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posted by martyb on Wednesday November 06 2019, @07:34PM   Printer-friendly
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


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  • (Score: 4, Insightful) by acid andy on Wednesday November 06 2019, @08:55PM (4 children)

    by acid andy (1683) on Wednesday November 06 2019, @08:55PM (#916996) Homepage Journal

    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.

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  • (Score: 2) by takyon on Wednesday November 06 2019, @09:02PM (1 child)

    by takyon (881) <{takyon} {at} {soylentnews.org}> on Wednesday November 06 2019, @09:02PM (#917000) Journal
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    • (Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Thursday November 07 2019, @01:04AM

      by fustakrakich (6150) on Thursday November 07 2019, @01:04AM (#917076) Journal

      You just store the cracked version

      BOO! That was horrible!

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  • (Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 07 2019, @08:52AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 07 2019, @08:52AM (#917255)

    Would’t it be Hound Dog Gay?

  • (Score: 2) by Nuke on Thursday November 07 2019, @02:34PM

    by Nuke (3162) on Thursday November 07 2019, @02:34PM (#917321)

    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.