anonymous cowpie sends word of a Utah startup that is about to introduce technology for writing DVDs that can be read for 1,000 years after being stored at room temperature. (Ordinary DVDs last anywhere from 3 to 12 years, on average.) The company, Millenniata, is said to be in the final stages of negotiation with Phillips over patent licensing and plans to begin manufacture in September. 1,000-year "M-ARC Discs" are expected to retail for $25-$30 at first, with the price coming down with volume. "Dubbed the Millennial Disk, it looks virtually identical to a regular DVD, but it's special. Layers of hard, 'persistent' materials (the exact composition is a trade secret) are laid down on a plastic carrier, and digital information is literally carved in with an enhanced laser using the company's Millennial Writer, a sort of beefed-up DVD burner. Once cut, the disk can be read by an ordinary DVD reader on your computer."
I don't know. But it's interesting to think that people watching the DVDs 1000 years from now will probably find our speech as odd and different as we find Beowulf now...
I don't know. But it's interesting to think that people watching the DVDs 1000 years from now will probably find our speech as odd and different as we find Beowulf now...
Yeh, they'll find it odd how we call it Christmas instead of XMas. How we saw Ask instead of Aks. And these rain forests we keep talking about.
Fascinating. Just 2,000 years ago, rain was a torture method. And just 1,000 years later, it seems to have developed into some the much-mentioned but never seen "rest and relaxation". So much of our past is yet to be discovered.
Talking about 1000 and 2000 years in the past, I prefer to think about what it could be like when we are seen as the distant past.
It seems very likely the changes in the next 1000 years are going to be much bigger than the changes in the previous 1000 years simply as we have so many better tools today, including far better information tools which helps to accelerate creating new technology.
I hope in 1000 years from now they will look back at us as if we are some kind of very early version of what they see as their technological dark ages. Although I would like to hope in 2000 years from now, the people then would be able to ask some of their oldest friends what it was like 1000 years ago.
A lifetime estimation study would be done.
Extended incubation tests, at ~ 80ÂC, 85%RH ect.
Accelerated ageing should give the user some idea, not that many of us will get to ask for a 'return' for faulty goods.
The problem is, after we've evolved several generations, our porn won't be nearly as enticing to future generations as it is to us. They'll be wondering where the extra pair of titties is?;-)
I'm sure the multi-endowed tentaclebeasted transfurry lolirape stuff that comes out of Japan and/b/ is _nothing_ compared to the unfathomable transdimensional Lovecraftian virtual Horror-Porn that our descendants will be fapping to in .
She's got one big breast in the middle of her chest And an eye in the middle of her nose So says I, if you look her in the eye You're better off looking up her nose
(* This post is for cultural research only. No sales of Hulu(tm) ads have been created out of contract by this post. This does not constitute a song.)
The situation won't be as extreme as it was with this proprietary system, of course (the number of number of DVD readers in circulation is very large, and the software that interacts with them is well documented), but in the long run the only thing that really makes sense is to make multiple copies that are shifted to new storage media as they become available.
No problem. Store them in a vault with 10 plates of instructions for building a DVD player and 100 plates showing how to crack the various layers of annoying DRM that have been added by the Hollywood studios.
I'm always confused as to why people get hung on this point so often. Why would someone in 1000 years (barring some apocalyptic situation), or even 20 years need a specific player to read a DVD, floppy disk, hard disk, or anything? All of these can be examined with more generic laboratory inspection equipment now, why is it unrealistic that 10 years from now you might have an optical disk scanner that reads just about anything? Even the encoding that the disks use isn't very complicated, we crack much more difficult codes all the time.
There is precedent. Hieroglyphs written 2000 years ago were undecipherable until the 1799 discovery of the Rosetta Stone and its subsequent study in the following decades. Reading technology was available the entire time (the paintings, writings and carvings were all visible to the unaided eye). Hieroglyphic writings weren't encrypted in any way -- other than being in a coding scheme (language) that fell out of use. The only real apocalypse that occurred over the ensuing eons was the cumulative effects
Thanks to the fact the data is literally "carved in", these discs are playable by a wide range of easily obtainable readers. Not only can you put them in a DVD player - in fact, it's possible simply to put a needle in the grooves of the disc, which gives detailed instructions on how to make a DVD player.
