Data Written With "Superman Memory Crystal" Could Last Billions of Years (computerworld.com)

Lucas123 writes: Researchers have demonstrated a method of femtosecond laser writing in self-assembled crystaline nanostructures that can withstand temperatures of up to 1,000 degree Celsius and last indefinitely at room temperature. The storage method enables up to 360TB of capacity on a single disc. Data is written to a file comprised of three layers of nano-structured dots separated by five micrometres. The technology was first demonstrated in 2013 when a 300 kilobit digital copy of a text file was successfully recorded in 5D digital data by femtosecond laser writing. Major documents from human history, such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), Newton's Opticks, Magna Carta and Kings James Bible, have been saved as digital copies that could survive the human race. Coined as the 'Superman memory crystal', as the glass memory has been compared to the "memory crystals" used in the Superman films, the data is recorded via self-assembled nanostructures created in fused quartz.

Comments

Good, but maybe not important

[Falconnan]

Consider this: Who would still know how to find or read this? Granted, the half-life of the readable data is more about durability than actual length of time... But in a billion years will anyone even know it's data?

Re:Good, but maybe not important

[tchdab1]

We have achieved the inevitable in data storage, not by creating a media that will outlive its physical readers, but by creating a media whose content will outlive its human readers.

Re:Good, but maybe not important

[gregarican]

Exactly. When cleaning out my storage vault at work I ran across old DAT tapes, Ditto ZIP drive media, etc. If I dug around old boxes at home I'm sure I might stumble across an old magneto-optical media example or three. Reading media, even if pristine condition, without the proper methods...meh...

Re:Good, but maybe not important

[Anonymous Coward]

Data is data.

Re:Good, but maybe not important

[Anonymous Coward]

Mkay, but it is still more stable than a CD or DVD with a 15 year shelf life

So, maybe it does not matter so much that it may last longer than our civilization, but it certainly does matter that it lasts longer than anything else currently available.

Re:Good, but maybe not important

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Unless something I'm not thinking of forbids this, I'd imagine that having the ability to produce durable structures small enough to be useful for bulk data storage would also allow you to build larger structures that are visible to the naked eye or under various levels of magnification, at the expense of data density.

This doesn't solve the rather nasty tech-writer challenge of trying to compose an instruction manual for a reader-of-the-language-in-use-2000-years-from-now; but it would allow you to provide multiple 'stages' of readable data with various trade-offs between storage capacity and intelligibility. Text large enough to be obvious and readable with the naked eye would be inefficient; but hard to miss. Text large enough to require modest magnification to actually read; but look patterned enough to be worth investigating to the naked eye could easily crunch several paragraphs into a reasonably modest space(microfilm/microfiche scale, say). Text invisible to the naked eye; but readable without any fancy polarization tricks and just an optical microscope could be denser still; and finally the technique described could be used for bulk data storage.

Doesn't solve the language barrier; but it would allow you to do some amount of self-documenting of the format, starting with a visible 'README', and proceeding down through one or more layers of less densely packed data describing how to interpret the more densely packed layer beneath, and finally the data area.(which we would presumably encrypt and tie to a DRM system that was nuked to ashes millenia ago; because what's a good technological advance without some self defeating stupidity?)

Re:Good, but maybe not important

[jellomizer]

From the look of it. it seems you can imprint visible text on it and pictures.
So you may make a rosetta stone of instructions on how to make a reader in as many languages you can think of. As well as pictures. I am not so much worried about a billion years but 10,000 years is a good run, where memory of our society would normally be close to gone. Finding such material on how to make a reader and to make one and get all our crazy data would be an major archaeological find. Perhaps after seeing it, they will realize that we share many of the same problems that our future has, while they may chuckle at some of the issues that we have now, which are so obviously wrong and stupid, but no one at our time realizes it.

Re:Good, but maybe not important

[Anonymous Coward]

And in a billion years would anyone know how to punctuat'e?

Re:Good, but maybe not important

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

It's considered cheating; but you can also ensure that the backups always outlast the users by 'retiring' any user whose backup media are starting to show signs of flakiness. The side benefit is the steep reduction in the number of people asking you to pull something from backups for them.

Re:Good, but maybe not important

[Anonymous Coward]

Of course they will be able to read it. It's not like technology just gets lost. Even in the event of a nuclear war, technology and knowledge would still survive.

Re:Good, but maybe not important

[Anonymous Coward]

Exactly. When cleaning out my storage vault at work I ran across old DAT tapes, Ditto ZIP drive media, etc. If I dug around old boxes at home I'm sure I might stumble across an old magneto-optical media example or three. Reading media, even if pristine condition, without the proper methods...meh...

And in 10 seconds I found drives for all of those formats on Amazon.

You really didn't try hard, did you?

Re:Good, but maybe not important

[Gr8Apes]

I cleaned all that crap out years and years ago. Why? Because all of them were flaky, slow, and were much improved upon by later technology. Now you have a tech that can store 360TB in a single small package that will never go bad? Just imagine! Get the entire filmography for everything you want to own and never have to buy a replacement because of media deteriorating in 1 form or another, nor your kids, or kids kids, and so on. Hmm, I'll bet the *AAs won't allow any content on those.

Re:Good, but maybe not important

[Anonymous Coward]

Two thoughts:
1. As you said, durability, two words: space travel
2. As for not knowing it is data... makes you wonder

Re: Good, but maybe not important

[BlytheBowman]

Stone case with hyroglyphics? Also, how about archiving content created by the "plebs", instead of just the usual big league players? Archiologists learn a great deal from the posessions and even waste from the "common" person of the era they are trying to learn about.

Re:Good, but maybe not important

[MikeMo]

Unless there's a catastrophe of some kind that turns our civilization into the ancient Egypt of the future, I'm pretty sure that civilization a billion years in the future will know it's data. They'll probably be able to read it (what WON'T they be able to do?). They just won't care about it.

