/maho/ - Hardware & Software

tiff or png because a picture is worth 1000 words

>>3008
They'll be obsoleted by apng and webp within 10 years.

>>3007(OP)
>We can look at a wall relief from 5000 years ago and work out an approximation of what it was saying just by looking at it,
No, we can't.
Without the rosetta stone, we would have no idea what any of these ancient scripts are saying. But there is only one rosetta stone, and many ancient texts. For most of them, we can only acknowledge that they look like actual writings, and that they are probably not the prehistoric equivalent of random key-bashing.
"Pre-historic" is a fascinating term in that regard. It's only pre-historic because we have no idea what they wrote.

On topic:
I think very basic image and music formats have the best chance at being resurrected (if the data itself survives). Of course, they probably won't look or sound anything like what they used to, given that they are being reproduced on completely different hardware with no output control in between generations.
But for example bitmaps encode every single pixel into a number. They are technically just a long stream of pixels.
If you split that stream at the right points, you get a sensibly looking image (just from the coherence of shapes), even if the colors are all completely wrong. Once you have a set of 10k such images, you can make educated guesses on what the correct colors would be.
This would hold true even in a speculative future where no one has any idea of today's languages. If they dig up some old physical data carriers from one of those long-term data storage centers we are setting up, they will probably be able to figure this shit out.

>>3011
Wall reliefs are drawings or sculptures, so they don't require you understand the language. Granted, there is a lot of speculation on the context and implications of such abstract things, but the data they portray is clearly visible to anyone with eyes and a human brain, even if the cultural interpreter is only functioning at the most universal level. Scripts can suffer the issue of losing the interpretive link to modern languages, but the actual data is still there and we can be pretty sure that it is language. Working to understand what glyphs mean is very different from trying to gain access to the glyphs.

What you described with the "best guess" analyses of surviving images would probably be the closest equivalent to this. They'll have to say "this is a reconstruction of what we think their art looked like, but we really can't know for sure". And unless they find the storage, hardware, software, and power source all in working order it's going to be a nightmare even getting to that stage. I suppose the bright side is that any successful extractions will be much richer in information.

>>>/jp/75701
>objective acquired: eliminate all gamer grannies
3000 A.D. here, what's the context, the meaning, and the greater cultural significance of this?

I expect .xlsx to presist in regular use until atleast one hundred years after microsofts total demise

>>3014
This seems true, and I think Excel itself will continue to be huge, but .xlsx is just barely older now than .xls was when it got replaced by .xlsx. .xls is still supported for legacy purposes (though often imperfectly), but older Excel formats like .xlc have been phased out entirely. Microsoft likes having shiny new things to sell and they can pretty much force people to accept it as long as it's not breaking everyone's workflows all at once.

>>3015
There are a ton of family videos stored on VHS too, but if you don't convert those to a modern format soon it's going to get increasingly difficult to play them.

>>3015
Normalfags store everything on the cloud nowadays.
If the cloud auto-converts everything from jpeg to the futuristic-and-great format, they will probably not even realize, nor will they notice the drop in quality.
When they try and fail to access the data on their old storage devices, people will laugh at them for living in the past.

I think compression of files (png, jpg, flac, mp3, etc) is going to be hard to reverse engineer with only access to some examples of compressed files, but if some digital archeologist can find a batch of files in an uncompressed format (bmp, wav) along with the compressed versions then it will be possible. It's funny to think a few random images on somebody's drive could be the format equivalent of the rosetta stone.

Look how complicated PNG alone is
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PNG
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deflate

>>3007(OP)
notepad is so cute...

>>3020
>It's funny to think a few random images on somebody's drive could be the format equivalent of the rosetta stone
finally, all the TBs of manga porn I have will be put to good use

>>3010
very optimistic in the face of tradion

>>3020
>Portable Network Graphics (PNG, officially pronounced /pɪŋ/[2][3] PING
always pronounced it as PEE-en-JEE

>>3007(OP)
The are multiple aspects to this, which have to separated.

First: If you have a byte array, how do you interpret the data to make sense of it? This is what you mean. I don't worry about it. As you say, .txt (ASCII) is very simple. Even if knowledge about very common file formats like PNG gets lost, descriptions of these formats exist in .txt form. This would make it relatively simple to recover. Before you get to the files, you need to know how filesystems work, which is part of the problem. Also some formats may virtually unrecoverable, like DRM protected shit, which most non-pirated commercial audio and video media will be in the near future.

Second: The robustness of physical storage. This is a huge problem. Floppy discs become unreadable after a very short time. When I still used them, this could be as little as weeks. Hard discs demagnetize. Optical discs rot. Flash storage loses electrical charge. None of that shit will survive. People who deal with archiving seem to have some ideas how to solve this. Also, digital media can be copied without loss. But that might not help. It requires someone to keep the media "alive" by copying it and backing it up all the time. Who says there won't be data centers, which burn down to the ground, which had the last copy of certain data?

Third: How to read digital media. Before you analyze a byte stream or a filesystem, you need to know how to get these bytes from a media. If you were given a hard disk but no computer with SATA ports, how the fuck would you read it? You could try to re-implement the SATA protocol. You could try to read the platters directly using some incredibly complicated method, then reverse engineer the proprietary, unknown layout the HDD vendor used, with yet unknown codes used to encode bits. Good luck with that. Better hope that this archeological data with 3000 year old furry porn is something you found on a forgotten cloud.

>>3010
APNG is actually just PNG with more than one image. PNG is extremely simple. It's just raw image data in its simplest form compressed with one of the oldest and most widespread compression algorithms. Which someone in the thread called complicated, which is ironic.