Slashdot Mirror
Digital Domesday Defies Doom
Hulver writes "The BBC Domesday project, originally completed in 1986 and under threat (as reported in this old slashdot story) has had its data recovered. The contents of the laserdiscs have been put on DVD, and new programs written so that PCs can access the data. Interestingly, most of the images and films were not recovered from the laserdiscs, but were instead re-digitised from the original analog films at a higher resolution than the laserdiscs contained. Full details of the recovered data are at the Public Record Office website."
Let's see how quickly it happens.
This article reminds me of something else I read - that the DOE is currently paying good money for people to help design a warning for Yucca Mountain (the giant nuclear storage facility out in Nevada). That one has to last as much as 100,000 years, albeight it has to store a lot less information (stay the F*** out). I wonder what kind of overlap there would be between the two?
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
laserdisc is, in fact, analog...so how can 're-digitised' be correct?
There was a story about this very recently here. Why not a reference.
Read your history and learn about the Domesday [sic] Book. It's not a mistake.
YFI
-uso.
Dreams, dreams, don't doubt dreams, dreaming children's dreaming dreams. Sailor Moon SS
"Interestingly, most of the images and films were not recovered from the laserdiscs, but were instead re-digitised from the original analog films at a higher resolution than the laserdiscs contained. "
.flac, so I can be laughing in the distant future when everyone has crappy mp3s just because they wanted to save some space decades ago when 700 meg was a lot.
This is why I have all my CDs stored as
graspee
The previous slashdot article
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
Language drifts and changes. Pick up a copy Beowulf, circle AD 800. Chances are you won't understand a whole lot, it's written in old english. What with the great vowel shift, the meanings of most of those words have significantly changed. Now, instead of 1200 years, imagine what 100,000 years of language evolution would do to such a warning. That's why ANY warning they choose will probably be pictoral, not script.
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
Seriously. I really think that a couple of hundred thousand mechanically activated (or perhaps solar so they come awake when they're dug up?) landmines are the answer.
Yes, there'll be a few casualties, but by god what ever our pig ignorant descendents make of the situation, they'll be wary investigators. Death is a pretty fucking good keep out sign, and probably a lot less loss of life will result than if they carve their way inside and start wearing uranium as jewelery from the ancient gods...
Hexayurt - open source refugee shelter,
michael, you font of knowledge you. I wondered what the hell 'defeation' was so I Googled it. I must say I understand what Google is suggesting.
...re-digitised from the original analog films at a higher resolution than the laserdiscs contained.
That's great as long as the film hasn't degraded to worse than the quality of the laserdisc images and the resolution is there to begin with.
The first thing that struck me when I went over was...where's my copy? This was put together as an educational tool using public money, but now there's only one copy of it in Kew Gardens, London? Why can't I just download it? All the data's public domain anyway.
As it happens, I don't live that far from Kew Gardens and so will probably go to see this. But what I'd really like to do is download the lot and use it as a referece tool at home. Or perhaps accessible online.
Incidently, no word on the formats used to rescue it. It now has a Windows interface - good news, but what about people running other things? That's not a trite statement - they already came close to losing it once in just fifteen years, and in fifteen more years' time I'll guarantee you that it won't be XP on people's desktop. Need to have the formats available so that people can write their own interfaces to it.
Cheers,
Ian
Domesday Book, vellum and ink, still readable after 900 years.
Domesday Book II, Laser disks and computer files, in need of rescue after 17 years.
Progress ?
I think you've hit on a really insightful idea. I'm reminded of a quote from Newsradio: "You can't take something off the Internet - it's like taking pee out of a pool."
The guarenteed way of protecting data against time is to make lots and lots of copies. The internet is the perfect medium for that. So yes, why don't they put it on the internet?
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
Shouldn't it be "Digital Doomsday Defies Dome"?
wait.. dOh!
Check the link, it is "Domesday".
...in a perfect vacuum, and someone discovered it thousands (millions?) of years later, would it still work? (provided there was power for it, some type of solar, perhaps?)
No, wait, I lied, they don't.
Yes, that might be true. Nowadays, for the first time in history, it's possible to record the actual speech (as opposed to symbols for speech). But, by the same token, the advent of the internet will only speed language evolution. For the first time, it's easily possible to sit down and communicate with someone half a world away. That will almost certainly encourage language homogenization, but that still means change.
