No Data Lasts Forever
lilysthings.org
No Data Lasts Forever
1–10 of 16 posts
Re: No Data Lasts Forever
#2> All data degrades and eventually disappears unless an effort is made to care for and maintain it.
This is the crux of it. You can have your holographic quartz or whatever new technology is supposed to last a hundred million years, but unless someone is keeping it from being thrown away after your family has a yard sale after you die, it's gone. Getting people to care about your data is the hardest thing required to make data last forever.
Re: No Data Lasts Forever
#3> All data degrades and eventually disappears unless an effort is made to care for and maintain it. This is the crux of it. You can have your holographic quartz or whatever new technology is supposed to last a hundred million years, but unless someone is keeping it from being thrown away after your family has a yard sale after you die, it's gone. Getting people to care about your data is the hardest thing required to…
And even if they do care you have to also preserve the system used to read it. Even if your papyrus survives if no one knows your language it doesn’t matter.
Re: No Data Lasts Forever
#4Somehow "No Data Lasts Forever" sounds profound while "Nothing Lasts Forever" sound obvious. Why is that?
Re: No Data Lasts Forever
#5This cannot be true. Science marches ever forward. We are learning new things constantly and no knowledge has been lost. New findings from new studies always augment our growing base of empirical facts and evidence. We are more advanced today than anyone, anywhere in the past.
Re: No Data Lasts Forever
#6This cannot be true. Science marches ever forward. We are learning new things constantly and no knowledge has been lost. New findings from new studies always augment our growing base of empirical facts and evidence. We are more advanced today than anyone, anywhere in the past.
It is not clear to me how this refutes the article. Can you explain a bit more? Do you have an example of a piece of data that lasts forever by virtue of these facts?
Re: No Data Lasts Forever
#7This cannot be true. Science marches ever forward. We are learning new things constantly and no knowledge has been lost. New findings from new studies always augment our growing base of empirical facts and evidence. We are more advanced today than anyone, anywhere in the past.
Knowledge gets lost constantly, there is just so much of it that it happens on the sidelines. Just think about all the old software and hardware stacks which have been replaced and the people who were experts in it are now retired and dead.
Even the knowledge of today is not well-preserved. If Stack Overflow were to disappear tomorrow, how many other resources would there be for all the programming knowledge? There aren't that many great programming books. Thank god Github has been archived in the Arctic Code Vault. It could all be lost in a few decades.
Even cultural significant things like how to produce Saturn's F-1 Rocket Engine gets lost. The manufacturing processes, machining techniques, and supplier expertise is gone and wasn't written down. That was just ~60 years ago. The recipe for Fogbank, a material for nuclear warheads, was lost, and it took 5 years to reverse engineer it.
Re: No Data Lasts Forever
#8This cannot be true. Science marches ever forward. We are learning new things constantly and no knowledge has been lost. New findings from new studies always augment our growing base of empirical facts and evidence. We are more advanced today than anyone, anywhere in the past.
It is not clear to me how this refutes the article. Can you explain a bit more? Do you have an example of a piece of data that lasts forever by virtue of these facts?
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Re: No Data Lasts Forever
#9This cannot be true. Science marches ever forward. We are learning new things constantly and no knowledge has been lost. New findings from new studies always augment our growing base of empirical facts and evidence. We are more advanced today than anyone, anywhere in the past.
How can the net amount of entropy of the universe be massively decreased?
Re: No Data Lasts Forever
#10Somehow "No Data Lasts Forever" sounds profound while "Nothing Lasts Forever" sound obvious. Why is that?
It doesn't sound profound at all?