This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
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.
Here, put this weird glowing crystal into the Heart of Gold's navicom, it contains the location of the long lost planet of Magrathea.
Whoops, sorry, that was my Lincoln Park discography
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.
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.
I bet people in the 80's said stuff like this when music started coming out on digital rainbow mirrors (CDs).
Nope! The futuristic aspect was that they didn’t jam.
“No more cassette players eating my $8 album!? I LOVE LIVING IN THE FUTURE!”
"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.
That's Glass-R but fot a few bucks more you can get a Glass-RW
So it's great for archival storage. This is exactly the type of thing I'm interested in if it was cheap enough.
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.
I could see applications for home use. Media backup comes to mind.
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
"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...
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.
Backup wikipedia once a year to a crystal and then civilizations thousands of years from now can comb through it as they wish.
Archeologist in 1000 years: "this glass has some interesting etching, must have had some religious significance.
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".
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.”
Some of the same technology was actually also used to create windows.
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.
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?
Cats: Challenge accepted.
10,000 TB of cat pics.
This is also the 10,000th time I've heard about this so there is that...
Was it minority report or the matrix that showed humans storing data on glass?
Either way, this is pretty cool.
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.
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?
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.
I imagine it would depend on the size of the plate and the degree to which correcting codes are used for redundancy.
I remember when they told us a CD would last for hundreds of years LOL
Ah, shit... I guess my great, great, great, 100x great Martian grandkids will have to suffer leaked dickpics from ancient times.
They'll be able to use generative AI on a dick pic to reconstruct your conscious, make you feel embarrassed, then delete you again
Finally. I can store my porn in my glasses.
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?
10,000 years? But I want to forget about Windows 11 now.
Coding errors can live on in infamy!
It's fairly easy to store data for a very long time. What's hard is remembering how to read that data after all that time.
