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New DVDs For 1,000-Year Digital Storage
anonymous cowpie sends word of a Utah startup that is about to introduce technology for writing DVDs that can be read for 1,000 years after being stored at room temperature. (Ordinary DVDs last anywhere from 3 to 12 years, on average.) The company, Millenniata, is said to be in the final stages of negotiation with Phillips over patent licensing and plans to begin manufacture in September. 1,000-year "M-ARC Discs" are expected to retail for $25-$30 at first, with the price coming down with volume. "Dubbed the Millennial Disk, it looks virtually identical to a regular DVD, but it's special. Layers of hard, 'persistent' materials (the exact composition is a trade secret) are laid down on a plastic carrier, and digital information is literally carved in with an enhanced laser using the company's Millennial Writer, a sort of beefed-up DVD burner. Once cut, the disk can be read by an ordinary DVD reader on your computer."
Posting to prevent accidental mod.
How do we KNOW that they'll REALLY last 1,000 years?
Dubbed the Millennial Disk, it looks virtually identical to a regular DVD, but it's special.
These new non-degradable disks are larger, black, and made out of vinyl.
As if DVD players will be around for 1000 years?
Kodak 100 year data lifetime on its CD-R Ultima media?
Sounds like someone put some effort into dvds too.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
I was writting a flamming "how can they prove the 1000 year thingy" when I realized thad a mere century was more than enough at this price... I wonder what are the tests though...
Too bad trying to find a DVD player 1,000 years from now will be like trying to find a floppy drive 9,980 years from now.
For example, how does this laser "carve" into the substrate? Is a laser strong enough to "carve" into this subtstrate even legal to sell to consumers? If this is different from an ordinary DVD writer and discs, then how ? How do we know that these discs are any better than ordinary DVDs? After all, this company could fold in 10 years, just as it's "M-ARC" discs are failing.
Thanks to the fact the data is literally "carved in", these discs are playable by a wide range of easily obtainable readers. Not only can you put them in a DVD player - in fact, it's possible simply to put a needle in the grooves of the disc, which gives detailed instructions on how to make a DVD player.
Doesn't this sound a lot like, "We have this super special material and this really cool laser, but we can't tell you what they are. But it lasts 1000 years...really...trust us."
(Ordinary DVDs last anywhere from 3 to 12 years, on average.)
For those of you really concerned about optical media in your possession, check out NIST's "Care and Handling of CDs and DVDs - A Guide for Librarians and Archivists" [1.24 MB PDF warning]. That guide is extremely thorough.
While it is a longer span for pressed DVDs, I'm sure the RIAA/MPAA know that the media we purchase songs and movies on has a limited lifespan that may very well be shorter than the consumer's remaining years. And it kind of upsets me that creating backups for your own personal use of DVDs or CDs is illegal (although not typically prosecuted unless copyright infringement ensues). Personally, I rip all my CDs and some DVDs upon purchase and simply never use the disc again. It goes into storage and I create digital backups and hard copy backups of the discs. It's a bit pricier and not as instant as other ways of purchasing media but it ensures I'll always have it. When I purchased the latest Cloud Cult album, I bought the CDs and was able to download unencrypted MP3s immediately after purchase. When I purchased the vinyl record of She & Him, I was e-mailed a voucher to download the MP3s. I wish the big distributors would follow what the little guys are doing and offer you the whole package up front. Saves me a lot of work.
My work here is dung.
"...are laid down on a PLASTIC carrier,..."
Keyword for failure: plastic.
1. a player to play the damn thing
2. the resources to build a player to play the damn thing.
3. a screen to view it on
4. the resources to build a screen to view it on
5. the cultural interest in such behaviour (sitting and watching a screen)
6. the cultural capacity to decode and understand what the hell they're watching even if they do decide to watch it, assuming they have the ability to do so. For an extreme example, there is a non-zero probability that in 1000 years, the notion of "fiction" may well not exist, in which case an episode of "Friends" or "Seinfeld" become biographical portraits of stupid foolish people, as one needs to have the fictive distance to decode what is happening.
