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

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: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.

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.