It took me a long time to figure out who would be my hero.. I do not like the concept of hero’s. The sort of glorification tends to make people spotless, like a superhuman or something. Of course there are a lot of people who I admire or at least their work. However I kind of got stuck with the old icons everybody knows which is of course very boring. So I am going to write about a most peculiar guy whose contributions to the world are very unclear. Either he is one of the greatest inventors of recent times or he is one of the best conmen of computerscience. Whether he is admirable or contemptible, either way, he is an interesting guy. He goes by the name of Jan Sloot and I still know when I first heard of him, I was intrigued. The news item was actually about his death, which supposedly is clouded with mystery. I love conspiracy theories, because they hold some truth of what doesn’t hold up in official statements or media, but unfortunately usually are also too farfetched with their explanations. Anyway, this is a brief story of Jan Sloot. It’s a local story since he lived only a couple of miles from my place.
Jan Sloot was a Dutch inventor who, among other things, supposedly designed a radically different data compression system which didn’t work with a binary system but with a self-designed digital alphabet. It’s said that this so called Sloot Digital Coding System (SDSC) could compress at least 16 movies on a chip of 64 kilobytes. If I understand correctly it kind of works like this; SDCS devides files into unique blocks which are then stored only once via a reference table. Each primary information is being stored into the memory. From the reference table a keycode is being calculated. Then from executing this calculation a recursively the final key can be achieved. Don’t worry; it’s still quite vague to me as well. Please read more about it and try to explain it to me.
Jan Sloot died of a heart attack and took all his secrets into his grave. Despite some achieved patents, millions of euro’s in investments (ea ABN AMRO) and partnership with former Phillips ‘topman’ Roel Pieper, many people claim his invention is absolute nonsense and is theoretically impossible. Others affirm its possibility but the mighty industry made sure this revolutionary technology would never see the light of the day for it would radically chance the current information era. What do you think?
http://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jan_Sloot
http://jansloot.telcomsoft.nl/
http://jansloot.telcomsoft.nl/Sources-3/Dna/Website/Dna_Info.htm