7. that anyone will give a rat's ass about us in a 1000 years. They may well be pissing on our graves for having ruined the planet, and these disks may simply be destroyed as examples of the evil Evil EVIL petroleum age.
8. Reverse engineering NTSC (SD or HD - just getting 29.97fps with rectangular pixels is fucked up enough) from a disc filled with microscopic pits strikes me as impossible and or pointless.
I can list many more reasons why a 1000 year disk is a waste of time, those are just a few off the top of my head.
Frankly, I think we are the civilisation that in 1000 years will be a great and tantalizing mystery. Their world will be filled with our garbage, telling them how we lived (like wasteful pigs at the trough) but they won't really know that much about what we think (because it was all digital and the technology disappeared in the die-off).
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
> Millenniata, is said to be in the final stages of negotiation with Phillips over patent licensing and plans to begin manufacture in September.
I guess Phillips felt sorry for some old lady who fell for a Nigerian government scam and decided to hire her...
Anyone who buys this is an idiot.
If this is true then shouldn't new movies come with a date stamp on the case so you know you're buying a "fresh" copy? Sounds strange to me. I've got data and music CD's I made over 10 years ago that still work. Can't say I've been burning DVDs that long though.
...than I am in seeing the cool time machine they must have employed to test them.
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I have DVD's in my collection now older than 12 years old and they work fine. Maybe they mean recordable discs?
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
http://www.zeropaid.com/news/86356/mpaa-says-making-even-one-copy-of-a-dvd-is-illegal/
Now, if everyone understands DRM and closed formats are hopelessly short sighted, maybe we can avoid the current day being the future's digital dark age. We can leave a legacy of storage media still readable in formats whose workings are widely known. Some would leave their descendants a tangled mess of data hidden with secrets on media not designed to last longer than a decade. Which is not really seeing the bigger picture.....
Backups of DVDs and CDs are not illegal, what gave you that idea?
Wish you were correct. But you need only look at the short history of 321 Studios' DVD X Copy or Real's RealDVD whereby both ended in lawsuits where the movie studios won. Why is this? Our good friend, the DMCA.
Like I said, it's not prosecuted (when you do it in your home) but try to release commercial software that decrypts DVDs or even copies without decrypting a disc. Instant lawsuit. I'll bet if the MPAA/RIAA had a way to detect when this occurs without invading your privacy completely, we'd see a hell of a lot more lawsuits issued via the DMCA.
My work here is dung.
That's a quote from Idiocracy, not flamebait.
Go somewhere random
that tells us global warming will doom us in one hundred years.
So, in the meantime, thank you for funding my lavish lifestyle and be happy to know your saving your data (world)
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
It's not the medium that has a short lifespan, it is the format. When the DVD came out, I was working for a medical IT company. In medical IT, there is an obligation to keep the data for 15 years or so. But no one could tell whether it would be +RW or -RW that would still be known 15 years later. What use is a 100 year disk if you cannot even know that the format is still supported 5 years from now?
Well, we can compare with CDROMs that were rated to last for 50 years and to have excellent new-fangled error correction properties. Experience shows that an average pristine CDROM, when taken out of its lovely packaging, is, within say, around 5 minutes, royally fucked by virtue of a single hairline scrape.
So, concluding the obvious --- that a long 50-year rating is actually hazardous to the lifetime of a medium --- we can clearly see that a 1,000-year medium will, in fact, be a powerful tool. With it, we can erase from history events that have already happened.
what's the point, exactly? even today 5GB is not much for archival, and we know the pace at which storage size availability grows in time. For example, we already have tape systems of greater size and whose durability is proven.
The only (dubious) advantage would be: you'll be able to record a DVD which you'll be able to readily plug in your reader somewhere in the far future... provided that a DVD reader will still available, which I doubt.
I mean, would you care if someone in the 80's had created 1000-year-proof eight-inch floppy disks?
This is actually useful to those of us looking for a decent data archiving system. While I'm not aiming for a 1000 years of recovery, 20-30 would be decent.
