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

  • @[email protected]
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    2247 months ago

    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.

    • @[email protected]
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      1097 months ago

      Here, put this weird glowing crystal into the Heart of Gold’s navicom, it contains the location of the long lost planet of Magrathea.

      • @Geriatrickid
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        727 months ago

        Whoops, sorry, that was my Lincoln Park discography

        • @psyc
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          307 months ago

          Four score and seven years ago, in the end it doesn’t even matter

        • BlanketsWithSmallpox
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          137 months ago

          Ahhh Lincoln Park.

          The cover band mixing President Abraham Lincolns greatest escapades with the nuwave metal of 2000’s Linkin Park. Featuring the Bed Intruder dude.

          • @FrostyTrichs
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            47 months ago

            I tried so hard, and got so far. But in the end, I still got assassinated.

            • @lepthesr
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              17 months ago

              I was gonna go for, “In the head, I was still assassinated.”

        • kamenLady.
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          7 months ago

          Lincoln Park’s greatest Hit?

      • @7u5k3n
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        147 months ago

        oh no, not again!

        • A house plant probably
    • @[email protected]
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      7 months ago

      Star Trek predicts another future technology; the isolinear chip.

      Add: And the chips used on the original series were opaque, but roughly the same size.

      • @ChicoSuave
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        67 months ago

        The opacity is probably storage density.

    • @[email protected]
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      267 months ago

      I bet people in the 80’s said stuff like this when music started coming out on digital rainbow mirrors (CDs).

      • Drunemeton
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        197 months ago

        Nope! The futuristic aspect was that they didn’t jam.

        “No more cassette players eating my $8 album!? I LOVE LIVING IN THE FUTURE!”

      • @grabyourmotherskeys
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        107 months ago

        That was more the reaction to Sony mini-discs. Video players using large laser discs had been around for a while.

          • @reptar
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            87 months ago

            I agree, but can’t figure out why. Maybe because it wasn’t wildly adopted?

            • @grabyourmotherskeys
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              57 months ago

              Every time I watch Johnny Mnemonic and he snaps in that laser disc I think “so cool”… :)

    • @logicbomb
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      27 months ago

      Optical communications, optical computers, optical storage.

    • GingaNinga
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      27 months ago

      I hope it’ll be like those communicators in the expanse, those things look fun.

      • @[email protected]
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        17 months ago

        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.

  • Yote.zip
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    1957 months ago

    “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.”

    Very important note here.

        • @CleoTheWizard
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          37 months ago

          Excuse me, I was looking to download more glass RAM. Is it free?

    • @[email protected]
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      517 months ago

      So it’s great for archival storage. This is exactly the type of thing I’m interested in if it was cheap enough.

      • SatansMaggotyCumFart
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        17 months ago

        What kind of files would you use so it could be read in 10 000 years?

          • SatansMaggotyCumFart
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            127 months ago

            Wouldn’t that be funny to be tasked with getting the data off a 10 000 year old piece of glass only for it to be dragon/car vore?

            • @Gabu
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              77 months ago

              Researcher in 10000 years: “Woah! You thought those ‘ancient greeks’ were weird? Look at this shit!”

        • @[email protected]
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          77 months ago

          My media collection. I really only need like 50 years tops. At which point I’ll be dead or to senile to enjoy it. Unless I can back up my own consciousness onto it. Then… That.

          • SatansMaggotyCumFart
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            27 months ago

            Interesting replies but I’m just wondering what file format to use.

            Don’t we have troubles opening stuff from 4-5 os versions ago?

            • @[email protected]
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              37 months ago

              I don’t have anything I can’t open and I’ve got stuff from 20+ years ago. I don’t even have to go out of my way to have applications that are compatible with it. If I did run across something I would just build a VM with whatever software I needed to open it. Just have to keep in mind what software you’ll need and back that up as well.

            • Arsecroft
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              37 months ago

              Interesting replies but I’m just wondering what file format to use.

              ascii + markdown for text if you’re from the US

              Don’t we have troubles opening stuff from 4-5 os versions ago?

              Yeah, but that is because people want to make money and so make their file formats difficult to understand on purpose.

              Whatever creatures discover our mystical tablets will hopefully be far smarter than us, or they’ll use the sum of human knowledge to tile their bathrooms.

    • @Otakulad
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      477 months ago

      True, but being very easy to make would hopefully keep costs down, allowing you to have multiple plates.

      Also, this may not be for home use but companies that need to store data for years.

        • @OneOrTheOtherDontAskMe
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          7 months ago

          My great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great grandson is really gonna love this 36K remaster of Shrek. I know I would

          • @tpfm
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            7 months ago

            Your great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great who?

            • @OneOrTheOtherDontAskMe
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              97 months ago

              All that time copying greats, no time deciding on WHO. My future progeny are doomed

          • @samus12345
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            37 months ago

            That’s roughly 1,500 years of descendants. Well past even Futurama’s time!

    • @z00s
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      357 months ago

      “Bob, why the hell did you format this as ‘Jim sux dicks’?! You know that’s permanent, right?”

      10K years later

      Alien captain: Anything to report?

