Hypothetically...

>does being able to read modern code help you decipher floppy vinyl discs from the 1970s?

I don't mean to be rude, but are you a fucking idiot? With a bit of hardware attached and some SOFTWARE you can convert vinyl to digital. You can convert pretty much everything to digital, that's the fucking point.

> can an average historian even get data off of a computer 30 years old without the proper tools for reading it (most of which no longer exist now, let alone in 100 years)?

What is the point of this? Computers which were around 30 years ago exist in a very niche market. The way computers work is it's continually being updated? You don't actually think the internet is conglomerate of people working together right? As technology gets better the people increase their servers to deal with this new technology to make it easier for people to access their servers, so they can in turn make more money off of website traffic.

I am pretty certain you gave literally no idea what you are saying. Computers today and computers 30 years ago a completely different things, essentially what you are saying will happen. It hasn't happened. Because that's not the point of computers as things get better the things they are meant to be doing get better too, unless it can't then it's scrapped and an alternative takes it place.

Actually have no idea what you are saying.

With pic related you can fit pretty much any of the biggest libraries in the world in your pocket.

But yeah, digital so bad, rite? xD

Idiots incapable of thinking beyond their present bubble of immediacy.

The world will not continue indefinetely as it has for the las eighty years, morons. At some point in the future current technology will become obsolete, and all data stored with it will be lost. You are a flippant idiot if you cannot recognize how vulnerable and precarious the current. technological tower really is. A book has infinitely more permanence than a pdf document, for instance.

gb2 /pol/ dude

I know, right? That is why I'm printing all the works by REI for postapocalyptic posterity.

>At some point in the future current technology will become obsolete, and all data stored with it will be lost.

Are you literally trying to imply this hasn't already happened? IT HAPPENS ALL THE FUCKING TIME WITH COMPUTERS. THAT IS THE POINT OF COMPUTERS. WHEN THEY GET BETTER, THEY GET UPDATED, AND EVERYTHING COMES WITH IT.

Holy shit, you're a literal moron.

But no yes, computers today are literally ENIAC. Why the fuck are you posting, if you cannot even comprehend the most basic IDEA behind computing?

>At some point in the future current technology will become obsolete, and all data stored with it will be lost.

We have plenty of obsolete formats. Our ability to get data from them has not diminished.

why do you think future tech won't have a method of information transfer and all current media readers will completely disappear?

Is this what aging librarians do when they're angry about the future? Shitpost?

Time cube is all you need.

You are so fucking retarded, Jesus.

I posted that current technology will become obsolete, not current generation of computers, idiots.

I am referring to the technology, not to the generation of a specific device.

It seems that you don't know what technology is.

Lol

Again. DVD's Blu-Rays are an explicitly different type of technology than a Floppy Disk, are you saying they are the same?

Are you actually trying to say that if we do 'create' a completely new type of technology which obsoletes computing all our data would be lost? What the fuck, why? TODAY we are capable of converting from completely different technology formats, I like how you completely disregarded the fact that we can convert vinyl to digital, two formats very far apart, one came about before computers. Kek, you think we are idiots? You have literally no understanding of how anything works. I mean, computers made books obsolete, as a storage format. Surprise surprise, almost all the books we had are now digital.

Again, you are a literal moron.

Well, your central point is dumb.

It's like saying

>well nobody writes in heiroglyphics any more
>yeah, but they know how to translate from heiroglyphics to English
>THEY CAN'T DO THAT BECAUSE REASONS

Like, data encryption is a language.

Unless the actual language is lost, it's going to remain readable.

No, they're different iterations of the same kind of technology. You don't even have to be an expert to realize that, you just need insight, which apparently you lack.

Again, you don't know what technology is.

>Unless the actual language is lost, it's going to remain readable.

That is my whole fucking point, idiot. Current technology will become obsolete in future, therefore all data recorded with it will be lost, therefore a "dark age" is very feasible, which was the whole point of OP's question.

