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Imagine being isolated off-grid for an unknown number of years. Maybe you're stuck somewhere like Davidge or Mark Watney; or perhaps you've chosen a life of isolation like Yoda or Obi-Wan Kenobi. Maybe you're a survivor of the $Apocalypse. Wouldn't keeping a journal be a great idea? You could pass on your knowledge, keep track of daily activities, maybe even keep yourself from going insane!
Forget all the wastefulness, extravagance, and complexity of most modern devices, you've got survival to think about! Obviously power usage would be a major concern, but ergonomics, searchability, repairability, and data robustness would be important too. Keeping in mind that this is a dedicated device for journaling and barring the old Russian pencil and paper, what would the best solution look like with off-the-shelf modern technology?
(Score: 2) by urza9814 on Monday June 11 2018, @08:11PM (8 children)
Clay tablets and some sticks. Couldn't be easier to use, and we've got some of those that have survived thousands of years still intact. Plus in most places on Earth at least you could easily produce replacement parts from the dirt laying around you.
If that's too much weight, you can use paper and pencil without sacrificing *too much* of the reliability, and you can still potentially do some repairs/replacements from local resources.
If it absolutely MUST be digital...my first thought would be something based on a Raspberry Pi, but SD cards aren't even reliable enough to discuss their "reliability" -- they don't have any such thing. Although if you brought a stack of SD cards and a USB card reader, and included the card image on the card itself, you could probably keep it going for a while by using the backup card to re-flash the main every time it got corrupted. But probably you want the lowest power device you can get that'll boot a standard Linux distro off a USB stick, then run in CLI mode and edit your journal in vi or nano. Bring multiple USB sticks, keep multiple copies of everything, and ensure you have the ability to reformat and reflash your sticks should they become corrupted. Or use a standard PC/Laptop style system and replace the hard drive with a compact flash card, those things are extremely robust...but still bring a few spares with you, and use two at a time in RAID (or some other kind of duplication...maybe rsync to a USB drive might be better for simplicity). And bring at least one full backup computer too for when parts start failing.
Clay tablets definitely seem like the best option... :)
(Score: 2) by LoRdTAW on Monday June 11 2018, @08:32PM (6 children)
Honestly, if you want a solid computer you're looking for 80's/90's stuff that lasts for decades. Some of that stuff was running up until it was tossed in a dumpster. I'm thinking m68k, EEPROMs, flash, drams and srams with a mono lcd.
(Score: 2) by urza9814 on Monday June 11 2018, @08:53PM (2 children)
Yeah, that's still not going to survive if you trip and smash the thing against a rock though, so you'd likely still want at least one spare...and with size/weight considerations you might be better off with a redundant array of garbage SBCs compared to a single ancient but robust luggable. Depends on the constraints...if weight matters but cost doesn't, buy two dozen Pis and two hundred micro SD cards and call it a day. If cost matters but weight doesn't, buy as many ancient PCs as you can. Although you may also need to consider how you get your data back out, too...you could eat up a good chunk of your budget on interface adapters if you're buying older hardware.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by bzipitidoo on Monday June 11 2018, @10:45PM (1 child)
If SD cards are so awful, why do I hear that SSDs are pretty good now? They've maybe pulled ahead of HDDs in reliability.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Tuesday June 12 2018, @01:44PM
Maybe because SD cards aren't SSDs? Aside from the underlying bit-storage technology they're completely different products.
You may as well ask: If floppy disks are so bad, why do I hear that hard drives are pretty good now?
(Score: 2) by frojack on Monday June 11 2018, @09:11PM (2 children)
No grid.
What you going to plug those energy sucking old pigs into? A Current Bush.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 2) by LoRdTAW on Monday June 11 2018, @09:31PM
hmmm. Now you got me thinking. If it were a divine burning bush, one could build a boiler around it and...
(Score: 4, Insightful) by urza9814 on Monday June 11 2018, @09:52PM
If we're starting from an assumption that you can have a computer system that will survive whatever duration is required in whatever environment it's required for, then surely you could also have a sufficient quantity of solar panels (plus the requisite redundant backups).
But that does make the old machines look even worse compared to a big bucket of RPis if you've got any constraints on size or cost...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 12 2018, @12:20AM
Hollerith clay tablets.