Project Silica’s coaster-size glass plates can store unaltered data for thousands of years, creating sustainable storage for the world
Microsoft develops ultra durable glass plates that can store several TBs of data for 10000 years::Project Silica’s coaster-size glass plates can store unaltered data for thousands of years, creating sustainable storage for the world
Of all the stuff I've seen in sci fi movies and tv shows, I really didn't think the computer chips on glowing transparent plates was gonna become reality. What a crazy world this is.
I want a glass computer that is on a manipulator strapped to my back that way it can float free and I can use both hands, then push a button to have it collapse back along the backside of my ribs.
"Project Silica’s goal is to write data in a piece of glass and store it on a shelf until it is needed. Once written, the data inside the glass is impossible to change."
This.. well roughly. People here say muh file formats etc. But you're really going for the maximum lifetime, if its uncompressed text, it wouldn't be too hard to reverse engineer if future people figure out that there's data on there at all. The harder part may be extracting the data at all.
We could also include instructions on how certain file formats can be read.
It's is is still a great long term archive storage, and more likely the data would be transfered to a better storage device within a few 100 years (if we're talking about archiving the present for future archologists that is)
Archaeologist in 1005 years: "We have translated the folder names on this glass storage device! The writings within refer to a important man named "Brazzers", and there is another folder full of his correspondence to his "step sister" and someone named "Milf".
Awesome. So Microsoft, does this mean I'll finally get access to the other 3TB of OneDrive storage that I pay for on my family plan? Or do I still have to create random accounts that would simulate other family members in order to use it?
This plan it built under the assumption that more people will be using one drive. The value of scrapped data isn't just quantity, but number of people.
I almost literally yawned reading the title. "Journalists" regurgitating things they don't understand and hyping them everytime like it's the breakthrough of the century. I feel it waters down actual breakthroughs and makes people immune or at least apathetic to these stories because it's the same thing over and over.
It was Minority Report, during the sequence when Anderson is going through the footage of the murder in the beginning of the movie. One of the guys puts some video from a nearby computer into a small tablet -size piece of glass and hands it to Anderson who plugs it in and puts the video on the main screen.
We've got some pretty good glove mouse things so we're just kidding the pre-cogs.
It seems like it would make for a great replacement for Tape Backups that are currently used for long term storage. They are easy to write to but hard to read from and restore. It'll probably be a great technology to put backups on especially if it lasts as long as they say. The challenge will probably come in with the specialized reading and writing laser / microscopes being expensive.
According to the article, they're using their AI cloud service to decode the data, so it's also likely so computationally expensive to decode that it won't be practical. Seems more like a gimmick to woo investors that won't actually ever see real world use, at least not any time soon. I suppose you could make the argument that you can back up data on it now, and hope reading it becomes more practical later, but then it's more of a supplement to tape backup, rather than a replacement.
There is certainly an element of this being PR for Microsoft. But it is worth considering that a huge amount of computing is done in large data centers.
I think this fact could easily jump-start the use of a technology such as this. If it starts out where every large to mid-sized data center has a reader and writer shared among their thousands of customers it certainly would make it more viable.
I would guess the AI service is MS's way of trying to make sure they control the technology. Hopefully, it eventually can get replaced by a local AI model rather than MS's proprietary AI.
They're being so vague with the numbers that I really doubt how mature any of this is. Given some of the examples (photos, music, War & Peace) I'm guessing 3TB or so, but it's a fluff article, so who knows.
Just out of curiosity, I calculated that the article's (War and Peace * 875,000) claim would net you less than 1TB of storage space (~973GB), assuming it was GZipped (and ~3x that if not).
The most concrete number we have is from another article (also on an official Microsoft page) that claims it's upwards of 7TB.
Can they work on the 30 year old code base supporting OneDrive first? How the fuck are we supposed to willingly put our personal data up for ransom through that service?
Well that's the problem, you have absolutely no way to know if it will make sense 10000 years down the line. Humans only invented writing around 6000 or 7000 years ago. It's a really long time on our scale.