We no longer use styluses to write cuneiform.

Do you think that we'd have any trouble making one if we needed to?

It seems like there's a central point you're missing, which is that we've been growing exponentially more sophisticated in our use of encoding technology, not less.

And nitrocellulose film is like 1880s level technology. The code itself is simply linguistics mixed with a little bit of entry level math and logic.

But the current languages are in books aren't they?

Less than 5%

Bits and bytes are much more sensitive than books in many ways

Take away power and your information is gone
Advance operational systems another 20 years and they won't be able to read your harddisks

Hel, old harddisks fail because the bearing or whatever let them spin gets rusty/corroded

Cd's get scratched or fucked due to sun exposure

I have fapped to pr0n that hasn't been available since my harddrive fried almost ten years ago, and the other freaks who had the same pr0n aren't sharing or lost their drives themselves

Digital information is ridiculously fragile when it comes to it.

>You don't even have to be an expert to realize that
Do you have any idea how they work? They are completely different forms of technology. Sure, they fulfill the same purpose, but on the inside - they are completely different. It's like saying a corolla is a mazarati because they both have 4 wheels.

You didn't answer any of the questions I posed you.

>Again, you don't know what technology is.

Again, tell me why you think this new form of technology will make us lose all of our current data. I want some technical reasonings here, we get new technology all the time, you can say 'no' all you want. But you are literally wrong here, not me.

Here - comparebusinessproducts.com/fyi/10-largest-databases-in-the-world.

There is no way we can go back to paper resources. It's simply not efficent anymore.

>130 million items (books, photographs, maps, etc)
>29 million books
>10,000 new items added each day
>530 miles of shelves
>5 million digital documents
>20 terabytes of text data
That's American's Congress library. Again, I actually have no idea what you are saying.

>you don't know what technology is.
I clearly have a much better understanding of it than you do. If you literally think a new form of technology will come about that isn't based in computing will somehow make all computers obsolete and the data contained within actually gone.

>therefore all data recorded with it will be lost

I mean, we can still play wax disks made in the very beginning of sound recording.

We can still see photographs made at the advent of photography.

As long as technology moves in the direction of more understanding, rather than less, it will always be a trivial exercise to recover data encoded in a previous system.

The only way to lose access is to lose the knowledge of what the information means.

This has only happened to a handful of scripts from places that have experienced total civilization collapse.

For that matter, you're assuming that data can't be transferred from one medium to another, which is emphatically not the case.

I know, right?

It is perplexing how most persons don't realize this so obvious thing. It is. As if they are hypnotized or something, like these two or three morons in this thread with whom I was arguing. They cannot even grasp concept of technology, and just equate it with devices. Hey believe that technology = devices.

>Digital information is ridiculously fragile when it comes to it.
And physical is not? You're an idiot, you cannot read a book which has been burned to nothing. All those problems you mentioned with hard drives though you can still get the data off of them, if you send it away to a professional who knows how to do it, you could learn how to do it, but it's a very tedious thing to learn.

Data is suspect to the same thing as book when it comes to actual loss of data, and that's the physical destruction of the thing containing the data. When you empty the recycling bin on your computer files do not actually get deleted, the hard drive simply writes another sector and you cannot access the 'deleted' file.

THe only way you can 'get rid' of data is by destroying your hard drives, as is the case with books.

>Take away power and your information is gone
Gee, what are HDDs, Flash drives, SSDs, CDs etc

>mfw /b/ has experienced firsthand on many occasions how hard it is to destroy digital data

This, if there was ever a large solar flare our entire civilization would disappear and be unable to reach its previous level of development

... All of which require electrical power to even be readable...

How stupid are you?

Yeah, but data is backed up and copied incrementally over time to newer tech.

It's not like the only copies of songs by the Beatles are on vinyl records. They went to tapes, then to CDs, and now to the various types of digital files.

