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Start-Up Claims Immortality For Data With 'Stone-Like' Disc
CWmike writes "Start-up Millenniata and LG plan to soon release a new optical disc and read/write player that will store movies, photos or any other data forever. The data can be accessed using any current DVD or Blu-ray player. The M-Disc can be dipped in liquid nitrogen and then boiling water without harming it. It also has a Defense Department study (PDF) backing up the resiliency of its product compared with other leading optical disc competitors. The company would not disclose what material is used to produce the optical discs, referring to it only as a 'natural' substance that is 'stone-like.' Like DVDs and Blu-ray discs, the M-Disc platters are made up of multiple layers of material. But there is no reflective, or die, layer. Instead, during the recording process a laser 'etches' pits onto the substrate material."
Like the fabled non-volatile memory, stone-like disks have appeared on Slashdot at least once before.
you had me at #!
Yeah ... /me rushes out and buys one tonight at Best Buy because, you know, the last fourteen computers, MP3 players and PDAs i've owned all died in the vats of liquid nitrogen around my house - for some stupid reason I keep dropping stuff in those.
I think this is how Fred Flintstone's instant camera worked.
I'd like to see this along with a disc reader that will withstand the test of time. What good is a disc if it can't be read with future technology? Imagine an archaeologist finding this disc 2000 years from now, with no way to read it. Now imagine if there was a device that withstood the test of time and could play back the information on the disc in some form. The people of the future would just need to wipe the screen down and press play.
A unique way to learn a language: http://languageloom.com
Stonehenge is a data center! I wonder if they're hiring?
*chinkchink. pause. chink. pause. chinkchink. *
...not to drop it.
Palaces, barricades, threats, meet promises
Wasn't tested on toddlers, just ask my 2yr old about the state of my DVD library.
No problem, we can just burn some bitcoin hashes to these new "stone-like" disks and pay the royalties that way...
I wonder what their comment on backing your stuff up to a media that will last forever will be?
just think about encoding nightmares! reading the data problem is not too hard to solve even if we claw back from the stone age; the real problem is how to decode the data and then how to process it.
I can imagine them getting stumped on the DOC files they are trying open; the jpegs have to be even more difficult.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
Oh great, they hired Moses...
I wonder if it's possible they could be made of some variant of Mica. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mica
Interesting, live in one of those countries that export it the most and had no idea of the stuff :) Personally I was thinking of a thin layer of artificial diamonds/graphite, just don't know how you'd imprint anything on them without upgrading the laser to a handcannon.
Give a few of these to Labrador Retrievers and check back the next day to see if they are as durable as claimed.
Mica is a very soft mineral and not very suitable for this sort of application.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Apparently you're also part troll.
... the CD/DVD/BD discs don't last. If only they'd used a dye layer instead.
and wait for it to be archived.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
I was thinking something along the lines of carborundum or artificial corundum, either of which would make very durable disks.
1.Netcraft confirms:In Soviet Russia all your base welcomes a beowolf cluster of CowboyNeal overlords. 2.? 3.Profit!!1!
Mica is a very soft mineral and not very suitable for this sort of application.
They didn't say the whole disc is made out of (whatever it is). They say it's made up of "multiple layers of material."
Breakfast served all day!
You can put a normal CD-R disk in Liquid Nitrogen without any damage. I have tested it myself. Although it warps into a dome shape until it warms.
This doesn't sound a whole lot different than CDs or DVDs burned in factories. Those don't use a dye layer either, but pits etched into an (aluminum?) substrate. It sounds like this company has found a way to produce similar results at home -- but that doesn't mean the resulting discs will be any more durable or have longer life than your store-bought CDs/DVDs.
Breakfast served all day!
It can take boiling water and liquid nitrogen, but what about that Kleenex in my pocket? That's killed more DVDs than I'd like to admit.
=================
Unix is very user friendly, it's just picky about who its friends are.
Go over your Moh's hardness scale again - Mica is TOO SOFT to be usable as ANY layer. It's very brittle as well and not quite transparent.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
My wife's Thesis was on this subject. Readers won't last long enough to make this useful.
http://explorer.cyberstreet.com/CET4970H-Peterson-Thesis.pdf
The material is probably mentioned in one of these Patents
I don't need to test my programs.. I have an error correcting modem.
I'm guessing sapphire, what the little stones in sand paper, and high end watch crystals are made of. There is already patents for data storage on it, and it is incredibly heat resistant. I don't know about die free writing.
It's Play-Doh.
(Oven-fired, that is.)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0049833/ I'll be here all week, try the veal!
they make it asbestos they can!
This actually fills a nitch, considering that most memory can be wiped easily with a magnet, and that personally burned DVD's only last a few years before they start to degrade. It's perfect for time capsules.
Go over your Moh's hardness scale again - Mica is TOO SOFT to be usable as ANY layer. It's very brittle as well and not quite transparent.
Really? So it's too soft to be sandwiched between two pieces of hard, transparent plastic?
