrive that they were originally stored was trash 10 years ago along with 3 or 4 other drives that they lived on over the years and yet my papers remain. They remain because I wanted to keep them (and I'm good about protecting my data.) They are on a completely different filesystem (EXT3) on a completely different operating system and yet I can still get to them, read them and print them out. They are now on a RAID 5 array that is backed up to a separate drive with all my other important data.
In the article he states about physical things "Mostly, stuff lasts". That is just not true. How many of those documents that we printed out back in the early 90's before everything was email based are still around? I know several people who have all their email going back 5-10 years. It's simply much easier to keep digital stuff around.
Most people upgrade to a new machine and bring their data over with them. The drives fail but the files that people care about stay. Crashes can be devastating and people certainly do lose data but the same thing can be said about fire in the physical world. Keeping 2 digital copies of important stuff makes it hard to lose it. If you lose one copy, make another one. The odds of losing both before you can make a new copy are very slim.
It's also much easier to keep digital things organized and search through them.
I think digital things in general will always have better lasting power than paper things. Internet based backup services will make this much more so in the coming years. For a few dollars a year you can have all your important files stored somewhere off site on redundant media. Try doing that with paper?
set softtabstop=4 shiftwidth=4 expandtab nocp worlddomination
(the only thing worse than a spelling mistake in a post is a mistake in the subj:)
When I was in highschool, a friend of mine gave me a picture of her in the park. She was off center and some guy was in the background. Several times I considered taking scissors and cropping that guy out. After all, I didn't know him and he wasn't nearly as cute as she was. Fast forward a few years, and I'm scanning my pics and posting them to my site, and I see the picture of her. Only this time, I recognize the guy in the background. He's a friend of mine now. So you never know what'll be important or interesting later, and you don't always need to wait a few hundred years for your perception to change.
jred
I'm not a mechanic but I play one in my garage...
I was asked my my employer to find a way to archive digital photograhs for 100 years. My solution? Print them to black and white film as "color separations" (R, G, B).
You mean the Domesday Project, created in 1986 on the 900th anniversary of the creation of the Domesday book.
http://www.atsf.co.uk/dottext/domesday.html
While many of the preserved texts are still here because of luck, I think the ancient Egyptians were planning for the future. That is what is so fascinating about them. It is evident in the scale of their monuments and the way they preserved their dead. The Egyptians did everything in their power to make sure their culture would be remembered for eternity. And they're doing pretty well so far.
Don't make your files on your hard drive networked on the 'net.
I would much rather see a system that was similar to a RAID design.
Get a new computer, plug it directly into your home network. It automatically takes on part of the load of the common file system of all your machines. If one machine dies for any reason, the data is fine.
Upgrading to a new machine would be as simple as putting a network cable between the two machines and running the make-live command. The new machine then has a replica of all the data on the old machine. You can then turn off the old machine.
Of course, we have a long way to go before we can do this. We might have to have a dual filesystem. One for programs, and one for data. Running the make-live command would copy the data filesystem over, and leave the programs/os file system.
real men don't back up their data, they just upload it to an ftp and let others mirror it
--fetch daddy's blue fright wig, i must be handsome when i release my rage
Of the 99.79 % percent of stuff stored digitally, how much of it has any general value, let alone historical? The docs on my hard drive consist of my resume, e-mail, and some technically oriented pdfs. I don't think the history of the world will suffer if my pdf manual for an Asus motherboard is lost.
Will my grandchildren be able to read my emails to my parents? Nope.
Journals are especially valuable to the future historian...
-
Think about it for a second. Any thing that humans truly deem worthwhile for saving is copied an backed up. It's always been that way since the begining of time. How else do books like the Bible and the Quaran remain? If the future is truly interested in learning about us, they will find a way to read our crashed hard drives. Worrying about the loss of our information is like the greeks worrying that in the future, no one would be able to read their language. Anything that is truly relevent for humans is passed on from generation to generation, it may be different media, but it's still the same idea.
T Money
World Domination with a plastic spoon since 1984
here
But how about the ratio of usefull information that is printed to that of digitized. Whenever I need a science journal article that was printed before 1996 or any science book at all I have to go to the library. The only really good information that is on the internet pertains to computers. Most of the rest is crap.