No reason to think this isn't going to be the case in the future.

Well, in the case of data storage, technology fundamentally means encoding.

Like, data in a punch card system isn't fundamentally different from data in a thumb drive. The functioning of a turing complete computer isn't related to the physical technology.

I bet you could make a working Z1 or ENIAC emulator with a handful of grad students and a couple hundred bucks.

we have 2k year old books. meanwhile for computers, they need to hire 90 year old PERL programmers just to be able to decode basic functions from digitally encoded information from 20 years ago

you're clearly an idiot and need to learn more. stop reading history and get out into the real world you fuckng retard

Okay.

If electrons stop working, everyone is fucked.

Meanwhile in the magical world of reality....

I'm still really confused as to why you think there's a fundamental difference between code on a hard drive and text on a piece of paper.

There isn't one. A hard drive is simply a more compact way to store information, that requires a different language.

It is not not "newer tech", you fucking moronic idiot. Are you even reading the posts to which you are replying?

THEY'RE ITERATIONS OF THE SAME TECHNOLOGY.

THEY'RE DIFFERENT GENERATIONS OF THE SAME KIND OF TECHNOLOGY.

TECHNOLOGY IS NOT EQUIVALENT WITH DEVICES.

>we have 2k year old books. meanwhile for computers, they need to hire 90 year old PERL programmers just to be able to decode basic functions from digitally encoded information from 20 years ago

And? To read those 2k year old book you need a linguist trained in it's original language? Which is even worse, as now problems with translations occur, there are no such problems with data.

>you're clearly an idiot and need to learn more. stop reading history and get out into the real world you fuckng retard
You are clearly frustrated, take a break and come back once you've formed some actual worth-while points.

>people in the future won't know about the magical phenomenon of electricity thus all information is lost

>TECHNOLOGY IS NOT EQUIVALENT WITH DEVICES.

Why do you keep saying this? No one has claimed it such.

But different devices have different technology. Technology is not 'one' thing. It's everything. Blu-ray is technology, the wheel is technology floppy is technology, all different parts of technology. Hell even a fucking book is a form of technology.

We literally have no idea what you are trying to say, it's so very fucking wishy washy.

Use your little minds for a minute, and realize how idiotic you are being.

No, you

Well, a digital file is a different generation of the analog equivalent.

Like, a TXT file is just ASCII or unicode, physically stored on a storage device.

You could easily represent this with rocks and sticks, it would just take longer to do.

Audio, video, and so on are just a more complex, detailed version of mosaics, or sheet music. A collection of 1s and 0s that doesn't care what device is reading it.

Describe the scenario you're thinking of for us please where electrical power not being available is a concern.

>Use your little minds for a minute, and realize how idiotic you are being.
Kek, you are literally the one who is saying with a new form of technology all form of data will be lost.

I have actually no idea how that's possible. Like, it's just not logical.

Computers are for storing data, why would a new form of technology come about whose purpose is the storage of data which will destroy all other forms of data, and I mean destroy literally, lost information.

It's simply not logical, it's malicious to our wellbeing. It's quite frankly, idiotic.

All you are saying is
>you're an idiot
>technology =/= device
>no

For like the fiftieth time which you haven't answered, which will actually end the argument in this thread.

>Again, tell me why you think this new form of technology will make us lose all of our current data. I want some technical reasonings here, we get new technology all the time, you can say 'no' all you want. But you are literally wrong here, not me.

It seems like even if we all died tomorrow and aliens had to come figure it out

>oh, it's a silicon wafer
>that's probably a silicon mass storage devide like those fags at the pioneer village use
>we can figure out what the physical configuration is by physically looking at it
>figuring out the encryption is simply a matter of cryptology, which shouldn't be that hard if we have powerful enough processors are computer algorithms

Now actually turning a piece of text into an abstract idea, that's hard.

But all data, fundamentally, is just ones and zeroes physically stored on a medium.

