256GB Geometrically Encoded Paper Storage Device

jrieth50 noted that a method of using geometric shapes combined with color to store up to 256GB of data on a sheet of paper or plastic. The article says "Files such as text, images, sounds and video clips are encoded in 'rainbow format' as colored circles, triangles, squares and so on, and printed as dense graphics on paper at a density of 2.7GB per square inch. The paper can then be read through a specially developed scanner and the contents decoded into their original digital format and viewed or played."

Comments

This looks like a lie

[OeLeWaPpErKe]

What does this bring that normal scanners can't ?

Let's see A4 - 256Gig. Let's say n different colors.

He'd need to store 256*1024*1024*1024*8 = 2199023255552 bits
on A4 = 210 mm x 297 mm = 62370 mm^2 = 2456 inch

That makes 895 367 775 bits per inch. To encode that you'd need 895 367 775 / log2(n) dots. Increasing the number of colors can buy you some leeway, but not that much.

The surface area of such a dot would be 1/30 000 000 th of a millimeter.

Where will you find paper that has surface flaws significantly smaller than that ? No matter what the encoding, you're still going to need it. So this is a scam, plain and simple.

Re:This looks like a lie

[kubalaa]

Your scheme doesn't work because triangles are not atomic; they are made out of lines, which are described in terms of endpoints, which have a finite resolution. For example, an inkjet printer would make a triangle by printing dots at some fixed resolution. A drafting machine or laser printer might be able to draw the triangle without resorting to dots, but the elements of the triangle can still only be positioned with finite accuracy.

Let's say that we're drawing very tiny triangles as close to our resolution limit as possible (which we must do if we want to fit a lot of them). Such a triangle might be, say, 3 x 3 resolution units, so a hollow, up-triangle might look like this:

010
101
111

But look: there are 2^9 (or 512) possible shapes that can be made in this grid -- so by using only 64 different triangles, we are actually underutilising our medium. It doesn't matter what technology you use, any shape other than a "dot" is itself made out of smaller units like "dots", so restricting our vocabulary to certain shapes (rather than arbitrary sequences of dots) will waste space.

Do The Numbers

[SQL Error]

2.7GB per square inch, eh?

Alright, that's 21.6 gigabits per square inch.

For the sake of argument, let's say that the printer and scanner can reliably print and scan colour at 24-bit fidelity (which is nonsense, but makes the numbers nice and tidy): 900 million pixels per square inch.

That's 30,000 dpi.

That means you'd have to print and scan pixels less than a micron across. In full colour.

I don't think so.

Ultimate compression?

[Flain]

This story is a hoax.

Lets just imagine for one second that its true.

Instead of printing this data onto paper, why not just store it loslessly in a bitmap file? After all, printers only have a certain DPI and a certain amount of colours. If you could take this bitmap file and somehow extract 256GB of data from it, that sure would be some cool magic.

Re:RTFA

[fatphil]

The entropy rate of arbitrary pixel values is higher than the entropy rate of related pixel values (such as shapes).

Therefore the obvious way gives a better information density.
Therefore comparing against the obvious way is *not* necessarily the behaviour of a jackass, but quite possibly the behaviour of someone who has a grasp of Information Theory.

Time for everyone to borrow Cover and Thomas from their local library, methinks.

FatPhil

Not Dots

[Sinbios]

All the "proofs" in the comments that show this is a scam so far calculates how many dots can be printed/read from a piece of paper, and then corresponds each dot to a bit of data. Well, guess what. The whole point of this thing is he's NOT USING DOTS. This may very well be bullshit, but the "proofs" against it are meaningless.

Re:Robustness & Feasibility

[Anonymous Coward]

Based on the number of scratched and ruined disks I've got (including music CDs that got a mysterious fogginess to them and are now unreadable), as well as various forms of CD destroying bacteria, I'd have to say that optical disk technology is nowhere near as "robust" as you seem to imply. Conversely, we are still digging up readable paper from thousands of years ago. Something tells me that archaeologists in the year 3006 will not find a single readable CD from this decade.

As a genealogy hobbyist, I keep paper backups of everything, because I know the paper form is likely to last a hell of a lot longer than the digital versions.

Re:maybe not scam?

[Yartrebo]

Can you really print 4,096 dots per linear inch on paper and still be able to read each individual dot? My guess is that beyond 300 dpi or so bleeding becomes a major issue and somewhere beyond that the grain size of paper becomes an issue.

Also, can you really have 256 distinguishable color levels on a piece of paper - especially considering that paper is not a uniform color on the micro-scale (it's made up of short strands of cellulose)?

Even if all these problems can be overcome, there is the limiting factor of diffraction, which will limit any optical system (paper or otherwise) to a data density of about 1/wavelength^2, which is roughly the density of a DVD.

I've always defended Slashdot, but..

[Peter Cooper]

In this Digg generation, I've still kept reading Slashdot. The community here feels a lot nicer (surprising, I know!) and a lot more clued up. It's just a shame, then, that idiotic stories like this get posted. Usually I wouldn't whine about a bad story, but it was an hour or two before this story hit that I read the whole "why it's a scam" story on Digg.. so I read how stupid something is on Digg, only for it to be posted seriously here at Slashdot.

