a "long period" for Stability

As Anne W. pointed out to me in private communications, a common 
definition of persistent sounds like this:


Persistent = Information is machine accessible for long periods of time.


The problem I have with this is that "long periods" is a very ambiguous 
concept on the web. I know we touched on this at the F2F but I wish I 
knew how to tighten it up a bit.

- long periods to data at my house is through 2 hard drive standards
    (MFM/IDE/EIDE/SATA..)
- Long periods in the scope of the Internet is a couple decades...?
- Long periods to a person might mean a generation...
- Long periods of weather data could mean since the last ice age?

Any formative comments about how I can rephrase "long periods" to scope 
it better would be appreciated.

-Ronald P. Reck

Received on Thursday, 9 February 2012 19:15:56 UTC