To answer the next question; if enough people think the same way, yes there will be a player for them in 30 years. And many of us are thinking the same way. For reference; there are turntables with USB interfaces.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
"digital information is literally carved in with an enhanced laser"
Surely an enhanced chisel would be more appropriate.
They also offer a cryostasis program.
1000 year Reich?
I *KNEW* it!
By the way: Why would anyone put a date on when their empire will die? I mean imagine the Nazis sitting together after winning. 1000 years went by. And someone goes: "Now what?" ;)
Also: Instant Godwin'd! ^^
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
You mean fewer.
From the musical Big River*
She's got one big breast in the middle of her chest
And an eye in the middle of her nose
So says I, if you look her in the eye
You're better off looking up her nose
(* This post is for cultural research only. No sales of Hulu(tm) ads have been created out of contract by this post. This does not constitute a song.)
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
I'm from the future and these things started to fail after the invasion the P'tarr which brought Ma'arev plastic rot.
And holy muhummumud-iebuz-krizhn'aah, why do you bury all these DVD with acrobatics of naked people ? It's always the same, not very interesting and confuses our archeologists.
I heard a second-subsided Co-Proproffezor from the 3rd Uranian Institute for Frombetics and Timeline research claim they have something to do with procreation, a special cult or so. Which I find wacky - people come from the cloning factory, why do acrobatics or culting about it ? What's next ? Babies growing in the womb or what ?
You are a strange timeline.
And what's about these acrobatics from 2016 and the Mars bars ?
Impossible-to-substantiate claims of long-term data integrity aside, it's an absurd concept.
A 'DVD that can be read for 1,000 years'? It will be nothing short of incredible if you can even read it in a HUNDRED years. I'm not saying their uber material and process won't etch rather more permanent 1s and 0s into the disc. I'm saying that even if each one comes WITH a DVD drive to archive with it (And at that price, they could.) the chances are still pretty slim that anyone could access the data in any meaningful way down the road. (And exactly what are you going to be archiving that you think will still be relevant or usable in a thousand years?)
In FIFTY years, you're going to have future geeks taking these quaint 12cm discs, doing a 3D scan of the material's structure, extracting the binary data, and sticking it in an antique computer emulation to view the content. The data will likely hold very little meaning whatsoever. They'll do it because it's clever and geeky, and then they'll post a writeup about it to their blog/the cybernetic hivemind/whatever, shortly before forgetting all about the discs and never accessing them again.
In a thousand years, you'll be lucky if someone thinks they'd make a good wind chime or something.
Friend: "The NIC is misconfigured..." Me: "No prob, I'll just telnet in and fix it." *Silence*
That seems a little low to me. I have some DVDs which are at least 10 years old and some CDs which are older than I am,(25 years), and they all still play fine.
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It's a perfectly legitimate question.
They used to say writable CD-Rs would last 50 years, then next thing we knew, we discovered "disc rot" (or whatever it's called) in CD-Rs that were barely a couple years old.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I'm sure when the world gets taken over by futuristic super-intelligent tree-climbing octopii, they'll find it useful.
These disks were not developed to store compressed copies of Hollywood's favorite movies they were designed for archival of data. I can see lots of applications for this especially in photography. Think about all the photos that you have from your great great great grandparents. They were printed on paper and kept in a shoebox on a shelf for years. They have withstood 100 years easily. With the advent of digital photography people dont print their images as often now and the ones they do tend to fade. Instead they burn them to CD and DVD (If your lucky) These archives only last 10-15 years. This new disk will last so much longer. The problem I see with the new disk is that you need a special burner to burn them. My only hope is that this will become a standard feature almost like litescribe and be included in most premium drives. For now I will stick with good quality archival disks like MAM-A gold. They are a normal DVD and will last 100 years. At that time most of the photos will have no value to future generations and they can then be converted over to the current storage mediums and formats.
They are larger, made of clay, and pinkish-orange.
They also come in other shapes and sizes.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Yes, there is also a section that tries to answer the question whether in 1000 years there will be any DVD readers available.
