What is Digg?129 Comments
- isemism, on 10/12/2007, -15/+126No, not Dances-With-Wolves Indian, Fixes-computer-over-phone Indian.
//prepares for burrial - macatak, on 10/12/2007, -4/+49oops. there are a lot more than 1024 bytes in a megabyte... i'm a bit dumb. scale that down to 20MB per page...
- macatak, on 10/12/2007, -10/+43some quick maths...
600(dpi)*600(dpi)*5(number of ink colours + no do) = 1800000 possible values per sq. inch
1800000/8(bits in a byte)/1024(bytes in a MB) = 219.7265625 (MB per sq inch)
219.7265625 * 96.68 (number of sq inches on a peice of A4) = 21243.1640625MB
So without funny compression and stuff, you could get ~21GB on a page of A4. Right? - msjacoby, on 10/12/2007, -6/+40I dunno about this....
- kanavulator, on 10/12/2007, -4/+32Soon they're going to be storing data with a series of knots on strings tied to a yet thicker string! It's brilliant!
EDIT: The Incas beat me to it, digg this down. - omaryak, on 10/12/2007, -1/+21It's eco-friendly in the sense that it's biodegradable. Plastics take centuries to degrade.
- benggg, on 10/12/2007, -5/+22don't they have paper storage called punch cards?
- BinDrinkin, on 10/12/2007, -5/+21Sounds a bit flimsy to me
- Auxon, on 10/12/2007, -2/+15I'm skeptical, because the article doesn't explain how things are encoded and decoded, beyond that it uses geometrical shapes, instead of binary.
Does anyone have more information? - imikedaman, on 10/12/2007, -1/+14Since I appear to be the only one here who "gets it", I'll say it succinctly:
The Register runs spoof articles all the time. - quietbob, on 10/12/2007, -1/+14I can see it catching on...fire!
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -3/+15This is good as proof of concept, but I really can't see it catching on.
- axiomflash, on 10/12/2007, -9/+20the whole idea of this being 'ecological' is ridiculous. Where do you think all that paper is going to come from? Plus it's not a rewritable or long lasting system as far as I can suppose, so drive space would need replacement 10x as often.
- doctechnical, on 10/12/2007, -1/+11Two words: Cauzin Softstrip. Circa mid-80s, it was a high-density (for the time) optical data storage system, Byte Magazine used to publish source code listings in this format. Went over like a lead balloon.
- eatsushi, on 10/12/2007, -0/+10"Sounds good...except...I believe that paper is biodegradable....I'm not sure how comfortable I am with the concept of my data decaying after only a few years."
I'm sure that by the time it becomes usable, the paper will have been developed into a life lasting element. What I am really interested in is how much government info can be hidden in a pic of Jenna Jameson to pass around har har. - dr3d, on 10/12/2007, -2/+12revolutionize ! .. how so ? ignoring the impossibility of the claim -- what would be the access time ?? or longevity of storage?
- arcele, on 10/12/2007, -1/+10yeah...but the punch code is binary (hole or no hole), while this is....well not binary, they mention 3 shapes in the article, but I guess it could be a lot more than that....then again, the more shapes you have, the more pixels you'd have to print out on the paper. Aren't these larger shapes just a series of pixels that are in fact binary (either a pixel is printed or it isn't)....this article is mildly interesting, but like a lot of you, I'm very skeptical about how viable this technology really could be. To me, it would make more sense to have single pixels printed and read, they can be read as 1/0 rather than trying to determine what a 6x6 pixel print's shape is.
- anteyekon4myst, on 10/12/2007, -0/+8So this guy basically found a way to install Windows with toiletpaper? I could see it now, Microsoft Plush. Then Linux comes out with Toiletbuntu opensource toilet paper. Then for years people are positing on message boards. My toiletpaper is softer than yours! Mine has a clock! Mine wipes your ass for you! Mine is so sleek you wish you were full of crap!
- pbjorge12, on 10/12/2007, -2/+10The paper is going to come from trees grown specifically from paper...