While it is a longer span for pressed DVDs, I'm sure the RIAA/MPAA know that the media we purchase songs and movies on has a limited lifespan that may very well be shorter than the consumer's remaining years. And it kind of upsets me that creating backups for your own personal use of DVDs or CDs is illegal (although not typically prosecuted unless copyright infringement ensues). Personally, I rip all my CDs and some DVDs upon purchase and simply never use the disc again. It goes into storage and I create digital backups and hard copy backups of the discs. It's a bit pricier and not as instant as other ways of purchasing media but it ensures I'll always have it. When I purchased the latest Cloud Cult album, I bought the CDs and was able to download unencrypted MP3s immediately after purchase. When I purchased the vinyl record of She & Him, I was e-mailed a voucher to download the MP3s. I wish the big distributors would follow what the little guys are doing and offer you the whole package up front. Saves me a lot of work.
It's illegal to make backups of media if you have to violate the DMCA to do it. Unfortunately, this applies to DVDs (but NOT Audio CDs.) And of course, this is USA-centric.
You don't have to violate the DMCA to copy a DVD. Just copy the files to a blank disk.
CSS is about player licensing, not copy protection. (Which there are a lot of people that *still* don't get...)
You can't play a DVD back on a player that isn't licensed by the DVD consortium. Thats what CSS prevents. (And thus, you can't format shift.)
Making a backup works just fine, and is perfectly legal. In fact, you can make a backup to a harddrive and it'll work just fine as long as the program playing it on your comp
And this assumes that in 1000 years there will be:
1. a player to play the damn thing
2. the resources to build a player to play the damn thing.
3. a screen to view it on
4. the resources to build a screen to view it on
5. the cultural interest in such behaviour (sitting and watching a screen)
6. the cultural capacity to decode and understand what the hell they're watching even if they do decide to watch it, assuming they have the ability to do so. For an extreme example, there is a non-zero probability that in 1000 years, the notion of "fiction" may well not exist, in which case an episode of "Friends" or "Seinfeld" become biographical portraits of stupid foolish people, as one needs to have the fictive distance to decode what is happening.
7. that anyone will give a rat's ass about us in a 1000 years. They may well be pissing on our graves for having ruined the planet, and these disks may simply be destroyed as examples of the evil Evil EVIL petroleum age.
8. Reverse engineering NTSC (SD or HD - just getting 29.97fps with rectangular pixels is fucked up enough) from a disc filled with microscopic pits strikes me as impossible and or pointless.
I can list many more reasons why a 1000 year disk is a waste of time, those are just a few off the top of my head.
Frankly, I think we are the civilisation that in 1000 years will be a great and tantalizing mystery. Their world will be filled with our garbage, telling them how we lived (like wasteful pigs at the trough) but they won't really know that much about what we think (because it was all digital and the technology disappeared in the die-off).
I can list many more reasons why a 1000 year disk is a waste of time
I think you are missing the point.
Let's say you are an engineer working for DiskCorp, and your boss tells you to develop a compound that will last for 100 years to sell to people worried about archival. In the persuit of 100-year life, you happen to come up with something that lasts 1000 years.
Do you: (a) decide that you failed and go back to the drawing board, or (b) tell marketing they can run with the 1000-year life?
It's a psychological trick. No one will take their word for it that their disks last 1000 years. Instead, people will assume they are exaggerating, but anchor their estimate of the "real" lifetime of the disks to the 1000 year number (even though it's obviously fictitious). Half, a third, even a tenth of the advertised lifetime is still longer than a human lifetime -so people will buy it.
Just stick it in the molecular scanner. This is 1000 years into the future, isn't it?
2. the resources to build a player to play the damn thing.
3. a screen to view it on 4. the resources to build a screen to view it on
Oh, you want to full old-school experience? I'm sure you can replicate a player, then. Or incorporate the molecular scan from 1. in a holodeck program that simulates a player and a screen.
5. the cultural interest in such behaviour (sitting and watching a scree
8. Reverse engineering NTSC (SD or HD - just getting 29.97fps with rectangular pixels is fucked up enough) from a disc filled with microscopic pits strikes me as impossible and or pointless.