Re:Good, but maybe not important

[Anonymous Coward]

I remember one problem I had in a previous job (details slightly altered to protect the guilty/innocent):

I was handed a bunch of tapes, some QIC, some 8mm, some 4mm, some DLT, some LTO. The trick was to recover any data and toss it on a deduplicating SAN for long term storage.

First, finding the hardware (20 year Compaqs with 4mm autochangers stashed in an elephant graveyard), then finding the OS it was backed up with, then the program used for backups. On UNIX machines, there is also the blocksize. Did the previous software use dynamic blocksizes, or a certain size? Was it tar, cpio, afio, individual files written with dd as separate tape images? Was it encrypted somehow? I managed to restore a good chunk of it, but even then, it was hard to tell if the tape was a dud, or if the previous admin decided to do a run of tapes with a different blocksize just to be cheeky [1].

Of course, one problem with backup programs were finding the serial numbers so they would actually restore data. I have to give hats off to Bru because all their stuff will -restore- without ever needing a single serial key. A middle finger to the other guys, especially those companies long since out of business.

Oh... I do have to thank the makers of the no-name backup programs. I couldn't find a serial number for some backup software never heard of, which got me fired the next day after reporting that... for "failing to manage the integrity of vital data."

tl;dr, this media in TFA may be high density... but it really needs a standard filesystem, so that years to centuries from now, the data can be recovered. The only format I know which this can be done is old fashioned tar... but even with that, there are blocksize issues, and there are also compression items as well (gzip, bzip2, xz, etc.) Something like a PDF/A standard... but for filesystems and data.

[1]: Finding and expunging two year old burritos in the tape safe showed me that the previous admin wasn't a happy camper.

Re:Good, but maybe not important

[onepoint]

I was thinking along the following lines ...

big x's mark about 20 or 30 spots on the moon.
you can see it with a real powerful telescope
that would have been invented around 1900
this is a frame of reference to technology to spot it

we know that they have to develop a huge roman candle to get to the moon
so we have to form some sort of lock that 1950's humans could open
when they get to the X

Now we have to design a language, What would 1950's human read ...
it's got to be binary or math or chemical symbols ( Water would be one of
them, using 3 orbs connected properly with size difference I am guessing )

so we get them in, find the door language, and basically a lot of instruction
books in large writing ( 5 point ) going smaller

we have given them everything, from the IC design to today, but they have to
design more powerful microscopes and stuff every time to see deeper and learn more
it's a huge instruction book set with lot's of redundancy

Re: Good, but maybe not important

[Sowelu]

So dump archive.org into it.

Re:Good, but maybe not important

[Etcetera]

There's a lot of discussion about some of these problems in the various agencies tasked with documenting nuclear waste sites. Perhaps most famously, the WIPP:
Expert Judgment on Markers to Deter Inadvertent Human Intrusion into the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (Excerpts here)

It's a great read. One of the most critical determinations by the interdisciplinary team was that the most detailed information wasn't necessarily the most important or useful. You need multiple layers of messaging, when trying to convey something to people 10000 years from now who probably don't speak the same language. The most basic being: "There is a message here"

Re:Good, but maybe not important

[omnichad]

Save part of the thing to print microscopic human-readable instructions a la Voyager 1.

Re:Good, but maybe not important

[TapeCutter]

Scientists looked at the structure of quartz and determined that pretty much ALL of the Earth's quartz comes from the bodies dead sea sponges. If we can work that out by looking at the structure of quartz, then our ancestors will work this out from the structure.

However you don't need to read the content for the artifact to be informative to an archeologist. Geometric symbols smeared onto cave walls with coloured dirt have lasted at least 40Kyrs. Some of them are up to half a kilometer underground in places that are difficult to reach even with modern equipment. We have no idea what the symbols mean but they tell us a lot about the mental and physical abilities of our ancestors.

Re:Good, but maybe not important

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

They fired you because some jackass 20 years ago, who wasn't you, used a noname backup program you couldn't even figure out?

Re: Good, but maybe not important

[TapeCutter]

Also, how about archiving content created by the "plebs"

Store the slashdot archives on it!

Re:Good, but maybe not important

[CanadianMacFan]

Try reading some data files created 20 or 30 years ago. Never mind the problem of getting them off of the media. It's how do you read the format of the file. Sure simple things like text and GIF files are okay. But what about spreadsheets and word processing files? Anything from a database? Now imagine 100 years into the future and try to interpret a Word or RAW file.

Re:Good, but maybe not important

[St.Creed]

Now that is out-of-the-box thinking! And it should simplify disaster recovery as well!

Re:Good, but maybe not important

[St.Creed]

I would agree that that's the best option. They select for people who run away screaming and thereby show their intelligence. :P

Re:Good, but maybe not important

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

> in a billion years

I was wondering where all those fucking elf fey languages c'ame 'fro'm.

Re:Good, but maybe not important

[MikeMo]

Right, but I'm thinking the folks of a billion years from now might have a few more technological skills than we do. :)

Re:Good, but maybe not important

[lister king of smeg]

tl;dr, this media in TFA may be high density... but it really needs a standard filesystem, so that years to centuries from now, the data can be recovered. The only format I know which this can be done is old fashioned tar... but even with that, there are blocksize issues, and there are also compression items as well (gzip, bzip2, xz, etc.) Something like a PDF/A standard... but for filesystems and data.

If only we had a Universal Disk Format

Re:Good, but maybe not important

[rubycodez]

actually, what you are asking is trivial and done regularly. dbase III goes into Microsoft Access, for example. my 1980s compac discs play file too

Re:Good, but maybe not important

[JoeMerchant]

Yeah, awesome 5D digital data - that's gotta be good stuff.

Re:Good, but maybe not important

[JoeMerchant]

Wasn't this called microfische in the 1970s?

Re:Good, but maybe not important

[JoeMerchant]

Voyager encoded binary on an optical disc, this is just making wild claims about how much longer a crystal based structure might last - for all they know, when Planet X returns (once every 70,000 years) it could totally mangle their fine scale crystal structures.

Re:Good, but maybe not important

[lister king of smeg]

Try reading some data files created 20 or 30 years ago.