A more modern threat is lawyers. Many corporations are putting record/email retention policies in effect that intentionally destroy data so that it can't be subpoenad in a future legal proceding.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
Looks like Penny Arcade is ahead of the curve =)
I still have my "original" : ) DOS 6.2 directory on my computer... along with the images and program for creating the software from my old P-75
( Pentium 75mhz ) machine. Sometimes a new set of dos disk or just SimCity 2000 is nice.
....succeeds, there will be no need for archeaologists or anthropologists (it will run a regex and thats that).... .....there is no human future for us anyhow. So who cares?
NO SIG
I thought the whole point with archeology was to discover our undocumented past history. Back in the time where nothing was written down on paper.
Nowadays anything important seems to get documented. I don't think people 300 years from now will have much problems looking up information on what happened in Y2k.
Ebbex
- I wish slashdot would get a spellchecker of some sort.
And I find it arrogant that you assume my information won't be valuable. The inane babblings of the dominant cultural leaders of a time are not nearly as useful to archaeologists as the information left behind by common individuals. The people who write the record don't accurately represent the lives and spirits of average people.
I think we have an opportunity with technology to preserve more than the party line, the "fiction agreed upon" by history's victors.
You say something to the effect that if your loved ones are all that important, you should be able to remember them without a picture.
But even if this were so, how do you show your child what his granddad looked like, who died before your child was born??
The point of archiving data is not just so YOU can remember it. It's so people who had no chance to see it firsthand can also get a look at how things were (regardless of the sort of data it is).
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
How soon we forget. As discussed a short while ago, IBM's new storage format could be a step toward more permanent storage, at least compared to the physical deterioration of magnetic and optical media: IBM 's Hyperpunchcards
Things in the printed world is just as fragile. Also, it is less likely to have multiple copies. The danger of digital dark age is real, but so is the danger of "paper" dark age (natural disaster). The fragility is not more or less, but simply different.
Daniel
Fund the Library of Congress to establish a underground data repository next to the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste storage facility. Print out the data on archive quality paper and store it in a controlled atmospheric environment. Then use the nuclear waste to run thermoelectric generators to power the facility.
That should be good for a couple thousand years.
-----
Note to the humor impaired. Yes, I'm joking.
// TODO: fix sig
For the simple reason that hard drives fail, everybody should burn "My documents."
Life is like pants... fit in or you don't fit in.
is to sort through 80 years of your blogs.
No offense, but would it really be that fun to read through 40-50 years of blog material just to get an idea of your ancestors? I guess it would be fun for awhile, but it seems like a big job to me. If everyone did it you'd have hundreds of people to go through for your own family if you went back a couple of generations. COunting all you realitives of course, not just your direct line.
Digital Data is the most fluid data storage system ever created. If information is truly important it will transverse from storage system to storage system as the systems change. When I got a computer I typed my documents on word processors and stored them on floppies. When hard drives came out I copied the floppies to the hard drive. When cd's came out i burned my harddrive files to cds. When DVD's come out I burned the CD's to DVD. The rate of growth of the storage medium is great enough that no data need be lost. If its extremely important....have backups...duh.... And as far as people dying. Since when does being dead make your password unhackable???.... With the future of storage medium heading towards holograms and other futuristic storage mediums I don't forsee a loss of any truly important data. And there's a lot of data that doesn't truly need to be kept....just like my garage acumulates junk I no longer need.....
We've secretely replaced the Enterprise's dilithium crystals with Folgers crystals. Lets see if they notice.
looks like the future of photonics and optics is just about to arrive after many nears of hard work.
http://colossalstorage.net/colossal.htm
What a load of shit. If it isn't worth 10 Cents for a CD and your time to back up it isn't worth anything. If you haven't accessed the data in 3 versions of Word 7 yeas or something like that, it isnt worth anything. Data that sit's around not being accessed isn't worth the tape you used to archive it.
If you don't put the resources into maintaining your shit you don't deserve to have it. How often do you change the oil in your car? I know i've complained about my Final Writer documents, along with 3 years of email being in accessable, but so what. Life goes on.
I think we're all losing sight of the big picture here. We are all operating from the premise that these "things" we hold onto--whether it be data, gold, your house or your own skin and bones--are in fact permanent. We become disillusioned when we wake up one day and realize that the mental constructs we have applied to what amounts to continually-changing collections of atoms are in fact only that--convenient illusions which ignore the impermanence of things. The keyboard on which my hands rest is decaying imperceptibly even as I use it, as is the collection of atoms I label "me". Going further, we might even say that time itself is an illusion: again a construct that we apply to the continually-changing stream of moments which comprise existence and upon which we have built a host of other strange notions very far removed from actual reality. We continually attempt to hold onto moments in time and fail to recognize the absurdity of such an endeavor, then suffer when we ultimately fail. We are all one, and everything under the sun is in unity whether we recognize it or not--whether we impose constructs on moments and separate the "me" from "everything else" is irrelevant. My data is your data, and the data of now is the data of all time. Shanti.
