Ironic that this comes up after Root's Fahrenheit 1111 thread. Neat stuff. Can't wait to see somebody convinced that the world will end soon attempt to transcribe all sorts of stuff onto a bunch of these discs in an attempt to make a sort of general ark of knowledge or some such nonsense. | |
Yeah, but how much will this Diamond-esque stone cost? | |
it is both odd and cool tech. tho i think the tech will change a lot in 1000 years, heck try finding a 5.25" floppy drive now | |
Well I've seen 8-track players at garage/yard sales and the like, but whether they worked or not is a different question. What about vinyl record players? Everyone thought those would be extinct by now, but it turns out that sound quality on vinyl is superior to that of CDs/DVDs. | |
I have one build into my car But aren't we moving onto solid state memory now? | |
Not particulary useful, but convinient for saving data in case of apocalypse. I suppose. Or you could just take a flash memcard and put it in a safe. | |
Does that now mean you can mind-fuck people who live in the future? Cool!...kinda. | |
Isn't that incredibly environmentally unfriendly? Surely we'll just end up with landfills full of the things... | |
Funk, you missed out on the crazy Japanese golf bra, you're slipping! Cool bit of news. Probably the only reason these will sell at all is because some people are going crazy over the 2012 thing and trying to record everything. | |
As to a point made in the article... how many people actually have a Blu-ray burner? Or the need to burn 50 GB of data? Or the desire to pay for the writable disks? I'd rather use the redundant file server in my home. | |
Didn't I see this on Cribs: Bedrock? | |
you know if you laminate the face of your DVD you can probably get a whole hell of alot more years out of it. I still have dvds that work with no degradation thats well over 12 years old now :P its where u keep it and how much wear and tear it has to go thru. | |
and I challenge anyone to find a working player for that. in my room, theres one in my record player and i DO actually use it, albeit very rarely. in any case, id like to ask what the point of this is? looking at coming technology (carbon nanowires especially, which theoretically can store data for over 1000 years AND have a higher theoretical capacity than even hvd) this wont have much of a life span. | |
Actually there are entire subcultures revolving around old media players like 8 tracks and repairing and maintaining them and such. People like to tinker with antiquidated technology. As far as the viability of media that doesn't degrade, well it all depends on what you want to record. If your planning on say sticking something into a time capsule that is a good thing. Whether anyone will ever care or not, consider that a lot of people like to record journals and such to leave behind a record of their existance (as mundane as it might be). There are also groups of people who COLLECT journals, and actually the more boring and "normal" a journal or diary is the more valuable it can be to someone who is say interested for sociological or historical reasons. Surviving journals and such from a hundred years ago help answer questions about what the ordinary person was like or how they lived. Just imagine being able to have a CD or DVD to do the same thing and actually show it in 300 years. Guaranteed someone will resurrect the technology specifically for that reason if no other. | |
Yeah, I can't believe how long this junk will endure. If it's good after a 1000 years, when will it begin to rot? | |
Did anyone else come into this thread thinking that this company was claiming that DVDs as a format would last a millennium? | |
I'll just go borrow my grannies. And hers still works. ot: I don't know if I would really even have any sort of practical use for something like that. Whatever happened to just keeping a handwritten journal? | |
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Start-Up Claims Stone DVDs Will Last a Millennium
In case you really wanted to leave your copy of Legally Blonde to your distant descendants: WA-based start-up Cranberry LLC claims that its stone DVDs will last a good 1,000 years into the future.
On average, consumer-grade CDs and DVDs - that is, the discs sold to consumers to burn via their computer - last anywhere from two to five years before beginning to degrade (at least, if the government is to be believed), and with more and more people turning to digital media to store precious memories like family photos, it makes sense to want to preserve your data in a format that will last. Some companies have developed long-lasting DVDs with a reported shelf-life of 300 years, but Ferndale, WA-based Cranberry LLC thinks it can one-up them: The company has claimed that its proprietary DiamonDisc technology will still be good a thousand years from now.
In fact, says the Cranberry website, the DiamonDisc will literally etch your memories in stone - synthetic "diamond-like" stone, that is. Unlike normal discs, the DiamonDisc contains no silver or gold reflective layer, rendering it transparent ... but also rendering it without any laser-sensitive ink to decay. While the only way to determine whether or not the product will actually last 1,000 years will be up to our great-great-great-great-etc-grandchildren, Cranberry claims that the DiamonDisc is unharmed by "heat as high as 176 degrees Fahrenheit, ultraviolet rays or normal material deterioration." So you could leave it outside in Death Valley and it'd still be hunky-dory at the end of the day.
There are downsides to the technology, of course: While any normal DVD player can read one of the discs, they can only be burned by Cranberry itself, which means trusting your private data to a third party. Also, a single DiamonDisc holds a meager 4.7GB of information, which is standard DVD size - and while perfectly suitable for holding things like family photos, it seems awfully small in the era of High-Definition video and Blu-Ray.
But this of course is ignoring the elephant in the room: Will we even have DVD players a millennium from now? It's only been twenty-some-odd years since 8-track tapes went the way of the dodo, and I challenge anyone to find a working player for that. You might be able to preserve your data for the future to find, but it means nothing if they don't have the technology to access it, right?
So let's file this one under "technology that's cool, but seems kind of impractical."
(ComputerWorld)
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