So in theory the more of these disks you buy the more eco-friendly it is... - arcele, on 10/12/2007, -0/+8Sounds good...except...I believe that paper is biodegradable....I'm not sure how comfortable I am with the concept of my data decaying after only a few years.
- fgsfds, on 10/12/2007, -1/+9Your math is wrong.
Lets take a single byte for example.
Each byte has 8 bits.
Each bit is either a 0 or a 1.
By your math, that would be 8*2 possible values per byte, for a total of 16 possible values. However, it turns out that a byte can ACTUALLY store 256 different values (I would list them all out to prove it, but that would be a stupid waste of time). The REAL calculation is (Number of possible states)^(Number of elements), which means that a byte is 2^8, which means that a byte can hold 256 possible values.
Now, lets assume that the printer is a standard inkjet, with 3 colors plus black. That means that it would be 4^N. N in this case would be 34,804,800 dots, by the by.
(Incidentally, that's the exact number of bits you would have on that same page if you printed in pure black and white.) - sreeks, on 10/12/2007, -1/+8Well this news item was covered in Indian papers before and looks like he has developed the full cycle of encoding and decoding. I would tend to believe that this can be used as a storage medium in say a smartcard instead of a full scale storage solution. And of course the paper should not be flimsy
- Skeuomorph, on 10/12/2007, -0/+7It might look like this:
http://www.dangermouse.net/esoteric/piet/samples.html - Mike89, on 10/12/2007, -3/+10I think you'll find there's already a prefectly good paper-based storage system: it's called a book.
Straight from TFA, baby! - danr, on 10/12/2007, -0/+6neorporcupine: I don't believe you can figure halftones into this, as the use of halftones relies on adjacent printed colors blending after they reach the eye. The maths are considering each printed "dot" as a unique bit, creating a color with halftoning requires more than 1 dot.
- eatsushi, on 10/12/2007, -1/+7Because you didn't read, you skimmed like a jackass
- jaydj, on 10/12/2007, -1/+7Er... so you scan in this piece of paper... and then decode the image into data. What's the size of the raw image once it's scanned? 10 MB? Why can't you just save the image as a compression technique? Why bother with the paper? What happens when I save the scanned images onto the paper disc?
The student can "claim" anything he wants. I claim that this is BS. - nightowl313, on 10/12/2007, -0/+6That's because there's nothing to "get." This is a mystery article written by a mystery author about a technology that probably doesn't exist as anything more than an undergraduate science project—if it exists at all.
Yeah, I admit, the idea is cool—this is probably how Rainbow Brite stores data—however, no one here has any idea what it would look like. - Savut, on 10/12/2007, -1/+7In the future, the best pirates will be the secretary
- Anpheus, on 10/12/2007, -1/+7Uhm, let's say you implement 4-bit gradients for C, M, Y, and K. That's (2^4)^4, which can be simplified to 2^16, 16 bits, or 65536 possible values.
But you mess up by ignoring conversion of units.
600 dpi * 600 dpi = 360 000 dots per square inch.
Each dot contains 16 bits of information, because each has 2^16 possible values.
600 * 600 * 16 = 5 760 000
Divide that by the number of bits per byte (8) and then the number of bytes per kibibyte (1024)
600 * 600 * 16 / 8 / 1024 = 703.125
So, 703 kibibytes per square inch. Multiply that by 8.5"x11" and you get:
65742.1875 kibibytes per letter sheet. (~64 mebibytes)
Or multiply that by the number of square inches in a sheet of A4 (96.6736933):
67973.6906015625 kibibytes per letter sheet. (~66 mebibytes)
However, if you increase the density, you vastly increase the data storage. - thejadedmonkey, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5who cares. With 8 cores in the near future, even if it uses an entire core, would it really matter?
- ij00mini, on 10/12/2007, -2/+7Why does it have to be put on paper? Can't the same process be applied to plastic, or any other substance?
- adamcurtis, on 10/12/2007, -2/+7Paper Storage + 20 gigs of data + water = bye bye data
Still a cool proof of concept tho. - ostracize, on 10/12/2007, -3/+8Yeah, like April 1st wasn't it?
- ehershey, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5or skin! Let's all get data tattoos!