- It works very stable for billions of years;
- It doesn't allow "bad" or useless information to exist too long;
- It's already known to modern human science;
Create some plants (I'm a vegetarian), better trees, encode all libraries to their DNA in order for information to be reproduced on tree leaves as pictures of texts with diagrams, better in English alphabytes, but Chineese or Cyrilic will work as well. Distribute such plants between public parks with a condition to grow such trees.Imagine - you go for BBQ and read some archived slashdot articles right on the tree :) Well, Slashdot might be wiped out by the evolution. But Einstein's articles will certainly stay forever! I am sure. Otherwise, why would the evolution allow Albert Einstein from the first place?
Less is more !
Great, now the copywrite will now not only outlive the author, but existance of the work itself.
If someone is passing you on the right, you are an asshole for driving in the wrong lane.
It works and has stood the test of time. Why not just etch the most important stuff in some sorta hall of records? I remember there was a huge debate about this though back when Mount Rushmore was being built years ago. The designer wanted a timeline etched beside the figures of the four presidents as well as a hall of records, but that was heavily debated over, and thus was not able to be made. Looks to me it'll be some private firm or org that'll do it. Perhaps coat etched stone with some special solution to help reduce erosion?
I like this idea, it is very charming. I do worry, however, about the "printout" speed... it takes a good while to chisel slashdot commentary into granite blocks.
Might I suggest you consider those new "plastic printers" now used for 3d modelling? You can print out a 2-layer sheet with the lettering either raised or lowered, per your preference. There is still a fire vulnerability, but plastic sure does weather better than paper.
For machine access you could make plastic punchcards of this data.
Don't forget we're currently churning out millions of non-bio-degradable plastic bottles of all sorts; we could emboss critical data on the bottom of these bottles, and it would last forever.
Then again right now there could be so much data that extracting something useful or factual from the fray could be difficult. Some data probably ought to decompose (eg. a Hanson mp3).
I mean, not to flame this guy, but his mom loses some email and suddenly there's going to be a time where all digital information stored on hard drives is lost?
Jesus, it's not like every hard drive on the planet is going to die simultaneously at an unknown future date....and in the meantime, new hard drives are manufactured and new storage media ara invented, did it ever occur to him that people might migrate their data along the way?
Horrible, horrible article.
This message brought to you by the Council of People Who Are Sick of Seeing More People.
Ask your bank "What is your medium for Statement of record?"
You might be suprised at what answer you get. The majority of banks use Microfiche, but the trend is to go digital.
When I worked for a bank (name left blank), I was involved in a project for the conversion of "Statement of Record" from microfiche to digital format. Being the lowly sys admin, I first thought "Cool, this would be fun." But then I realized, "Hey, they will be converting MY records! I know how this place works, and how much a bad idea this really is!" I started to ask questions like "What is the FDIC rules on this?", "What is required time for retention?", "What format are you chosing?", you know the basic stuff.
Turns out the FDIC didn't have rules at the time, for long term storage of digital information (no one in the bank bothered to call). The time retention was minimum 7 years, possible up to 50 years.
Myself and my co-admin, we kept asking basic common sense questions, we ended up delaying the project for 3 years. Sorry, but we were just asking questions from the consumer point of view, with some insight of the technical area.
The biggest question that remained un-answered for a long time, was the cost. The cost of upgrading when equipment became obsolete. What do you do, when the format you chose is no longer being used. You have to go back and convert all the old data to the new format, how much is that going to run? We never did get an answer, none of the upper management wanted to touch that question, nor did they really understand what was involved. They just thought, "It is on disk/tape, we will be able to read it forever." (this was an actual remark from one of the CEO's on a conference call).
We finally got someone to run the numbers comparing the cost of the current microfiche vs digital. With the comment of, if one has to, they can use a magnifing glass to read the microfiche. When it was all said and done over a 50 year time period, the microfiche won as being the least expensive. But did that stop them? Nope... they are continuing on with the project, but only now that myself and my co-admin have left the company.
