Last night (actually early this morning), I needed to loop mount the JFFS2 rootfs image from the FW 1.2 update file. I chose to sleep a bit first. Now I am thankful I posted my steps to
loopmount JFFS2 in this thread. It was non-trivial AND had to be adapted from (almost but not quite working) instructions I found on google (after multiple attempts). There is an AWFUL LOT of information out that (found with google) that just DOES NOT WORK these days, though it likely DID work when it was posted. I wonder what future generations will think when they attempt to use the huge landfill of information excavated from old websites, only to find it suffered from horrible
bit-rot...
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bit rot: n.
[common] Also bit decay. Hypothetical disease the existence of which has been deduced from the observation that unused programs or features will often stop working after sufficient time has passed, even if ‘nothing has changed’. The theory explains that bits decay as if they were radioactive. As time passes, the contents of a file or the code in a program will become increasingly garbled.
There actually are physical processes that produce such effects (alpha particles generated by trace radionuclides in ceramic chip packages, for example, can change the contents of a computer memory unpredictably, and various kinds of subtle media failures can corrupt files in mass storage), but they are quite rare (and computers are built with error-detecting circuitry to compensate for them). The notion long favored among hackers that cosmic rays are among the causes of such events turns out to be a myth; see the cosmic rays entry for details.
The term software rot is almost synonymous. Software rot is the effect, bit rot the notional cause.
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