Considering that the article reassures us that
Uh, reality check here? You just convinced us that those disks (which don't use your terrific new technology) won't last more than a few years until they will have to be rearchived on new disks? Why on earth would anyone need to keep DVD readers around for more than 2 to 3 times the lifetime of a DVD after a newer technology was widely adopted (I'm talking about non-DRM'ed DVD data)?
The article also cites a "digital preservation officer" from BYU who, er, doesn't seem to understand the necessity for making multiple backups of important data, and is willing to be presented as someone who is losing "1 to 2 percent" of his important data per year! Either they're misrepresenting him in the article, or someone should put him out of his misery already and fire him (OK, he might be able to justify it based on budget limitations, but, really)?
The article smells very, very fishy. Oh, it's a local newspaper covering a local startup? Ah, I begin to understand....
Thanks to this evil potion.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
it would take 1000 years to see if this works, and usually most people don't make it that long...!
Is this for a regular 5 gb dvd, or a more volumed 50gb blue ray dvd?
is behind this technology, I remember hearing and talking a little to him about the research he was doing. It has been a few years since I graduated now. It is pretty cool to see something coming to fruition. The Information Technology program at BYU was the perfect place for a person like me and largely because of the amazing professors who were putting it together when I was there. Of course this technology may not last 1000 years but if it doesn't it will be able to do so because something better came along, not because the media went bad. I haven't read up on the details of their recent developments yet but I can't think of anyone more likely to figure a tricky problem like this out than this professor. He was one of the toughest and sharpest minds I had the pleasure to learn from at BYU.
Why recreate the wheel if using paint on cave walls has always worked in the past? :)
Call me when they have a cheap 1,000 year blue ray and blue ray burner.
Tsukasa: All I really want, is to be left alone...
The US sent a golden disk (record) on Voyager 2 Spacecraft. With picture instructions on the side of the craft as how to build a record player (victrola). They did not send a record player.
Traveling at its' current speed (35000 mph) it would take almost 2,771,354,142 years to reach the closest star (33 light years away), which is the target. However in that 2.7 billion years the star system would have moved.
The not perfect vacumn of space will eventually slow the craft before it arrives. Oops.
The minor constant radiation of space will 'melt' the craft before it reaches that distance. Opps.
The half life of certain materials to build the craft is 1,000,000 years.
If Voyager 2 survives that gauntlet the chance it will actually pass within the detectable distance of a habited planet with detection technology is even more minute.
If anyone (loose term) finds the record it is probably because it CRASH LANDED on their planet. The US is sure their packaging will protect it. I am sure a gold record would survive the impact (sarcasm). Not to mention the pictograms on the outside of the craft (oh, i guess I did mention it).
But our government thought it was worth the risks to try because they thought the recorded sounds of animals and human voices would keep them (loose term again) up nights thinking about the possibility of GOD.
If our government is willing to do all that then 1000 year DVDs sound reasonable.
But before they send these DVDs into outerspace with a Sony BluRay I would remind them of the Deltan Ilia with the glowing throat lozenge and the creepy V'ger spacecraft fetish, and the hots for the dad from 7th Heaven.
Sun Computers: "The Network is the Computer"
Me: "The Network is the Hard Drive"
Don't bother saving stuff on a dvd. Just encrypt it and gmail it
to yourself, and you're good.
Oh, don't forget to pass your password down to the grand-kids
before your memory goes.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
I suppose that I'm the only one who sighed when reading a number range being described as an average. Come on, other nerds, be a LITTLE bit critical. It's ?. and Friday! (In the Bay Area, it's Fry'sDay, 'cos that's when the San Jose Mercury News has the multi page ad section).
I'm always confused as to why people get hung on this point so often. Why would someone in 1000 years (barring some apocalyptic situation), or even 20 years need a specific player to read a DVD, floppy disk, hard disk, or anything? All of these can be examined with more generic laboratory inspection equipment now, why is it unrealistic that 10 years from now you might have an optical disk scanner that reads just about anything? Even the encoding that the disks use isn't very complicated, we crack much more difficult codes all the time.