A few years ago, I spent many days loading tapes that contained the archives of the Stanford SAIL computer, from the old AI lab at Stanford. That data has been preserved. Contact Bruce Baumgard at IBM Almaden Research if you ever had a SAIL account, and he can give you your old files on a CD-ROM.
IBM maintains a large corporate archive that is copied over from one medium to the next as necessary. But IBM is a century-old company. Few other companies have that sense of time.
The interesting thing is how the power to change information and thus history becomes available by a digital format. If the format is changeable, and data is stored on computers, what if you had a group of uber-hackers (such as, say, a government-sponsored group) who changed the information in a variety of "trusted" information repositories? Some scary implications there.
I think this has been missed, hopefully I can explain this as lucidly as possible:
The Information Dark Age is a real possibility, a terrorist attack against our digital infrastructure could create somewhat of a mass panic. Think of what would occur if there was a physical bombing of Yahoo's servers, or Hotmail's. Millions of people would lose their e-mails. They would even lose their addresses, their digital identities. They would have to begin again. However unlikely that is, it is a possibility.
But that is all a mute point if we look at the way our information is being handled. We, as many have pointed out, buy a machine, create documents, then throw them away as needed, then the machine may die, or be thrown away. Our documents have become much more expendable. Just look at websites that will trash content after so long or wipe clean their servers after they go under financially.
However, we aren't Abe Lincoln and we aren't hanging on to tattered books, because there is such a breadth of information at our disposal, and just as much coming each day. Information we don't need. Who needs all their old e-mail messages? Who needs the New York Times from August 21? Who needs all their old documents? No many people need them, but a lot of people want them. Information now has become trivialized. My inbox is full of Webster's Words of the Day and e-mails from friends that I just got, then saved, for no reason.
Our society is awash in digital details, the number of hits at your website, the sales of Britney Spears' latest album, the ramblings of the SlashDot postees archived. Why do we need all of these things?
We don't.
But, then, you say, 'what do we need?' We think we need Presidential archives, we think we need video of the '64 Super Bowl. We think we need all of these things, but do we?
I am an information junkie, I like to read the papers and read the goings-on here, but, in retrospect, why do we need all of these things, all of this information?
Certainly we need a base to continue building on as people, but our base isn't the '64 Super Bowl, nor is it how many records N*Sync has sold.
Perhaps as we increase our progress we can effectively decrease the need for archived and insignificant information. Perhaps, we will have to.
Think of it: If you are coming out with more and more technology, say new chipsets, doesn't your need for knowledge of the older chips decrease as your progress with the new one increases.
Another way: If you are creating more information, new information, how can you rely on old information, how can you even remember it? As we move forward quicker and quicker, if we can, is there anyway for people to look back in history in the same way? No, there simply is not a way to do this without evolving our minds to gather more information at one time.
Our society is like a file cabinet, there is only so much space for information. As we add and add to that information, to create a new society, why should be obligated to maintain the information left behind?
But, on the counter, as we progress and progress, should not our ability to handle information increase, as well as our ability to sort it?
Information is reaching a tedious point where we will have to make decisions. It is highly likely that we can store all of the world's saved information at the same archives, within the next 50 years. However, is there any reason to store some of this information? Is keeping my website, for instance, archived for the next millennia going to do the human race any good? Or will it just clog pipes of knowledge? As proud as I am of my website, and as much I want it to be saved, it does not deserve to be archived for thousands of years, because it's impact on progress is very limited, if existent at all.
In fact, as we get more new information that moves us in a new direction, how can the old information help? Remember, we need to shift the paradigms, because, as we see from today's world, the current one isn't preserving human life, nor is it getting us anywhere too fast. [The new computers look as if they will be doing the same thing only faster; the cars will be doing the same things only with more gadgets, and no horse; the way information is stored hasn't changed much since the first library, now it's only broken into different, personal, digital libraries; we still have war; and medicine is still mostly symptom-based, or the disease adapt just as the cures do.]
I think we will need to, if not delete, disregard information that today seems important, if we want to ever get anywhere. We could, of course develop a way to store and sort all of today's information--someday, maybe all of it in one disc, or whatever new media of the time stores data--, and save it for the esoteric wonderings of historians. But, again, what good does it do?
As we progress we will need to know more about that day, less about yesterday.
*Any thoughts?
