New storage break through: paper
By John Pospisil
The storage break-through that we’ve all been waiting for has finally arrived – it’s called paper. And it has important implications for the world of secret agents and espionage.
A 24-year-old Indian student, Sainul Abideen, claims to have developed a technique for storing up to 256GB of data on a single sheet of 8.26 inch by 11.69 inch paper.
Abideen, who has just completed a Master of Computer Applications Degree, has named his new storage system “Rainbow Versatile Disc” (RVD).
RVD uses colored geometrics shapes, such as circles, triangles and squares, densely printed on paper to store information, and not surprisingly RVD print outs have been liken to modern art. The information is retrieved using a specially developed scanner. The storage capacity of RVD is said to be 2.7 GB per square inch, and either plastic sheets or paper can be used to store the information.
The technology has been demonstrated to the Arab News, where Abideen encoded a 45 second video clip onto paper, and then played it back. Abideen hopes that eventually small scanners could be built into notebook computers and mobile phones that could read SIM (subscriber identity module) sized RVD cards containing up to 5GB of data.
According to Abideen, the big benefit of RVD is that paper is biodegradable, while DVDs and CDs are obviously not. Paper, as a storage medium is also cheaper than CD or DVD (about one tenth of the price he estimates).
Of course there are some serious doubts about this technology (the experts always have to find fault with impossible break throughs), but we really hope that Abideen’s storage technology is legitimate.
Abideen seems to have missed the most important application for this technology, and that’s in the espionage business. For too long spies and secret agents have struggled to effectively destroy top-secret CDs and DVDs; now they’ll simply be able to burn their orders after they’ve downloaded them to their notebook.
And we’d also make this suggestion to Abideen: please come up with a better name. The Rainbow Video Disk doesn’t quite cut it in the Western World (not that there’s anything wrong with THAT).
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November 28th, 2006
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November 29th, 2006
any one got any ideas how this works, i just do not see, even with color were a 10 fold jump in data density comes from
November 30th, 2006
ok i have thought long and hard about this. And i think i have com up with a way to get more information into a 300 dpi than would fit if you could fit one of 256 colors into 90,000 bits per square inch, giving you 90K per square inch. if you use large geometric shapes (circles, squares triangles and so one) the shapes would be large maybe a quarter inch and tightly packed. then much like a hologram the squares would be printed on top of the cirecls and the triangles on top of that. if you know the exactl lay out of each layer you can read the appropriate layers off one at a time use some high level math and arrive at the color of each geometric figure. so if i can pack 10,000 of each over 20 different geometric figures, each of of a distinct color out of 256, then i can pack 200k into 90k worth of space. the problem as you scale this up the amount of time it takes to unpacked the esentially hashed data would almost not make this worth the time to decode it. though I guess if you are in india with out access to the internet this is a great and cheap way to pass large amounts of data.
as well with large shapes, error correction can be applied and a high level of accuracy is not needed to read it as the shapes inherent in the data would help orient the program as to how to decode the data.
my best example of how all this works is sudoku. you have to fill in 81 squares, but if you are given 4 diffrent puzzles and none of the puzzles have the same initial squares filled in, then you could fill a sudoku board with all four puzzles, as long as the end usere knew which patterns to pull back out of the board to re assemble the 4 original puzzles. the same would hold true of this method on a massive scale.
BUT id don’t think gig’s per square inch is possible, I think even being very generous 100M would be pushing it. maybe 2.7meg per square inch instead of gig.