If the medium were clay tablets, there wouldn't be a fundamental difference between that and punchcards, or cogs, or cassettes.

a lot of old perl script for BASIC FUNCTIONS SUCH AS CHECKSUMS needs to be done by the EXACT SAME PERSON

keep in mind hiring a linguist will allow you to translate a variety of old books from the samer region/period spanning 500 miles and perhaps a 100 year time period, because the information is robust against loss

hiring a programmer who works on a PARTICLAR type of code within a 10 year range period, who might not even be able to decode something written by someone else, which may or may no even work depending on the hardware, which tehn presents to you BASIC TEXT INFORMATION, which is still not necessarily understood, and must also be hashed. this is called lossy information, you fucking retard.

So information, instead of being readily available, becomes the privilege of the enlightend few

+ you still forget that data is fucking gone when power is gone, and what about viruses and the like? Sure a book can be eaten by mites and rats, but you can loose an entire harddisk's worth of information to a replicator virus

.They are useless without power, or without the neccecary tech to read them

Try plugging up an old 8MB harddisk from 1990 to your computer and see if they can talk together..

Hell, you can't even play Dungeon Keeper with fluid graphics on a computer these days without a shitload of fanmade software, and with older games it gets even worse

Doesn't even need to be that, a single kiloton explosive in those laudd digital libraries will delete information that has taken humanity hundreds and even thousands of years to collect.

You guys know what happen once a book is scannd?
It isn't stored, that's expensive, that's why they scan them, they are sold cheaply or simply thrown in the trash to be burned or recycled for toilet paper

All those books, 'stored', 'safely', and if that server collection ever gets fried, all will be lost forever.

And don't talk to me about backup, how many chans have you not seen have massive server failure and had their content completely and irrovacbly lost?

Digital storage is fragile as fuck

Holy shit, those two scenarios are the exact same fucking thing. Like, people are doing what you are afraid of, converting these type of data into new data. Like, again, we literally have no idea what you are saying.

One linguist translates something and it doesn't have the same meaning as another's translation. Like I mean, another person can work on it but it loses all validity, you actually have no idea what you are saying.

Are you an actual idiot, it's been hyperbole all along, but now it's becoming so very true.

Seriously, take a fucking break and come back this thread will still be up Veeky Forums is a slow board. Like, I am so fucking confused and you still haven't answered the question which everyone is asking you to.

Have no idea why. I will link them AGAIN.
>Again, tell me why you think this new form of technology will make us lose all of our current data. I want some technical reasonings here, we get new technology all the time, you can say 'no' all you want. But you are literally wrong here, not me.

>Describe the scenario you're thinking of for us please where electrical power not being available is a concern.

So is your logic that people will stop caring and lose the documentation for a given segment of code?

Because that's possible, but it only effects data that doesn't matter.

>because the information is robust against loss

So your logic is that computer languages are more difficult to untangle than languages?

Because I'd respectfully disagree. A computer language physically can't work unless it's precise, with absolutely no deviations from the correct form. Meanwhile, me and my faggot friends could decide to call all birds "dingleberries" and the only way a linguist would be able to understand our writings is if they piece it together from context clues.

>an entire harddisk's worth of information to a replicator virus
Kek. So you are an actua moron. Thread hidden.

electron decay alone guarantees that outside of an absolute zero vaccuum, digital information stored on electronics is guaranteed to not last more than 100 years.

now introduce half lives for component parts, as well as metals, rust, magnetic destruction of electron information, the fact that digital information must be HARDWARE AND SOFTWARE compatible and there's no standard system for either.

yeah, Veeky Forums is again showing how retarded it is

let me recap just the threads I've seen since yesterday

>intelligent design
>statistics is unneeded to learn history
>can we know EVERYTHING?! (deep)
>why communism is great
>why africans are genetically and culturally equal but the chinese are stupid (genetically.)
>why evolution is true, but humans are genetically equal
>NOW "digital information is robust"

fucking. idiots.