Okay here is the source code for the Multic operating system published in 1970's over 40 years ago.

http://web.mit.edu/multics-his...

Re:Good, but maybe not important

[Anonymous Coward]

what about the disposal problem?

Re:Good, but maybe not important

[FatdogHaiku]

Well that's what the box was for damit!
Some people just want everything...

Re:Good, but maybe not important

[Anonymous Coward]

The empirical evidence proves you wrong on this. There are plenty of cases in the comments above where media from just a decade or two ago was rendered unreadable due to lack of standards documentation. They might figure out how to read the data off but knowing what format it's in hundreds or thousands of years from now is far from a sure thing.

Re:Good, but maybe not important

[Anonymous Coward]

Hell no! It has only been 500 years and Americans cant speak proper English like I does.

Re:Good, but maybe not important

[techno-vampire]

Doesn't solve the language barrier...

What makes you think that there's going to be one in only 2000 years? I can think of at least seven languages off the top of my head that are at least that old and are still in use today, and I'd expect most of those to last at least another 2000 years. English, of course, isn't that old yet, but unless there's a worse breakdown of society than the Dark Ages, I'd expect that it'd still be in use, even if it's not the main international language any more.

Re:Good, but maybe not important

[Livius]

We have data "files" from thousands of years ago in unknown languages, and while only specialists are in a position to even attempt to decipher it, there are experts passionately trying their best, and the world will be excited if (when) they succeed.

Re:Good, but maybe not important

[Livius]

Who would still know how to... read this?

If it's designed to be deciphered easily, it won't be too hard. Include a child's picture book, progressively more difficult textbooks, dictionaries, a recent version of Wikipedia, etc.

Even if it's turns out it's not as easy as it sounds, as long as the medium has longevity, future archaeologists can spend decades or centuries on it if they have to.

Re:Good, but maybe not important

[Streetlight]

My wife is into going to estate sales. There's even a phone app that she looks at that shows where they are with pictures of what's in the sale. So last Saturday we found an estate sale that was in the neighborhood and we went. In the dusty basement there was some old computer accessories and I saw this little blue thing with a data cable attached and I said I bet this is a Zip drive. Sure enough. My first thought was I don't think you can buy the data cartridges for it any more. My second thought was I wonder if anyone under 30 knows what a Zip drive is. The folks running the sale had already had a trash dumpster out front of the house.

Re:Good, but maybe not important

[CanadianMacFan]

Like I said some things will work. I have diagrams that I made 22 years ago on a Mac while I was on a university work term that I can't open. I got away from the Mac for a long time and now I don't even know if anything can read the files. I have an old bunch of WordPerfect files that would probably only be able to be read in a copy of of WordPerfect but I'm not buying one since I know that they aren't that important to me. I can use some command line tools to get a basic look at the contents to make sure. I know my last year project is one of those files.

But how would someone coming across an archive of files know which ones were important if they could only open a portion of them? For example what would you do if I gave you a data file from Ingres that I had stored from the mid 1990s?

Re:Good, but maybe not important

[RabidReindeer]

what about the disposal problem?

Hammer.

Re:Good, but maybe not important

[dbIII]

Try reading some data files created 20 or 30 years ago

.
In my workplace we do that all the time. Sometimes even stuff from the early 1980s. The "secret" is to use files with published standard formats instead of obfiscated Microsoft crap.
Radical? No kids, the oil industry that is as conservative as it gets does it.

Re:Good, but maybe not important

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

I don't know how much of a barrier there will be, I just wanted to be careful to emphasize that my post only covered the problem of dealing with legacy storage media, not linguistic issues.

My wild guess is that (barring some cataclysm that makes prediction basically futile) whether or not they'll call the most English-like thing spoken in 4016 'English' or not will depend more on political continuity than on its exact properties(nation states love to have a pet language, so even minor regional differences can be dressed up into 'languages' and even serious barriers to mutual intelligibility can be handwaved as 'dialects' depending on where the borders are); but given the turnover of English vocabulary, a layman might well find something written in today's English familiar but not all that readable. It would be a surprise if you couldn't find a suitable specialist, though, much as it's not a huge challenge to find a classicist today.

Re:Good, but maybe not important

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

The dense storage mechanism proposed in the paper is significantly different, since it depends on manipulating birefringence; but the proposed 'just write some directions into the storage disk' part of the plan would be more or less identical, just on a sturdier medium.

Man, I kind of miss microfilm. Clunky; but you still run across items available on microfische and not in digital formats from time to time.

Re:Good, but maybe not important

[turbidostato]

" this media in TFA may be high density... but it really needs a standard filesystem, so that years to centuries from now, the data can be recovered."

Bidimensional centimetric storage.

The kind you can find in papyruses, babylonian tables or the Rosetta Stone. Anything else is not guaranteed to be recovered.

Re:Good, but maybe not important

[techno-vampire]

Some of the languages I was thinking about change faster than others. At least two of them are at least 3000 years old, and their early literature is still easily understood by modern speakers. (Specifically, Greek and Hebrew.) My guess is that today's English will be at least as understandable as Middle English is now, possibly as readable as Shakespeare.

Re:Good, but maybe not important

[Anonymous Coward]

My second thought was I wonder if anyone under 30 knows what a Zip drive is.

Reporting in.

Re:Good, but maybe not important

[Anonymous Coward]

I have an LS-120, two Zip-250s, a CDRW, a DVDRAM, a DC300 and a Colorado (tape drives), and three other tape drives of different form factors I can't remember, a 3", 3.5", 5.25" floppy drives, all sitting on a shelf across the room I'm in right now.

Re:Good, but maybe not important

[Anonymous Coward]

it wasn't an optical disc, it was closer to laserdisc (grooves and wobbles, like a phonogram).

Re:Good, but maybe not important

[Anonymous Coward]

Code is Data.

Re:Good, but maybe not important

[KGIII]

I'm not a linguist but aren't those languages no longer the same? They're similar, as far as I understand it, but they're not really the same and the reason that we're able to understand them as well as we are is because we've got works that show them as they evolve. I stress that I am not an expert but that was how I understood it. They might be technically that old but the old version is very different from what is in use today.

