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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."
My question would be how much wear & tear can a sample of this medium stand before it is rendered unreadable? I would highly doubt one would be able to fold it--however it would be interesting to see whether creating a diagonal read/write scheme would protect from vertical & horizontal folds with the proper ECC. I think the plastic sheets could potentially be as robust as discs but would you be able to bend them? I doubt it though if they allowed it, it'd probably end up being more expensive than a disc.
Interesting technology but I'd sure like to hear a lot more of the details of how it works & how it performs before I make a solid judgment on its feasibility.
My work here is dung.
I would love to know which scanner has the ability to scan with such high fidelity.
600dpi times 8*11 inches makes 32M dots. To get 26GB you need 6500 bits per dot. This gives either an amazing resolution in color separation (as opposed to, say, 32 bits on a screen - maybe 700 different frequencies, each with 10bit separation), or much higher dot density - something like 50000dpi!
Unless he is doing something really novel, like relying on computational power elsewhere to do the compression.
I have seen articles about algorithms that allow you to calculate the value of any decimal place in Pi.
Plus, additional ones that allow you to prove (in a mathematical way) that any given string of characters you care to wish for are present in some location somewhere in the Pi decimal string.
SO the first point allows you to decompress knowing the beginning and ending values, and the second point allows you to pick some pretty long strings.
That would not really be compression, but more of a lookup table or code that allows anybody to have the table (or recompute it as necessary).
I agree, completely bogus. For one, you would need to pay lots of attention to the quality of the paper and resolution of the printer to the point it would BE the point of this method of data storage. Paper, is a piss poor medium for really precise images. Plastic or foil would be much better. But this guy mentions that only in passing.
I recall lots of talk of holographic storage and how a cube of some size stores X. So far real practical data storage has not come of that either.
Send your investment checks elsewhere, in other words.
...the old 'softstrip'(?) barcodes from BYTE Magazine? And wasn't there something in NIBBLE too? Did anyone else here ever use them, and what stories do you have about them?
I remember _finally_ finding an HP barcode wand at a show and hooking it up to my Apple][+. I wrote-up a reader and had a lot of fun doing it and used it to load their programs (ASCII BASIC) - I was surprised at how efficient it was (for the times). It beat the daylights out of cassette storage (couldn't afford a disk drive at that time) and it led me to writing an output application so I could barcode all my work to the printer for storage. Most of those pages are still legible after all these years.
Good times.
"It's time to take life by the cans." ~ Bender ("Bendin' in the Wind", ep. 3-13)
That claim doesn't make a whole lot of sense, because there are still bits of computer hardware that have and make use of the ability to distinguish between more than two levels of voltage (dial-up modems, for example). In transistors, going with the on/off motif greatly simplifies hardware design. But as long as you can reliably distinguish between n levels, you should be good to go.
2D barcodes aren't a good metric for the theoretical maximum for storing data on paper. Reasons:
- since it is assumed that some portion of the barcode may be damaged, you have to devote a lot of space to error correction.
- it has to be scannable from any direction.
- it has to be scannable almost instantly by the sort cheap, rugged handheld device you'd find at millions of point-of-sale stations.
- it has to present a big enough target for the person doing the scanning to easily find it.
But I'm still really suspicious of the initial claims. The thing that really bothers me is the idea of encoding using "shapes". I can see using pixels, and I can see using various colors (with some limitations on the number of different colors the scanner can reliably distinguish). But using shapes only seems to make sense if you have both the ability to squirt multi-shaped pixels from your inkjet (I've never heard of such a thing), and also the ability to scan at a significantly higher resolution than you can print. If it takes multiple pixels to create a shape, then I find it odd that those pixels aren't being devoted to "more dots".
Also, I think we need to distinguish between two claims. First, there is the claim that this student is able to reliably write 256GB of data to a sheet of paper and read it back. Then there is the claim that this feat can be bootstrapped into a production mass storage system without extreme difficulty. I consider the former much more likely than the latter.
BTW, my back of the envelope calculation: 8.5x11in * 1800dpi * 1800dpi * 256colors = 77 billion bits of information, or about 9GB. I think 1800dpi is the output you get with a high quality laser printer. I doubt that "theoretical maximum" is achievable, because even the best printers are designed only to impress the human eye.
You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!
AFAIK, a CMYK printer can still squirt multiple colours onto one point. Since it's pointless to mix with black, and mixing all three gives you a dark brown that's pretty close to black, that leaves eight reliable colours: white (no ink), cyan, magenta, yellow, red, green, blue, black. So that's basically three bits per dot. For a piece of 8.5x11" paper at 1440dpi, I figure only about 69MiB of storage. Not looking very plausible...
In other word, this person is claiming a way to compress arbitrary 250GB into 5GB, losslessly. That is impossible theoretically.
No, the person made no such claims. You have created a strawman. In a computer, when you read a "1" what is the chance that the following bit will be a "1"? I'm not sure what the real probablility is, but I'm guessing somewhere around 50%. Why? Because the bits are not dependent on the previous bits. However, this guy is using shapes and patterns. Perhaps there is some manner of differential information stored in there. The pixel below is blue and the pixel above is red? Then add green to the blue pixel. I'm not saying that I think he is correct. I'm saying let him prove it before all the people here say it is impossible because they can't think of how it works.
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Resolving 16 bits of color for a typical four-color (CMYK) laser printer or even a digital press won't improve things, because you always have exactly four colors plus the medium color (most typically white). Increasing color depth can improve with dye sublimation and similar technologies, but the ink and paper quality (especially absorption rate) need to be strictly controlled.
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The problem is, all you guys who posted above me aren't thinking inside the box.
I expect something a bit more sophisticated than this is being done. A bigger matrix would allow more distinctive shapes and probably be more robust against dust motes, etc. I have no doubt that the technique can be made to work, and it is really appealing! It sounds like the software being developed will work with many of the printers and scanners that are already in common use. And we've got centuries of experience in handling paper. A four drawer filing cabinet could be tomorrow's petabyte archival storage.