Re:An update of 455 new words
by tialaramex on Thursday October 28, 2021 @05:21PM
(#29032186)
The thing that's interesting about digital data, such as the CDs, but also say a stone tablet with carved lettering - is that this is a binary occurrence.
With non-digital data (e.g. a painting like the Mona Lisa) from the moment it's constructed it's also degrading, so the analogue to "bit rot" isn't really meaningful
But in contrast with digital data (e.g. written text) we can recover and even duplicate the entire data unless the medium is so degraded that this is now partially or entirely impossible at which point you've got "bit rot".
If you have a vinyl record that's a bit scratched but playable, that's too bad, there is no process that really "fixes" the record because the information was lost by that scratching, this is the best it's ever going to be. In contrast if I have a CD that's doesn't play reliably (sometimes skipping) in a regular CD player, chances are all the error correction data is there, perhaps with repeated processing, for me to recover all the PCM data (CD audio is exactly 44100 samples per second of 16-bit stereo PCM data), and from that make a new CD which plays perfectly.
With non-digital data (e.g. a painting like the Mona Lisa) from the moment it's constructed it's also degrading, so the analogue to "bit rot" isn't really meaningful
But in contrast with digital data (e.g. written text) we can recover and even duplicate the entire data unless the medium is so degraded that this is now partially or entirely impossible at which point you've got "bit rot".
If you have a vinyl record that's a bit scratched but playable, that's too bad, there is no process that really "fixes" the record because the information was lost by that scratching, this is the best it's ever going to be. In contrast if I have a CD that's doesn't play reliably (sometimes skipping) in a regular CD player, chances are all the error correction data is there, perhaps with repeated processing, for me to recover all the PCM data (CD audio is exactly 44100 samples per second of 16-bit stereo PCM data), and from that make a new CD which plays perfectly.