Re:Good, but maybe not important

[KGIII]

Word dawg. I don't be trippin' yo. You feel me?

I suppose, it probably does seem a bit odd but I'm sort of fluent in Ebonics. In fact, there are quite a few dialects. One of these days, I'll have to see if there are some formal studies and some literature about the dialects of American English in use. Not too many years ago, I actually had to translate for a female traveling companion - and we were just in Louisiana.

Re:Good, but maybe not important

[techno-vampire]

To some extent they've changed, but not as much in some cases as you'd think. Latin, as an example, has hardly changed at all. Classical Greek and biblical Hebrew are about as similar to the modern versions as Elizabethan English is to what we use today. As far as the others go, I don't know enough to say.

Re:Good, but maybe not important

[KGIII]

I'd start with a hex editor and find out if I could figure out the file type. That might actually be just enough to read it but, if not, I might be able to go from there and see what I find. I'd try reading it in plain text too, that often has an indicator as to the file type. Some things have the equivalent to a magic bit, even if not expressly for the same reason.

It should't be *too* bad, really. It's already being given to me so it's not like I have to worry about figuring out the file system, byte size, track(s), sectors, or things like that. Yeah, I'd probably be able to figure a little out and then work from there. No guarantees of course, as I'm assuming you picked a file type that you know would be difficult. However, I'd give it a good ol' College Try. (Silly expression, really. Trying hard is not necessarily a collegiate trait.)

Err... Did you have a specific file in mind? 'Cause it just might be possible and probably not too difficult seeing as you've already got the file retrieved from the storage mechanism. One of the hardest parts is figuring out old storage formats. Some of those are kind of odd, proprietary, and entirely undocumented - at least in public. If it's just a plain file that you created, the data might be easy enough to pull out of it. It probably won't be pretty but it *might* be recoverable.

Hell, I'm not even an expert in the field. I'm sure there's even better ways to go about it. Worst case scenario - I'd find the appropriate old computer with the appropriate software and recover it that way. I might have to write something to convert it to a new file format and then some sort of shim to export the data into that new format but that's possibly doable.

I'm pretty sure you can find lots of people here who are not only good at it but have done similar things. I've seen comments where people have recounted similar tales.

Re:Good, but maybe not important

[KGIII]

Latin is the only one I'm familiar with and it's unfair to say that it hasn't changed but I guess it's true. It hasn't really changed but we've bastardized the hell out of to make new words. It's also a dead language, no longer used to communicate. Some ritual use of it is still seen but nobody writes in it, nobody speaks it, and nobody is doing anything to maintain it as a language in and of itself. However, we're happy as hell to bastardize it and make words up with what might have been justifiable Latin back in the day.

So, using that language, I'm still not sure. I think if someone from ancient Rome were here today - they'd probably be a bit confused at some of the ways we use Latin. I suppose we might understand them.

Oddly, I took Latin for four years and I can actually sorta, kinda, maybe read Italian and it was a great help when I started learning Spanish. (I'm sort of fluent in Spanish, not quite but damned close. Sometimes I have to guess a word but it's usually close enough and the gist is there.) But, just having learned Latin means that I can actually read (and I can confirm that I do not speak it) Italian well enough to get the gist of it. I often don't even use a machine translation if I come across it. There's some variations to Spanish and I can generally read those well enough, even if I'm not certain and wouldn't try to speak them. I can kind of get some Portuguese but not nearly as much as I can with Italian.

At any rate, I'm not a linguist so I'll defer. It does seem that Latin's changed but a more accurate statement would be how we use it has changed. I think the point I was getting at was that they're probably (and I do not know) really not the same languages that they were 1000 years ago. They might not even be the same languages they were 500, 250, or even 100 years ago. Living languages evolve and dead languages aren't really in "use" so much. 'Tis not a big deal or anything, just not entirely clear - at least not in my head.

Re:Good, but maybe not important

[Joce640k]

Let's just hope nobody drops it on the floor and breaks it.

(Or install shag-pile carpets in the server room, just in case...)

Re:Good, but maybe not important

[Joce640k]

Try reading some data files created 20 or 30 years ago. Never mind the problem of getting them off of the media. It's how do you read the format of the file. Sure simple things like text and GIF files are okay. But what about spreadsheets and word processing files? Anything from a database? Now imagine 100 years into the future and try to interpret a Word or RAW file.

The trick is not to use deliberately obfuscated file formats (or software that generates them).

I'm pretty sure people in the future will be able to decipher ASCII / XML / Markdown / etc

Re:Good, but maybe not important

[Joce640k]

I'm sure they'll still be using ASCII + UTF8.

(What possible reason could there be to stop using that?)

Re:Good, but maybe not important

[Anonymous Coward]

BS. There is no empirical evidence of any sort, just completely baseless anecdotes that have been destroyed by proof to the contrary. You cannot name a single media format from any time in human history that cannot be read and to even suggest that a more advanced society would be unable to deal with our meager data storage technology is ridiculous and arrogant.

People won't lose the ability to analyze and study and there has never been a technology that has simply been lost.

Re:Good, but maybe not important

[techno-vampire]

Latin is the only one I'm familiar with and it's unfair to say that it hasn't changed but I guess it's true.

I'm not Catholic, but I have friends that are. My understanding is that in their seminaries there are theology classes taught in Latin because there are technical terms used that have no accurate equivalent in any other language. And, I've heard of priests communicating in Latin simply because it was the only language they both knew. Does that make it a living language? Well, I'm not a linguist either, so I can't say, but it's still in use for something other than the liturgy so it's not quite dead yet.

Re:Good, but maybe not important

[Anonymous Coward]

Only from the 1980s? Wow.

We routinely look at things from the 1960s. All kept on paper and (eventually) scanned paper converted to pdfs. If you pull the paper copy of something not yet converted, you get the pleasure of scanning it.

The oil industry sure plays fast and loose compared to the defense industry.

