[V8] Complications: Bentley Type 44 manual discs

[Scott Simmons]

Hey there,

Here's my source: 
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/23/business/media/23steal.html

~Scott S.

cobram at juno.com wrote:

> Scott Simmons <indischrot at gmail.com <mailto: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."