CD's made of rock... yes, rock :)

[Sabre]

Interesting company here: http://www.millenniata.com/

Millennial Disc™ Series
The Millennial Disc™ Series is the first permanent, backwards-compatible archiving solution for the digital age.

M-DISC™ Summary:
Preserves data for centuries with physical changes in data layer
Constructed with rock-hard materials known to last for centuries
Backwards-compatible on all standard DVD drives
Functions like a standard DVD with a capacity of 4.7 GB
Exclusively written by the M-WRITER™ drive
Projections, modeling, and testing indicate that digital media manufactured with Millenniata's cost-effective technology will last for centuries.

The M-DISC™ does not use organic dyes.
No dyes are used in the manufacturing process of the M-DISC™. The degradation of organic dyes is known to be one of the main failure mechanisms that cause data rot in current optical technology

[complacent]

i gotta ask... um, why?

[sirwilliam]

Hey...hey, are any dyes used?

Sorry, that just seemed to be the one word to stand out in that whole blurb...and I get a little silly at the end of the work day on less than 4 hrs of sleep.

[scheherazade]

Once upon a time people wrote things in stone. These lasted a LONG time.
Later on paper. These lasted a decent time.
And now people store their knowledge on plastic/magnetic media. These are good for a few decades - with proper atmosphere.

Imagine, what will people find of us if they dig 2000 years from now?
Useless bits of oxidized scrap.

Or what if there's a world war and electricity is lost for a dozen years+.
We'd lose most of our knowledge.

I mean, there's some general knowledge in books... but it's mostly general ideas and high level approaches.
Practical designs, implementations, practical information needed to *do things outside of academia* - it would largely perish.
Non-perishable media is, imho, important.

-scheherazade

[complacent]

I mean, there's some general knowledge in books... but it's mostly general ideas and high level approaches.
Practical designs, implementations, practical information needed to *do things outside of academia* - it would largely perish.
Non-perishable media is, imho, important.

-scheherazade

Agreed (of course). But having a CDR/DVDR that can be read only by a machine kind of gives you a bit of a do-loop, yes?

Again, I gotta ask... Why?

[chicken n waffles]

sounds like a pretty cool idea, since regular disk media does not have a very long shelf life.

[zaxrex]

But having a CDR/DVDR that can be read only by a machine kind of gives you a bit of a do-loop, yes?

Yeah, I could have 50 megs of data on a pile of 5.25" floppies, but I ain't got no way to read them. Same thing with this. 200 years from now where they are using optical quantum storage and processing, who's gonna have a DVD player and a way to read NTFS? Shoot, and for that matter, what is going to be the surviving document format, MS Word 2210? Adobe Reader 47? Better convert everything over to unformatted ASCII. Say bye bye to any schematics or graphics...

[Sabre]

sounds like a pretty cool idea, since regular disk media does not have a very long shelf life.

Pretty much. If you have data that you want to archive at an organization without fear that 10 years later it won't be degraded, this is your solution. It's perfect for this guy.