Re:Good, but maybe not important

[Zeroko]

If you could find the reader/editor software, you could use that. Even if the architecture had been completely forgotten, it could be reverse engineered. Of course, data files could give far fewer clues, especially if compressed, & if executables are compressed there might be too little code to follow for reverse engineering.

I reverse engineered (almost all of) a proprietary instruction set given just a single piece of code (the system ROM, 48 KB) & the ability to play with the system (with no low-level programming capability until I found an exploit from examining the code). If you did not have the system around, it would be harder, but things like Microsoft Word also have much more code.

Re:Good, but maybe not important

[Anonymous Coward]

I have no idea... They call it a dead language, I know that much. :/ Buggered if I know. I checked Wikipedia and they say it's dead. Err... I guess we can defer to them? However, I've actually communicated in Latin. I know they're still willing to butcher the language any time they feel like being clever - so words are being added to it. We discover new species and we give 'em a Latin name.

I really haven't got a clue. I'm gonna just defer to you and Wikipedia. *nods* That was not a topic of discussion in Latin class. I can conjugate verbs, if you want? I didn't even go to a religious school. I want to a private, boarding, preparatory school 'cause my parents figured I'd been really poorly behaved and the school system said I was smart. So, off I went... It turns out, being a rotten kid had its benefits.

Re: Good, but maybe not important

[Anonymous Coward]

The system administrator from hell

you olders will recognize him. He was also a mass murderer and could edit the mail queue in real time.

Re:Good, but maybe not important

[dbIII]

That too but the comment was about "data files". Published standards were the go until Gates and others used secrecy to lock customers in.

Re:Good, but maybe not important

[RockDoctor]

Scientists looked at the structure of quartz and determined that pretty much ALL of the Earth's quartz comes from the bodies dead sea sponges.

Can I get a smoke of that, cobber? That's some good gear you're smoking.

Where the absolute fuck did you get that particular piece of complete bullshit from?

Re:Good, but maybe not important

[rubycodez]

how old the wordperfect version? there are import filters going back to 5.1 (released 1989) for microsoft office

Ingres is open source, GPL licensed. I'd use cvs export feature of older version and import assistant of new

Re:Good, but maybe not important

[rubycodez]

really most the common old file formats for dbase, foxpro, wordperfect, ms works, lotus, etc. have imports into modern tools. LibreOffice for example does dbase and wordperfect

Re:Good, but maybe not important

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Plenty of room in the tape safe, thanks to the innovations in backup efficiency.

Buzzwords

[darkain]

Goddamn, I don't think I've seen so many buzzwords in a single summary in my life!

Re:Buzzwords

[Anonymous Coward]

Not even close: 3D printed 5D nanocrystals from privately mined Elon Musk Hyperloop asteroid mines. Private spaceport!

Re:Buzzwords

[Anonymous Coward]

Buzzwords? This summary has no buzzwords but it has a lot of jargon. The difference is that jargon has a specific technical definition and buzzwords are executive-speak with no clear meaning whatsoever.

Re: Buzzwords

[Anonymous Coward]

+ graphene.

Re:Buzzwords

[Anonymous Coward]

As read on the internet of things.

Re:Buzzwords

[WallyL]

On my iPhone 13 while taking an uber to my airbnb for my stacation.

And on indefinitely +1, or after a 1001C event...

[Anonymous Coward]

A user will need that file restored.

This has already been posted on Slashdot

[Anonymous Coward]

Timothy beat you to it.

Why bother

[Dunbal]

Major documents from human history, such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), ..., Magna Carta and Kings James Bible, have been saved as digital copies that could survive the human race.

So long as they called the directory: Documents we humans chose to ignore.

Re:Why bother

[vel-ex-tech]

Wait. The King James Bible is alive and well, isn't it? I can go to any parking lot in town and find a preponderance of passages from that version on bumper stickers. Some people have moved on to NIV, granted, but folks love to thump that KJV hard.

But yeah, not sure what the point is in keeping the other documents. Nobody knows what they say and nobody cares.

Re:Why bother

[Dunbal]

It's one thing to quote and recite the bible and it's another thing entirely to live it. I take the atheists' view: if only Christians acted the way they are supposed to, the world would be a better place.

Re:Why bother

[Anonymous Coward]

What's sad is that in a couple millenia, even if people could read the super memory, they would discover that, in their time, most of those documents had already been changed.

Re:Why bother

[Anonymous Coward]

Major documents from human history, such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), ..., Magna Carta and Kings James Bible, have been saved as digital copies that could survive the human race.

So long as they called the directory: Documents we humans chose to ignore.

Heh. The Bible is definitely something to be ignored...

Re:Why bother

[Anonymous Coward]

It's one thing to quote and recite the bible and it's another thing entirely to live it. I take the atheists' view: if only Christians acted the way they are supposed to, the world would be a better place.

Yeah gee, you think if Muslims acted the way they are supposed to that... oh wait, if they did, the 'world' would have its throat slit and the 'world' would be dead. But yeah, go ahead Mr. Luddite and focus on Christians. You know, they rarely cut someones head off just for disagreeing with them which makes you a real (fake) hero(!) for your stance.

(Written by a real atheist btw.)

Re:Why bother

[Dunbal]

Take your meds.

5 dimensions?

[pr0t0]

From TFA: Researchers at the University of Southampton have discovered a way to store data in five dimensions on nanostructure glass...

No, they certainly did not.

Re:5 dimensions?

[John Bokma]

"The information encoding is realized in five dimensions: the size and orientation in addition to the three dimensional position of these nanostructures,"

IIRC orientation = phase

Re:5 dimensions?

[Anonymous Coward]

You do realize "dimension" has other means than just spatial, right?

Re:5 dimensions?

[Anonymous Coward]

X,Y,Z spacial dimensions, as well as orientation and intensity. That's five dimensions.

Re:5 dimensions?