Bro, you are not telling us in actual word what you think. You're looking like a tin-hat moron.

What is your alternative?

Judging a board by it's shitposters isn't fair, it's a given one accepts with the website in general and you know that.

>Try plugging up an old 8MB harddisk from 1990 to your computer and see if they can talk together

I'm like 90% sure you can get a USB device to do that for ten bucks, and the drivers to translate it into modern formats for free.

Like, I seriously don't think you understand how computer science works.

All data is 1s and 0s. The ones and zeroes physically exist on the storage medium, the way words exist on a page. Any turing complete computer can perform the same function as any other turing complete computer. We've known this since the 30s.

Like, I can take a picture of a physical newspaper from the 1840s with my cell phone camera, and run it through reader app, and have it as a TXT file.

Data transfer, translation, and storage, has literally never been easier than at any point in history.

>electron decay alone guarantees that outside of an absolute zero vaccuum, digital information stored on electronics is guaranteed to not last more than 100 years.

You're ignoring a basic fact.

If people care enough to keep data around, they can transfer it from one medium to the other.

The massive data farms that people like Google and the NSA have have to change out drives every ten minutes or so. They don't lose any data, because computer algorithms and the rapid speed of data transmission make it very easy to keep data.

If your logic is that electronic mediums physically don't last as long as books, then that might be the first bit of sense you've made all thread.

Do you even know what I am talking about?

A replicator is a virus that simply replicates itself, or an image, or a piece of text, until the only thing on the harddisk left is the little stump of program that enables it to function, the rest is filled a pic of pepe and the text 'all your base are belong to us'

It's like the most basic virus ever created, why are you calling me a moron for pointing out the danger to information stemming from such a piece of code?

Hell, one of those usb kill capasitors could probably do the same job

>a secondary translation of the primary source is not lossy
are you a retard? you're clearly a retard

look at the picture I posted. this is an example of analog decay. you can still decode it.

take ONE digit out of a string from digital code and it becomes incomprehensible

this is a mathematical argument, but I guess I've learned to expect that al of his couldn't even pass calculus in high school

there is basically next to zero documentation on code AS IT EXISTS TODAY. the internet is a patchwork of mutually unintelligible codes, if you weren't aware.

>untangling computer languages
unlike a human language, though, a string of 1s and 0s cannot be decrypted in terms of FUNCTION because the function of code doesn't necessarily conform to standards.

a string of code ten lines long can write an executable. a string of code 100k lines long can accomplish the same thing. because computer code isn't bounded, it can't be decrypted the same way messages can. which means that messages hashed VIA the code also become unrecoverable.

look at my pic for the same argument, visually. this is a lossy example of analog. it is robust because you can lose many parts and still have a comprehensible message.

digital is the exact opposite.

this is why languages become MORE complex over time. they become less lossy via adding information.

>electron decay alone guarantees that outside of an absolute zero vaccuum, digital information stored on electronics is guaranteed to not last more than 100 years.
Electrons don't decay in 100 years and we, uhh, don't store data as electrical as electrical charge just FYI.

And even if the max life of any modern storage device was 100 years (again, it's not) that wouldn't really mean anything since data is generally hugely redundant in storage: data centers maintain many copies of their dataset which are continuously renewed

I am calling you a moron because you are afraid of something which has been around for ever. Which is causing no 'real' problems at least to the extent you are saying. Those sorts of malicious attacks are so fucking basic they are not needed anymore in the realm of cyber-warfare. It's high-school level. Do you actually think here is some black hatter out there coding this ubervirus to destroy teh interwebz?

You are, in fact, a literal moron.

You are still not answering the questions.

He's probably aware, but saying it really isn't relevant when there a steps you can take to prevent that. It's like saying criticizing books as a data storage medium because of fire or literal bugs.