- emorphien, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5Sounds like a clever extension of the 2D "barcode." I'd love to find out more and see if it's actually true and see how it works
- omnithought, on 10/12/2007, -1/+5One thing to check on....are your calculations still based on binary? Remember, he's using geometric shapes rather than 1's and 0's.
- babayada, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4You mean THC, right?
Hemp *does* contain THC, just in very, very small amounts. - SuperM, on 10/12/2007, -6/+10I'm interested. If this proves to be viable it could completely revolutionize data storage.
- Swabie, on 10/12/2007, -4/+8Check your facts omaryak..... Not a slam on you personally, it's just a common misconception.
Paper is a huge problem in landfills and evidence suggests it does not degrade much faster than normal plastic bags (the majority of which use a blend of biodegradable and 'non' degradable materials anyway.) People regualrly dig up 100 year old newspapers in landfills (ask an archeologist) and SOME biodegradable plastics decompose in much less time than that.
Paper is also a huge energy waste both to produce & recycle.
A little info...
http://www.reusablebags.com/facts.php?id=7 - biff198, on 10/12/2007, -2/+5In the past, man killed millions of trees to store the knowledge that he collected. This data was gathered in books, and the books gathered in libraries.
Then man invented the computer. It stored the knowledge of 10 libraries in the palm of man's hand. Trees became obsolete for Man, except for that little thing he called "air". Man was pleased, but craved more.
Man turned back to trees for the answer. He wrote the knowledge back on the trees as he had done so many years ago. The trees showed that they could hold the knowledge of 100 libraries in a napkin. Man was satisfied.
Or was he... - cintyram, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4since this discussion is aobut data density and shapes, here is a simple puzzle, how may unique human faces can a grayscale printed, black and white passport size photograph represent?
- Auxon, on 10/12/2007, -7/+10After searching the internet for more information and finding nothing but the same few articles with very little additional information, and learning about data compression, I think this is BS.
- Pignanelli, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3At the microscopic level, of course, ordinary paper is quite chaotic, a loose mat of cellulose fibers, intertwined in a locking tangle which forms a linear sheet only at the human scale. If we were to delve into that tangle of fibers in an attempt to store data, we would have to do what all data storage does (dna, magnetic media, punch cards, DVDs): create order from chaos, which would be kind of like trying to store data in someone's hair (which we know is possible, since dna does store data in hair). However, in our case, we want to do it quickly, not over eons or lifetimes. A strategy that could yield an increase in data density over simple printing might be a doping process, in which small areas of the mat of purely carbohydrate beta-glucose cellulose long-chain polysaccharide polymers are sputtered with electrically deposited metal particles, like ink stains on a carpet, but so small and colorless that they would be invisible to the naked eye. They would be read by a sensor able to microscopically determine the altered local electrical properties of the doped areas versus areas of pure cellulose, thereby representing each tiny pixel. [c2006, jap]
- turbodigg, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3dude, stop spamming.
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3Why is this guy calling it "Rainbow Versatile Disk".
1) Printing in color will make cost go too high.
2) It is not versatile cuz it is on Paper.
3) This is on a paper so it is not a Disk.
And it is not viable because OCR is not accurate and then we have things like RFID so not viable at all.
Possible but not viable this kid must have got idea from bar-codes. - systemlayers, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3If it hemp paper was used that could be a brilliant format seeing as how it would last 1000 years.
- quietbob, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2ooh...
I thought I could rebut my above comment by saying that a program written by a human can have a computer generate random symbol structures: placing pixels differently in endless combinations and colors, and outnumbering any language-based symbol structure humans have in place. I think of the matrix code in pause mode, but instead of green only the computer would add in the 16 million color attribute to each pixel. Succeed and you got a symbol system which humans cannot decode with the naked eye alone, and computers would be the sole interpreter/judge for all our digital documents. - isemism, on 10/12/2007, -3/+5@Anpheus:
kibibyte? is that more or less then a zilibyte? -
Show 51 - 100 of 128 discussions
Digg is coming to a city (and computer) near you! Check out all the details on our 
© Digg Inc. 2009
— Content created and posted by Digg users is