Braile?
This is about the absolute be all and end all of backup solutions though, is it not?
Excuse the hyperbole on my part but I kinda grabbed that concept and ran with it.
The problem comes in when local store managers, assistant managers, and comanagers ignore what the system is telling them to do … which happens a whole lot more than you would think. The store I worked at was actually a brand new store when I started there. I even started a couple of weeks before the opening. That store was also replacing an older Walmart in the same town, and all the old, unsold inventory from that store was brought over to our store when it closed and we opened . That inventory was not accounted for. It was dumped in our back room and was completely off the books and out of the inventory management system. How they got away with doing that, I have no idea, but they did. They kept throwing that stuff on clearance aisles for the next year or so trying to sell it.
Pure, pristine 1s and 0s only exist as an abstraction. Cloud services simply hide the physical storage devices in remote locations. They protect the data through redundancy and backup more reliably than you would on your own. Instead of you worrying about upgrading to the next generation of hardware and migrating your data, you leave it to to professionals. But this doesn’t solve the problem of proprietary or obsolete data formats, or knowing what data must be kept, what may be of interest in the future or what may be safely discarded. It may be possible to read the sequences of 1s and 0s long into the future, but future readers would also need to understand the formats, metadata and context of the information for it to have any value. Although the software industry has made strides in developing common data formats, archiving, migrating and curating data in cloud storage is a multi-generation, civilization-level project.
some digital film materials have encoded onto film negatives-- each frame contains a massive barcode (akin to a qrcode) which can be scanned to retrieve the original file. More suitable for archiving than magnetic tape or optical disc, but still digital.
1 Like
Thinking more about this, I guess the Egyptians idea is relatively effective.
You just have to build monuments that will guarantee to impress, thousands of years from now.
I once read a Stephen Baxter short story where the last sequence for activating a viral re-writing of the DNA weapons hidden in the bodies of Inter galactic Aid-Workers were the various nursery rhymes and limericks that had been distributed ahead of the fleet in the social pantheon of the spacer-settlers.
The military could then distribute the fleet in enemy territories and ‘activate’ them once they had distributed into a particular volume of space where the final code words had been inserted.
1 Like
Even that strategy only worked as well as it did because some archeologists found the Rosetta stone.
Good point and why I introduced the concept that the Clock of the Long Now is using to actually include learning materials with the encoded information.
Sure, you have to assume a level of intelligence and determinedness and I guess just hope for the blind luck that whatever post-apocalyptic civilisation finds your life insurance records, actually cares about honouring such commitments from their distant and storied ancestors.
Yeah, small media at those prices can be useful for a lot of things. About two years ago I was trying to buy a bulk of either small capacity USB sticks or small capacity SD cards in order to do a stealth giveaway on an … avant garde media project. I gave up because I couldn’t get any more than a handful.
I guess you could do the same thing with QCodes or something but getting people to open one of those is kind of onerous whereas my first instinct when finding an old USB stick or SD card is to plug it in and see what’s on it.
Disclaimer: My project wasn’t going to be malicious. Just cute/mind bendy.
These days, that sorta seems to carry the same levels of risk attendant unto any random glory hole. You might get rewarded with something fun. Then again… maybe you won’t.
Heh heh heh.
Oh, I agree it’s conceptually dangerous to plug random old stuff in. But it’s human nature and I wasn’t going to do anything malicious with it so their naivete lack of cynicism wouldn’t have been abused.
This topic was automatically closed after 5 days. New replies are no longer allowed.