>take ONE digit out of a string from digital code and it becomes incomprehensible
>this is a mathematical argument, but I guess I've learned to expect that al of his couldn't even pass calculus in high school
lolno, digital encoding is not minimal, it usually involves significant levels of redundancy. One bit encoded in standard 2016 formats is not one bit of maximally compressed information

>the internet is a patchwork of mutually unintelligible codes, if you weren't aware
>I don't knows what standards are

the solution, same as in any system, is to routinely filter and selectively promote the best information available, turn it into a sort of flexible canon, purge the majority of it, and archive the rest.

good information CANNOT overcome noise when signal amplification is involved. this is obvious from basic information entropy theory or even basic radio signals theory

it's a lot worse on Veeky Forums trust me. I JUST came here. this kind of shit doesn't fly on most other boards.

1. replication error exists
2. digital information involves the need to replicate, perfectly, both software AND harware. this is HARD ENOUGH even when that software and hardware is only 3 or 4 years old, and also involves around 10x the processing power.

some of this stuff, when it'sgone, is GONE. and you people don't really understand that because you've never worked with machine code

>the internet is a patchwork of mutually unintelligible codes

This is 180 degrees from right.

Electronic codes are literally the most standardized technological system in the history of the human race.

I seriously don't think you understand how this works.

File formats are standardized so that every device, from a Zuse Z1 to a supercomputer can run them.

The code that's specialized to each individual machine is the code that allows the machine to run an OS. The machine code is designed so that the machine can run any code written by any other machine.

If the internet was a patchwork of mutually unintelligible codes, you wouldn't be able to load a website from an HP server using a toshiba computer.

Standardization and intercompatibility are the backbone of digital technology.

>the solution, same as in any system, is to routinely filter and selectively promote the best information available, turn it into a sort of flexible canon, purge the majority of it, and archive the rest.

Kek, this is literally what they are doing. It happens naturally. Google does this to maintain the quality of their servers.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA. You're a literal
LITERAL
LITERAL
MORON

>digital information involves the need to replicate, perfectly, both software AND harware

Well, the software part is accomplished with a multitude of algorithms designed to deal with data errors.

The hardware part is just straight wrong. If it wasn't, there would only be like 2 Veeky Forums users, because the rest of them don't have the ability to access HTML webpages that weren't designed by the same model of processor.

Uh, what? Did you mean to reply to someone else?

your "question" is not coherent. because you're asking a question that reflects your confusion on the subject, and confusion is addressed by prsenting information in a coherent context, not by adressing incoherency.

I see Veeky Forums idiots saying this all the time. jesus christ.

"what color is tuesday"
"tuesday doesn't have a colo-"
"YOU DIDNT ANSWER THE QUESTION"

redundant data is actually harder to decode, just fyi

You are a/g/ poster, aren't you. Typical, you have actually no understanding of computing systems. You do not even understand the most basic fundamentals of computing.
Factually wrong in many parts of your posts.

Hilarious.

>redundant data is actually harder to decode, just fyi
I don't know what you metric for "hard" is but I don't see how that affects my point.

I am literally asking what your alternative is, and to actually explain the reasoning behind this thread.

If you think that's not coherent you might need an MRI.

>it's a lot worse on Veeky Forums trust me. I JUST came here. this kind of shit doesn't fly on most other boards.
Now I know you're shitposting.

Everyone, you're wasting your time.
This man came home, kicked off his shoes, microwaved a box of tendies, and fired up his shitposting machine.

>came home
>implying he left
I might be giving him too much credit still.

The thumbnail looks like a guy giving Reimu a sticky note bikini.

it's a patchwork of standardized systems, which a variety of UNSTANDARDIZED systems via which they inferface with each other. when people run stress tests on computer systems, guess which type of code they're stressing? (hint, it's not internal frameworks.)

I just wanted to point out to OP that if you idiots actually wanted to know what COMPUTER SCIENTISTS think about the issue, which you clearly don't, because it's too hard for you and that bruises your ego, they universally agree that digital information is fucking LOSSY.

you people are so fucking stupid that anything you can't understand, you worship as an infallible god.

