Millenniata's Millennial Disk should last longer than you, your memory
Considering that we're still waiting patiently for any company (we're looking at you, Call/Recall) to produce a commercially viable holographic storage solution, we're required to tackle Millenniata's newest assertion with a sprinkle of skepticism. The claim? It's specially lubricated, fortified and homogenized Millennial Disk is said to last some 1,000 years, making it the world's finest and most longevous archive solution. If it's legitimate. We're told that digital information is carved into layers of hard, "persistent" materials, and somehow, those carvings are able to stay fresh and readable for more years than you care to count. Still, we reckon the robot apocalypse will be in full effect by the time 3009 rolls around, so even if it only lives up to half of its claims, we'll still be impressed.
[Via Slashdot]
[Via Slashdot]
I loved the Jetsons!
past tense!? What happened? Did they cheat on you? I always knew that rosie was a slutbag...
Seems like a good solution for archival purposes if they can deliver even 1/10h of that claim.... Hope its priced sensibly and has a decent capacity.....
"We're told that digital information is carved into layers of hard, "persistent" materials"
So, we're back to using stone tablets again?
wow, its cool to see news about what my professor at college was working on! One of the nice things about the media is that while you need special equipment to write to the DVD it is still just a DVD that can be read by any old DVD drive...and the only reason it is estimated to not last longer than 1000 years is because they had to use plastic somewhere on it so they could get some product out the door...they are currently working on fitting in some other material and then it will last even longer than this
Grammar police to the rescue!
Seriously, how hard is it, after all these years to learn once and for all the difference between it's and its?
In the article "it's" is used correctly, the apostrophe is placed to show the joining of two words "it" and "is".
Fuck the Grammar Police !
Major4Play, if that's the case, why is "it's" being used as possessive instead of a contraction? It's "its", not "it's" for possession. Try rereading the paragraph with "it is" in place and realize how silly it sounds.
Weewooweewooweewoo~
Oddly enough, "it's" was used properly in the next sentence. Egad! :O
It's reassuring to know that our descendants will be able to watch our 1000-year-old porn.
We don't have any flying cars just yet... but they were right about the "button pressing finger" issue.
This is built to fail what are the chances that anyone in 1000 years will know what a cd/dvd/bluray disc is; people might think the disc are frisbees, how will they know is has anything on it are they going to write a note with the disc to tell them put in DVD player and if so what language most current languages will have either died out of changed drastically by then.
Its the same as the situation was with Hieroglyphs and the Rosetta Stone, unless someone plans on building a DVD player that last 1000 years its useless.
We would be better off with a stone tablet and a chisel because paper, any optical media, hard drives and SSD's wont last a damn 1000 years and be functional no matter what either through human, animal or weather intervention
Not really. DVDs last maybe 20 years at the most. So whether there's a DVD player around in 1,000 years is besides the point. I suspect Blu-Ray won't last much longer. Even magnetic storage like hard drives or even flash storage like SSDs will not make it 1,000 years.
The way our society has moved means that it will eventually be completely forgotten in just a few hundred years without constant backups. It is rather ironic that in the "information age," where it seems nearly everything is recorded or studied, we still can't beat the longevity of an ancient stone tablet.
We need more data storage solutions like this, preferably that last 2,000-3,000 years.
Sure languages will have changed drastically but it's inconceivable that any major language now wouldn't be easily understood by scholars; we have such an enormous volume of language material, much of which will be preserved (by copying to new media, etc, quite apart from plenty that actually is written on stone - memorials etc) that it will be much easier for scholars to translate languages from the year 2000 in the year 3000 than it has been for scholars to translate languages from the year 1000 in the year 2000...
...which by the way they can easily do anyway; Old English didn't cause near as much problem as hieroglyphics.
Much more of a genuine worry is whether a human civilisation will be around then - there are plenty of ways that we might destroy it in the next thousand years (far more than were available in the previous thousand). If there *are* people around with enough spare time from scavenging food or whatever to be scholars, though, they won't have any trouble reading English.
That doesn't mean I think this is a necessary technology - personally I think it'd *also* take a nuclear-world-war-scale catastrophe to have any chance of losing most of today's data, too, regardless of whether it's written on some random archival material - look how much is preserved on the Internet, it'd really need an 'Internet gap' period of a few hundred years when the network, computers etc are unavailable to kill all that. (Sure not everything will be preserved, it'll be a bit random, but a lot will.)