      Alien: We need to find a being named “Jim”, sir…

      • ASeriesOfPoorChoices
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        97 months ago

        We’ve got lots of Roman dick drawings, so it’s our turn to leave our mark on the future

      • @ricdeh
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        -17 months ago

        Why so negative? It could just as well be humans that find such a thing 10K years later

        • @Gabu
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          47 months ago

          Unlikely at the rate we’re going. I’d give us 100 years, at most.

    • @WhatAmLemmy
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      7 months ago

      If the glass is nothing special, each piece would cost cents and be like burning CD’s back in the day, except infinitely recyclable.

      What’s more important is the time and cost to read and write.

    • @[email protected]
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      177 months ago

      Backup wikipedia once a year to a crystal and then civilizations thousands of years from now can comb through it as they wish.

      • @[email protected]
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        17 months ago

        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)

        • @[email protected]
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          27 months ago

          How amazing would it be if we came across some tomb that was just filled with thousands of scrolls detailing the whole history of Rome and Greece and all those other empires from the BC years?

    • @joel_feila
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      87 months ago

      So its cd but fom the future

      • @[email protected]
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        7 months ago

        CDs aren’t expected to last more than 100 years in storage.

        This is more like stone tablets for the future.

  • @Usernameblankface
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    1097 months ago

    Archeologist in 1000 years: "this glass has some interesting etching, must have had some religious significance.

    • TrenchcoatFullOfBats
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      207 months ago

      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”.

    • danielbln
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      107 months ago

      “There is only the true religion of the Void, these heretic artifacts must be destroyed”

  • @drivepiler
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    767 months ago

    Some of the same technology was actually also used to create windows.

  • @[email protected]
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    727 months ago

    Logs into the SilicaArk long term storage system for the first time.

    “Welcome Andy, would you like to use the optimistic theme or the pessimistic theme?”

    Chooses optimistic. Types in command to show storage capacity.

    “The glass is half full.”

  • @anon_8675309
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    517 months ago

    Didn’t someone make a holographic cube some ten or so years ago with the same promises.

    I never get excited by this stuff. If I see it in Best Buy, then I’ll believe it.

    • @AnUnusualRelic
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      137 months ago

      Many people have made such devices I think. There’s probably a guy somewhere with a shelf full of them.

    • @kshade
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      27 months ago

      Yeah, also writing 10 GB of data to rolls of sticky tape in the late 90s. It can be done, but it’s not practical.

  • @MeekerThanBeaker
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    417 months ago

    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?

    • @nl_the_shadow
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      117 months ago

      Sure, if you don’t mind storing stuff and then never reading them again.

      • @flop_leash_973
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        7 months ago

        To be fair, I have a lot of stuff I am storing that I have no realistic reason to ever need or want to read again as it is.

      • @[email protected]
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        47 months ago

        Never read again? These can’t be modified, but they can be read. After all, it’d be pretty useless to store data on a medium than can never be read.

    • @ForgotAboutDre
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      27 months ago

      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.

    • HMN
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      107 months ago

      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.

  • @JTskulk
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    367 months ago

    That’s a lot of start menu ads and telemetry code!

    • @ItsMeForRealNow
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      77 months ago

      The goddamn telemetry code!!! Is ancient!! That’s why it’s so huge and slow

  • @generalpotato
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    267 months ago

    Was it minority report or the matrix that showed humans storing data on glass?

    Either way, this is pretty cool.

    • ShustOne
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      97 months ago

      Minority Report had some glass storage stuff that was fun to see. He would insert a glass slide into the machine.

      • @generalpotato
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        27 months ago

        Thanks! That may have been the case I was thinking of.

    • @[email protected]
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      77 months ago

      in The Expanse their ships are somehow powered/controlled by a shelf of things that look like this

    • @nicoweio
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      77 months ago

      Star Trek also has this.

    • @cazssiew
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      67 months ago

      I think the blade runner sequel had something like this too.

    • @[email protected]
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      37 months ago

      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.

    • @dangblingus
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      37 months ago

      I think you’re thinking of Star Wars. Like episode 2 or something.

      • ShustOne
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        77 months ago

        Definitely I’m Minority Report as well in several scenes

    • Captain Poofter
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      37 months ago

      I don’t remember this anywhere in the matrix

    • @ripolochon
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      37 months ago

      In 2001, HAL is disconnected through glass like components.

  • @[email protected]
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    257 months ago

    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.

    • @MrMcGasion
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      127 months ago

      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.

      • @SkyezOpen
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        97 months ago

        using their AI cloud service to decode the data

        The hell does that even mean? Is it a model that convinces people it’s decrypting data while taking guesses based on the training set?

        • @[email protected]
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          67 months ago

          My guess is it’s an attempt to build long term a subscription service model behind the idea. No subscription, equals it can’t be read or some contrived bs to leech more money out of users/governments of the encoding/decoding technology.

      • @[email protected]
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        87 months ago

        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.

  • @[email protected]
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    237 months ago

    So I read many times that it can store “several TBs of data” but how many exactly? 2, 3, 5, 10?

    Do they know exactly? Is it possible that they write 5 TBs and when they try to read it, they can only read like 3, losing the other 2 TBs?

    • @[email protected]
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      167 months ago

      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.

    • Pyro
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      127 months ago

      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.

    • @elrik
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      127 months ago

      I imagine it would depend on the size of the plate and the degree to which correcting codes are used for redundancy.