If Things Fall Apart, it'll be impossible and pointless, because people probably won't even be able to discern that there are pits. A DVD will just be another piece of godtrash, desirable because it makes pretty rainbows, but with only legends about its function.
If This Goes On, it'll be trivial, whether or not players still exist. I'm pretty sure that with a consumer digicam, ImageJ, a simple audio package and some ambition, I could recover an Edison cylinder recording without any sort of physical "player"; doing the same for a vinyl disc would be a stretch at present, but probably not ten years from now. A physical artifact with gross topographic features (as opposed to subtle patterns of charge or spin) just won't be able to retain that much mystery. The software it represents can be a bit more mysterious, but I don't think the ability to analyze a digital video stream is likely to be lost unless we lose most everything else.
Of course, if the RIAA and its minions come up with truly strong encryption and DRM, information could be lost irretrievably. But gods have always had demons to contend with.
We have archeologists who dig up the most mundane objects from more than 1000 years ago and make a big deal out of it. I'm sure the guy who wrote his diary on stone tablets back in the day didn't worry about us being interested in his day, or having a way to read it. And yet we do.
As for your other predictions of the future, I'm sure they have about the same level of accuracy as that of a man living 1000 years ago.
While I agree with the technical criticisms, I cant agree with the attitude of "future people will be so rational and alien to us they wont understand fiction or care about history." Humanity has always cared about stories, its where we learn things as children and as children we demand stories. We have also always have cared deeply about our roots and our understanding of history.
Even in some uber-technological future the tools that make us smart in engineering are the same tools that make us curious. Curious and smart go hand in hand, and we will always be curious about the past.
Just because the future is unpredictable doesnt mean we should care about preserving the culture and history of the present.
>>They may well be pissing on our graves for having ruined the planet, and these disks may simply be destroyed as examples of the evil Evil EVIL petroleum age
Wow, angsty much? Are modern people sitting and seething in anger over the dodo bird and other species hunted to extinction? No, we're interested in the motivations and history of the period.
>>the cultural interest in such behaviour (sitting and watching a screen)
How old is the collection of christian myths? People are still interested in reading it and usually in the form of a book!
The point of a "thousand year DVD" is not to archive something for literally one thousand years. Very few if any companies would have any possible business need for such a thing. The point is that if you have a 'large enough' number of DVDs with a 50 year MTTF, some of them will fail well within the time frame that they might be called into use, whereas a 1,000 year DVD is much less likely to have a catastrophic failure within its useful lifespan. Theoretically.
If this is true then shouldn't new movies come with a date stamp on the case so you know you're buying a "fresh" copy?
Sounds strange to me. I've got data and music CD's I made over 10 years ago that still work. Can't say I've been burning DVDs that long though.
Now, if everyone understands DRM and closed formats are hopelessly short sighted, maybe we can avoid the current day being the future's digital dark age. We can leave a legacy of storage media still readable in formats whose workings are widely known.
Some would leave their descendants a tangled mess of data hidden with secrets on media not designed to last longer than a decade. Which is not really seeing the bigger picture.....
Forgetting that they didn't have carmeras... If someone popped up with a bunch of photos from little Octavius's birthday party from the height of the Roman Empire, TONS of people would be interested in seeing it. From the way they were dressed, to the kinds of gifts they gave, to the way they had their home decorated. Many people really are intersted in the past, and the past is often lost because only extrodinary situation get recorded for the ages. Day to day life is much harder to get a view of.
Posting.... (Score:4, Funny)
How do we KNOW that.. (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:How do we KNOW that.. (Score:5, Funny)
I don't know. But it's interesting to think that people watching the DVDs 1000 years from now will probably find our speech as odd and different as we find Beowulf now...
Yeh, they'll find it odd how we call it Christmas instead of XMas. How we saw Ask instead of Aks. And these rain forests we keep talking about.
Parent
Re:How do we KNOW that.. (Score:4, Funny)
Parent
Re:How do we KNOW that.. (Score:4, Interesting)
Rain?
For rests?