It's time for some sort of shakeup with editorial at Slashdot. Digg is imperfect and a lot of the users are idiots (I'd certainly say the average Slashdotter is significantly more intelligent and clued-up) but Slashdot is slow and has a poor editorial process. Could we, perhaps, strive to produce something with the perfect mix of the two? Fast news, the ability to vote, etc, but coupled with the superb Slashdot audience? It's all false hope, I'm sure, but I have more hope in people than technology.. so Slashdot is just the place to bring this up IMHO.

Re:I've always defended Slashdot, but..

[Lord_Dweomer]

While I agree that Digg's quicker updates make it more "relevant", and that Slashdot indeed needs a shakeup with its editors there is a reason Slashdot is still superior. In the Digg comments for that story, most of the people quite obviously have no science to back up their responses. On Slashdot you will find some of the most thorough scientific debunking on the net. You see, not only do the intelligent people on Slashdot hate to see crap like this posted, but they also hate for people to read it and go away believing it. So they do their due diligence and make a post explaining why, scientifically, something is a load of crap.

And yes, there are plenty of pseudo scientists who post their crap along with the real ones, but the good ones tend to be validated by others and filter to the top. So while I read Digg to stay up to date on the latest greatest 5 minutes of distraction, I come to Slashdot to read the discussions and learn the varying viewpoints on things.

Re:Related prior art

[iocat]

You're thinking of the Cauzin Softstrip. It was basically just 2D barcodes. It totally worked though; my computer teacher in middle school had one and it worked well.

If you assume an 8.5 x 10 inch sheet of paper (85 square inches), 300 x 300 dpi x 256 colors, you end up with 1.95 billion bits of info you can put on a page. Divided by 8 (to get bytes), you end up with something like 244GB of potential info. But you'll need to have some good error correction and registration. if you look at the original link (which is a link from tfa), it basically looks like a colorful, 2D bar code. I guess the color could make it a 3D barcode.

So despite the "fake" and "scam" tags on this article, there's no reason IMHO to doubt the theory, although I don't know if the application would be super practical.

Re:Robustness & Feasibility

[synthespian]

Your claim that paper last less because it gets exposed to elements has no data to support it.

Paper lasts 2000 years, as archaelogists will tell you. If you have error-correcting code, it sounds achievable.
I believe NIST has made a study about this, IIRC, some years ago. Digital media is bad media. I mean, for starters, large business have trouble with 1995 .doc files...Imagine something you want to last 100 years. Maybe LaTeX files can, if you print the code.

Regarding the use of paper, one begins to imagine the use of robotics to handle huge "Rainbow Formats" paper archives. I'm not so sure how you can have very large databases using this format. I can't envision this being feasible. Maybe it is, time will tell.

By the way, this begs the question: how useful is such a technology without open source software? Much more interesting it would be if the specification was open, and if the technology could be made to work with any old scanner and any lousy home printer. *Then* you'd have a revolution. Right now, it seems he wants a monopoly. We all know how Great Proprietary Ideas finnish sometimes: nobody cares about it; it dies.

Also, I hope a patent for "saving data on paper" is not filed, we'd loose our right to use pencils. However, he did let the cat out of the box. I expect to see copycats, just like there are many HD manufacturers.

Anyways, this is one of the most ground-breaking things I've read in years. Sainul Abideen is a genius.

Re:RTFA

[Anonymous Coward]

8.5*9600*11*9600*3 bits != 3.23136 TiB.

Re:Related prior art

[PaladinAlpha]

If what you're saying was true, wouldn't it be easier to just encode two dots, rather than in a 3x3 matrix? Dot 1 for color, dot 2 for color? Same result. All that other rotation hullabaloo is less efficient than just putting one more dot, since we're talking about upper bounds. If you're using 256 colors, that's the same as one byte. (1 byte = 0-255, 256 states.) So you're talking about a byte, and then another byte. Two bytes, or a 16 bit integer. EVERYTHING you've said about this 256 select 2 garbage applies to 16 bit integers, without exception.

Let's for sake of simplicity consider just one 3x3 matrix, and surely you can agree the rest of the concepts for the full sheet will follow.

We say: 3x3x256, a byte is 256, so 3x3 bytes, so 9 bytes (using 256 color). You're saying 3,329,280 combinations per 3x3. As a little experiment, let's see how many 'combinations' 9 bytes can hold, or the highest number you can count to with nine bytes, which is 9x8 or 72 bits: 2^72 is 4,722,366,482,869,645,213,696. So with our nine bytes we could hold every single combination that you postulated per matrix FOUR QUADRILLION TIMES just by assigning it a unique number. Your 'innovative' technique does nothing but waste space in a ratio of 4,000,000,000,000 to 1.

Now, the mistake you're making: bits don't store 'combinations', they store states. In order to increase the number of states you have to DOUBLE the number of combinations. A single bit has two combinations: 0 and 1. Two bits has four combinations: 00, 01, 10, 11. Three bits has eight combinations: 000, 001, 010, 011, 100, 101, 110, 111. And so on. That's why people have been repeatingly telling you to take the log and not just use the number. Combinations do not equal bits and do not equal storage space.