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Glass discs that can store 360TB and remain intact for billions of years (2016)

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Re: Glass discs that can store 360TB and remain intact for billions of years (2016)

#161

Post by inflatableDodo »

YayamiOmate wrote: post #18

I dunno, but it seems to me universities increasingly focus on press releases and marketing departments... 5D and 13.8 billion years? Phony. I know no sane scientist or enigneer that would say they use more than 3D physics. Sounds like catch phrases to sell. With such logic plain old HDD is at least 4D, because it uses CHS coordinates and magnetic orientation, to store data. To me such communication style undermines…

>I know no sane scientist or enigneer that would say they use more than 3D physics.

Are they from flatland? If not, how do they calculate motion?

Re: Glass discs that can store 360TB and remain intact for billions of years (2016)

#162

Post by toyg »

syn0byte wrote: post #140
toyg wrote: post #45

Seems a bit of a waste to dedicate an entire 360TB disc to a single text document like a bible, which is probably just a few KBs... /s More seriously, they don't talk about reading capabilities (retrieval speed etc). And what if it gets scratched? What is the error tolerance? At that density, a single speck of dust could have dramatic implications... I hope this reaches industrial viability, because we desperately ne…

BD-Rom is already pushing sane limits. It's why an important if under reported "feature" of BD-Rom over DVD was harder, more scratch resistant plastic coating. If you really need the lifespan of paper... http://ollydbg.de/Paperbak/

Thanks for that link. It's clearly a joke and obsolete, but I wouldn't mind having something like that to backup a few small things (ssh keys, passwords meant to survive me, etc etc). After all, we will likely always have some sort of image-capturing device to leverage - unlike with discs of any sort.

Re: Glass discs that can store 360TB and remain intact for billions of years (2016)

#164

Post by spaceheeder »

YayamiOmate wrote: post #18

I dunno, but it seems to me universities increasingly focus on press releases and marketing departments... 5D and 13.8 billion years? Phony. I know no sane scientist or enigneer that would say they use more than 3D physics. Sounds like catch phrases to sell. With such logic plain old HDD is at least 4D, because it uses CHS coordinates and magnetic orientation, to store data. To me such communication style undermines…

I think (and it's possible I'm being too charitable in the face of bad science reporting) it's a reference to the number of independent variables that affect a read operation, and not a statement about new spacial physics.

To clarify what I mean when I talk about what I think they mean (yes that sentence is confusing), consider the following example:

The pits on a DVD are subject to one-dimensional analysis because every position targeted by the laser for a read operation can be in one of 2 states (i.e. 2^1)

The pits on a dual-layer DVD are subject to two-dimensional analysis because every position targeted by the laser for a read operation can be in one of four states (i.e. 2^2, because there are two layers and each layer can be in one of 2 states independently of the other)

If I understand the article right, this technology uses 3 physical layers, and adjusts the size and orientation of each air pocket in the glass. So on each individual layer, a dot can be categorized in any one of 8 states (2^3) and there are 3 layers (2^3) of dots. That should give 2^6 possible states per read operation. So why do they say 5 instead of 6? There could be any number of reasons, such as certain adjustments to size and orientation at a higher layer affecting the ability to read from a lower layer, or error correction built into the decoding algorithm.

But yeah, that's my lukewarm take on their silly buzzwords.

Re: Glass discs that can store 360TB and remain intact for billions of years (2016)

#165

Post by layoutIfNeeded »

lvh wrote: post #125
petre wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Heh, that number is suspiciously close to the age of the Universe. Phony indeed. "WMAP estimated the age of the universe to be 13.772 billion years, with an uncertainty of 59 million years. In 2013, Planck measured the age of the universe at 13.82 billion years."

Yes, 13.8Gy is the approximate age of the universe and yes the researchers used that number. But it's not like they made this up and conveniently landed there: they computed a range of options and worked back from that specific number to prove it'd work for as long as we could possibly care. Turns out the biggest decay factor is nanograting and the biggest contributing physical quantity is temperature. They plotted w…

Ok, we get it. No need to copy-paste the same comment multiple times.

Re: Glass discs that can store 360TB and remain intact for billions of years (2016)

#166

Post by daenz »

gnode wrote: post #142
lvh wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, 13.8Gy is the approximate age of the universe and yes the researchers used that number. But it's not like they made this up ("phony", as you put it)! Turns out the biggest decay factor is nanograting and the biggest contributing physical quantity is temperature. They plotted what decay would look like on an Arrhenius plot. They both computed estimates and measured to confirm: the measurements are quite accurate.…

I don't think they meant it was fraud, just that it's sensationalist drivel. It's choosing a way to interpret results for the sake of sounding impressive, rather than improving understanding. Choosing a temperature in order to say "this will last as long as the universe's current age", or finding ways to count extra dimensions is the behaviour of marketeers, not academics.

"Room temperature" is a pretty meaningful rough measurement for storage of anything.

Re: Glass discs that can store 360TB and remain intact for billions of years (2016)

#167

Post by edejong »

navigatesol wrote: post #78
ru999gol wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And the picture they release show the christian bible. Tells you everything you need to know about them really.

So the fact that the demonstration disc they chose to use in a photo for the article happens to be the Bible (the first book ever printed and most printed) tells you "everything you need" about "them"? No wonder public discourse is so terrible nowadays, when people are willing to dismiss entire institutions based on an arbitrary image in a press release. But, I guess that's just a step or two removed from asking some…

I wish I could automatically append your comment to each similar statement people tend to make nowadays.

Re: Glass discs that can store 360TB and remain intact for billions of years (2016)

#169

Post by modsiw »

lvh wrote: post #129
ptero wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be the devil's advocate, it is often convenient to represent states of a system with N degrees of freedom as a subset of an N-dimensional space. For example, state space of two balls linked by a rigid rod in 3D would be seen as a 5-dimensional space. That said, the article is heavy on marketing (13.8 billion year claim is not scientific, at least in spirit) and looks like PR department product.

The 13.8Gy claim is made by estimating, calculating and then confirming by experiment how quickly wear and tear works (the primary mechanism is nanograting, and the primary contributing physical quantity is temperature). It then specifically grabs 13.8Gy as an example data point because that's the age of the Universe, but they could've picked any other point on a time/temperature scale, like, say, "room temperature".…

Because they first chose the result they wanted — age of universe and worked backwards to derive that result. Is it true? Sure, probably. The method flys in the face of the foundations of science and was done for sensationalism.

What’s special about 462K? Is it a local min/max? Doesn’t seem so.

Re: Glass discs that can store 360TB and remain intact for billions of years (2016)

#170

Post by sp332 »

lvh wrote: post #139
YayamiOmate wrote: post #18

I dunno, but it seems to me universities increasingly focus on press releases and marketing departments... 5D and 13.8 billion years? Phony. I know no sane scientist or enigneer that would say they use more than 3D physics. Sounds like catch phrases to sell. With such logic plain old HDD is at least 4D, because it uses CHS coordinates and magnetic orientation, to store data. To me such communication style undermines…

Yes, 13.8Gy is the approximate age of the universe and yes the researchers used that number. But it's not like they made this up ("phony", as you put it)! Turns out the biggest decay factor is nanograting and the biggest contributing physical quantity is temperature. They plotted what decay would look like on an Arrhenius plot. They both computed estimates and measured to confirm: the measurements are quite accurate.…

13.8 Gy is the age of the universe so far, in the past. Completely irrelevant to how long the discs will last starting from now.
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