6 ms·

Amazing this stuff still yields secrets after thousands of years. Meanwhile the 3.5" floppy disks in my parents attic on which I've kept all my teenage Turbo Pa

by sdfjkl 9y ago

Amazing this stuff still yields secrets after thousands of years. Meanwhile the 3.5" floppy disks in my parents attic on which I've kept all my teenage Turbo Pascal source code have long lost all their data.

irrational 9y ago
Real programmers store their source code on baked clay tablets.
- dredmorbius 9y ago
  Nam shubs.
- Gustomaximus 9y ago
  Ceramic is better. An interesting project here: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/01/human-knowledge-salt-mine/512552/ https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/01/human...
bmaupin 9y ago
Way off topic, but have you actually tried to read them? I was able to get data off some ~25 year old 5.25" C64 diskettes a few months ago, encouraged by success with data recovery from some 3.5" diskettes a few months before that.
- sdfjkl 9y ago
  Yes, most of them didn't last more than a few years before the bits started falling off. This may partially have been because most of them were SD (720kb) that I'd drilled the HD (1440kb) marker hole into to save money. Worked fine at the time, but probably didn't help boost their longevity.
dsnuh 9y ago
This is something I think about a lot. How do we build a "data pyramid" that can be interpreted by future generations. I feel like much of our culture will be lost to bit rot.
- pcrh 9y ago
  Wikipedia could be encoded into DNA and them spliced into species that are very long lived, geologically speaking, such as horseshoe crabs. Absent any negative selection against "wiki DNA", they could remain readable in millions of years time.
  - gus_massa 9y ago
    You will need a very strong error correction scheme. It is not necessary to have a negative selection against "wiki DNA", if there is not positive selection the error will accumulate quickly. With a quick googling, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutation_rate#Variation_in_mutation_rates https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutation_rate#Variation_in_mut... I think that a mutation rate of 10^-5 per base per generation is a good estimation for humans. Let's assume 10^-6 per base per year. So after a million year, with no selection pressure, probably more than a half of the bases will be overwritten with garbage.
    - sndean 9y ago
      It'd be smarter to simply integrate it into a genome, make copies, extract it, then lyophilize and store it. Don't house it in an organism.
    - Houshalter 9y ago
      Losing only 50% of the data after a million years doesn't sound that bad. The bigger problem is keeping knowledge that the data is there and how to get it to survive even a tenth of that length.
    - pcrh 9y ago
      Probably there would be "signal decay", but one can still make sense of a text when many of the letters are missing. So the decay would have to be more than 50% for the message to be completely useless. Also, a million years is quite a long time, I doubt there are many media one could use that one could expect to still be at least half readable in one million years time.
  - 9y ago

by sdfjkl 9y ago

irrational 9y ago

Real programmers store their source code on baked clay tablets.

dredmorbius 9y ago
Nam shubs.
Gustomaximus 9y ago
Ceramic is better. An interesting project here: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/01/human-knowledge-salt-mine/512552/ https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/01/human...

bmaupin 9y ago

Way off topic, but have you actually tried to read them? I was able to get data off some ~25 year old 5.25" C64 diskettes a few months ago, encouraged by success with data recovery from some 3.5" diskettes a few months before that.

sdfjkl 9y ago
Yes, most of them didn't last more than a few years before the bits started falling off. This may partially have been because most of them were SD (720kb) that I'd drilled the HD (1440kb) marker hole into to save money. Worked fine at the time, but probably didn't help boost their longevity.

dsnuh 9y ago

This is something I think about a lot. How do we build a "data pyramid" that can be interpreted by future generations. I feel like much of our culture will be lost to bit rot.

pcrh 9y ago
Wikipedia could be encoded into DNA and them spliced into species that are very long lived, geologically speaking, such as horseshoe crabs. Absent any negative selection against "wiki DNA", they could remain readable in millions of years time.
- gus_massa 9y ago
  You will need a very strong error correction scheme. It is not necessary to have a negative selection against "wiki DNA", if there is not positive selection the error will accumulate quickly. With a quick googling, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutation_rate#Variation_in_mutation_rates https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutation_rate#Variation_in_mut... I think that a mutation rate of 10^-5 per base per generation is a good estimation for humans. Let's assume 10^-6 per base per year. So after a million year, with no selection pressure, probably more than a half of the bases will be overwritten with garbage.
  - sndean 9y ago
    It'd be smarter to simply integrate it into a genome, make copies, extract it, then lyophilize and store it. Don't house it in an organism.
  - Houshalter 9y ago
    Losing only 50% of the data after a million years doesn't sound that bad. The bigger problem is keeping knowledge that the data is there and how to get it to survive even a tenth of that length.
  - pcrh 9y ago
    Probably there would be "signal decay", but one can still make sense of a text when many of the letters are missing. So the decay would have to be more than 50% for the message to be completely useless. Also, a million years is quite a long time, I doubt there are many media one could use that one could expect to still be at least half readable in one million years time.
- 9y ago