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How long do they last, and what will you do when they stop making tapes and equipment to read them?

I ask because I came from a generation with a lot of tapes (reels, cassettes, 8-track, Betamax, VHS, etc.). Cassettes are coming back a little, but not much. I know long-term storage still uses tapes, but I wonder for how long. What happens when we run out of the resources to make them? Is there no better and safer long-term media that is affordable? A magnetic event could wipe them all.


Tapes are still being actively developed for archiving by companies like Fuji, Sony and IBM. They’re not going away any time soon.

And if a magnetic event is strong enough to wipe all your tapes you probably have bigger problems on your hands than a fried backup.


I think you're good for 20 years or so if you store the tapes well. Pretty much all of the industry is using LTO tapes so i don't see them going away soon.


I think Americans do similar for the EU- think of the government and other things we see in the news or identify with it first before its people.


The massive photo and site header of this site are fun but distracting when reading on mobile. Removing the top photo and removing or minimizing the top header would be a nice change for readability. I’m not sure what the SEO recommendation would be though.


uv sounds great! For those still using Python v2, how well does it work? pip used to be a pain when having to manage both Python v2 and v3 projects and tools.


If you are still on 2.7, packaging is the least of your problems


Unfortunately, I don't think many things nowadays are tested with a 15-year-old version of a language.

I was one of the last holdouts, preferring to keep 2.7 support if it wasn't too much hassle, but we have to move on at some point. Fifteen years is long enough support.


This seems like it would break things.


I’m serious! I don’t know why we’re turning a fundamental command off, even if it didn’t work correctly for everything. Do you realize how much documentation and how many tools reference it? And it still can work.


I think people know you're serious (I'm not one of the downvoters), but that it seems silly to stop all innovation for the sake of legacy

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protocol_ossification is a big enough problem that we're being taught about this in school so that we're aware of the problem and maybe things get better in the future


shocking news indeed.

Major regression. How can we trust the internet now ?


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