Philips Improves Electronic Paper

Remco writes: "BBC News ) has a story about Philips apparently improving the quality of electronic paper. What they've done is instead of using sillicon, they've discovered a polymer for use in electronic paper. This makes it cheaper to produce and has the added bonus of providing 256 grey shades of gray." Philips has been working on flexible displays for a while as well as research on using plastic instead of silicon. here's an article we posted before about OLEDs, another one of the promising leads toward thin, low-power, cheap-to-make displays.

Comments

repeats

[stiefvater]

it's not that i mind the repeats. i mean, who cares if you see the story twice, right?

what i DO mind, is that the editors of slashdot seem to have SO LITTLE concern for the material they produce. it makes me wish they cared about this news as much as i do.

-k

Re:Interactive paper

[sketerpot]

They think we were expecting it to provide, say, 256 plaid shades of gray?

At least it's not "256 grey shades of gray that happen to look remarkably graye".

GBA piracy is easy, but most users are honest

[yerricde]

How many people did you see pirating N64 games? Hardly anyone has the ability to write to a cartridge, so if these papers took their input from a cartridge piracy would not be easy.

Nintendo 64 piracy was hard because every official cartridge in a territory had an identical "key" chip. The mechanism by which the Nintendo cartridge lock/key system (used on NES, Super NES, and N64) works is patented (until about 2005), and it relies on a program that's copyrighted (effectively forever), letting Nintendo go after backup devices.

Game Boy Advance, on the other hand, has no encryption and no lockout. The only checks its BIOS does are checks for the Nintendo logo (legal to reproduce under Sega v. Accolade) and a simple checksum on the ROM header. Its cartridge interface (multiplexed address bus and data bus) has the Intellivision's system as prior art. And you can get a development kit with a cartridge writer and a flash cartridge that holds 256 megabits (enough for four to eight official ROMs or even more independently produced ROMs) for under $200. Go to gbadev.org for details.

Don't steal games. Just because piracy is easy doesn't mean you should do it. Instead, download games released under a free software (or even just free-beer) license. In the future, I will be releasing some free GBA games here.