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It seems like PDFs might still work in a hundred years. Just like zip files. Fun fact: HN's been around for 10% of a century. That makes Arc one of the longer-
by shawn 8y ago
It seems like PDFs might still work in a hundred years. Just like zip files.
Fun fact: HN's been around for 10% of a century. That makes Arc one of the longer-lived programming languages.
Re: the ability to take books off the shelf and read it, Library Genesis has made a lot of progress in that area. http://libgen.io/ http://libgen.io/
- BlackFingolfin 8y agoPDFs might still work - but will the storage devices they are on? There are good reasons to doubt this: tapes, CDs and DVDs age and degrade over time; plus devices to read them only last so long, and may not be produced anymore at some point. Classic "spinning" hard drives degrade, too; and even ignoring this, will there still be conputers supporting, say, SATA, in 50 years? And then there is a trend to switch to onboard soldered flash in new devices which adds further problems. Not saying this is impossible to overcome, but "PDF might still work" is at best solving a part of the problem, for only a part of all data (PDF is great - but only for some types of data) one might want to preserve.
- Koshkin 8y agoThe cloud-based storage will never die. (And if it does, we'll have bigger problems on our hands than lost PDFs.)