On Tuesday 20 February 2007 12:57, Stevens wrote: > On Tuesday 20 February 2007 07:03, Carlos E. R. wrote: > > The Tuesday 2007-02-20 at 06:51 -0600, Stevens wrote: > > > How can any outfit claim 100+ years reliability for any product that > > > hasn't existed for more than a few years? > > > > It is done by ageing tests. The item is subjected to stress, temperature > > extremes, vibrations, humidity, etc, to see how it behaves and make a > > durabilty prediction. They can be mistaken, but it is the best that can > > be done. > > > > For instance... have you seen in Ikea a demo of a drawer being closed > > and opened about once per two seconds, with a compressed air piston? > > Measuring the wear they can predict durability in years for normal > > ussage of a few operations per day. > > > > -- > > Cheers, > > Carlos E. R. > > Sorry, old man, but you mistook my cynicism to be lack of knowledge. > > Auto manufacturers try to predict how their interiors and their paints will > last, too, but until both are subjected to the Texas sun they are only > guessing. The North has salt that kills cars; in the South it is the sun. > Only when they obtain empirical data can they be sure and that data takes > a long time to gather. The same goes for optical media manufacturers. Any > longevity rating is a SWAG, at best, which is the reason for my cynical > view. > > Fred > > (SWAG = Scientific Wild Assed Guess)
Someone else sort of indicated, and I agree, that it is extremely unlikely that any device which can read any digital recording media of today will exist in 100 years. I would put that number at 25 years, myself, but it's unlikely that _I_ will exist in 25 years, so I won't know. The problem with data is that it is so massive. A phonograph record could easily last for 100 years (and some have) and the mechanism for playing one is not difficult to create, even if all of the existing machines are shredded in some horrible war, but there's no way to put enough useful data on a phonograph record. And in what format would it be? Is it expected that Unix/Linux will exist in the (quite distant for us) future? Or Fortran? Or even C++? Or M/S Word? I wonder if anyone is seriously considering these problems. or if anybody actually cares. I would think that scientists care, but what, if anything, is anyone actually doing about it? --doug -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
