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A comment on The GitHub Arctic Code Vault. Parent comment

Re:The GitHub Arctic Code Vault by Wowfunhappy on Thursday July 16, 2020 @05:33PM (#23864064)
>> They drag the 200 platters out into the 24hr sunshine, plug the solar panel into the Raspberry Pi, point its camera through a magnifying glass at the first frame, and let the QR app they happen to have on the Pi's micro--SD card do its thing. A couple of seconds later they have the first 2,900 bytes on the USB drive. It takes another couple of seconds to move to the next frame by hand. So they sit there for 383 days scanning a frame every 4 seconds to decode the entire archive. Except there's only sunshine enough for the Pi half the year, so it takes rather more than two years. Then they need to start the Pi building all that code...

>> Of course, this is ridiculous. No-one will decode this archive in the foreseeable future.

Yes, no one will be digging code out of Github right after the apocalypse. But what about 200 years after the apocalypse? Or maybe just 1,000 years from now, no apocalypse needed? I could see the archive being of immense historical value.

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Re:The GitHub Arctic Code Vault by ThrowawayR2 on Thursday July 16, 2020 @10:48PM (#23866466)
> "But what about 200 years after the apocalypse? Or maybe just 1,000 years from now, no apocalypse needed?"

-Thanks to flash memory cell charge leakage, I'd be surprised if the micro-SD card or USB drive kept its data for more than 3-5 years. They're designed for low cost, not longevity.

-The electrolytic caps will probably have dried out and failed by 50-100 years.

-The plasticizers used will have evaporated away by a century, leaving any plastic or rubber components brittle and crumbly.

-The lead free solders used in modern electronics are prone to the "tin whiskers" phenomenon. Not sure about the mitigations or timeframe for growth but a couple centuries is far, far longer than any reasonable design timeframe, making it a distinct possibility in my mind.

-At 1000 years, I'd wonder about diffusion effects in chips wrecking the circuits. It would be interesting to do a calculation to see how long that would take for an unpowered chip at room temperature.

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Re:The GitHub Arctic Code Vault by Wowfunhappy on Thursday July 16, 2020 @11:11PM (#23866587)
Right, so it wouldn't be a 2020 computer. It would be whatever new computer they've built.
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Re:The GitHub Arctic Code Vault by dmitriid on Friday July 17, 2020 @03:06AM (#23867950)
By then, why would they need code from GitHub? Given that they will won't even be able to run it in any shape or form.
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Re:The GitHub Arctic Code Vault by Wowfunhappy on Friday July 17, 2020 @10:11AM (#23870632)
To study history and culture. And who knows, there may well be algorithms we came up with but which no one ever re-discovered.
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Re:The GitHub Arctic Code Vault by kevin_thibedeau on Thursday July 16, 2020 @09:12PM (#23865887)
The Pi isn't going to work after 200 years. Its flash will be wiped. Never mind aging on all the other parts.
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Re:The GitHub Arctic Code Vault by jedieaston on Thursday July 16, 2020 @10:50PM (#23866478)
Presumptively, the Tech Tree will have some way of bootstrapping a system capable of decoding the tapes. They say in the introduction that it’s nearly useless to access the tapes without a computer and that they expect whoever is reading this is to have a computer that is centuries more advanced than we have now.

Maybe they just zip tied a ThinkPad to the tape reader and pray that it can eat whatever happens to it in the vault.

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