If I'm limited to 17th century technology then I guess my other solution is out too. Compressor: Drop Wikipedia into a black hole Decompressor: Read Wikipedia out of the hawking radiation
Ahh well.
On Mon, May 4, 2009 at 11:24 PM, Tim Starling tstarling@wikimedia.orgwrote:
Brian wrote:
Wouldn't the most cost effective solution to be to first fund research in compression so fewer bits have to be etched out? In that case these guys are already on the job:
The obvious reply to that is that the Rosetta project aims to make an archive readable with 17th century technology, which digital information compressed with advanced algorithms is not.
They try to make an issue out of the obsolescence of digital technology, which I think is overwrought. Just because I don't have a slot in my computer where I can insert a 1970s era magnetic tape doesn't mean it's unreadable. I don't have a 750x optical microscope lying around either. Both media are readable using extant technology.
There have been some problems with restoration of data where the decoding software has been lost. But the popular, well-documented digital formats of the past are as readable as ever: I have a program on my computer called groff which is largely backwards-compatible with runoff, one of the earliest digital typesetting formats, dating back to the 1960s.
There is still a great deal of extant text dating to ancient times, despite the fact that copying was fantastically expensive, and that everything was written on flammable materials in a time when flame was the only artificial light source. Maybe the future will be more like Orson Scott Card's Homecoming series than the dark ages: a future with such a weight of carefully recorded and preserved history that studying it, even in overview, becomes the work of a lifetime.
Anyone who claims to know what the far future will be like is a charlatan. But I think it would be foolish to assume that it will be anything like the past.
-- Tim Starling
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