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from the what-is-the-read/write-speed? dept.
Why Microsoft and Warner Bros. Archived the Original 'Superman' Movie on a Futuristic Glass Disc
Microsoft has teamed up with Warner Bros. to store a copy of the 1978 movie "Superman" on a small glass disc about the size of a coaster. The collaboration, which will be officially unveiled at Microsoft's Ignite 2019 conference in Orlando, Florida Monday, is a first test case for a new storage technology that could eventually help safeguard Hollywood's movies and TV shows, as well as many other forms of data, for centuries to come.
"Glass has a very, very long lifetime," said Microsoft Research principal researcher Ant Rowstron in a recent conversation with Variety. "Thousands of years."
[Image] The piece of silica glass storing the 1978 "Superman" movie, measuring 7.5 cm x 7.5 cm x 2 mm. The glass contains 75.6 GB of data plus error redundancy codes.
Microsoft began to investigate glass as a storage medium in 2016 in partnership with the University of Southampton Optoelectonics Research Centre. The goal of these efforts, dubbed "Project Silica," is to find a new storage medium optimized for what industry insiders like to call cold data — the type of data you likely won't need to access for months, years, or even decades. It's data that doesn't need to sit on a server, ready to be used 24/7, but that is kept in a vault, away from anything that could corrupt it.
This is not the Superman memory crystal we need.
Also at The Verge.
Related: "5D" Laser-Based Polarization Vortex Storage Could Hold Hundreds of Terabytes for Billions of Years
(Score: 0, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 06 2019, @07:53PM (7 children)
Did they forget that glass window panes over a couple hundred years old are thicker at the bottom because of gravity?
(Score: 3, Informative) by epitaxial on Wednesday November 06 2019, @07:56PM
That never happened.
(Score: 4, Informative) by tangomargarine on Wednesday November 06 2019, @08:09PM (4 children)
They didn't forget it, because it isn't true. There are places that have been found where the thicker part is at the top.
The way they manufactured glass back in the Middle Ages was different than we do now, so there was some amount of flowing as it was cooling, not after. And mounting the panes thicker-side-down just makes sense from a construction standpoint.
https://io9.gizmodo.com/the-glass-is-a-liquid-myth-has-finally-been-destroyed-496190894 [gizmodo.com]
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 2) by Common Joe on Wednesday November 06 2019, @08:35PM
Wow. I'm one of the lucky 10,000 today. Thank you.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 06 2019, @08:56PM
The ones that were thicker at the top are that way because the earth is flat and it was located near the edge.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 07 2019, @01:13AM
Yeah, in Australia...
You know I'll love you
till the moon's upside down...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 08 2019, @02:37PM
How did they not headline that:
"The glass is a liquid myth has finally been shattered"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 06 2019, @08:27PM
That's not true. I was told that before too, that glass is still a "supercooled liquid" and as such will still flow (albeit slowly). Then someone on slashdot posted several articles about why that isn't true, and they were pretty interesting to read.