Breakfast served all day!
Weren't the original large-format Laser Video Discs created via this principle? I thought they etched dots into an aluminium substrate using a higher power setting.
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
I can not wait to see that video. :)
religious or ceremonial, the catch all of confused scientists.
"What were all the microscopic pits for?"
"To catch their souls of course!!!"
but the face palm happened when i read this:
"However, the discs write at only 4x or 5.28MB/sec, half the speed of today's DVD players. "We feel if we can move to the 8X, that'd be great, but we can live with the four for now," Shumway said, adding that his engineers are working on upping the speed of recording."
they record half the speed of todays players at 4x?
thats unpossible !
"I have a 'stone-like' 'natural' substance in my pants."
Sand?
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
Also can be tied to a stick and used to smack down post-apocalyptic miscreants after its original purpose is long forgotten.
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools The way to dusty death. --Will
I miss my old Creative CD Burner! Fast as hell, but sounded like a defective jet engine. And most everyone that I knew about died shortly after its warranty expired.
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
51/4" floppy drive? oh, and my 31/2" one as well. cd? what's that? ad infinitum
This is how they touted CDs in the earl 1990s. Tapes from the early 1980s are still playable (despite physical abuse), and can be repaired easily if they are not. It's a rare CD which lasts 10 years under non-archive conditions.
By the time this technology is proved useless, they will have made their money and retired!
(or perhaps this is a good thing and I'm being too cynical -- but they'd better have a self-powered player unit that will live as long as the media -- or human-readable plans to build one)
These "diamond-hard stone" discs can withstand "temperatures extending up to 176 degrees Fahrenheit as well as UV rays that would destroy conventional DVD discs."
http://www.engadget.com/2009/11/14/cranberry-diamondisc-the-35-dvd-thatll-last-longer-than-your/
"no reflective or die layer"
Does this mean that I can't record on both sides any more?
...omphaloskepsis often...
I have a 'stone-like' 'natural' substance in my pants.
Coprolites?
We really need your help
http://www.gofundme.com/help-sherry
Am I the only person who saw 'Stone-Like' in the title and immediately thought of Radiant Silvergun? Let's hope it doesn't destroy humanity...
Karma: Terrifying (mostly affected by atrocities you've committed)
put it to the mythbusters test
you can press with a die and you can stain with a dye. and you can dye a die, but you cant dye a dye because then you would just have more dye. but oddly you can press a die of a die. also if you like, you can press a die of a 20 sided die and then stain it with some dye. does that clear things up?
They requested modified testing to get the numbers
Basically, modified ECMA-379 testing, starting with known good discs (where the write was initially verified to be good) with testing limited to 85C temperature and 85% relative humidity profile testing, with the addition of full-spectrum light in order to make the dye substrate more vulnerable to phase-change from humidity lensing of the light.
The two key elements of the Millenniata test which differ from ECMA-379 are
consideration of the initial write quality of the discs selected for testing, and the
introduction of full spectrum light to the test environment.
...or to put it into slash-terms: any sufficiently advanced technology is equivalent to a rigged demo. I'm not saying it's not useful; it probably will be a big hit with the LDS Church, the military, and the IRS, but they had to start with good writes and then work at extreme boundary conditions on the testing to successfully destroy the other discs.
-- Terry
This must be how the message of the Weaseljumper was able to survive being embedded in coal for a million years or so: http://www.scribd.com/doc/13855395/Weaseljumper-Read-Me-First
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
Actually in your case I'd take a wild shot and go with Homo Erectus... ;-)
I'm guessing though, from the shallow end of the gene pool. Chlorine anybody???
Best of all, the DRM is built right into the stone.
We need to store them in huge vaults, protected by robots (golems). Perhaps some day some little guy will investigate with a band of adventurers (murderous looters, really) and they'll trip over every security measure put in place.
WOW! This is a mixed salad of mental illness
Let's see, we start it all off with a really witless attempt at a racial slur. Honestly, this is a living example of why we so need Head-Start. Then he goes for the ham-fisted attempt at sarcasm, and finally brings the whole trailer trash Trifecta home with an awkward insinuation regarding a political system that only exists any more on a backward Caribbean Island. My hats off sir, in two sentences you've regurgitated enough stupidity to lower the average IQ of the western hemisphere by 0.3%. What a monument to ignorance. What a shining beacon for morons everywhere! You must be very proud! Congratulations. ;-)
Because boiling water and liquid nitrogen is what I regularly expose my discs to. Not.
How 'bout testing it against my kids, that drop them on the wood floor, and then swirl them around doing their own etching.
One man's pink plane is another man's blue plane.
Sounds alot like vinyl to me, and I only just chucked out the old turntables!
It's made of diamondium! - Professor Farnsworth
The problem with archival-quality DVD blanks is that they cost too much. These cost about $8 each from Amazon.