[slew]

"The information encoding is realized in five dimensions: the size and orientation in addition to the three dimensional position of these nanostructures,"

IIRC orientation = phase

Not exactly, but close. In birefringent crystals, there is a different index of refraction on each axis, Incident light in a specific direction to a section of birefringence will bend differently depending on the relative indices (because one axis will be slow and another will be fast)

These folks used a pulse laser to set a nanostructure located at an (x,y,z) in the crystal to one of 4 orientations for birefringence and one of 2 different light retardance yielding 3 bits of storage for each (x,y,z) location in the crystal (what they call 5D storage).

Their advance is that their technique uses a spatial light modulator (kind of like an LCD panel) to configure the 3 bits instead of traditional optics which would have required a mechanical apparatus (e.g., stepper+screw assembly on optics) and thus be bit serial and slow, although they still need to physically move the crystal to change what group of (x,y,z) locations to write.

The spatial light modulator was use to create a holographic (aka phase-like) image for some fancy optics (i.e., fresnel lens and a specially constructed half-wave plate matrix) to set the amplitude and the polarization of the light used to configure the nanostructure. But unlike a phase hologram, what they are actually configuring is the birefringence axes of that local structure (i.e., the local index of refraction relative to each axis of the crystal).

Why use birefringence instead of traditional phase recorded "holographic" memory storage? Because it's easier to write partial sectors, incident light from bits comes out at different angles (easier to build detectors), and you don't have to have expensive phase-controlled optics to illuminate the storage to read it out.

Indefinitely?

[Anonymous Coward]

Will it last indefinitely? Have they never heard of proton decay? If my data cannot reliably survive the heat death of the universe, then what is the point?

Re:Indefinitely?

[onepoint]

ROFL... thank you

Dupe. We covered this yesterday.

[skogs]

http://hardware.slashdot.org/s...

As long as they make superman crystal readers

[Anonymous Coward]

vinyl records, cassette tapes, and CD are still around, but the need for devices that read/play these memory devices are a niche market anymore.

Length, width, depth

[Anonymous Coward]

5D? What are the other two dimensions?

Re:Length, width, depth

[SpankiMonki]

http://www.orc.soton.ac.uk/fil...

Re:Length, width, depth

[93 Escort Wagon]

5D? What are the other two dimensions?

Flexibility and Grape.

Re:Length, width, depth

[compro01]

Orientation and intensity.

Re:Length, width, depth

[Anonymous Coward]

size and orientation

Re:Length, width, depth

[Anonymous Coward]

5D? What are the other two dimensions?

Flexibility and Grape.

I thought they were: Scale and Topaz

where to put it?

[roc97007]

> as digital copies that could survive the human race

(That's actually really cool.) Ok, let's assume that we've put the entirety of human knowledge on crystals that could survive us as a race. It seems like we should put it somewhere ... what would the term be ... astronomically safe? Maybe in solar orbit out past Jupiter? In the Oort cloud? On Pluto? The problem seems to be, the more remote we put it, the harder it will be for some other civilization to find.

Re:where to put it?

[NatasRevol]

Why would you put it in just one place?

Copies everywhere!

Re:where to put it?

[roc97007]

Why would you put it in just one place?

Copies everywhere!

Not bad. If the resulting crystals are small and light enough, perhaps part of every spacecraft and lander. All landers double as memorials of the human race up to that point.

Re:New Boss

[flopsquad]

It wouldn't be home without next-day reposts. Tomorrow they'll be telling us about this awesome new archival glass data storage concept that operates in FIVE DINENSIONS!
O_O

Re:Dupe. We covered this yesterday.

[swb]

We don't need to store data indefinitely, we just need to keep Slashdot up. Any lost information will be duplicated here eventually.

Out of my price range for sure.

[sims 2]

I would think this would be wonderful for companies offering long term storage for rarely accessed data even if it is write once media.

May lower the cost of services like Backblaze B2 and Amazon Glacier.

Otherwise I expect the equipment to be well out of anyone's price range for a while.
Should give Panasonic's Blu-ray storage a run for its money though.
http://hardware.slashdot.org/s...

Also....this is a DUPE http://hardware.slashdot.org/s...

Re:Dupe. We covered this yesterday.

[sinij]

Wait until someone patents this storage method in a "with computers" patent and then /. will have to stop dupes.

And how do you decode that data?

[Opportunist]

It's great that we can store data that will last for eons. Guess what: So did a lot of cultures that left us mountains of written text. Too bad nobody has the ability to read it anymore.

Storing data forever means nothing if the future recipients of that data cannot access it. And we're not even talking about some stone tablets that are at least easily readable if you know the language. You first of all have to find out THAT what you hold in your hands is actually data. Imagine I'm not familiar with our way of encoding data, what would I see in the disc the man holds in the picture in TFA? An image. And some other image above it. And I think in the middle there's some scratched square.

That's basically all there is to the "uninitiated".

No, folks. If you want to store data "forever", you first and foremost have to make sure that whoever digs it up also knows without a doubt that this IS data. Next you have to provide a way for him to decipher it. And THEN we can talk about the significance of producing data storage that can last until the end of the universe.

We already have had data storage that can outlive our civilization.

Re:And how do you decode that data?

[epine]

So did a lot of cultures that left us mountains of written text.

No culture has ever left us a "mountain" of text that we aren't able to at least partially decipher, unless we're talking a writing system measured in words/kilogram.

You're so clueless about this matter, it's almost shocking.

Leibniz would have recognized a digital archive of Wikipedia (say the size of the English Wikipedia, but in any human language) as a linguistic record at the drop of pin (I grant him a few weeks to crack UTF-8.) Every conceivable statistical measure would point to this. Perhaps a sentient dolphin—if our wildest theories about the nature of the dolphin mind play out—would have trouble dialing this in without the use of a calculating machine. One doesn't need to understand a single word in order to extract the semantic graph. From there, deep learning would practically spew out coloured buckets like a rainbow farting unicorn.

You don't think with hundreds of thousands of pages where the bold subject is immediately followed by "(1646-1716)" that this wouldn't quickly be recognized as ordered pairs of positive integers? With a bell curve on the interval distribution? And a sudden flat top at 2016? But only if you ignore the ones containing BC or BCE, which thin out tremendously the further back you go?