Fascinating. Just 2,000 years ago, rain was a torture method. And just 1,000 years later, it seems to have developed into some the much-mentioned but never seen "rest and relaxation". So much of our past is yet to be discovered.
Parent
Re:How do we KNOW that.. (Score:4, Interesting)
It seems very likely the changes in the next 1000 years are going to be much bigger than the changes in the previous 1000 years simply as we have so many better tools today, including far better information tools which helps to accelerate creating new technology.
I hope in 1000 years from now they will look back at us as if we are some kind of very early version of what they see as their technological dark ages. Although I would like to hope in 2000 years from now, the people then would be able to ask some of their oldest friends what it was like 1000 years ago.
Parent
Re:How do we KNOW that.. (Score:4, Funny)
Ah, you talk like a fag, and your shit's all retarded.
Parent
Mod parent Funny, not Flamebait (Score:5, Informative)
That's a quote from Idiocracy, not flamebait.
Parent
Re:Mod parent Funny, not Flamebait (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:WTF? (Score:4, Funny)
Ah, you talk like a fag, and your shit's all retarded.
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
Re:How do we KNOW that.. (Score:5, Funny)
I'm just thinking of how old porn collections will be used in medical classes.
1,000 years ago, women had only two breasts...
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Extended incubation tests, at ~ 80ÂC, 85%RH ect.
Accelerated ageing should give the user some idea, not that many of us will get to ask for a 'return' for faulty goods.
Re:How do we KNOW that.. (Score:4, Funny)
Parent
Re:How do we KNOW that.. (Score:5, Funny)
How do we KNOW that they'll REALLY last 1,000 years?
People from the future told us. They also told us to bury more porn.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:How do we KNOW that.. (Score:5, Funny)
I'm sure the multi-endowed tentaclebeasted transfurry lolirape stuff that comes out of Japan and
Parent
Re:Wondering (Score:4, Interesting)
You mean fewer.
From the musical Big River*
She's got one big breast in the middle of her chest
And an eye in the middle of her nose
So says I, if you look her in the eye
You're better off looking up her nose
(* This post is for cultural research only. No sales of Hulu(tm) ads have been created out of contract by this post. This does not constitute a song.)
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
...and will there be any DVD readers 1,000 years from now?
4Gb of storage is already getting quite small. By the time this gets to market it will be too late to be useful.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
from the same consensus (Score:2)
that tells us global warming will doom us in one hundred years.
So, in the meantime, thank you for funding my lavish lifestyle and be happy to know your saving your data (world)
Larger Disks (Score:5, Funny)
Dubbed the Millennial Disk, it looks virtually identical to a regular DVD, but it's special.
These new non-degradable disks are larger, black, and made out of vinyl.
Re:Larger Disks (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
players? (Score:5, Insightful)
As if DVD players will be around for 1000 years?
Re:players? (Score:4, Informative)
'As if DVD players will be around for 1000 years?'
Or even 20 years:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2002/mar/03/research.elearning [guardian.co.uk]
The situation won't be as extreme as it was with this proprietary system, of course (the number of number of DVD readers in circulation is very large, and the software that interacts with them is well documented), but in the long run the only thing that really makes sense is to make multiple copies that are shifted to new storage media as they become available.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Consider the Rosetta Stone (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm always confused as to why people get hung on this point so often. Why would someone in 1000 years (barring some apocalyptic situation), or even 20 years need a specific player to read a DVD, floppy disk, hard disk, or anything? All of these can be examined with more generic laboratory inspection equipment now, why is it unrealistic that 10 years from now you might have an optical disk scanner that reads just about anything? Even the encoding that the disks use isn't very complicated, we crack much more difficult codes all the time.
There is precedent. Hieroglyphs written 2000 years ago were undecipherable until the 1799 discovery of the Rosetta Stone and its subsequent study in the following decades. Reading technology was available the entire time (the paintings, writings and carvings were all visible to the unaided eye). Hieroglyphic writings weren't encrypted in any way -- other than being in a coding scheme (language) that fell out of use. The only real apocalypse that occurred over the ensuing eons was the cumulative effects
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Yeah. If it was rocket science, you'd reuse or lose the media, and we'd have to hope somebody found copies in Australia or something.