It's not clear what the writing rate is. Etching pits is usually slower than turning a dye a different color. Despite this, it's a useful technology to have around.
The discs you mentioned are from the same source, Cranberry was just a company (that does not seem to exist any longer) that handled the marketing of the MDiscs. The technology has been around a while, I used one of the drives and played around with the media a few years ago at my former employers office and at that time I think the discs went by the names Cranberry DiamondDisc as well as the manufacturers name M-ARC disc.
Hey, there is only one Return and it's not of the King, it's of the Jedi.
Would that be "dye"?
Or have we renamed it the "die layer" with hindsight?
No sig today...
probability of survival of the media. If it is designed to withstand two millenia you really ought not to have any problems reading it after 30 or 50 years. And you still can get hardware 50 years old in working condition
So the marketdroids didn't lie about my 4 year old dvd 16x player being the "technology of tommorow"?!
... years ago:
http://lalists.stanford.edu/lad/2008/01/0446.html
For some reason I got accused of being silly about the issue of selling media containing GPLed software...
grrr. forgot to log in.
IT Admins Group: Where you decide the content
Open air, exposed to weather is not a good environment for long term storage of anything. Just think about the difference in the conservation status of the exposed and the buried parts of Pompeii. The buried ones will be well conserved even when those M-disc will be unreadable, that is when nobody has a reader for them anymore and nobody cares about building a new one from the specs, if they ever find them.
Will it blend?
There are two rules for success:
1. Never tell everything you know.
It's a "CD-R" so still clunky, cumbersome for transport of big amounts of data and write-once read-only. Personally I'm sick of CDs and DVDs mainly because the CD and DVD drives still have problems with them (not all DVDs are recognized/can be read) and they represent an era I'd like to leave behind. This may be great for archivists but for normal users it'll be like a step back.
Next thing, you'll, be saying, there are, too many,,,, commas.
Waterfox - a Firefox fork with legacy extension support, security updates and better privacy by default.
While I like the idea of long term storage only half the problem is solved as when the hardware goes obsolete there will be nothing to read them on. The BBC 1986 Domesday project stored data on laserdisc, while the laserdiscs survived very few players capable of reading them survived. Now this was a high profile project that people made the effort to recover, but what about all the stuff that is not considered valuable until it is to late. Who is going to find something that can read a DVD in 100 years time ? And even if you did, will the file formats be readable by anything or will the 1000 year copyright laws that we will have by then prevent someone writing software to read a long since defunct file format ?
You'll need a good reader though, to reconstitute yourself after the next Big Bang.
Why oh why is there not a data archive format at the file system level for optical media?
Why isn't there enough redundency and enough scatter to the information.
I should be able to:
1. Break a disk in half, glue back together with crazy glue, and read the disk.
2. Cover up to 45% of the disk with paint. ANY 45% and still recover my data.
Sure, reconstructing would be difficult. Capacity would be down. But I'd like to have an archive format that I can write to, and put in a box along with a reader and be reasonably confident that my grandkids can read it.
Third Career: Tree Farmer Second Career: Computer Geek First Career: Teacher, Outdoor Instructor, Photographer.
Hand the disk to a 3 year old kid to play with for an hour. Bet it won't work then. - Marketing BS IMO.
This is a great article, I'll just program my current computer to copy the article using these punch cards, and record it on this handy wax cylinder.
I'll just plug my wax cylinder and punch card readers into my serial port, its so easy!
Any stress on the plastic layers would cause a split in the mica layer, it's that brittle. You can flake it off with finger-pressure, the same amount of pressure woud cause fractures and data corruption.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Wikipedia has no real-life experience.
I have stuff from block mica to yellowcake uranium ore. I know mica is nowhere near suitable in uses such as plastic discs.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Well, you can easily do it. The technology needed is: A CD pen. Write your data on the CD with the pen. You don't even need glue, or a drive to read it.
Of course the data capacity is not very high. But then, think of the advantages!
For more durable data storage, you also may consider scratching the data onto the disk.
SCNR
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
Perish the thought. But possible. Homage to commedienne who was born 100 years ago this week.
In the cases you've cited, it's not so much about data redundancy as it is about the laws of physics. If the surface of the disc isn't smooth enough, that sucker isn't going to spin and you're boned. If we want backups that last, we should really use some sort of non-optical media, if you think about it. At least, that's my opinion.
Unity? Screw that: XFCE. Slashdot Beta? Screw that: SoylentNews. Australis? Screw that: Pale Moon. UX developers DIAF
The Flinstones had this technology a long time ago, however it was not played with a regular DVD or CD player but with a Pterodactyl
So its laser etched on this special disk, but will a good scratch kill the data readability. One careless nimrod can really make for a bad day. and where are these "data crystals" babylon 5 promised us .....and my light-weight Jet pack lol
Two very informative posts. Wish I had some mod points to send your way.
I'll give it to my granddaughters for 2 minutes. Or less.
There goes Gartner's credibility, right out the window.