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
The guarenteed way of protecting data against time is to make lots and lots of copies. The internet is the perfect medium for that. So yes, why don't they put it on the internet?
Becasue they are stupid, probably.
The ironic thing is that because they have decided to convert it to a proprietary Microsoft format, they will probably have to repeat the exercise in another 15 years. Bloody idiots.
Backup. It's just like having the original .wav files, so if anything happens to the CD you have a perfect backup copy. You get all the benefits of it being digitized as well, you can play it in it's full audio glory on your computer/stereo, you can FTP or transfer the tracks in a format that is a clone of what is on the disc, but with a nice time-saving amount of compression. Also when the CD format dies out you have the digital file sitting around on your HD, which will no doubt be the way we store our media in the future. Your question is similar, (albeit with a few important differences), to asking "Why keep around the full rip of your DVDs? You already have the DVD. Why not just make a divx and leave it at that?" Quality is important, disk space is cheap, and there's nothing like a perfect backup when you are serious about archiving.
Anti-social? My code is just platform-specific.
well, I made some of the entry for the village of Wickenby, near Lincoln, with a childhood friend, Ann. We both had BBC computers at home so we sort of got co-opted into typing some stuff. As children of farmers we concentrated on that side of life in the area. Sweet innocent times...
Rob.
It's clear that any specific format will last for a while and then be obsoleted within a decade or so.
Therefore transferring the information from format to format automatically as new and cheaper solutions arrive. This means a process and to simplify and reduce costs, some automatic tools to do the job.
There are hierarchical storage management[1] solutions around which can do this for you, Tivoli do quite a good one, but, because we're talking long term, the software really also needs to be cross platform and open source.
[1] http://itmanagement.webopedia.com/TERM/H/HSM.html
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
RetroBeep, a retrocomputing museum at Bletchley Park (near Milton Keynes, close to London) has the VL-reader and a BBC micro. The proprietor (John Sinclair, whose son is also active at the site) discussed the Domesday project when I was there in May 2003. I'm not sure if there's a copy of it there, but they did have the hardware, and were trying to connect one device to the other.
Next time use public domain file formats and document the hell out of them using Dos-CP/M text.
(Meaning CR and LF)
It's universal enough. Everyone uses one or the other some times both. Should continue to work well into the future.
(After all 7 bit ASCII text is almost 50 years old.)
Document the formats in ASCII, Englishn(psudo code), French, German, Klingonis.. and list Klingonis as the offical laguage of earth at the time. Just to mess with peoples heads.
Then maybe we can wait a whole 50 years before having to recover this.
I don't actually exist.
and there's nothing like a perfect backup when you are serious about archiving.
Considering that the masters are probably 24 bit at 96khz sampling rate, and undoubtably more than two channels.. I'd have to say both FLAC and the original CD are "nothing like a perfect backup"
455fe10422ca29c4933f95052b792ab2
Well as perfect a backup of an album as they allow consumers to get, and perfect in the sense that it is an exact clone of whatever you audio you wish to digitize. However FLAC is capable of 24/96 sampling, so if you had the masters for a given recording you could FLAC them and have a "perfect backup" of those masters. Also if you are taping your own music you can take advantage of the 24 bit format. I actually have a few 24 bit FLACs that were made from the masters of various live shows. So despite the fact that the music that we buy has been resampled and is inferior to the original, the FLAC format is a "perfect" way to archive whatever audio you have available. Be it a decaying Lomax tape of Leadbelly that needs to be saved, or the Dark Side of the Moon masters.
Anti-social? My code is just platform-specific.
The first continuous signal from outside our Solar system is just about decoded. Here is it....What's this? It's written in an obsolete proprietary Microsoft file format! Someone owes some licensing fees.
Am I hearing this right? They make it sound like they only had 1 copy of this on LaserDisc - and since everyone's players were going to shit the content was in danger of being lost forever. ???
Conserve Oil, Recycle, Boycott Walmart
Well, what do you think "YFI" stands for? I was aware of that.
-uso.
Dreams, dreams, don't doubt dreams, dreaming children's dreaming dreams. Sailor Moon SS
Just think of all the nasty things a terrorist could do with those disc(s). It's a threat to national security! It's a good thing we have nothing like that here in America... HA
Of course, one gets an analog TV signal out of most DVD players. The difference here is that DVD has discrete pits that represent ones and zeros, whereas LD has pits that are variably and continously sized. Digital audio was tacked onto the LD standard in a couple of different ways, there are two digital audio tracks that can be used and have discrete pits on the disk, and Dolby Digital 5.1 or 6.1 can be modulated onto one of the analog audio tracks and then converted back to digital by a periphial demodulator device.
