[V8] Complications: Bentley Type 44 manual discs

[cobram at juno.com]

Scott Simmons <indischrot at gmail.com> writes:
> Not sure where I read it, but apparently it costs more to store data 
> on digital medium than analog.  Also, digital mediums will lose the 
> data  faster than analog.  Something like.. a DVD will lose integrity 
> after 10 years?
> 
> Throwing that out there,
> Scott S.
 
You read it wrong or whoever wrote it is seriously misinformed.  Digital
media lasts much longer, and digital data does not degrade over time, nor
does it degrade from copying.  There are a whole new generation of solid
state "hard drives" coming on-line now, which have no moving parts and
make an airplanes black box look like an old cassette tape for
maintaining data integrity.  Like all things electronic, they're very
expensive and only used in critical applications for now, like in medical
devices, but as they gear up production they'll get cheaper and cheaper.

A DVD will last from 50-300 years, nothing touches the media, life span
is solely dependent on the type of material used to make the disk.  This
is for brand name quality media  There is plenty of poorly made junk on
the market, some of the cheap no-name dye-based DVD-R and DVD+R discs are
so badly manufactured that you're lucky if you can read the data after a
week.

The real problem lies with the media becoming technically obsolete after
20 to 30 years, decades or centuries before it physically deteriorates. 
Makes it tough to set a standard, for the time being PDF is about as good
as it gets, the good news is that as improved formats come out, they are
including some pretty decent translation interfaces which convert the old
format seamlessly.

BCNU,
http://www.geocities.com/cobramsri/
"In my many years I have come to a conclusion
that one useless man is a shame, two is a law firm, 
and three or more is a congress."