I really hate this like 'in my imaginary world, where everything is perfect and not as much as an atom of dirt comes into contact with the product, and therefore nobody uses the product while it is sealed in a vacuum chamber, then hypothetically it will still be good in a billion years. MTBF = infinity. ship it.'
But we can make estimates for the endurance of various materials from today. And we know the limitations of most of our media is quite short. So having something that's predicted to last a while is still a good thing, even if we don't have empirical evidence yet.
Ignoring physical damage, by being crushed or said on fire. We know that some materials are not inherently stable. Like they haven't reached their final molecular state. Especially in the presence of oxygen or other catalysts.
Papers a great example, a lot of paper, and a lot of ink used on paper can be acidic degrading the paper over time. So we know that what's printed today, the vast majority of it, is not going to last very long. Just because of the acid ignoring all the other issues with paper and rot etc.
So if they have some stable glass material that can encode data, and is in molecular steady state, so it doesn't want to degrade on its own. That changes the problem from how do you prevent this material from reacting to its own environment, to how do you prevent this material from being manually destroyed. It's a different problem, but it's an easier problem
Also, with any storage system, it's not "store it and forget it". With something like this you'd store, then do testing in determined intervals, to ensure it's still retrievable.
You'd also do replication and duplication. I.e. replicate the data on disparate and different media, with each location performing duplication onto new media as part of the ongoing testing/validation process, eventually leading to longer and longer intervals for testing/duplication.
I don't want to detract from your point, but I'm picturing Jaskier's new skill being lyrical literalization in which he can said Geralt on fire just with the line "burn, witcher, burn"
I get where you're coming from, but I also think it's fair to say archaeologists have at least some insight into what happens to glass over long periods of time. Hopefully Microsoft has consulted with them.
I don't think it's that type of "durable." I think they mean you can read from it forever without having to rewrite the data, which currently isn't true of platter and solid state storage. This isn't screen technology, though, it's storage technology, so I'm not sure the comparison is useful.
What are you going to read it with? Unless it’s photographically reduced text, like microfiche, it’s unlikely that the computer hardware and software will still exist.
Nobody uses a 6502 with commodore basic anymore either, I can still pop on an emulator in about 10 seconds to run a game from that era.
Have some information there to build a reader, we can read hieroglyphics and cuneiform and that's older, more primitive and only written in a few places by a few people.
I can already see the future where warlords fight over the pretty glass buried in vaults across the land so they can whittle it down into jewelry they use to decorate the skull chalices of their enemies in order to pour out libations to the magic forces from the sky that govern their lives...
Data is data, you could store anything there. The question is if this would eventually reach some sort of consumer market. By the looks of it it's in a very early stage (where all equipment to read and write is still in RnD phase) so it's not where you can have a sata cable attached to it in your pc.
The question is will it be because we've advanced so far beyond that level of computing, or because we've had WW3 and are back playing with rocks and fire?
If you want something to last 1000 years you design it to last 10k. In 1000 years, the descendants of the ultra rich will come out of their bunkers with the technology to read these chips.
They could replace WORM storage, and since the person you responded to mentioned LTO, WORM may be possible with their data set since LTO is traditionally used for backups
If we know that the material can go 10k years without degradation, which is something we can know, then it can last that long. Will it be practically possible to store it in a way that will allow for the maximum amount of time before the material begins to degrade? That's a whole other thing.
That writing is for words and concept. This is for data. Its a bit more complicated to parse data especially when, according to MSFT, it needs AI to do it.
Your backups are only as good as your ability to access them. Its the same issue with keeping people out of nuclear waste sites.
You should look into message sent off world from Arecibo space telescope. It's super interesting how scientists made the messages universally readable with assumption whoever gets it has never spoken a word of any of our languages.
Given the 20 years of development between the first VTR and VHS, the 100% development to storage lifetime of that technology seems pretty large in comparison.
Also, how silly would it be if we put things into glass for 10,000 years and then 5 years later there's a format war like VHS vs Beta and we need to redo everything?
Intelligent life in the future will find 10,000 year old records from present day humanity and be so frustrated by the multiple competing formats over the first 100 of those years that they won't even bother trying to read it.
Of all the things to take time with to get right, extremely long term storage seems like one of the more prudent.