Can a sheet of paper really store 450GB?
If a chap named Sainul Abideen gets his way, we’ll all be storing our data on pieces of paper in the near future. Or at least read-only data, as his method doesn’t easily allow for rewritable media.
Rather than using binary to store data on a medium, Abideen’s technology, which he dubs ‘Rainbow Technology’, uses both differing geometric shapes and colours of those shapes stored on paper. He claims up to 450GB can be stored on a piece of paper. This is presumably the size of an optical disc, as he compares it with the DVD and names the media ‘Rainbow Versatile Disc.’
The idea is that when using differently coloured shapes, each can store more information than just a simple on or off binary representation. This is much like comparing the binary number 10010110000 (base 2, with two characters) to the hexadecimal equivalent of 4B0 (base 16, with 16 characters). The decimal representation of this number, with ten digits, is 1,200.
So jumping from binary to hex, or from binary to anything with a higher base character count, saves space — but only, however, when the characters require the same physical space in order to be portrayed.
And this is where I see the inherent problem — you will always need more space to store shaped characters than you do for binary, as binary can be stored using something (1) and nothing (0). His method would only work if each binary notation were the same size as the shapes.
That can’t be the case, however, as binary is far more efficient at using space than other methods. You can’t draw a shape in the same space as a dot — or no dot — so this idea is flawed right from the start. Drawing a shape completely cancels out the advantage of using a higher base — the higher the base, of course, there is need for more physical space for the added detail on each shape or character.
The only way this might work is by using different coloured shades of dots to store information. Only we already have that — it’s called a digital colour picture. When was the last time you scanned in 450GB from an A4 photo? How about those multi-gigabyte print jobs you so often perform? It just doesn’t happen.
Unless a custom dictionary is stored off the page and used to decompress information from each printed piece of paper like a ZIP or RAR archive, pulling more information from a scan than a scan itself is utterly preposterous.
The slightly less paper-filled, digital office is here to stay. As cool as it originally sounds, this is probably nothing more than blatant vapourware after a gullible venture capitalist.
If not, I’ll eat my colourful words.
