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Comment by Mithaldu | Hacker News Reader

I don't get it. How the hell do i put this in my computer? The second image block implies not the usb port. And even if it were to be put there, i wouldn't want to put glue in there, and have no idea how a thin sheet of material is supposed to maintain contact. Maybe i need a special drive for it?

Note, i don't actually care for the answers at this point, just wanted to lay out for the guys who made the page how its very confusing and useful for getting me to want it.

Edit: So as it turns out that this is in fact a fake advertisement for a non-extant product i feel compelled to point out this irony: I assume some ad company or group made this in order to attract customers, likely because they have a hard time getting real customers. Now the ironic part is that my confusion when faced with it demonstrates perfectly why they have such difficulties.

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"Each of the dataSTICKIES can be simply peeled from the stack and stuck anywhere on the ODTS (Optical Data Transfer Surface), which is a panel that can be attached to the front surface of devices like computer screens, televisions, music systems, and so on. The special conductive adhesive that sticks the dataSTICKIES to the ODTS is the medium that transfers the data."

This should be made MUCH MUCH clearer, because it's a really cool idea that takes way too long to find in that page.

With graphene + imagination you can do anything ... in your imagination.

Thanks for pointing out the obvious. I have too much faith in people.

I've heard someone in Northwestern is trying to do hybrid materials with cement + graphene. Why is way beyond my imagination

It seems that they're all stuck on an "optical data transfer surface", whatever that's supposed to be. I'm guessing this is just a visual design study, not an end-to-end product design. (Seems to me a workable solution might involve Bluetooth LE - good luck filling a 32GB drive that way though - I estimate it'll take you about 11 days)

Of course, you could store just some cryptographic keys and unique file IDs on a small, low-throughput drive in a form factor like this, and link it into a cloud storage service. That would at least approach making practical sense.

The second approach sounds almost doable with the NFC technology. I wonder how small/thin a NFC tag can be built today.

Yeah, I haven't been following the NFC stuff - ubiquitous NFC tags have been "just around the corner" for a few years now.

The thing is, if you're going to require an internet connection to make the little tabs work at all, you may as well just do it all online in a pure cloud service in the first place…

It looks like the answer is in the pictures on the right in the How block near the bottom. You stick a strip called the Optical Data Transfer Surface (ODTS) to the edge of your computer screen. It can somehow read any dataSTICKY that has been stuck to it. Presumably that strip is connected to your computer through a USB cable or Bluetooth.

But yeah, it is confusing that the site doesn’t make that clear. They should show how you plug dataSTICKIES in right next to that “not the USB port” image in the Why block.

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