Recall Kodak (Score:2)
Sounds like someone put some effort into dvds too.
Carved in (Score:3, Funny)
Thanks to the fact the data is literally "carved in", these discs are playable by a wide range of easily obtainable readers. Not only can you put them in a DVD player - in fact, it's possible simply to put a needle in the grooves of the disc, which gives detailed instructions on how to make a DVD player.
Disc Lifespan (Score:5, Informative)
(Ordinary DVDs last anywhere from 3 to 12 years, on average.)
For those of you really concerned about optical media in your possession, check out NIST's "Care and Handling of CDs and DVDs - A Guide for Librarians and Archivists" [nist.gov] [1.24 MB PDF warning]. That guide is extremely thorough.
While it is a longer span for pressed DVDs, I'm sure the RIAA/MPAA know that the media we purchase songs and movies on has a limited lifespan that may very well be shorter than the consumer's remaining years. And it kind of upsets me that creating backups for your own personal use of DVDs or CDs is illegal (although not typically prosecuted unless copyright infringement ensues). Personally, I rip all my CDs and some DVDs upon purchase and simply never use the disc again. It goes into storage and I create digital backups and hard copy backups of the discs. It's a bit pricier and not as instant as other ways of purchasing media but it ensures I'll always have it. When I purchased the latest Cloud Cult album, I bought the CDs and was able to download unencrypted MP3s immediately after purchase. When I purchased the vinyl record of She & Him, I was e-mailed a voucher to download the MP3s. I wish the big distributors would follow what the little guys are doing and offer you the whole package up front. Saves me a lot of work.
Re: (Score:2)
Backups of DVDs and CDs are not illegal, what gave you that idea?
Re: (Score:2)
It's illegal to make backups of media if you have to violate the DMCA to do it. Unfortunately, this applies to DVDs (but NOT Audio CDs.) And of course, this is USA-centric.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
You don't have to violate the DMCA to copy a DVD. Just copy the files to a blank disk.
CSS is about player licensing, not copy protection. (Which there are a lot of people that *still* don't get...)
You can't play a DVD back on a player that isn't licensed by the DVD consortium. Thats what CSS prevents. (And thus, you can't format shift.)
Making a backup works just fine, and is perfectly legal. In fact, you can make a backup to a harddrive and it'll work just fine as long as the program playing it on your comp
Sure. 1000 years. (Score:5, Interesting)
1. a player to play the damn thing
2. the resources to build a player to play the damn thing.
3. a screen to view it on
4. the resources to build a screen to view it on
5. the cultural interest in such behaviour (sitting and watching a screen)
6. the cultural capacity to decode and understand what the hell they're watching even if they do decide to watch it, assuming they have the ability to do so. For an extreme example, there is a non-zero probability that in 1000 years, the notion of "fiction" may well not exist, in which case an episode of "Friends" or "Seinfeld" become biographical portraits of stupid foolish people, as one needs to have the fictive distance to decode what is happening.
7. that anyone will give a rat's ass about us in a 1000 years. They may well be pissing on our graves for having ruined the planet, and these disks may simply be destroyed as examples of the evil Evil EVIL petroleum age.
8. Reverse engineering NTSC (SD or HD - just getting 29.97fps with rectangular pixels is fucked up enough) from a disc filled with microscopic pits strikes me as impossible and or pointless.
I can list many more reasons why a 1000 year disk is a waste of time, those are just a few off the top of my head.
Frankly, I think we are the civilisation that in 1000 years will be a great and tantalizing mystery. Their world will be filled with our garbage, telling them how we lived (like wasteful pigs at the trough) but they won't really know that much about what we think (because it was all digital and the technology disappeared in the die-off).
RS
Re:Sure. 1000 years. (Score:5, Funny)
And finally and most importantly, Congress would *never* consider extending the copyright term to 1000 years
Parent
Re:Sure. 1000 years. (Score:5, Insightful)
I can list many more reasons why a 1000 year disk is a waste of time
I think you are missing the point.
Let's say you are an engineer working for DiskCorp, and your boss tells you to develop a compound that will last for 100 years to sell to people worried about archival. In the persuit of 100-year life, you happen to come up with something that lasts 1000 years.
