What is Bitrot?
The Software Rot article on wikipedia collects a few points: • Environment change: changes in the runtime • Unused code: changes in the usage patterns • Rarely updated code: changes through maintenance • Refactoring: a way to stem bitrot By Moore’s Law, delta(CPU)/delta(t) is a constant factor two every 18 to 24 months. Since the environment contains more than the CPU, I would assume that this forms only a very weak lower bound on actual change in the environment. Unit: OPS/$/s, change in Operations Per Second per dollar over time delta(users)/delta(t) is harder to quantify, but evidence in the frequency of occurrences of the words “Age of Knowledge” in the news, I’d say that users’ expectations grow exponentially too. By looking at the development of $/flops basic economy tells us that supply is growing faster than demand, giving Moore’s Law as upper bound of user change. I’ll use function points (“amount of business functionality an information system provides to a user”) as a measur
Bitrot is an interesting term that has two separate meanings. One of them relates to electronic data decay lacking apparent cause; the other to digital art imitating life by reflecting natural decay in digital environments. As to the first meaning, many of us have had the experience of saving a prized program, game or file to a storage medium for safekeeping. The file sits there, undisturbed and unaccessed for months, maybe even years. Finally a day comes when we go to the hard drive or pull the prized floppy or memory stick out and you can’t access the data! How can this be? In many cases there is no chance of external corruption. In fact, the data might have been accessed several times just fine in the past. So what’s happened in that period of time when the data simply sat in storage? Some would explain it by saying, bitrot happens! Though experts haven’t agreed upon the mechanics, explanations for bitrot abound. For a time, rumor had it that cosmic rays caused bitrot, though this t