Really? Did you know that NASA had to fund a project to decipher old digital records because they no longer had the means to do so normally?

nytimes.com/1990/03/20/science/lost-on-earth-wealth-of-data-found-in-space.html

But sorting out what's on the tapes and putting it into usable form is a daunting enterprise. Two years ago, for example, Eric Eliason of the United States Geological Survey learned that more than 3,000 images from the Viking mission to Mars, obtained in the late 1970's, had never been processed from the master data record, the unprocessed data transmitted from the spacecraft.

Data Tapes as Puzzles

After tracking down the data, Mr. Eliason looked up the NASA documents that described how theywere entered. ''It was written in technical jargon,'' he said. ''Maybe it was clear to the person who wrote it but it was not clear to me 20 years later.''

There were copies of some old computer programs used to turn the raw data into pictures, he said, but the source codes the computer needed to run the programs could not be found and the computers themselves no longer existed.

I'm not 100% sure that humanity will lose the ability to understand .jpg, .png, of .gif any time soon.

It's kind of like a Rosetta stone sort of thing where if you have one copy of a translation, everything written in that language becomes usable.

>which a variety of UNSTANDARDIZED systems

See, this is the point of machine code.

It allows any computer to do the job of any other computer.

With modern formats, you don't even need to know the machine code, you just need to understand how to decode the format.

I thought you were a different poster. this board doesn't have IDs.

the solution is more or less what we're doing now. I never said there would be a dark age, like OP. I'm just arguing that digital systems are heavily lossy, which is fucking true.

I think until everything is standardized completely, or we have a framework for establishing a more solid process, I think that information needs to remain somewhat largely analog. that's all I'm saying

the existence of digital networks, in and of themselves, does not preserve the information. some idiot poster above thinks that just because the information is on a cold server under the ice in sweden somewhere, that it's preserved, and that means it's accessible, accurate, and ready.

if you look at information accessibility among peer reviewed papers in the last 9 years, it's actually gone DOWN in many ways. for example, capital allocation for new types of medical treatments has gone down.

this is clearly due to information loss.

>we can't get data off of old formats
>here is evidence which says we are getting data off of old formats
Okay?

You know why we are able to decipher hieroglyphs right? And no, it's not because we can actually understand them. It's because in around 100 BC Ptolemy V commissioned a stone to be written in three languages, Egyptian hieroglyphs being one.

There is literally no way to get around the loss of data, at least no way now. All we can do is keep going with the best options we have, which is computing.

You are fucking kidding yourself if it's efficient to store a 20 terabyte file which will be billions and billions of lines of data onto pieces of paper.

How the fuck are you meant to efficiently and effectively compute chaos data without computers?

Dude, speech to code is /almost/ the definition of AI.

We need both. We need computers that can do speech to code; and we have to teach machine level codes to primary school kids.

>the solution is more or less what we're doing now. I never said there would be a dark age, like OP. I'm just arguing that digital systems are heavily lossy, which is fucking true.

This was never up for contestation though. Holy shit. The point has always been, at least in this thread, what the fuck is the point of it (this thread)?

Storing data in books is lossy as well. All data storage is lossy, what's the point? There is no point which actually relates to this thread.

he DIDN:T know that and I have a strong feeling that 99% of the posters in this thread didn't, otherwise they wouldn't be such smug cunts

there is a lot more valuable information than can be stored in .jpg, you know?

actually, half of our DIGITAL system is still processed by hand. look up the government pensions office. they had to triple their staff once the system was "digitized" which just means that for every digital file there's a paper file, and a paper file that determines how the paper file is transcribed to a digital record...

which the other offices can't access. if they need confirmation, they access the analog file.

that's our "digital archive" kek

I'm not saying this isn't the job of machine code. I think it's an instbility that reaches equilibrium.

unfortunately, that kin of unstable equilibrium point is BAD at archiving information.

that's my entire point.

