4 ms·

Well there is sowmthing to be said for simpler formats, that can be read by basic engineering skills, compared to for example storing something on a flash drive

Well there is sowmthing to be said for simpler formats, that can be read by basic engineering skills, compared to for example storing something on a flash drive the requires millions of lines of code to read data of. For the same reason, I print all important photos for posterity. Who knows if apple / google cloud photo library will be around in 50 years when I grow old? I can make sure my printed material remains much more easily.

derefr 8y ago
I don’t disagree with your general point, but for this specific assertion: > something on a flash drive the requires millions of lines of code to read data of Does it really require millions of lines? Even if you’re just targeting that one model of drive, rather than writing a general purpose SATA/USB kernel stack? If what’s on there is, say, JPEG images, libjpeg (plus its dependencies in glibc, I guess) isn’t “millions of lines” either. Where are these millions of lines? (I’m speaking as someone who has written a unikernel with disk IO and graphics support. It was far less than a million lines!)
- ics 8y ago
  I think they're considering the entire start-to-finish process of viewing, i.e. mounting the drive, decoding the jpeg, displaying on screen.
- HarryHirsch 8y ago
  Compare the BBC Domesday Project to the original Domesday Book from 1085. One can be read today, the other not so much. You ask what the folks at BBC were thinking, did they never consult an archival librarian?
  - jacquesm 8y ago
    I played with that when it first came out. We had the discs and the player, it was very impressive but even then I knew that there was no way that it would last for even a decade. It was a puny bit of data for todays standards (about 500M in total), but of the day it was incredible. Back then a mainframe winchester pack with the same capacity would be roughly the size of a washer-dryer combination. The data not being publicly accessible at the moment is more of a copyright rather than a technical issue.
coldtea 8y ago
>For the same reason, I print all important photos for posterity. Who knows if apple / google cloud photo library will be around in 50 years when I grow old? I can make sure my printed material remains much more easily. You can be sure the JPEG and BMP and PNG format will be, and plain text and basic html as well. So you don't need to print anything, just to have plenty of backup and repeat the backup process every few years (which takes all of 2-3 minutes even for 1000s of images).
- adrian_mrd 8y ago
  Unless you get bitrot on some of that data, I’d proffer (which has happened to me over the past 8 or so years of hard disk backups). There is something to be said for tangible, archival-paper printed photographs. Maybe printing the top 100 photos each year is a good middle ground, but to each their own :)
  - coldtea 8y ago
    >Unless you get bitrot on some of that data, I’d proffer (which has happened to me over the past 8 or so years of hard disk backups). That's why I advocated for multiple copies -- and in a redundant format with corrections codes even better. It's not like printed photos can't be burned, scratched, lost, discolor, soak, stained and many other things besides...
    - makmanalp 8y ago
      > It's not like printed photos can't be burned, scratched, lost, discolor, soak, stained and many other things besides... Not that I disagree with you, but this is an interesting point. I've heard archivists argue that with simpler analog storage, the curve for corrupt bits vs interpretability is smoothish, but with digital storage it's often a step function where it's like "whoops, a few bits flipped, can't read at all anymore"
      - evincarofautumn 8y ago
        > with digital storage it's often a step function where it's like "whoops, a few bits flipped, can't read at all anymore" Digital anything, really. Analog signals degrade somewhat gracefully—you have to explicitly build error correction into a digital signal. A relatively recent example of a bungled transition from analog to digital: when the US switched to digital television in 2009, my family suddenly and completely lost many local/lower-powered/more distant stations that we used to be able to get with just a little static or distortion. And the channels we continued to get wou— —ut out occasio— —in a really a—oying wa— and became unwatchable (well, unlistenable).

derefr 8y ago

I don’t disagree with your general point, but for this specific assertion: > something on a flash drive the requires millions of lines of code to read data of Does it really require millions of lines? Even if you’re just targeting that one model of drive, rather than writing a general purpose SATA/USB kernel stack? If what’s on there is, say, JPEG images, libjpeg (plus its dependencies in glibc, I guess) isn’t “millions of lines” either. Where are these millions of lines? (I’m speaking as someone who has written a unikernel with disk IO and graphics support. It was far less than a million lines!)

ics 8y ago
I think they're considering the entire start-to-finish process of viewing, i.e. mounting the drive, decoding the jpeg, displaying on screen.
HarryHirsch 8y ago
Compare the BBC Domesday Project to the original Domesday Book from 1085. One can be read today, the other not so much. You ask what the folks at BBC were thinking, did they never consult an archival librarian?
- jacquesm 8y ago
  I played with that when it first came out. We had the discs and the player, it was very impressive but even then I knew that there was no way that it would last for even a decade. It was a puny bit of data for todays standards (about 500M in total), but of the day it was incredible. Back then a mainframe winchester pack with the same capacity would be roughly the size of a washer-dryer combination. The data not being publicly accessible at the moment is more of a copyright rather than a technical issue.

coldtea 8y ago

>For the same reason, I print all important photos for posterity. Who knows if apple / google cloud photo library will be around in 50 years when I grow old? I can make sure my printed material remains much more easily. You can be sure the JPEG and BMP and PNG format will be, and plain text and basic html as well. So you don't need to print anything, just to have plenty of backup and repeat the backup process every few years (which takes all of 2-3 minutes even for 1000s of images).

adrian_mrd 8y ago
Unless you get bitrot on some of that data, I’d proffer (which has happened to me over the past 8 or so years of hard disk backups). There is something to be said for tangible, archival-paper printed photographs. Maybe printing the top 100 photos each year is a good middle ground, but to each their own :)
- coldtea 8y ago
  >Unless you get bitrot on some of that data, I’d proffer (which has happened to me over the past 8 or so years of hard disk backups). That's why I advocated for multiple copies -- and in a redundant format with corrections codes even better. It's not like printed photos can't be burned, scratched, lost, discolor, soak, stained and many other things besides...
  - makmanalp 8y ago
    > It's not like printed photos can't be burned, scratched, lost, discolor, soak, stained and many other things besides... Not that I disagree with you, but this is an interesting point. I've heard archivists argue that with simpler analog storage, the curve for corrupt bits vs interpretability is smoothish, but with digital storage it's often a step function where it's like "whoops, a few bits flipped, can't read at all anymore"
    - evincarofautumn 8y ago
      > with digital storage it's often a step function where it's like "whoops, a few bits flipped, can't read at all anymore" Digital anything, really. Analog signals degrade somewhat gracefully—you have to explicitly build error correction into a digital signal. A relatively recent example of a bungled transition from analog to digital: when the US switched to digital television in 2009, my family suddenly and completely lost many local/lower-powered/more distant stations that we used to be able to get with just a little static or distortion. And the channels we continued to get wou— —ut out occasio— —in a really a—oying wa— and became unwatchable (well, unlistenable).