MOLECULAR LEECHING
Smaller = More Ephemeral
i have seen a 150 year old wood nail that has fused itself
into a piece of rock due to the natural properties of
molecular leeching.
the smaller you pack your bits on a hard drive.
the more data you squeeze into a square inch,
the sooner it will give way to molecular leeching
and become a paperweight.
a 20Mb hard drive from 20 years ago (1980's)
will last longer than a 20gig drive front 2002.
hemp paper lasts longer than tree-based paper.
if you really want long-lasting. you're better off
printing your documents on hemp paper than
storing it on a CD-ROM or hard-drive.
i've also been to the british museum
and seen the original rosetta stone.
alas - the CD-Roms ABOUT the rosetta stone
will probably not last a fraction as long as the original.
best regards,
john.
I still do remember those piles of paper on my desk. When they were around to long I could read the text from my desk. Also old faxes turned into blanc toilet paper. I'm not sure about HP ink but I doubt it will last long enough. I will stick to copying_the_old disk_onto_the_new disk. Until now this always worked. Jack
There was actually a story about this on slashdot a month or so ago - there's a group of people trying to figure out how to mark nuclear waste storage sites so that it's still clear they're dangerous thousands of years from now. That's just one example - the fact of the matter is, there are quite a few things we really probably should try to Make Damn Sure our descendents don't forget, even if civilization somehow magically collapses. Radiation is bad for you, for example. Boiling water makes it clean - simple, but do you know how many people die even today from waterborne bacteria? Too damn many.
In short, any data that really DOES matter to the survival of the species probably really should be etched into a pyramid or monolith or something.
I'm the stranger...posting to
"Unbreakable encryption" doesn't exist, and never can.
Afterall, if you cannot decrypt something, it does no one any good - including the individual that saved/created/modified it.
Winners tell stories while losers yell deal.
I know this contradicts another post I made to this thread, but is the collapse of civilization worth worrying about? I mean, civilization was a much more fragile thing when humans numbered in the millions and a village of 1,000 people was considered pretty damn big. A big storm or famine could destroy civilization, at least locally, but enough people would be left to pick up the pieces.
That isn't true now. Even in the event of fairly major war, plague, etc., there is usually going to be someplace that can stay "civilized", that can retain technology and culture, and assist in recovery efforts. Example: World War 2 left Europe in pretty bad shape, but the Marshall Plan helped turn those bomb-churned fields back into producers of tasty crops. Mmm...crops. Sorry, I'm hungry.
My point is, the only things that could destroy all civilization on Earth - which would be the only way to end civilization, even temporarily - would all have the nasty tendency to end human existence on this planet. Nuclear war could do this, for example. Or maybe a superplague. Or a Big Freakin' Asteroid. All these things could "end civilization", but they'd be unlikely to leave enough human survivors to carry on the species. Remember, if it ISN'T a total global catastrophe, civilization will survive somewhere.
So why worry about saving info for potentially barbaric descendents? If civilization dies, humans are probably screwed anyway.
I'm the stranger...posting to
You can burn to CD or DVD now (or dump to tape for that matter). Once a new media comes out, transfer to disk, transfer to new backup media type. Voila! If a new format doesn't come out after X years or months, burn another copy just in case. Just make sure to set a date for yourself to recopy (every year, two years... whatever) and stick to it.
:P Losing porn is always a bad thing. Be smart. Protect yourself. Protect your porn.
You could even dump stuff into a deposit box or something if you're really concerned about saving your data. Who knows if you'll be able to download all your favorite porn clips and pics in the future
What won't we be able to read if we have nanotechnology? You'll be able to throw a wax cylinder, a vinyl record, audiotape, hard disk into the machine's receptacle, tell it to detect the medium from its huge database of format standards and decryptions, and away you go.
What's more, the fidelity will be better than it was originally.
The loss of passwords through DBAs dying is a bit of a worry though.
Thanks :-).
It's courtesy of a link from the ever-awesome memepool about No-Scalpel Vasectomy. I was quite tired at the time (so I probably found it unusually hilarious) but it was too good to pass up.
8. What are the alternatives for birth control?
Tubal ligation is the most often considered alternative, but it requires a much more invasive surgery and much more pain to the patient. Tubal ligations may also increase premenstrual syndrome symptoms, and a recent study showed an overall pregnancy rate of 1 in 40, far higher than vasectomy. Birth control pills have about the same effectiveness as vasectomy, but are far more expensive and bring with them hormonal side effects. Condoms and foam together also nearly equal the effectiveness of vasectomy, but are inconvenient and in the long run, costly. Either one alone is far less effective. IUDs (intrauterine devices) are less effective and increase the risk of pelvic inflammatory infections. Diaphragms and spermicidal foam have a lesser effectiveness and an increased risk of urinary tract infection. Withdrawal before climax is very ineffective and those who try this are usually called "parents." For all these reasons, it is my feeling that men who have vasectomies are being responsible and kind to their sexual partners.