Not the series of tubes dammit, just one single server farm by attacking the main access computer and spreading it from there, and thus deleting thousands of terabytes of scanned books that haven't been copied elsewhere due to a lack of funds.

Hell, they probably operate on old server software because companies and goverments are cheap like that.

And the reason why people stopped using replicators is because they are boring and Not Profitable. Better take over a computer and ask for ransom money.

And let me tell you, if they can take over your computer, they sure as Hell can delete whatever they want on it.

Well, places like Google, the NSA, and the Pentagon seem to think differently.

I think they have more or less lossless data storage, at an extremely low cost per diem.

>heh, 20 year old code only needs to be compared to heiroglyphs in order to make sense of basic information
>heh, can't you see that 20 year old code being compared to heirogylphs from 3k years ago proves how easy it is to archive information digitally
nothing personnel kid

>that's our "digital archive" kek
You understand this is proving exactly what you want? The fact that we are storing data (at least some are) not for the purpose of accessing it, but for the purpose of archiving it.

Are you actually retarded?

Correct me if I'm wrong, but won't a modern OS shut down if it detects the HDD getting raped?

Not if it thinks you are just installing another program, or if the virus tells it not

analog systems are actually accessible though.

digital systems are more or less inaccessible. I'm not saying we shouldn't be improving them. we SHOULD. but there is iteraly not a single system in the entire world who can function purely on digital data.

that should sound off alarm bells towards the people thinking that it exists in a functional state

but ti doesn't. because this board is full of peopl who don't understand technology, and worship it like a bureaucrat bowing down to an astrological prediction

none of them actually need to do the job or accomplish it in order to make their money. simply having monopoly access to hte information is enough to maintain a grip on power.

Only thing different in those situations is the time frame, m8.

Dunno how time has anything to do with the effectiveness of data storage xD

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-DISC

You might be interested in this.

It's supposed to last 10,000 years.

>digital systems are more or less inaccessible. I'm not saying we shouldn't be improving them. we SHOULD. but there is iteraly not a single system in the entire world who can function purely on digital data.

What the fuck, who said this was the case? But you?

>that should sound off alarm bells towards the people thinking that it exists in a functional state
Kek, you mean the imaginary people in your head?

>but ti doesn't. because this board is full of peopl who don't understand technology, and worship it like a bureaucrat bowing down to an astrological prediction

You've literally just projected a random point onto everyone. Like that is literally the first time you've posted your reasoning of this thread.

That being that there is no digital system that is completely digital, right, no one said there was, can we move on now?

look buddy, you clearly don't know what he deal with the public pension system is. do your due diligence and look it up. they might as well be masturbating into a bucket. the system is useless, you can't access information from it, you can't even directly write into it. it's a cargo cult project

I didn't say you can't get data off old formats. I was refuting his claim that "Our ability hasn't diminished."
Obsolete storage methods and file types present challenges right now, and these challenges will only become harder to overcome as time goes on.

A huge part of the problem is the actual storage medium. All modern storage mediums are highly prone to breakdown over time. Flash media, optical media, and magnetic media will all become useless 100~ years or so down the line. None of these things are made to retain data longterm. The only possible way to prevent this would be to write data to something with better longevity, or create new backups until a better storage medium is created.

>the Rosetta stone bro
This brings up another problem. A very large amount of ancient writings and inscriptions that have been discovered have never been translated and probably won't be for the foreseeable future. It's time consuming and expensive to do that sort of thing. Now imagine if you were trying to decipher all the ancient data from the 21st century.

Oh, and you ignored the bit where they mentioned that you need the appropriate hardware to access the data in your possession. That is a huge project by itself. What are you going to do with a pile of USB drives when none of your hardware can make use of them? You would have to painstakingly open every drive and devise a method of copying the data without fucking things up in the process.