I wonder, could this axis be a physical dimension, or perhaps the infamous fourth dimension? We are talking a cognitive mode which has discovered planetary motion, are we not?

If you don't think any of that, well then, you have such a spectacularly low opinion of human or human-successor intelligence, I don't even think we can communicate.

Re:And how do you decode that data?

[Anonymous Coward]

Nope, because he can not comprehend that most people are a lot smarter than he is.

Re:And how do you decode that data?

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

There are some undeciphered texts out there; but some of the main causes of difficulty are scarcity and lack of context. It's not clear that you can really resurrect 'fluency' in a language that has been solidly killed off with only a written record to go on; but the larger the supply of texts and, ideally, the larger the supply of texts including multiple languages, pictures, accounting systems, periodic tables, etc. the better off you are.

Hard to say how much the future will care; but they'll have a much easier time of it if digging up one box of these things provides them with several hundred thousand pages of text, with translations into multiple contemporary languages where available, than we do when looking at something like Linear A, for which we have under 2,000 known specimens of any length(most of them short). Team Linguistics can get fairly clever when they have something to work with; but the archaeological record really, really, sucks in some cases.

Re:And how do you decode that data?

[Anonymous Coward]

Until the discovery of the Rosetta Stone, ancient Egypt did *exactly* that, and they didn't have the 'advantage' of using a medium where the 'writing' is invisible to the human eye. To recognize a linguistic record, you've got to be able to recognize a) that the object *is* a data storage medium (e.g. SD card), b) figure out how to extract the data from the storage medium (e.g. card reader), c) determine the encoding used (e.g. UTF-8), d) convert that into a set of discrete symbols you can operate on (e.g. glyphs), and *then* you've got to determine what type of data it is.

To move from a to b, you've got to have hardware that is *capable* of reading the storage medium, that can interface with your current systems.
That's a tricky enough job today with 10" floppies, because a) the hardware to read them is rare (even rarer if you want it functional), b) the hardware interfaces to communicate with them are virtually non-existant on modern systems, c) the file system format of the data on those disks is often unknown, and d) the file formats on those file systems are unknown and/or undocumented.

Your whole 'this is easy' mind-set is built on the presumption that the people who are looking at the storage medium will be able to recognize it as something with writing on it. That was easy with engraved stone tablets, because we could physically *see* the writing. If I give you a stack of unlabeled micro-SD cards, and ask you to tell me which ones contain text, you're not going to be able to do it without *also* having the hardware and software necessary to read those micro-SD cards.

Re:And how do you decode that data?

[onepoint]

dude, you seem to be the guy to work on the Voynich Manuscript or Rohonc codex.

Re:And how do you decode that data?

[drinkypoo]

Leibniz would have recognized a digital archive of Wikipedia (say the size of the English Wikipedia, but in any human language) as a linguistic record at the drop of pin

Sure, if he had a way to read it out...

Re:And how do you decode that data?

[rubycodez]

yet a CD would be readable in the 18th century by microscope, and certain data would be decipherable even on a music or VCD (titles and other metadata, etc.)

Re:And how do you decode that data?

[Anonymous Coward]

True but why not include a low tech rosetta stone to help that along? Maybe even eventual instructions with pictures at lower levels to at least hint at how to access the deeper and more complex layers? Maybe building up the understanding to a technology level that could start decoding? Something like the Rosetta stone/cosmicos/wikipedia? We could even try to simplify a device to last and do the first few layers as a holder of the device? Despite the convoluted part in the beginning I think the not truly necessary device part would be the most difficult. But hey think of our descendants! It sounds like it could be worth it even if they do maintain a significant technological level culture.At best it would help quell disputes about history and at worst provide a large pretty looking rock that someone might one day be able to figure out.

Re:And how do you decode that data?

[techno-vampire]

What you're missing here is the fact that there was never any doubt that the Egyptian inscriptions were written messages of one sort or another. The problem was that the last people who knew how to read hieroglyphics left no instructions on how to translate them into any other form of writing. The only reason that we can translate them today is the fact that the same text is present in three different languages, one of them Greek, on the Rosetta Stone, giving us a way to work out what the symbols meant.

Re:And how do you decode that data?

[roman_mir]

If you don't think any of that, well then, you have such a spectacularly low opinion of human or human-successor intelligence, I don't even think we can communicate.

- you should read his opinions on humans on this forum, he is a collectivist that believes humans are animals that need to be herded and governed, not individuals with individual abilities that are vastly different from one to another, not individuals that value individual personal freedom over collective order and pre-defined routine.

He is of a very low opinion of human intelligence, perhaps the reason for it is self-projection.

Your Superman editing powers have failed us.

[dsmatthews9379]

http://hardware.slashdot.org/s...

Hmmmm

There should be a rule, if you post to /. you must read /., all of it.

This will never sell

[cyber-vandal]

The blank media tax will be prohibitive.

Damn!

[Anonymous Coward]

This means I am going to have to buy the White Album again... and.. Catcher in the Rye for that matter..

Not just a dupe...

[Areyoukiddingme]

I keep hoping for journalism. Foolish, I know. From TFA:

...similar to that found in Polaroid sunglasses.

That's quality, that is.

It continues:

The technology was first demonstrated in 2013 when a 300 kilobit digital copy of a text file was successfully recorded in 5D.

Thanks for that. Anybody who has been paying attention knew this wasn't just a dupe, but a two year old dupe. (We won't ask why we're talking about the size of a text file in kilobits.) Except, is it? Why are we talking about it again? Did the write speed go up? Did the theoretical longevity improve? Did the mome raths outgrabe? TFA doesn't say.

It gets worse. The effing press release doesn't say. And it is in fact the idiot source of the quote in the previous summary that managed to be mangled unicode:

...virtually unlimited lifetime at room temperature (13.8 billion years at 190 degrees C )

The University of Southampton press office believes room temperature is 190 degrees C. A fine educational institution, no doubt. (And slashdot refuses to even display ASCII 248, let alone the unicode degree symbol.)

