2009/3/25 <b...@cpan.org>: > On Wed, Mar 25, 2009 at 12:30:19PM +0100, demerphq wrote: >> >> Hows that for a thought? Some hacker 100 years from now may be >> bitching about how hateful the microfiche robot is while they are >> trying to convert it into the new fancy nano storage technology... >> > > Well, we were able to read and decypher hieroglyphs, using a good sample > of the original media. (OK, the rosetta stone was not made out of papyrus, > but still.) > > How about a civilization 1000 years from now finding a bunch of > hard drives or CD-Rom full of documents in the binary format of your > choice? I'm pretty sure they'd love to process some analog media like > punched cards or microfiches instead.
Thats the thing. A CD-Rom disk has a very short lifetime, im pretty sure MTBF is like years. The plastic it is made from starts decaying and stuff like that due to environmental factors and eventually it becomes useless. The hard drive has an even shorter active lifetime, used or not. Tape is slightly better than disk and CDRom. So not only will nobody 1000 years from now be extracting data from them, they probably will have decayed to an ususable state in the next 20 years. Afaik Microfilm is the best known solution because its decay properties are well understood and it its known to have a very long lifetime, measured in multiple decades. As far as i know there is nothing associated with modern computing that can compete with microfilm in terms of data density and storage lifetime. And thats what i say that industry is pretty interesting. Its huge unsolved problem that will have serious and deep implications on many aspects of our profession.... Anyway, I apologise for not working out how to make this post about hateful software... Yves -- perl -Mre=debug -e "/just|another|perl|hacker/"
