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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)

#241

Post by 5D »

Great. Now "the holy bible" is going to get dragged around for billions of years, as if 2,000 wasn't enough tedium. Oh well, at least now it's reduced to a pocket sized, machine readable glass wafer. Easily ignored and essentially worthless as ever.

But yeah. Who cares about non-standardized data format design decisions. Just because you can make bigger, pointier dots in a medium doesn't mean you should.

I can use a magic marker on multiple HDD platters. Does that make my scribbles optical 5D data storage?

Hey, look, one of my dots is bigger than the other, and it points in a different direction. And then I put another dot on this other platter. Wow! 5D! Incredible!

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

#242

Post by 5D »

lvh wrote: post #194
airesearcher wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are actual papers. Press releases and popularizations are not the same thing. If you look you can find the actual papers.

It appears you’re agreeing with me? I’m suggesting the confusion would have been alleviated by reading the actual paper.

Dude, you're a fucking faggot.

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

#243

Post by saltcured »

GuB-42 wrote: post #110
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…

A light field is typically 5D: 3D position + 2D angle. The concept dates back from 1936 according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light_field And it looks like it is the idea behind that storage medium. I haven't read the paper though so I can't really comment on whether or not it is justified to call it 5D. Also note that 4+ dimensions are relevant even in a 3D world. For example the Lytro camera really outputs 4D…

The problem, I think, is when people conflate coordinates and properties. Each dimension is a component of the coordinate and is expected to increase the extent of simultaneously indexable positions, each of which is assigned its own properties configuration.

There is a common conceit to treat a vector of possible properties as one (small) dimension. For example, we can make your light field hold an RGB value at each coordinate. We can alternatively interpret this as a 5D field of 3D luminance vectors or a 6D field of luminance scalars.

However, if someone writes out a set of these light-field measurements as individual measurements, they might append the coordinate vector and the properties vector into one longer point (x, y, z, a1, a2, r, g, b) and claim it is 8D. However, that perspective ignores that a real light field cannot store more than one color combination at a given (x, y, z, a1, a2) coordinate. An arbitrary 8D point cloud can represent nonsensical, sparse superpositions of multiple light fields.

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

#244

Post by djdidf »

jalk wrote: post #107
skrebbel wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely nothing. The only theory I can come up with is that GP is a snobby atheist who associates Bibles with morons.

Using the Bible could be interpreted as ‘this is one of humanitys most important works so let’s preserve that first’ Yet the majority of people on planet earth are not Christian. I’ll go with the Gutenberg homage though

Or the KJ bible is considered by the English their most important literary work, and the university is English!

If researchers at KAUST had decided to etch the Quran as a sign of devotion and humility before the unknown, what would have been the problem?

None!

For the decision of who to honor is solely of the creator(s) and not of some political commissar

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

#245

Post by dang »

notacoward wrote: post #223
kragen wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Rosetta Project disks have a much shorter expected lifespan and weigh more, so they're less practical. Since I've been talking about the Rosetta Project and related initiatives for about 15 years, long before Elon Musk was involved, you're also mistaken to assert that "we're [not] talking about it here for any other reason." I mean, I'll take your word that it's true of you, but it's not true of me. Maybe you've…

> shorter expected lifespan Shorter claimed . FTFY. > Maybe you've got a mouse in your pocket? By "we" I meant not just two people but the dozens who have commented here. But you knew that. Let me know when you want to have a discussion instead of merely trolling.

Hey, please don't break the site guidelines by crossing into personal attack, no matter how provocative another comment may be or feel.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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

#246

Post by dang »

ru999gol wrote: post #57
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…

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

Please don't take HN threads into religious flamewar. That is not welcome here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Edit: please stop posting flamebait generally. You've been doing it repeatedly, and we ban that sort of account regardless of its views.

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

#247

Post by rbanffy »

newen wrote: post #201
rbanffy wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since Christianity is not the largest religion, I find that claim needs additional proof.

Really? It's a google search away https://www.businessinsider.com/the-top-10-most-read-books-i... And it's in the Guinness book of world records. Also, Christianity is the largest religion... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_religious_populations

The first reference quite explicitly says "number of copies each book sold over the last 50 years."

Sales is an approximation for readership. The second source also claims "figures may incorporate populations of secular/nominal adherents".

So, while I agree that populations that identify with Christianity may be larger, it's pretty obvious a lot of those do not observe the rituals the religions they identify with specify.

To get a better readership proxy, perhaps, one could use the share in sales of religious texts across the different demographics.

Then we need to also define what "read" means. Does it mean the book was read cover to cover or does it mean the book is read from occasionally? Religious texts are used in very different ways than other forms of literature, to the point comparison borders the questionable.

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

#248

Post by matheweis »

cgravill wrote: post #151
lvh wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s perfectly reasonable to say you’ve increased dimensionality when you find a new physical property to store things with. If a CHS-addressed HD tomorrow starts using opacity or depth as a way to store 2 bits in each, obviously the dimensionality has increased. In ML, we regularly accept 100+d data (much higher for imaging applications). Even simple mechanical systems have large state vectors. I’m a regular critic…

There's a related Microsoft Research project https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/project-sil... (I work in the same lab but on different things)

The one recent (late 2018) publication (1) from that lab hints at the current practical state of the technology:

“We have not (yet) built a full storage system and are currently building out (multiple) prototype read and write heads.”

“the prototype decoder achieves an accuracy of 99.47% across ... voxels written at two micron lateral separation, over 10 layers.”

“we anticipate that in a volume equivalent to a DVD-disk we can write about 1 TB. The technology can potentially get to 360 TB”

1. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/uploads/prod/2018/0...

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

#249

Post by simonh »

kragen wrote: post #218
simonh wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm guessing that's the estimated time it would take for entropy in the material to render the data unreadable. They specify at room temperature, so I'm pretty sure they're talking about entropic disruption of the structure due to thermal effects. Note that 'glass' is a hugely varied class of materials, so without knowing much more we can't make spot judgements about the validity of the claim.

No, 10–100 billion years is at 462 K, which is a lot hotter than room temperature. At room temperature the estimated lifespan (or, really, the time constant τ) is 3×10²⁰ years.

That's really great, precise information. Where did you get it from? Also which exact material is that for? As I said, there are a lot of different things called 'glass'.

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

#250

Post by simonh »

benj111 wrote: post #43
simonh wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Books only have one orientation, so they're not actually making use of that dimension to encode data. The rest of your points... oh my. None of the dimensions count at all, really? So rant away, but it's nice if the sound and fury at least signifies _something_.

No 2 dimensions are important at least :) Regarding orientation, are you saying they printed half the book over the first half, but at right angles over the top? Ie you see different data from different orientations? Ps I've seen old (18th century?) letters where they wrote at 0, 90 and 45 degrees to get more on one page. Postage was charged by the page so it made sense. Newspaper also used to be taxed by the page (i…

I think they encode the data as asymmetric marks in the material, with different orientations of the marks corresponding to different values.

Imagine you could print a page containing just a grid of 100x100 numbers. If you can orient those numbers so the top of each digit could be facing up, down, left or right and use those 40 different glyphs to encode in base 40 instead of base 10, now you can fit 4x as much data into the same two dimensional area.

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