The whole things look like a botched effort on the part of the university to drum up some funding, especially since the press release ends with:

The team are now looking for industry partners to further develop and commercialise this ground-breaking new technology.

Yeah, no kidding...

Best of all, at the current write throughput (not mentioned in this idiot press release), it would take approximately 1200 years to fill a single disc to capacity.

Stargate SG-1

[Anonymous Coward]

After i read this, it reminded me of those crystals they used in stargate sg-1 for all the alien computers

Re: Stargate SG-1

[Anonymous Coward]

It made me think of the data crystals on Babylon 5.

Bullshit. Complete and utter bullshit.

[Anonymous Coward]

360TB on a 500 square millimeter glass disk in three layers comes out to a center-to-center distance of 0.7nm between dots in a layer. That's six times the diameter of a silicon atom. They are absolutely not writing that into glass with a laser. The press is eating this up, and they wonder why they can't sell subscriptions anymore.

Re:Bullshit. Complete and utter bullshit.

[Anonymous Coward]

++this. There's no mention of the areal density of the storage, except that they say the bits are written with 5 micro-meter spacing. Hard drives are at about 1.5Tb/in^2, where a 6TB hard drive would need about (6*8/1.5=) 32 square inches, divided into multiple platters - where a 3in platter with a 1in spindle, has a usable area of about 6 square inches. 5 micro-meter spacing in two dimensions is 0.04Tb/m^2, which is about 40k times lower density than the hard drive. Even with three layers, and varying size and orientation of the dots, they're not going to make up that difference, let alone get to 360TB.

Even worse, there's no mention whatsoever of writing rate or reading rate in the article. When you go to the paper, they say an optimal writing speed was 200kHz, which hundreds of times slower than hard disks that write at tens of MByte/s.

Personally, I'm not very interested in archival storage at the billions of years level - storage that lasts a hundred years is plenty, given my remaining lifetime and the rate of further progress of technology.

What about a hammer?

[Lumpy]

will it survive being smashed by a hammer?

Technically if you wrote the data to the crystal properly with redundant writes you should be able to.

How long would it take an OS to fill it?

[Harlequin80]

Just a silly thought. But if you put this into a current PC as it's main storage medium how long would it last before it was full assuming it could never delete anything written, so every single write is to a new block. You definitely wouldn't want it to swap to it but I'm kinda thinking along the lines of building up stacks of notebooks. Never accidentally delete anything ever again. Of course all your porn that got cached to disk would be there as well.

Dupe, dupe, dupe

[scdeimos]

Nanostructured Glass Could Provide Highly Durable, Deeply Dense Data Storage

I know, I know, people have already commented that it's a dupe. But if we can have dupe stories all the time, why not dupe comments as well? :)

So 'self assembled crystalline"

[NEDHead]

Will anyone recognize it as different than a chunk of salt? Is the knowledge of the universe being wasted on dinner tables every day? Should we be reading every truckload coming out of the salt mine just in case?

Re:So 'self assembled crystalline"

[physicsphairy]

We've used ancient structures as quarries. Used mummies as medicine. Shakespearean manuscripts have been burned for fuel by the unwitting. Fossil fields ground up. As unlikely as it may seem, it actually wouldn't be terrible to give some occasional thought to whether there is anything useful being lost in the salt mines.

Superman memory crystals?

[Chris Mattern]

So everything gets read out by Marlon Brando?

But ..

[PinkyGigglebrain]

what if they get wet?

Re:Dupe. We covered this yesterday.

[0100010001010011]

We covered this in 2012 and 2013.

http://hardware.slashdot.org/s...

http://hardware.slashdot.org/s...

YES!!

[lactose99]

My cat pictures will last longer than ever before!

Re:Dupe. We covered this yesterday.

[JoeMerchant]

If data hasn't been accessed for over 100 years, is it really of any value, anyway? If nobody cares to hot-swap in new "limited lifetime" backup media into the RAID array as elements fail, then the value of data in the array is pretty suspect. Sure, it's cool to think you're writing indelible graffiti on the sidewalks of the universe for all who come after you to ponder, but of all the yottabytes of crap that we're generating today, how much of that will anybody really care enough about in the year 3015 to bother to scan it?

Wait - is that the data crystal from zardoz?

[Anonymous Coward]

Wait - is that the data crystal from zardoz?

Maybe there are already crystals with info encoded

[Anonymous Coward]

Has anyone considered that maybe the info is already in crystals from when aliens visited the planet long ago, and maybe we can now read the crystals they left behind? If we can do it and the sun is a second-generation star, surely someone else could have thought of it already! Just have to find where they left the useful crystals....

I, for one, am glad that they decided to place

[mark_reh]

the King James Bible among the other great works of human creativity. I wouldn't want aliens or just more advanced humans who find this stuff 100k years from now to think that we were superstitious idiots.

360, eh

[SimonInOz]

360kb, takes me back to, oh, 1976?

Oh, 360TB.

Sorry.

Re:360, eh

[R3d M3rcury]

...which ought to be enough for anyone.

What Readme?

[Anonymous Coward]

Doesn't solve the language barrier; but it would allow you to do some amount of self-documenting of the format, starting with a visible 'README',

Oh, yeah, 'cause average chums read README files, especially in their native language.

Re:Dupe. We covered this yesterday.

[Anonymous Coward]

If data hasn't been accessed for over 100 years, is it really of any value, anyway?

This might be a good question to ask on November 23, 2063, or whenever the government finally gets around to declassifying everything surrounding Kennedy's assassination.

WTF is wrong...

[Mr_Nitro]

the king james fucking bible bullshit? really? ffs ....we should put a stop to this irrational bullshit being propagated....damn religious virus..../ rant

Sigh

[ThatsNotPudding]

..Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), Newton's Opticks, Magna Carta and Kings James Bible,...

Grimm's Fairy Tales would have been a better choice.

Freakin' lasers

[Anonymous Coward]

Dunno about everyone else, but all I heard was LASERS WOOOOO!!!

What about this old invention?

[Anonymous Coward]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyper_CD-ROM