"Remember, there never were pineapple-almond cookies here."
You're assuming that the FLAC software will be compatible with computers and operating systems in 20-30 years. Will the current version of FLAC be compatible with gcc 6.x on a 64-bit system? Is FLAC 3.x going to be capable of reading files encoded by 1.1.0? And even if the software and compiler are compatible, how well will they work with files that aren't DRM certified?
:)
In a worst-case scenario (no source code works on "modern computers"), FLAC is open-source and could be reimplemented, if the people looking at the files are interested enough. You do have the source code on your computer, right?
The principle idea in building yucca is they *assume* it is going to be forgotten about and not updated. (Good engineering, btw - they plan for the worst) I mean, in 100,000 years a lot can happen, and chances are that the sign won't be kept up to date.
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
Open format specs will survive far into the future (just try googling for any free and open specification). As Linus said, "Only wimps use tape backup: real men just upload their important stuff on FTP, and let the rest of the world mirror it." Open format specs survive far into the future. Someone (you or someone else) can write the software to read it. Flac is free:
I think that you undervalue the meaning of "free" in free software.Just say its pirated warez, throw it up on a torrent, kazaa, winmx, or whathave you, and it will last for years. ;P :)
look at the www.textfiles.com archive.
Well, what do you think "YFI" stands for?
i have no idea, please enlighten me...
I was at school when the Domesday project was being built, in fact my school was one the schools responsible for covering part of Carlisle in Cumbria.
Our school bough one of the Domesday kits and on the first day all the teachers were bringing us through in to the library class by class to show it off. This was until one of the teachers dropped one of the discs and it shattered, bearing that in mind I am very surprised there are still discs in woking order after all this time.
I would hope now that they will work on some of the other discs that used the Domesday hardware. I vividly remember a disc that featured an interacitve film. Basically the topic was about wathching a group of kids mucking around and every 2-3 minutes it would freeze and various options would appear over the characters, e.g "Simon calls Peter stupid". Depending on what you chose (using the track ball) the film would take a different path, either they would all go home happy or they would end up in some sort of trouble. Never mind the brainwashing apsects of the film (i.e. don't misbehave kids), the technology was trail blazing. This was in 1987! Years before DVD and even now I've seen very few interactive DVD films.
Aparently there was over an hour of film and 4 possible endings to a 15 minute program on one of those discs. Whats more the system was very quick and totally foolproof.
As an 11 year old obsessed with technology I was in awe of all this fancy equipment, Domesday wasn't just a great archiving project it also introduced some fancy technology which even today seems new fangled.
What the BBC and their partners should have done is to add new material to the Domesday archive every 5 or so years. As well as the obvious enrichment of the archive, this would also mean there was a chance to update the technology in steps in order to keep track with data storage devlopements. Instead once it was finished it was forgotten about, meaning 15 years later when people realise the value of the project you have to get university's on board to make sense of the storage medium, data and software. That would have been a much better way to preserve the data.
And consider the lubricants in the spinning components....
"You might as well get your son a ticket to hell as give him a five string banjo." -unknown minister
There are maybe a few dozen people in the world who could even partially decipher indo-european, and that is only some 10,000 years old (it started in Ankara around 8,000 BC and is the mother tongue of the latin and germanic families). Now, instead of 10,000, what is it were 100,000 years. How many people would speak it then?
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
Adrian's first goal was to get the BBC Master computer working reliably again. This was no simple task. It involved getting hold of and reading through systems documentation, trying to understand both the operating system commands and the internal workings of this mid-1980s computer.
Jesus, it was only 17 years ago. This reads like he was trying to decipher Egyptian hieroglyphs from scratch.
I'm sure that many of the people who originally designed and used the system back in 1986 are still alive. Why not just ask one of them how it works?
Indeed, nearly any British hacker that went to school in the eighties and early nineties would have been able to help him out with those pesky BBC operating system commands.
According to a nice man I spoke to at the Public Records Office, it's *not* on DVD. And they can't sell copies for various copyrighty reasons. Although apparently the PRO and BBC want to and are trying to figger out how.
The link you provide comes up with the following in seriously big letters:
Perhaps he turned to Google to turn up a definition where the dictionary[.com] did not.