[SPG_Active_Members] Swiss format archive

[Olin Sibert]

I think calling this a "publicity stunt" is being too kind.

They seem to be claiming that they have created some unique physical 
artifact, which must be kept secret and stored safely away untouched 
by human hands, as if it's some kind of digital Rosetta Stone 
awaiting a future Champollion to discover it and magically bring enlightenment.

What bosh. If they really wanted to help "future generations to read 
data stored using defunct technology", they'd collect the information 
publicly, and store replicas of it all over the world (e.g., the 
Internet). I mean, even granting that they might be smart people, 
what if they forgot something? Surely would be better to find that 
out sooner, rather than when the "time capsule" gets opened decades hence.

One of the great things about digital data, and about paper, too, is 
the ease with which it can be replicated. We've learned a bit in the 
last few thousand years, and one of those things is that carving 
marks in stone tablets--while certainly durable--had some 
disadvantages. Another is that open, collective models tend to 
preserve and maintain information better than secret ones.

I'd be sore disappointed if it had been my 15 million Euros spent on this.

And does anyone really believe that formats like the CD won't be 
readily readable 25 years hence? The Yellow Book CD-ROM standard is 
already 25 years old, and billions of data CDs are sold every year, 
all of which are instantly readable by billions of devices across the 
globe. It may lose popularity, but it's not going away. The media may 
deteriorate, sure, and that's a serious issue, but if the media is 
gone, some magic box of instructions for reading the format won't help.

Furthermore, is the guy who's complaining about not being able to 
read his thesis actually serious? He seems to have received his Ph.D. 
in 1993, so it's not likely his data is stored on 7-track magtape or 
something actually difficult like that. If he used a PC (or a Mac), 
I'll bet that if he could FIND the diskettes or CDs on which he 
stored it, he wouldn't have much trouble reading them with any modern 
version of Word or WordPerfect, because they have converters for old 
formats built in. And if he used LaTeX on some Unix system, well, 
that hasn't exactly disappeared, either. His case might be bad 
luck--perhaps all his backups are on some wacky QIC tape cartridge 
format--but even there, it's not hard to find specialists to read 
that media today. And if there aren't any backups? Well, that's 
always a sad story, but knowing how to interpret the format the 
backups should have been in is cold comfort indeed.

Stunts like this distract from the very real problems of organizing 
and cataloging valuable information, of devising tools for 
maintaining format compatibility, of developing truly durable and 
inexpensive storage media, and of ensuring reliable, survivable, 
accessible storage.

  -- Olin Sibert



At 03:08 AM 5/20/2010, Peter Capek wrote:
>There seems not to be anything very serious or very detailed.  There 
>is a web site which took some effort to find with a bit more 
>information:  <http://www.planets-project.eu/>http://www.planets-project.eu/
>
>The effort seems to be a part of the PLANETS project, a cooperative 
>effort among 16 organizations, of which 2 got the credit for putting 
>the box in the mountain.
>
>It seems to me as much as anything to have been a publicity stunt.
>
>Peter Capek
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