There is precedent. Hieroglyphs written 2000 years ago were undecipherable until the 1799 discovery of the Rosetta Stone and its subsequent study in the following decades. Reading technology was available the entire time (the paintings, writings and carvings were all visible to the unaided eye). Hieroglyphic writings weren't encrypted in any way -- other than being in a coding scheme (language) that fell out of use. The only real apocalypse that occurred over the ensuing eons was the cumulative effects of time. Nations and empires came and went, but we never had to rebuild the totality of the human population and civilization from scratch.
And in 1000 years, before you decode a disk, you've got no idea whether it contains Chinatown, Quadrophenia or some guy's backup of qdata.dat.
I am not a crackpot.
"...it looks virtually identical to a regular DVD, but it's special." Oh...it's a *special* disc. Man, that's cool.
Sorry about the mess.
The plastic itself will not survive the 1000 years. ^^
Also, I doubt that you will find a working reader.
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
They need to build a dvd player that will also last 1,000 years and prey that DRM in the future will let them play it.
In the not too distant future, next Sunday A.D.
The comments regarding the inability to test such claims are unfounded and not well thought out. Third parties could easily monitor the molecular breakdown of the data over the course of a shorter period of time, and project that over many years. And that's just what I conjured up with just a rudimentary knowledge of material science and chemistry.
Archival-quality digital storage was seriously lacking in the marketplace. Is it completely unfathomable that someone could engineer materials that don't degrade in such a short period of time? The claims made by Millenniata are easily testable, and it doesn't make any sense for such a small company to make a completely testable, yet reputation-damaging claim such as this.
Skepticism is good when well-founded. Otherwise, you're just being needlessly cynical.
I guessed it was a reference or a bad attempt at humor, but wasn't sure which or where it might come from and, in doubt, didn't mod. That said, it's not difficult to understand why an unsourced stream of verbal abuse was modded down by a few.
You know, not everyone is American or watched that movie in English. It isn't required viewing in any class I've heard of, either. I will DL and have a look, but your unseemly arrogance makes me retch a little.
Spotted my reference? If not, insert an unsourced stream of verbal abuse likely to hurt your feelings here.
I'm reading a lot of comments about these discs being "frisbees" and trash in the future, which goes to show me that as versed as many on /. are in technology, quite a few don't know anything about archaeology. Discovering a 1000 year old artifact that is physically in good-enough shape to be read (even if it can't be interpereted) would be priceless to some in the field. Nobody said the discoveries in egypt were "as good as gravel" because they were in glyphs that weren't readily readable.
Even from a technological standpoint, reverse engineering a 1000 year old video or data file sounds absolutely fascinating to me... even if the DVD was a 1000 year old rick-roll.
Forgive my spelling from time to time. I'm often posting during short breaks.
All my DVD from 1997 are going to break on me now?
I can't help but wonder if this company can prove that really the data will be available after 1,000. How is this test being performed? Also will there be DVD readers a 1,000 years from now?
Its nice to be important but its more important to be nice
As society is headed more and more towards prudery again, it's likely that naked titties will be all that's needed to make you come in your pants in about a hundred years' time.
Remember, or look it up, sexual repression lies in the interests of an authoritarian state. And following current trends, there'll be plenty of those in a couple of decades.
There was a story a few months ago that said they could get data to last a BILLION years.
I scoff at your weak, lame figure of 1000 years.
WTF? Over?
in 1000 years DVD format will still be used and drives will still be available. NOT.
My god, someone on /. knows that show?
mind blown
My projection about titties might be way off. I'm not very good with them. Also, for me, it was more a way to sneak in that I'm worried about the current advances in authoritarianism than establishing my prophetic nature with regards to fetish porn.
While I may be too pessimistic and choose my data a little biasedly, I prefer to err on freedom's side.
Hard to take those kind of rants seriously from an AC.
It wasn't a very good movie, but it is very quotable. And anything that is "required viewing" in a class is suspect and likely of little real cultural significance.
... in 1000 years?
I'm not sure it will be of any value. I mean, look at what the "ideal" female form looked like only a few hundred years ago. I can just see a man of the future saying, "Asian chicks? Big tits? And only two? These guys must have been real sickos."
