41–50 of 50 posts
We now (2023) live in a time where storing years of text and even audio is essentially free. Storing years of video is still actually costly. Btw: You need about 12 TB for a 1 year video stream at 3 Mbit/s, so it's certainly doable, but it's not cheap.
I just found this quite old paper and it came as a surprise to me to discover that the idea of append-only storage is not 20 years old but more than 40! The older work I was aware of is on "The design and implementation of a log-structured file system" (1) So this is with pleasure that I learned that these ideas was around in the 80: - Deletion considered harmful - A non-deletion strategy using timestamps - The impor…
A non-deletion strategy should consider including an encryption and key management strategy to enable retroactive secure deletion without impacting availability, reliability, and performance. This seems to be missing from a lot of systems that deal with personal information.
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what if you accidentally wrote your private key, photos of your nude boyfriend, or evidence of a crime to your mass storage
The blocks with those would be scribbled over and invalidated. Do you know why ASCII 0x7f is DEL? Paper tape is write-once. To indicate a deleted character, it was conventional to punch holes in all bit positions -- 0x7f on a 7-bit punch.
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OK, so I think memory was wrong on this. I found this online: > In the 1980's we used 14 inch drives in our DEC VAX cluster. Each 14 inch drive had a capacity of about 450MB Those platters were definitely the 14" size, and there was more than one of them in the refridgerator-sized unit. At this temporal distance, I can't guess what the overall size was anymore, but it was clearly not 1MB. Sorry for the misleading pos…
https://gunkies.org/wiki/RA81_disk_drive
If mass storage were free, then everything would be append-only by default. There would be no excuse to not do this. A major benefit of append-only is that your writes are always ideal for whatever storage medium. Especially magnetic or tape. Combine append-only with batching of transactions (i.e. across 1-10 milliseconds at a time), and you can write multiple txns per disk I/O operation (assuming txn size < storage…
Isn't information retrieval potentially more costly if you have to search over a larger sea of useless blocks. Certainly is the case in my garage+house where I can now store way more than I ever could in previous stages of my life.
You can search for some comments I made recently about an append-only database scheme.
I just found this quite old paper and it came as a surprise to me to discover that the idea of append-only storage is not 20 years old but more than 40! The older work I was aware of is on "The design and implementation of a log-structured file system" (1) So this is with pleasure that I learned that these ideas was around in the 80: - Deletion considered harmful - A non-deletion strategy using timestamps - The impor…
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And -- in keeping with the flow of this thread -- a complete luxury until the implements (paper/pens/tape/disk/silicon) would become abundant and ubiquitous.
Paper and ink were good enough for centuries.
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Not at all! Medieval documents were routinely washed and reused.
More recently, movie studios regularly destroyed old film to make space for new ones, causing old pictures, especially silent era ones, to be lost forever. Even NASA wiped the original Apollo 11 tapes to reuse them.
I know a lot of it stemmed from space and budget constraints but the complete lack of forward thinking everyone seems to have drives me bonkers.
I'm glad the Internet Archive exists. This current digital only future is terrifyingly ephemeral.
I really wish someone would give the Archive a massive, multi-billion endowment to guarantee it surviving for decades of operation with no forthcoming income.
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Paper especially was very expensive until approximately the 19th century.
The explosive growth in the printing industry suggests otherwise.