I've set it as the sig on one of my mail accounts, but usually delete it when composing the mail. Especially if I don't want to offend the person. But, anything goes here, so...
[I'm envisioning a simple black shirt with that written on it in nice, white, bold letters... After all, if it's tattooed to someone's forehead, they won't be able to see it that often.]
Withdrawal before climax is very ineffective and those who try this are usually called "parents."
Great. Its wonderful to know that grandma might lose all her important documents because she fails to follow proper backup procedures, but if I said something silly on usenet 20 years ago, google's caching and redundancy will ensure that it'll still be available for hundreds of years to come.
-Restil
Play with my webcams and lights here
The problem is "why?" and scope.
Think about all of the information that you would have to record to give someone in the future an accurate picture of your life: your daily habits, where you live, what everything in your dwelling looks like..., in short, everything that you interact with on a daily basis. It's a vast, vast amount of information. The problems of medium and file format are Engineering problems -- throw enough of something at them and you'll get a satisfactory solution.
But there is too much possible information to store! Not because of the limits of the medium, but because what human being X years from now will want to read about your life in such great detail? By the time they would've absorbed your life, they would be 10 years older, and what's the point of that? They wouldn't have a life of their own....
The value of a contribution to the human world is in great part it's made up of uniqueness and its utility. Therefore, think hard about what value the things which you leave behind have. Can other people use this same information?
Or, you can really limit the scope and only leave those things behind which have meaning to you. Family pictures, for instance. Ultimately, this class of things may say more to future generations than a minute-by-minute blog of life.
But maybe not..., what does it really matter to you if you're forgotten or not? You'll be dead anyway.
IDE disk drives are amazingly cheap, and getting cheaper. So use mirroring and removable-drive drawers. 100GB of space costs about $100, if you don't mind slower IDE drives. So get a couple of those removable-drive drawers (~$25 for the mounting, and $12 for extra drawers), and an extra IDE controller if you need it, and copy all your files to it. Stick a copy of the important stuff on the shelf (or in your safety deposit box) and do it again. Pick your favorite flavor of RAID or mirroring - for small systems, it's much easier to be wasteful and do complete mirrors; for larger systems it's much more efficient to do RAID, so that WHEN you lose one of your drives, you can recover. As long as Cheap Disk Drives keep exceeding Moore's Law for price/capacity, you keep winning, and the removable drawers mean you can easily pop the new bigger drives in and out. And always make sure to copy all your old files to the new drives before the old drives become unusable - tapes and removable-media disks are the worst offenders. Got any 8" floppy drives?
Use Backup Software, and Back Up To New Machines when you upgrade.The two big reasons that data gets lost are failing hardware (addressed by mirroring) and accidental/deliberate erasure/updating/scribbling. Use backup software to deal with that, preferably some kind of software that doesn't use proprietary data formats. Journaling file systems can be really good places to put things, if you're on an open operating system. Backups are another excellent use of Cheap Disk Drives in Drawers.
Avoid File System Format Dependence by CopyingIt's nice to keep backup media in well-documented file system formats, but it's also critical when you get computers with new file system formats to copy your old backup data to the new computers
Data formats are the hard part - Use Open Standards Whenever Possible. Keep all of your software installation disks, however obsolete. MSWord is evil - too much complexity, too little documentation, too little compatibility. HTML is great, because it's human-readable and easily parsed, and it's a content description language (or was in the past), not a black-marks-on-paper description language. Graphics formats - If you can use open-source standards without major differences in compression, use them, because you can also store format descriptions and conversion software. And be sure to label stuff so you know what it is - README files as well as on the outside of the media.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Its not that records were un-available. Historical records are available, although in rare instances. This period is know as the Dark ages because people at the time after the fall of the Roman Empire, for one reason or another, simply ignored all the recorded accomplishments of the Romans, and earlier Greeks.
My only reference is my Western Civ. Professor Dr. King.
Now a little later around 1200 the forgotten knowledge and accomplishments of the Romans and Greeks was rediscovered during the renaissance.