Just looking more at 2D barcodes - this one looks quite innovative - http://research.microsoft.com/research/hccb/about.aspx Quite high density at 2K per square inch. You could possibly print the signed transaction in a passbook along with the human readable version. Using the right paper/ink combination would probably make it fairly durable - as well more socially acceptable (and those coloured pattern are pretty!)
Maybe you should talk to your friendly neighbourhood printer/scanner manufacurer to develop a combo printer/scaanner :-) ( HP does make business card scanners and 6x4 photo printers so it is only a matter of merging them) On Tue, Apr 15, 2008 at 2:56 PM, Sridhar Dhanapalan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > On 15/04/2008, Martin Visser <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > I understand your need to keep it vague, but if the data owner loses > > his card/token/barcode (his copy of the data) and the motorbike rider > > meets a grizzly end, is a whole village going to be very upset - or > > will regular paper bookkeeping be trusted enough as a backup. > > Nothing should be dependent upon a particular person, device or > storage medium. The village might be serviced by different people with > different laptops each time. There are lots of people fulfilling this > function, each with his/her area to service. The data from all these > people only comes together at the central office. The laptop should > only really be storing the data it picks up on its travels, not > carrying a repository of millions of account holders. > > > > Having > > endusers with no proof of a transaction or ability to read their own > > data I would have thought has the potential for a lot of social > > issues, and potential non acceptance of the technology. > > Interesting point. To be honest I didn't think of that. > > > > You may have already considered this though - it all comes down to the > > data value. Presumably if the cost of storage has to be <$1 then the > > value of the data might only be $100 or less (by my reckoning) > > In dollar terms, yes. But that's a hell of a lot of money for these people. > -- Regards, Martin Martin Visser -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
