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The Digital Dark Age
zygan wrote to mention a Fairfax Digital article about the possibility of a digital dark age, as a result of the increasingly short-term lifespan of digital storage. From the article: "It is 2045, he suggests, and his grandchildren are exploring the attic of his old house when they come across a CD-ROM and a letter, which explains that the disk contains a document that provides directions to obtaining the family fortune. The children are excited. 'But they've never seen a CD before - except in old movies - and, even if they found a suitable disk drive, how will they run the software necessary to interpret the information on the disk? How can they read my obsolete digital document?'"
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
this should be soluble
That could be a problem. At least a CD won't get damaged by water.
Maybe they can buy all the necessary components on ebay!
Seriously archeologist have decoded all sorts of dead languages, decoding digital (assuming you can still pick out the bits) would be easier.
In the second box is a player, if the fellow had any real fortune.
Besides, I'd have drawn the map on parchment, and tied it up with a string.
Arrr! Ye Mateys...
You can't talk about Wikipedia's flaws on Wikipedia
They'll take it to that crazy old guy in the corner house with uncut grass in his lawn, for he was once a great programming guru and has a ton of still functioning archaic equipment that requires insanely large amounts of power.
Linux is to the internet as Duct Tape is to the Universe.
\/\/H47'$ 4 L3773r?
Hell no!
Zip discs are the *only* reliable way to archive digital data indefinitely
So we're going to lose our information. Who cares? Proton decay will eventually destroy all of it. Sure, that's a long time in the future. You know how things go: it's 10^1032 years away today, but before you know it the kids have moved out and the end of the universe is right around the corner.
Just try and keep those bits in line.
--I'm so big, my sig has its own sig.
-- See?
Thats why I store all my important stuff on LS-120 discs.
That way even if someone does steal them they'd be hard pressed to find out what it is and finding a drive for it!
Music is everybody's possession.
It's only publishers who think that people own it.
Fuck Beta
~John Lenno
Yeah, I can just imagine ...
You find the CD buried in a box in the garden.
You see the Microsoft logo. An old, long-dead company.
You scrape some dust off the CD.
You read through the logos and fine print on the CD.
You see the logo 'PlaysForSure' (tm)
You groan and throw the CD in the trash.
-- "It's not stalking if you're married!" My Wife.
"Not to be rude, but for the love of God, don't you have something to do besides write 1-bit bitmaps by hand?"... said the guy being needlessly critical on Slashdot.
"Derp de derp."
...back and find a computer to read it on. I mean that's what they'll do when they need an IBM 5100 isn't it? :)