Have gnu, will travel.
Doing QA with this thing is going to require a lot of patience of the testers.
Your ad could be here!
Got to teach and everything you learn /obscure?
will point to the fact that porn is eternal
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digital information is literally carved in...
Once cut, the disk can be read by an ordinary DVD reader on your computer
Sounds like pressing-on-demand.. with lasers. Even pressed discs can rot.
(Ordinary DVDs last anywhere from 3 to 12 years, on average.)
This made me LOL. There's not a single disc manufacturer that claims less than 30 years, and they used to just round up to 75 or 100. "We use BLUE dye!" Those aging chambers literally speed up time, y'know.
Even more lolworthy is that Ask /. commenters felt the same way just 4 short years ago. Optical media from 2005 will outlast microfiche, eh? Then I guess this Millenniata company is blowing smoke.
New != Best. A difficult sell on a tech site. Data migration will always be necessary. Always. Which hardware manufacturer will commit to making drives compatible with DVD+R for the next thousand years? Until the next crowd of /. commenters call the format antiquated, and are willing to pay $25-$30 for the next shiny thing.
All those complicated binary formats could forgotten by year 3000, if not 2025. A cryptographer in the future working with a microscope could fairly easy work out the pattern of DVD pits signified English letters and words. Egyptian heiroglyphics- forgotten for 1500 years- would have been harder to decipher.
Should our electronic culture NOT be disrupted in the next thousand years, FORTRAN and JPEG will probably still be used in year 3000.
I have never burnt a disc faster than half its maximum speed
Then I take it you didn't use CD-R or DVD-R or DVD+R at all until 2x recorders came out.
If my dvd only lasts 950 years will I get my money back? With interest?
Who cares reading the DVD after 100 years, let alone 1000 years? If history is any indication, the content of the DVD would be copied into some other media yet to be invented, which probably will have 1000x capacity. If it's not copied, nobody would know how to read it anyway, and most likely it would be ending up in a dumping site. So making a DVD that last 1000 years is pointless, buying it is a waste of money, and using it hoping somebody would read it after 1000 years is just naive.
Is it 1000 years? or 1024?
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From CDs to DVDs to HDDVDs to Blu-Rays to Pink Discs to ADDs to Blu-Balls, no one needs a 1000 year DVD. I say in 20 years we'd be storing a million DVDs on a RW key-chain that lasts forever.
The great thing about data is you can copy it.
Unless we port all of our data to stone, it will not survive 1000 years.
Isn't flash memory supposed to replace removable media by then?
Does that 3-12 years comment mean DVDs or DVD-Rs? I have yet to have a DVD become 'unreadable', so that 3 year mark seems a bit low. . . . DVD-Rs on the otherhand. . . .
'Those are my principles. If you don't like them, well. .
twitter.com/scld
I have been waiting for something like this for storing family photos, slides, 8 and 16mm family films. If I remember correctly, Kodak sells 300+ year CDR/RW and DVDR/RW media. This would be suitable media for me. However, 1000 year media? I don't even know if our family line let alone the human race will still be around in 1000 years. But, it would still be cool to have the option..
"I bow to no man" - Riddick
This is coming out of Utah, the fraud capital of the country. Could they have something worthwhile? Yes, but don't believe it until you have proof. Oh, that proof will take 1,000 years? That's no proof at all. You might want to check to make sure you still have your wallet.
why not get one of these disks, fill it full of your personal details, photos, family history etc, then place it in a steel case along with some hair and nail clippings with the legend "please regenerate me in ad3000" engraved on the lid, then fund a trust fund that pays your family and descendants to preserve it as a family heirloom and pay for the regeneration, that way you have a chance at seeing the universe first hand as an immortal human.
(based on the theory that the tech of 3000AD could regenerate your memories and yourself from the data/dna provided, and they would be interested in meeting a primitive human from 2009AD)
A 1,000 year DVD? Some people are working on a 10,000 year clock, "The Clock of the Long Now"