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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: 2) by Booga1 on Wednesday November 06 2019, @07:39PM (9 children)
Almost big enough for a modern video game! I can't wait to see what the final capacity will be when it finally hits the consumer market.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by mhajicek on Wednesday November 06 2019, @07:41PM (3 children)
Lasts forever, until you drop it.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 06 2019, @10:59PM
Sure, it is breakable if you try hard enough, admitted Rowstron. “If you take a hammer to it, you can smash glass.” But absent of such brute force, the medium promises to be very, very safe, he argued: “I feel very confident in it.”
From the article.
(Score: 2) by deimtee on Thursday November 07 2019, @01:49PM
Just dropping it wouldn't erase the data. If it was valuable enough you would read the pieces and put the data back together again.
If you cough while drinking cheap red wine it really cleans out your sinuses.
(Score: 1) by Only_Mortal on Thursday November 07 2019, @03:38PM
I'm just about to start a small business selling protective covers...
(Score: 4, Insightful) by acid andy on Wednesday November 06 2019, @08:55PM (4 children)
Pity the video games won't work in thousands of years' time because the servers needed for the always-on authentication DRM will no longer exist; unless of course the corporations
are charitable enoughconsider it profitable to encode the servers on glass as well or go DRM-free.Consumerism is poison.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Wednesday November 06 2019, @09:02PM (1 child)
You just store the cracked version:
https://www.geek.com/games/diablo-iii-offline-play-crack-released-in-beta-form-1500569/ [geek.com]
https://www.techspot.com/news/80084-denuvo-protected-games-cracked-faster-than-ever.html [techspot.com]
If no crack, you consider it lost to history.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Thursday November 07 2019, @01:04AM
You just store the cracked version
BOO! That was horrible!
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 07 2019, @08:52AM
Would’t it be Hound Dog Gay?
(Score: 2) by Nuke on Thursday November 07 2019, @02:34PM
The lack of DRM servers is irrelevant. Microsoft will have changed the file format hundeds of times by then without back-compatability. That's even if the world hasn't become like H G Wells depicted in The Time Machine and nobody cares.