Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!lll-winken!lll-lcc!ames!ll-xn!husc6!bbn!rochester!ken
From: ken@cs.rochester.edu (Ken Yap)
Newsgroups: comp.society.futures
Subject: Re:  CD ROMs
Message-ID: <6438@sol.ARPA>
Date: 1 Feb 88 23:41:30 GMT
References: <8802011427.AA06366@jvnca.csc.org>
Reply-To: ken@cs.rochester.edu (Ken Yap)
Organization: U of Rochester, CS Dept, Rochester, NY
Lines: 12

|(1) Data sets have strongly bi-modal endurance.  If you were to plot the
|"lifetime" of every block written to disk, you would not observe a decaying
|exponential.  Instead, you would see a fast decay with a characteristic
|time on the order of a day, quickly leveling out.  A rule of thumb is that
|if you haven't changed a data set within a week, you'll keep it forever.
|If a CD ROM is not worse than a Winchester in price, then its greater
|stability makes it attractive for the role of a long term storage archive.

I suppose you mean human readable files as opposed to compiler
generated binaries? I keep executables for months on end but I don't
care if they get wiped out.

	Ken