[V8] Complications: Bentley Type 44 manual discs

[cobram at juno.com]

That article is about a specific industry storing terabytes of data in
mostly proprietary formats.  Not exactly something I'd use to back up
(pun intended) a blanket statement about digital storage.  I keep very
few personal archives on 35mm emulsion.

As an article it also had many mistakes and offered more lay opinion than
fact (the NYT, say it ain't so.)  I won't go into it too far because of
NAC, unless we're talking about Ronin, but the math in the article is a
little off, a digital archive is ready "out of the box" whenever you
decide to distribute or sell it, you plug in a cable or access a server. 
A film master has to be copied (not cheap), assembled, and the way things
are now...digitized, edited and enhanced before it's ready for the
market, I don't see any of those costs factored in.  Me thinks the report
the article is based on is a Chicken Little alarm sent out by an industry
(film archiving) which may be rendered obsolete in the not too distant
future.

The Viking space probe reference in the article serves to contradict the
premise that digital media "lose the data faster", since the data was
about all there, main problem being the way in which data was recorded
back then.  The data stream from Viking was kind of like writing a 1000
page book and not including any spaces or punctuation.

MAC-for our purposes digital beats analog and paper by leagues, we can
consult most of the list archives and we can backup a pdf version of the
manual a whole lot easier than a paper one.  BTDT about 50 times on the
pulp version many moons ago. (You out there Mike?)  ;-)

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."



Scott Simmons <indischrot at gmail.com> writes:
> 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.