Sony Develops 25 GB Paper Disc

jaaron writes "TOPPAN Printing and Sony today announce the successful development of a 25GB paper disc based on Blu-ray Disc technology. Yes, that's right, *paper*. Details will be announced at the Optical Data Storage 2004 conference to be held from April 18th to April 21st at Monterey, California."

Comments

Re:Interesting

[Mateito]

Its not that hard.

300 dpi is 300x300 dots per square inch.
You have 8.5 x 11 square inches.
That means you have 300x300x8.5x11 dots per page.

What's your encoding mecanism?

If you forget error detector and recovery, divide by 8 and you have byte. Divide by 1024 and you have real kilobytes, then by 1024 and you have real MB, (but given that we are trying to sell thing scheme, divide it by 1,000 and 1,000,000 respectively to give Marketing Bytes).

Given the low quality of the media, I'd be inclined to use 10bit bytes to allow double bit error detection and single bit error recovery. This also makes the maths easier.

So you end up with 300x300/10 = 9000 bytes = 9k per square inch, and 840k per page. Make a double sided version and yo have nearly 1.7MB.

Environmentally friendly?

[machead526]

So is this good or bad for the environment? Can these disks be recycled? Can they be made from recycled paper? Do they contribute less to landfills, or do they result in more trees getting chopped?

Re:SIX Sided cheat sheet!

[Dun Malg]

Last year my 30 year old daughter informed me of how much data a 7th grade student could put on the six sides of a new yellow pencil. From a few feet away it looks like it has been chewed on so the teacher asks no questions. Use only three sides and it even stays hidden when you put the pencil down.

When I was in 5th grade, I used a similar trick for a test in which we had to name all the states and their capitals. Rather than spend 4 weeks memorizing those useless facts, I simply wrote them on my pencil in the format of "Sacramento, California" = "SAC-CA". My prototype pencil turned out to be too obvious, though, so I then created a modified alphabet that only I could read. I probably spent more time refining that alphabet than it would have taken me to memorize the stupid state capitals, but in the end the alphabet was a better investment. I was for years able to use it as a "plain sight" type cheat-sheet font, whereby I could write out names, dates, or other mnemonic reminders on (say) the paper cover of a history book and leave it in plain sight next to my desk. To anyone else it looked like meaningless scratchings. I managed to get through YEARS of school without having to learn anything! ;)