@ sam
That is if scholars find the info instead of the average person; there have been times in-which people have found old scrolls in Arabia and used it as fuel for fire. Depending on who finds the data will depend on if it gets to someone that has a remote glance of what it is; if you take the average person and they find something I bet that there is a 99% chance it will either be trashed, kept for there use, or destroyed by accident.
The major languages in terms of speakers would be English, Chinese, Hindi, French, Arabic, Spanish if anything was not saved in one of those languages the likely hood of a person finding it and not having a damn clue what it is would be greatly increased.
Then theirs the problem of spoken language and written language a language may only partly survive. Lets say only spoken English survives, anything written or displayed as text would be overlooked and lost.
Then there is the possibility of all of those becoming dead languages and something else replacing them as did happen in BCE and early AD.
Another thing that could happen is civilization collapse which happen to the Greeks, Romans, Egyptians, Mongols, Mayan, Ancient Britons etc when these civilizations collapsed most of there knowledge went along with it, the same could happen today and will happen eventually.
If this thing breaks in 3006 I'm getting my money back!
it will be the Butlerian Jihad, not the robot apocolypse
The issue of not being able to read the DVDs in a 1000 years is one I've seen a few times. The problem with digital medium up until now it that it has not had any longevity to it and so there has been no incentive to keep developing the hardware to read it. If it had to be copied on to new media to preserve it, then why not just develop better medium at the same time.
Once there is a medium such as this that will have longevity, then there will be more incentive to develop and maintain hardware to read it.
You have seen thus issue a few times? Not being able to read media 1000years later?
How long you been around? A long time I guess
There's a knee to technology progressing. At some point the tech progress starts to level out, either due to a development wall or consumers deciding that the current level of progress is "good enough." When that happens, it tends to make archiving easier.
FAT32 is a good example. There are better file systems out there, but just about anything can read a FAT32 volume, it gives reasonably good performance (although not journaling), and will hold a sufficient amount of data to keep things interesting. While I wouldn't trust anything archival to FAT32 on a hard drive, on a medium designed for long term storage (and read-only), it would be a good candidate.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_Allocation_Table
You talk to my kids, and yes I've been around at least a 1000 years. :-)
What I meant though is that the issue has been raised a few times. "What good is a DVD capable of lasting a 1000 years if there is nothing capable of reading it in a 1000 years?" My point is that if data archivists start using this type of product to preserve major digital collections, then there will be a much great incentive to ensure that there is still equipment around to read it in a 1000 years.
The problem is that the product will be obsolete within a few years, even if it lasts for a millennium. Think back a few decades - what if somebody had made an archival cassette tape that could store all the data from your Commodore 64 word processing program for 1,000 years? how useful would that be now?
For real archival storage, holding material digitally on upgraded computer systems (via 'cloud' technology, or oldfashioned offsite backup) will be the best way to preserve it, and it's something we have good experience of because all large companies do that already - archives just need to treat their historical data the same way companies treat their current data). The challenge is in indexing the material and keeping it available, not in storage - unless you're really expecting a truly global nuclear war or similar interruption of civilisation.
My memory is going to live forever after I have a 1,000 foot gold statue sculped in my image that spews fire while shouting, "REMEMBER ME!"
Nice try, but the gas will run out, and then somebody is bound to melt it down for cash value. :)
Futurama FTW.
Heh. Rock and chisel. Put a wooden axle through the middle, get a donkey to spin it, and use a blue laser to read the contents...
here is the link to the article in a Utah paper, it goes into a little more detail.
http://www.heraldextra.com/news/local/article_b25c9a30-7242-11de-9feb-001cc4c03286.html
And it is true that CD's and DVD's will probably without question be replaced within a space of time, but remember, that there is no real medium for permanent data storage. This is so important because it allows people to store there data in something that is practically permanent, in the mean time, other technologies will come around that will in time replace it. But it is the best we have, and it saves organizations, businesses, and others millions, they store it once, test the CD's every few years, and don't worry about re-spending that same amount to upkeep their data archive.