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Project Silica

microsoft.com

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Re: Project Silica

#11

Post by dang »

Related:

Microsoft Project Silica, long term storage - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38003883 - Oct 2023 (1 comment)

Microsoft's project Silica: Is glass the future of long term storage? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37895643 - Oct 2023 (13 comments)

Project Silica 2022 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36089007 - May 2023 (1 comment)

Project Silica proof-of-concept stores movie on quartz glass - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21482904 - Nov 2019 (102 comments)

Re: Project Silica

#12

Post by naravara »

PaulKeeble wrote: post #6

I was asked the question about long term storage of news back in 2005. The answer hasn't really changed, fundamentally there is nothing you can buy that will give you rapid access other than a working computer and todays storage technology and it will need replacing and redundency. You need to budget to constantly move to new machines and storage technology and often you only have a 5 years to move off some technolog…

> But the problem of binary formats over the long term will persist and I am not sure there is much we can do about that.

It doesn’t solve the problem, but you could perhaps mitigate it somewhat by having part of each unit of storage contain more me or more parsers for other formats. Eventually a standard “archival format” could evolve that way, but even if not you would be able to cross reference across multiple parsers in multiple units to to have a sort of Rosetta Stone for translations.

Re: Project Silica

#13

Post by pndy »

evilos wrote: post #8

Love that this scifi trope is coming to life, I really do. Also pretty funny is the inevitability of dumb memes and porn being etched into glass for essentially eternity. We're gonna produce a lot of 'cave paintings'. I wonder if/when this will scale down to become commercially available to consumers.

I think these new formats should be just a complementary ways of preserving what civilization produces and we shouldn't abandon old physical media. There's a risk of relying only on digital media - we can screw ourselves pretty badly and we can be affected by things that we can't even control.

Re: Project Silica

#15

Post by mitthrowaway2 »

tmikaeld wrote: post #3
mitthrowaway2 wrote: post #2

Is this different than the quartz long-term data storage developed by Hitachi?

There's not much known on the Hitachi project and there's not been any news since it was first mentioned in 2012. However, project silica is also using Quartz glass.

I would assume that the silence around Hitachi's product reflected a lack of market interest, so I'm curious about why Microsoft wants to walk the same path.

Re: Project Silica

#16

Post by tmikaeld »

mitthrowaway2 wrote: post #15
tmikaeld wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's not much known on the Hitachi project and there's not been any news since it was first mentioned in 2012. However, project silica is also using Quartz glass.

I would assume that the silence around Hitachi's product reflected a lack of market interest, so I'm curious about why Microsoft wants to walk the same path.

Maybe Microsoft can find a market for it, they do have enormous datacenters and lasers are always getting cheaper.

Especially due to femtosecond lasers becoming very common for laser eye surgery, driving down cost a lot.

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