Topic: 450GB on a sheet of paper?

[idolminds]

Sounds too good to be true.

Abideen claims that that his Rainbow system is better than a binary storage because instead of using ones and zeros to represent data, Abideen uses geometric shapes such as squares and hexagons to represent data patterns. Color is also used in the system to represent other data elements. According to Abideen, all that's required to read the Rainbow prints is a scanner and specialized software.

Forget sheets of paper for a moment. Thats all really cool and all, but think all digital distribution. How large of an image file is required to store the data? A 10MB 24-bit PNG? Imagine downloading a 10MB or even 50MB image file and instead of printing it to paper you just feed it directly into the decoding software. All of a sudden you have 450GB of data to play with out of a 50MB file.

Game demos would be tiny again and you can toss in all sorts of promo trailers, wallpapers, and other extras. Or just digital distribution of games being sold.

Warez would explode when they got this going. Thats more data than a blu-ray or HD-DVD can hold. Download full size HD movies in a few minutes? An artists entire discography plus music videos in one small file?

This can change a lot if its legit. Who needs Blu-Ray burners when you convert your entire hard drive to an image and burn it to a CD?

[Quemaqua]

Sounds like a dream come true.  I've been wondering how long we would have to wait before alternative ideas regarding the mechanics of data storage were going to crop up.  This is the kind of thing I've been waiting for.  I really wonder if this could happen.  Like idol said, it could really change a lot.

[Pugnate]

Yea I read about this at DailyTech a couple of days ago, and like the tons of interesting ideas we have seen this year, I doubt this will come into practical existence. What he has done is interesting though... instead of binary code he is using symbols and color coding. Imagine if it works though... endless storage space.

Arab News is my home town newspaper.

This is the kind of thing I've been waiting for

This is the sort of thing that would revolutionize the storage market.

[sirean_syan]

Now that's an interesting solution. Rather than the brute force of a bigger disk or drive, you have some great compression.

I'm I understanding correctly when I think of it like a .zip or .rar file? You have to uncompress/decode it before it's actually usable?

[idolminds]

Yeah, it needs to be decoded before use.

[Xessive]

Cool!

Now if they can just develop a processor that uses light instead of electrical currents!

[Antares]

Yeah, it needs to be decoded before use.

Which means any time you'd want to access the data you would have to decode it.  Meaning the technology wouldn't be good for storing media that you'd want to watch on demand.

[Cobra951]

It wouldn't be good for streaming.  But you could store a whole movie library, and just decompress what you want to watch into a buffer on your HD.  (I'm assuming you can seek randomly into the data.  Otherwise, it would not be practical except for archival purposes.)

The whole argument for binary data is reliability.  As the data is carried electrically, all you care about is on/off, high/low.  That's difficult to misread.  I wonder how the reliability of this new approach would compare.

Edit:

The problem with more symbols is that it could lead to ambiguity - e.g. an octagon could look like a circle or a hexgon, etc. leaving a lot more room for errors in interpretation.
Binary data has the least ambiguity: it's either there or it 's not

That's right along my reliability line of thinking.

There's a lot of skepticism in the comments I read.  I think the key is whether this more-analog approach can be brought up to full reliability.  Otherwise, it would be a step backward.

[Cools]

Hoax

[Cobra951]

Would not surprise me at all.   

[WindAndConfusion]

Sounds too good to be true.

Probably correct.

Forget sheets of paper for a moment. Thats all really cool and all, but think all digital distribution. How large of an image file is required to store the data? A 10MB 24-bit PNG? Imagine downloading a 10MB or even 50MB image file and instead of printing it to paper you just feed it directly into the decoding software. All of a sudden you have 450GB of data to play with out of a 50MB file.

See, that's the fundamental problem. There is no compression algorithm that can pair every possible 450 GB binary file with every possible 50 MB PNG file. First, I assume the logical impossibility of this is obvious to all of you. Second, it would violate the No Free Lunch theorems.

[idolminds]

Yeah, thats when I was thinking its BS. No way could it work. Fun to dream, though.

[Cobra951]

No free lunch.  That's an inescapable principle.  But I was thinking along the lines of untapped storage potential, which is why I didn't dismiss this as a hoax earlier.  Like 4 GB on a fingernail-sized chip: no one would have believed it 20 years ago.  It did occur to me that you could not use compressed image formats.  But what I didn't think of is that even uncompressed formats like bmp can't hold 450 GB in an 8.5-by-11 image.  The resolution would have to be so high that no scanner could capture the visual data.  So even if there are enough atoms on the sheet's surface, and paint can be directed to each individual one, it would be useless except as a piece of art on a wall, waiting for future technologies to make deciphering it possible.

Is there some transcendental way to make one-dimensionally scanned images represent more data in two dimensions?  I don't think so.  But I'm not so quick to dismiss anything anymore.  Not after I learned that it really was possible for the entire functionality of an early TI calculator to be contained within a single IC.  That was a paradigm shift for me which opened my eyes to the possibility of other inconceivable things being achieved later.