Hacker News Reader

Asking if you can print all 8x8 bitmaps is very reasonable.

Wanting to copyright them to block competition is despicable.

I'm shocked at how "few" pages printing all 8x8 bitmaps would actually require. Assuming full page coverage of an 8.5 x 11 sheet at 600 dpi I'm only coming with a touch over 548 billion pages. I expected it to be more. Legal-size paper drops that to about 430.5 billion pages.

I think your math is a little off (or maybe mine is).

I'll take a short cut and imagine that you have an 8x8 square with no margins (68% of a borderless 8.5x11), then you have a grid of 600x600 bitmaps, which is 3.6e5. if each pixel is only black or white, than you have 1.8e19 possible bitmaps (64-bit), divide the two and you have 5e13, or about 50 trillion pages. Fix the equation, and you get a grid of 5.2e5, for 30 trillion pages instead of 50.

However, bring that up to 24-bit color or more (even 8-level greyscale is e154), and the exponentiality of the problem goes back to as described by the OP

Reply on news.ycombinator.com