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Can you buy these things? Patek Philippe may prattle on about how their watches are meant to be passed on to descendents, but this is something whose use is ex

Can you buy these things? Patek Philippe may prattle on about how their watches are meant to be passed on to descendents, but this is something whose use is explicitly dependent upon outliving you. Heck, losing it adds to its value! I'm not one for knick-knacks but I'd love to own one of these. Even as a fad, profitable sales could considerably increase their number and geographic distribution while reducing their cost (hand made at $25k? There must be a way to automate that!).

newt0311 18y ago
Agreed. I would love to buy one if the price drops anywhere below $100. From what I can tell, this is also in the creator's best interest as that is the natural direction for this project -- One in every household.
garethm 18y ago
From the article: Or you can have one on earth, if you want, acting as an additional node in the distributed archive. There are still two disks available from this prototype run. Currently, for all its high techness, each disk is hand crafted, and so they have a corresponding high hand-crafted cost: $25,000. Contact the office if you are interested in caretaking an archive of all languages.
misterbwong 18y ago
Seems like there's a business opportunity here. The problem they are addressing is the fact that digital storage, when done incorrectly, can be very fragile. I know several people that have lost all of their pictures due to hard drive crashes or theft. These people are now making physical copies of EVERYTHING and putting them in safes and safe deposit boxes. The currently accepted solution is to copy everything up to "the cloud" where things are backed up and redundant. While this is a good solution for a lot of people, it's not for everyone. I get the feeling that there's a group of (mostly older) people out there that would want (and be be willing to pay for) a longer lasting, physical storage medium like this. A long-lasting write-once medium like this might be a good compromise between digital (easy to store a lot, fragile) and analog (harder to store a lot, longer lasting). The main issues with this type of medium, though, would be price and compatibility.

newt0311 18y ago

Agreed. I would love to buy one if the price drops anywhere below $100. From what I can tell, this is also in the creator's best interest as that is the natural direction for this project -- One in every household.

garethm 18y ago

From the article: Or you can have one on earth, if you want, acting as an additional node in the distributed archive. There are still two disks available from this prototype run. Currently, for all its high techness, each disk is hand crafted, and so they have a corresponding high hand-crafted cost: $25,000. Contact the office if you are interested in caretaking an archive of all languages.

misterbwong 18y ago

Seems like there's a business opportunity here. The problem they are addressing is the fact that digital storage, when done incorrectly, can be very fragile. I know several people that have lost all of their pictures due to hard drive crashes or theft. These people are now making physical copies of EVERYTHING and putting them in safes and safe deposit boxes. The currently accepted solution is to copy everything up to "the cloud" where things are backed up and redundant. While this is a good solution for a lot of people, it's not for everyone. I get the feeling that there's a group of (mostly older) people out there that would want (and be be willing to pay for) a longer lasting, physical storage medium like this. A long-lasting write-once medium like this might be a good compromise between digital (easy to store a lot, fragile) and analog (harder to store a lot, longer lasting). The main issues with this type of medium, though, would be price and compatibility.