Do you: (a) decide that you failed and go back to the drawing board, or (b) tell marketing they can run with the 1000-year life?
Parent
Re:Sure. 1000 years. (Score:5, Insightful)
It's a psychological trick. No one will take their word for it that their disks last 1000 years. Instead, people will assume they are exaggerating, but anchor their estimate of the "real" lifetime of the disks to the 1000 year number (even though it's obviously fictitious). Half, a third, even a tenth of the advertised lifetime is still longer than a human lifetime -so people will buy it.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
1. a player to play the damn thing
Just stick it in the molecular scanner. This is 1000 years into the future, isn't it?
2. the resources to build a player to play the damn thing.
3. a screen to view it on
4. the resources to build a screen to view it on
Oh, you want to full old-school experience? I'm sure you can replicate a player, then. Or incorporate the molecular scan from 1. in a holodeck program that simulates a player and a screen.
5. the cultural interest in such behaviour (sitting and watching a scree
Re:Sure. 1000 years. (Score:5, Informative)
8. Reverse engineering NTSC (SD or HD - just getting 29.97fps with rectangular pixels is fucked up enough) from a disc filled with microscopic pits strikes me as impossible and or pointless.
If Things Fall Apart, it'll be impossible and pointless, because people probably won't even be able to discern that there are pits. A DVD will just be another piece of godtrash, desirable because it makes pretty rainbows, but with only legends about its function.
If This Goes On, it'll be trivial, whether or not players still exist. I'm pretty sure that with a consumer digicam, ImageJ, a simple audio package and some ambition, I could recover an Edison cylinder recording without any sort of physical "player"; doing the same for a vinyl disc would be a stretch at present, but probably not ten years from now. A physical artifact with gross topographic features (as opposed to subtle patterns of charge or spin) just won't be able to retain that much mystery. The software it represents can be a bit more mysterious, but I don't think the ability to analyze a digital video stream is likely to be lost unless we lose most everything else.
Of course, if the RIAA and its minions come up with truly strong encryption and DRM, information could be lost irretrievably. But gods have always had demons to contend with.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
We have archeologists who dig up the most mundane objects from more than 1000 years ago and make a big deal out of it. I'm sure the guy who wrote his diary on stone tablets back in the day didn't worry about us being interested in his day, or having a way to read it. And yet we do.
As for your other predictions of the future, I'm sure they have about the same level of accuracy as that of a man living 1000 years ago.
Re:Sure. 1000 years. (Score:5, Insightful)
While I agree with the technical criticisms, I cant agree with the attitude of "future people will be so rational and alien to us they wont understand fiction or care about history." Humanity has always cared about stories, its where we learn things as children and as children we demand stories. We have also always have cared deeply about our roots and our understanding of history.
Even in some uber-technological future the tools that make us smart in engineering are the same tools that make us curious. Curious and smart go hand in hand, and we will always be curious about the past.
Just because the future is unpredictable doesnt mean we should care about preserving the culture and history of the present.
>>They may well be pissing on our graves for having ruined the planet, and these disks may simply be destroyed as examples of the evil Evil EVIL petroleum age
Wow, angsty much? Are modern people sitting and seething in anger over the dodo bird and other species hunted to extinction? No, we're interested in the motivations and history of the period.
>>the cultural interest in such behaviour (sitting and watching a screen)
How old is the collection of christian myths? People are still interested in reading it and usually in the form of a book!
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
The point of a "thousand year DVD" is not to archive something for literally one thousand years. Very few if any companies would have any possible business need for such a thing. The point is that if you have a 'large enough' number of DVDs with a 50 year MTTF, some of them will fail well within the time frame that they might be called into use, whereas a 1,000 year DVD is much less likely to have a catastrophic failure within its useful lifespan. Theoretically.
I guess... (Score:2)
I guess Phillips felt sorry for some old lady who fell for a Nigerian government scam and decided to hire her...
Anyone who buys this is an idiot.
Should there be date stamps on movie DVDs? (Score:3, Informative)
Only 7-12 years (Score:3, Informative)
At last! Long term thinking! (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re:At least make some sense! (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent