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Paper Capable Of Playing Videos Developed
Makarand writes "Nature has posted an article describing paper capable of displaying video using rearrangeable electronic ink, being produced by Philips Research Labs (in the Netherlands). The paper-display draws
power from a lightweight battery, and displays data stored in a portable chip. The display consists of pixels containing a drop of colored ink that can spread over a reflective white background under electrical control to create colors. With fast switching times and lower switching voltages, these paper-displays are capable of displaying video images."
How convenient...
Okay, it might be way too late at night for me to be posting, but...
I wonder if the advent of multimedia paper, as it were, will create a sea-change in the nature of all types of advertising.
As it stands now, most every box/can/available-surface of products is in some way branded advertising for the product, like, your coke can says, naturally, "Coca-Cola". This advertising must translate into some approximately-calculable value for the Coca-Cola company, in terms of more coke sales.
But... is there an inflection point at which an ad for something else (say, Porsche cars) would be more valuable than the advertisement for coke? If so, might companies sell space on all manner of products wrapped in this multimedia-paper like banner ads?
It might be interesting to open my refrigerator and see a few-dozen multimedia presentations on various consumer goods, changing every morning, but... well, maybe a final trip in that Porsche to some Amish community might be more sanity-preserving.
~ Whence do you come, slayer of men, or where are you going, conqueror of space?
Color e-paper, great for display devices, able to replace LCDs, etc. Now when do these things go into mass production? I'd love to have flexible solar cells at pennies per yard, but I can't get those yet either.
Here's the BBC's slant on the news: Electronic paper prepares for video.
They're already up to 80 Hz refresh (12-13 ms respnose times). That's pretty damn impressive for a technology that's still in the basic R&D stage, and it augurs well for the future.
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
(With apologies to David Spade)
I liked it better the first time...
When it was called Etch-A-Sketch.
Karma: Excellent (In Soviet Russia, karma pimps YOU)
Boring...they had all that in Harry Potter two years ago, and oil paintings that talk ;-)
When I am king, you will be first against the wall.
Maybe better than charmin and wont tear in your hand while doing business and watching Howard Stern.
There may be some magical solution to this, but it looks to me as if color is very, very much more difficult than mono.
Panurge has posted for the last time. Thanks for the positive moderations.
The frequency would be great, would hurt your eyes after a couple minutes I would guess...
I guess that depends on what you mean by a "great" frequency. In Europe, television has a frequency of 50Hz (it's 60Hz in the US) - even if I've heard that two and two frames are alike, in other words that the frequency is 25 or 30Hz. Movies in theaters are usually run at 24 frames per second, in other words a frequency of 24Hz.
There is no real need to have frequencies running much higher than that to watch a movie - since a frequency of 72Hz would just mean that the same picture would be drawn three times over, and thats a waste on a device like this.
In addition, there might not make much sence in talking about frequeny at all on a device like this; if they want to save on power, they only alter the state of the pixels that actually changes between each frame.
Everything in the world is controlled by a small, evil group to which, unfortunately, no one you know belongs.
Sounds great. Let's just hope junior doesn't mix up 'touch screen' with 'crayola-responsive'.
I'd hate to come home and find my Toshiba notebook was turned into Little Billy's coloring book.
We're that much closer to those creepy animated singing cereal boxes from Minority Report...
Neal Stephenson's "The Diamond Age or, A young Lady's illustrated primer." focuses on a book that uses re-arangeable ink (a book with an AI).
Nice reading for SF fans.
When is it enough? How much can our wee little monkey brains take? I'm guessing that the 'eXtREEEM' of the future will be advertising that may kill old people or small children.
Of course, the perfect app for this is e-paper voting! Now elections can be rigged *and* everyone can have a copy of their vote!
(Note: Votes subject to change)
I'll still take real dead trees over electronic paper for my leisure reading, I think, but how about the opposite application: writing? "Print" a document to the paper, mark it up in a meeting, and have the changes all saved without having to go back and mark it up again on your PC. Alternatively, take the paper to your favorite country getaway, write up a story, and (assuming your handwriting is decently legible) have it automatically OCR'd into text for later editing, without needing to lug a laptop around and all the associated annoyances.
I dunno, sounds good to me . . .
My desk is buried in mounds of paper, and now they want be to find the one that is used as the display?
Sigh.
remember those old, cabinet-sized gothic beautiful wooden radios with huge glowing tubes visible from the back? some of you might have only seen them in museums
;-P
did you think to yourself "good gosh, what archaic times" when you saw them? we probably all did
and then i see news like this, and know how people like us, who grew up with crt screens and space heater-looking computer cases with noisy fans in the back, will be seen as archaic some day
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Tired of the bored centerfolds that just sit there?
No, no more Flash! Make it stop!
...what I read in a science-fiction book (can't remember the title now) seemed to be the right future for me.
:) Well, not quite, holographic creation overrides all that standard hardware limitations. Just load the right program and you have any keyboard layout you desire, manipulation by reading your hands position etc.
A computer the size of matchbox, or something similar. Some pretty, neat shape. One button. Upon pressing, a holographic image of the keyboard and display are created. Follow as with normal computer
2d displays like that have quite a few years of future yet, but far future belongs to 3d. And real 3d, not as in "seen from sweet spot, flat makes illusion of 3d", but so you could watch your pr0n from all sides by walking around it.
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http://www.io2technology.com/ :)
If you can vary the intensity of size of the cells, you can get lots of colors other than gray. I have a fairly high-end inkjet CMYK printer that produces great prints. (It's an Epson 2200, fwiw.) To the naked eye, colored areas look, um, colored. But if you look at a print with a loupe (even my relatively cheap 4x one) you can see zillions of different-colored dots. By varying the relative sizes and positions of the dots, they can get lots of different colors.
CRTs and LCD monitors work similarly. There are lots of small, single-color dots of varying intensities. Unless you get really close, the eye blends them all together into solid colors.
I hope that was coherent. The drugs I took for my backache seem to be taking effect, so I may wake up in the morning and discover I posted something horrendous. (Which would be better than the time that I didn't remember making a post at all and wondered who had hacked my account.)
Did someone say that hard, predictive SF was dead?
Here you go bucko.
IO2 has developed Star Wars hologram technology that floats on air.
The 50/60 Hz number is for fields per second. As you might know, (standard) television is interlaced; one field has the the odd lines of the picture and the other has the even lines.
If the source material was video, which stores its pictures in fields, you can see this in fast-moving objects (there's a ripping effect; occasionally you can see this effect in badly encoded DVDs also). Video source material is used mostly in documentaries, news, etc.
If the source material is film (most TV series are shot on film, as are all movies ;-)
then you have 24 FRAMES (not fields) from which to construct your 50/60 fields per second. In this case, adjacent fields do come from the same picture, and effective frame rate is 24 Hz.
(If you have 60 Hz TV, the method is called 3:2 pulldown; one film frame provides 3 and 2 fields alternately. 50 Hz TV just speeds up the film a bit and uses two fields per one frame).
Who needs this type of technology?
Shit, we've had all we need to watch the drawings on our paper move around since 1938!
Turn on, tune in, drop out!
No need to worry about out of Gamut warnings when working on RGB...
Hmm... the core technology behind this is something called 'electrowetting'... isn't that what the barnyard masturbators from the worst jobs in science article from PopSci used to extract sperm from pigs?
I for one welcome our new electrowetting masters!
We need to know how this thing works. Could we have a video about it?
With the quality of certain top posts on Slashdot, you really start to wonder what the general mentality is around here... Taco, we need better filters.
There *are* better filters: Preferences, Comments, Scroll down to Reason Modifiers, -6 for "Funny", Scroll down to Save. No more funny jokes.
Personally, I like to laugh once in a while.
How about "video" car paint? I'm sure noone would notice I don't own 5 different cars or that I'm not really sitting in a Porsche. :)
Effectively, films and TV go at 25/30 (europe/US)frames per second. However, as you've noticed, TVs have twice the frequency needed to show such frame rates. In fact, 100Hz TVs are becoming quite common in Europe, and I guess 120Hz TVs will also be available in the US. This is because, althought 25 fps is enough to make your brain see continous motion, it's actually so slow that you would notice a lot of flickering on the TV screen if it had a 25Hz refresh rate (because of the way the screen is redrawn). I have not seen any of these papers working, but I guess that the same thing might be applicable here.
with paper like that.
These are displays, ultra thin, ultra flat, paperlike. However I suspect that the wood (more accurately cellulose?) content is minimal, and that it does not absorb water, cannot be written on with washable ink or pencils, and cannot be torn easily.
Surely someone can come up with something better than "electronic paper" anyway. People these buzzwords are designed for (those who don't understand, somehow, and have to have things dumbed down) end up just getting alienated anyway. It's MUCH clearer to say "the super flat paperlike thing that your TV will become" rather than saying electronic paper, which the average technophobe will just laugh at?
Conversion Rate Optimisation French / English consultant
-> the first release of magazins on this e-paper will come for free
- youll be able to download all the books, zines, etc. for free
- but these will _still_ consist of 75% ads and 15 % content -
so whats the difference?
Often time I like the tactile feedback of holding a book in my hands. I like that it doesn't make a noise unless I ruffled the pages, no humming fan or whining battery...but, I don't like turning pages and diverting my eyes from the left to right sides, especially when reading in bed.
All jokes aside, I like to read with one hand curling the left side underneath the back of the book which makes reading the right side of the book great, and the left side a pain.
Well the article says that: High-resolution monochrome electronic paper is already on the verge of commercialization, produced by Massachusetts-based company
:)
So if the monochrome technology is reasonably priced, I'd imagine there would be a strong consumer demand. Since colour e-paper would be the obvious next step, and there are people willing to shell out money for the stuff, one would expect development on the colour technology to increase.
So my guess is soon , read sometime in the next 10 years
---
Any man who can drive safely while kissing a pretty girl is simply not giving the kiss the attention it deserves. -- AE
Light reflecting off of clean air seems technically impossible to me. The fogscreen machine from Finland reflects light off water vapors but this one appears to require nothing?
Now you can take your freshly downloaded porn wherever you go!
30% off web hosting. Coupon code "SLASHDOT".
You will be able to print webpages with the tag properly!
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Click this link to download a torrent that contains a 5MB zip file of the demonstration movies from Nature.com (free registration required to obtain, so I saved you all the trouble).
Homestarrunner.net -- It's Dot Com!
So if I overclock one of these, "burned out" will finally become a whole new meaning...? :)
Yes, I would like to have at least monochrome now. It would be great for, for example, (interactive) billboards. I get the feeling that monochrome "electronic paper" could be rolled out tomorrow, but the developers are holding back waiting for the 25 fps, 32-bit color, GeForce compatible version. I don't want to watch video or 3D graphics on "paper".
It's its. They're their, there. You're your. Who's whose? A looser loser, though those two too threw through the trough.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
"Honey, can you fold the TV up and put it away?"
:p)
Ok lame jokes aside... Anybody here a fan of Stephen Baxter? In his book "Titan", they use something just like this called "Softscreens" which had pretty much replaced television, books, etc. I remember wishing someone would invent it.
Guess my wish came true.
So, I propose, we call this newfangled thingys Softscreens. In honour of Baxter and all. (Althogh I doubt he's the first one to come up with the idea
ON that note, so much for the Tablet PC...
Homestarrunner.net -- It's Dot Com!
Print one of these and you'll have all the magic animated paper you need without electronics or drugs!
I foresee a new market growing, the licensing of books. You buy a license for six months, and even if you haven't finished it by then, the text will be erased automaticly...
bash$
This type of post is starting to get about as interesting as "First Post!!" and "Imagine a beowulf cluster of these!"...
Every single new technology article covered gets someone saying "that's all well and good but they've been saying this for years. speak to me when i can buy one.".
Take the article for what it's worth. It's not a sales brochure or an investment prospectus, it's a science/tech piece.
Karma police, I've given all I can, it's not enough, I've given all I can, but we're still on the payroll.
The fun you could have with contracts? Leave the signature intact and reword the contract to provide... shall we say... more favorable clauses?
Or maybe if Coke hacked a Pepsi 12 pack to say Pepsi sucks? (but we all know Pepsi sucks anyways)
Or maybe an over-zealous support of Arnold hacked into Huffington posted and put a Fu Manchu mustache on her? (or does she already have one?)
Oh for God's sake.
/.!
Will you just hurry up and SHIP IT! They've been going on and on about this for as long as I've been reading
If the paper feels / looks like "normal" print paper, this could very well be used for sending encrypted messages that looks like, say, a story about how many girls you got laid during the summer hols. All you'ld need was a chip/key with the proper digi-signature, and the paper would turn into the real message, by rearranging the ink-dots.
Its called paperbacks and they pretty much disintegrate if you read them for 6 months.
..to block out the flashing advertisement frenzy in urban areas. Maybe that will let us hold on to our last shred of sanity.
Where will the power come from to illuminate these wonderous paperlike display devices?
I would've thought one of the major attractions of a book (besides the obvious) is that it can be used in circumstances where AC/DC power is unavailable - e.g. camping, travelling in most forms of transport (e.g. cars, planes, etc). It's a form of "entertainment" with zero technological requirements.
If you make something like this require power from a wall socket, or require the user to lug around a Li-Ion battery everywhere they go (for 1 hour of uninterrupted reading before it requires a recharge) isn't the technology effectively largely redundant before it gets off the ground?
The ink in itself is pretty cool. But the articles raise many questions without answering them. Like:
- How fragile is the stuff?
- How are the pixels wired up?
- Are we going to be able to handle a sheet of this paper, or are they going to be mounted in some device (like in the photo on the nature article - doesn't look much different to a laptop)?
In short, the stuff looks pretty easy to damage...
Hmm, junk mail pouring through your letter box in the morning with strobing, annoying videos. Oh joy..
"You lied to me! There is a Swansea!"
... how do I print out a .mpg?
Steve Mann is way ahead of you
Fuck the system? Nah, you might catch something.
on this by the authors is available here
See how the 'shape' of the pixel can determine where the ink goes when voltage is applied. hmm interesting!
Am I the only one who read "Paper Capable Of Playing Video Games Developed"?
I was imagining some origami figure fragging away in the night...
If halftoning and similar techniques are impossible, you could alternate colours with appropriate duty cycles for the shade?
Hey, this is the kind of obvious solution which warrants an unnecssary patent!
How many of these digital paper technologies are going to be announced before we actually see them in use in the market?
I realize that digital paper isn't a total hoax, but it sure feels like one.
It seems as though the last-mile technical barriers must be really high. Maybe they're having trouble making these things last or making them in quantity?
Why are you letting these clowns ruin our country?
I hope that one day this electronic paper will be used to pass around documents, instead of printed ones. Maybe we save the forests that way.
The video newspaper displays even echoes something that started in sci-fi. Wasn't that featured in that Tom Cruise film "Minority Report?"
we didn't have no fancy-schmancy digi-ink! We did things the hard way and watched videos on Flip Books!
Trolls lurk everywhere. Mod them down.
Here, also a link to the official Press Release.
It's also full-color, but it's static so it only draws power when changing the image, it has a refresh rate of up to 70hz (plenty for displays) and it's not backlit (making it behave just like current paper, and again, draws -0- power when not changing the image).
It sounds like the way to go imo. backlighting may be a required feature for TVs (cultural emphasis on watching movies in the dark) - but for laptops/pdas/cellphones/handheld gaming/etc - it'd easily be a killer tech. yeah, you'd have to have some sort of a front-light (like the new light on the GBA SP) for Eg. dialing in the dark, using your laptop on a plane, etc.
But having the light only when you need it will save ridiculous quantities of battery power. Imagine your gadget battery lasting 2-3x as long.
Good stuff.
article
// "Can't clowns and pirates just -try- to get along?"
It would add a whole new dimension to the game, or a solitare deck would require a lot fewer physical cards.
Does anyone know if (a) the blue eBook is using this technology, and (b) does anyone have links to larger images of these displays? I'm curious about what kind of resolution these things produce; I couldn't find any dpi numbers in the article, but I skimmed it pretty quickly.
Let's plug our MC's into the Feed and go into some ractives!!
parts list:
plastic & titanium shell: check
HD-capable web cam: check
1GB+ flash memory: check
broadband/3G wireless voice/data: check
power efficient processor: check
high energy-density rechargeable batteries: check
flexible, low-power, FMV capable disply: SOON!
Now if I can only get the skrills to breed true...
I've been on slashdot so long I'm starting to get out of touch with the cool stuff if it ain't on slashdot.
when you see that chick on the cover of Playboy winking at you and doing a come hither look, you're not going be able to tell if it's that new paper technology, or if it's all that acid you did in the sixties.
They say the first thing to go is your penis. Well, it's either that or your brain. I forget which...
Well the article says that: High-resolution monochrome electronic paper is already on the verge of commercialization, produced by Massachusetts-based company
High resolution monochrome electronic paper has been on the verge of commercialization for years now, ans I expect it to stay on the verge for years to come.
This material may actually become useful in the near term for billboards and other signs where high resolution is not needed. (though in the samples I have seen they still have a significant problem with the contrast being too low. But I'll believe in commercially viable high resolution electronic paper when I can buy it at Fry's
The killer app that I would like this stuff to enable is a compact, lightweight, high battery life e-book reader that doesn't make you want to pluck your eyeballs out after reading a couple of paragraphs. If they could get the resolution up (Yes, I know I'm dreaming, but I want 1200 dpi) and resolve all issues with contrast and glare AND deliver to market at a reasonable price this could be exciting stuff. At least that's my take when I started watching for its imminent commercialzation (4 years ago)
Scene from the cereal isle of your local store in the not-so-distant future...
"Mommy, can we get a box of Porn Pops? There's a cool toy inside!"
Whoever stated that signature sizes should be limited to one hundred and twenty characters can just go ahead and kiss my
I suppose the next step is "talking newspapers".
I'm sure it's excessively alarmist to follow the "Fahrenheit 451" theme. Really. I'm sure.
More seriously, this suggests to me that newspaper articles could be rented on a time-basis.
This luddite prefers paper.
The video newspaper displays even echoes something that started in sci-fi. Wasn't that featured in that Tom Cruise film "Minority Report?"
Yup, and that's exactly what I was thinking when I saw this article. Except in Minority Report it was a box of cereal that started singing at him after he poured a bowl; it wouldn't stop, so he threw the damn thing across the room.
Yeah. More avenues for evil marketdroids to ply their wares with.
NUKE IT ALL, I SAY.
One thing that has been noted about E-Ink and it's like is that it only needs power to change display, while a static image is retained with no power usage. This is because the fluid that the particles are suspended in is viscous enough that they pretty much stay in place, unless a voltage is applied. This means that they can operate at very low power levels.
While it didn't say so in the paper, it appears that this new technology requires continous voltage to be applied to keep the ink from spreading out acrossed the full surface of the pixel. So this paper would likely use more power than the particle approach, and would be pure black when no power was applied, basically functionally equivalent to LCD's today. I wonder how the power consumption / price of this device will compare to LCD's once they are being mass produced. Regardless, it would be worth it to have a laptop that was easily readable outside.
This sounds like the winner in the PopSci/Core77 design contest: movie polaroids. The "flapping" of the polaroid could theorhetically charge the "battery" and pushing a button would play back what you just recorded. Check out the idea here.
Not All Who Wander Are Lost
From the article: Its devisers, Robert Hayes and Johan Feenstra...
:-D
Slightly interesting fact: fenestra is latin for Window.
Feenstra could conceivably be a nederlandisation of fenestra.
And this technology might be used as computer displays for popular graphical user interfaces?
The guy was destined to do this!
Cheers,
Nick.
Even better when you put it on all consumer goods packing, sooner or later some kid will go: "Hey Mom, look I've painted the microwave"
"Windows are for cheaters" - Bruce Springsteen
Just think of the implications to the paper porn industry.... titilating!
I consider those people who are logging out of the asylum that the current society is, to be the smartest.
When this planet was not fully explored, that may have been a viable option, and it was for the refugees who sailed from Europe to America in the seventeenth century. But now that 100 percent of Earth's habitable land is property owned by partners in the asylum, how is this possible?
Will I retire or break 10K?
Signatures are a waste of bandwi (buffering...)
Those screens are all using ito-coated glass substrates from what I can tell. Just like the twisted nematic displays in current LCD screens, but you don't need to supply continous voltage, which is the real benefit of a bistable system... huge power savings.
A ferroelectric LC display has switching times in the microsecond regime (that's thousands of Hz). You can drive an FLC cell at 440 Hz and listen to it hum an A for you.
This Philips paper is good but there is already a Full color version capable of running video at 70fps produced by Magink. There was an article in the International Herald Tribune and New York Times in August!
Jared Diamond makes some interesting points about the sophistication of hunter-gatherers and what it takes to surive in their world vs. ours. I think his point was that there are so many things that can kill you that all the dumb ones get taken out of the gene pool faster than the same kind of person in a modern society. I think the idea that our world is more sophisticated is sheer conceit. It's changing and maybe that has the lizard parts of our brains freaked out. It's slightly off topic, I know, but what mighty egos we all have!
Why do I have this? I don't smoke.
Wow. We ought to do an Ask Slashdot on this, I'm sure we could get some good feedback. This is a question that occupies a great amount of brainspace for me. I think it all depends on how far "off the grid" you want to go.
I think more than anything, the most important thing to do is to escape the strangulation of American popular culture. I make a distinction between "culture" and "popular culture", because American culture is incredibly rich and rewarding (Aaron Copland, George Gerswhin, Mark Twain, Ernest Hemingway, and to a lesser degree, Lovecraft, King, on and on). Notice the thread runnning here? No TV.
Now don't get me wrong here, there is some absolutely terrific TV on, both in the high drama sense (ER) and in the pulp / adventure sense (24). The problem is, IMHO, that tv is a default action; it is an open port that Americans constantly listen on. Sit down in front of the tv, flip it on, flip through the channels. Disconnect from your family, your friends, your neighbors, your church, your community.
I have some other opinions regarding urban-ness and personal space, but I've known enough people who seem perfectly happy and fulfilled living in the city to realize that it's more likely my own cultural biases that influence my views. Which doesn't mean that they're wrong, only non-universal.
I think the challenge for post-20th century man is to create the paradox of an individual culture; something unique to us and yet not solely of us (because we are not enough by ourselves to achieve the connectedness that fulfillment requires). At the same time, we can't utterly connect because our popular culture is corrupting in every sense, and sometimes explicitly designed to be.
If your bitterest enemies are people who hack the heads off civilians, then I would say you're doing something right.
..but what's the resolution of this?
Will code a sig generator for food
American culture is incredibly rich and rewarding ... George Gerswhin
So now you're approving of the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act? Next to The Walt Disney Company, the Gershwin estate was one of the biggest forces in lobbying for the Bono Act.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Standby...keyword "Gershwin" search in progress...Completed.
Results>>>
1. Gershwin estate - Sonny Bono Copyright Extension Act
Sonny Bono Copyright Extension == BAD
Post to Slashdot to kiss Slashdotter Ass == TRUE
Please, please, please listen to Gershwin and form your own opinion independently of what some computer nerds think about a totally unrelated law. Listening to Gershwin will make you a better human being. I mean it.
If your bitterest enemies are people who hack the heads off civilians, then I would say you're doing something right.
Now that we have this entirely new medium, I'm going to patent the following novel inventions:
I don't want to watch video or 3D graphics on "paper".
Gee, why not? Have you seen the prices on the really nice flat panel televisions (big screen)? Why not paper a wall with this stuff and have a really big screen that will likely cost less to produce?
--
As a matter of fact, I am a lawyer. But I play an actor on TV.
If I read the article correctly, the background of the "paper" is white, the ink is on it at all times (and does not move from place to place), but the ink's intensity is controled by how much of a charge is applied: apply greater voltage the ink becomes a smaller, more-spherical droplet, and more of the white background shows through.
What I wonder, though, is how well this "paper" could show a completely white image on some or all of its surface. With the ink still there, I would imagine it would not be a very clean white colour.
"Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one " -Albert Einstein
Is it just me, or does the picture in the article look just like Penny's book/computer from Inspector Gadget (the cartoon)?
Sure, but I wonder how much of this is simply history repeating itself - except none of us are old enough to have observed it in a past generation?
The grandparents who are "afraid of the ATM machine" and can't master the VCR have already spent many years on this planet learning and mastering other things. Retirement should be somewhat of an escape from all the work and learning one has to do throughout their life. Fact is, they're not going to be on this planet that much longer - and their decisions to avoid new technologies shouldn't necessarily be interpreted as "warning signs" that things have gotten "too complicated".
I can't help but think that before my time, the older folks were just as scared of such new things as the automobile or the railroad, or electricty in the home.
I make a distinction between "culture" and "popular culture", because American culture is incredibly rich and rewarding (Aaron Copland, George Gerswhin, Mark Twain, Ernest Hemingway, and to a lesser degree, Lovecraft, King, on and on)
Don't forget Lee and Kirby! :)
Peace be with you,
-jimbo
XML Tools for Mac OS X
"Philips Research laboratory in Eindhoven, the Netherlands" whatever.
This latest release from Phillips' Indian R&D is another example of the kind of technological lead that India has over the west. Considering all the breakthroughs they're not releasing, the west must be at least 5 years behind.
Amen. I really, really agree with this point, and now that you've pointed it out, I wish that I'd included it in my original post. Comic books are analogous to the folk legends that evolved into mythology.
People dismiss them because, well, those reasons have been discussed into the ground, but comics persist, like mythologies persist, because they address universal human truths.
Anyhow, another note in the simultaneous attack / defense of American culture.
If your bitterest enemies are people who hack the heads off civilians, then I would say you're doing something right.
By 2057 we could see this technology on the front of newspapers.
And aside from mech-pilots in japanese school-girl uniforms, this was an excellent Anime. Short, but then brevity is the soul of wit.
Or in this case, the soul of a particular atreur.
Every new form of media has it's own Requirimento
To a certain degree that's true. History does have a good track record of people being afraid of technology, but never before since electricity has an invention like the silicon chip and all the other technologies that came with it (digital optical storage media, PCs, the Internet, etc) invaded so quickly and had such an impact on society. That sort of impact our grandparents may have caught the very tail end of (they were children of the electrical age, just like most of us are children of the computer age.) Not very much changed in the way average people conducted everyday life in my parent's lifetime. They've lived their whole lives without a change as dramatic as the silicon chip.
My dad can't figure out for the life of him how to set a digital, embedded clock. Microwaves, cars, alarm clocks, watches, VCRs (which people joke about but it's honestly not that hard).. it just baffles him. I bet most of us here are able to recognize the regular patterns and behaviors of electronic controls for such things. It's not something that can be easily taught. You can't teach instinct. I believe that every time something truly revolutionary comes around, people who were born without it have an extremely difficult time adapting. The competency line moves up and down in relation to the general population.
Also, what happens if sometime in the future, the government decides that Fahrenheit 451 is too subversive to allow the masses access to? Or that 'Catcher in the Rye,' or EE Cummings' poetry is too obscene? Would it be going too far to think that the Dept of Homeland Security (or whatever passes for it in the future), would be able to remotely crash all copies of them before a modern G. Montag could memorize it?
OTOH, it would be great for portable computing. As a helpdesk tech, I *hate* having to carry 21" CRTs up 3 flights of stairs.
Am i the only one who get to think of the Hitchikers Guide to The Galaxy. Just need to write Don't Panic on the front off that book. And another thing.. Where can i get one :)
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---- "Excuse me. Where's the children's gun section?"
Finally, finally I can wipe my arse on Episode I.
There may be some magical solution to this, but it looks to me as if color is very, very much more difficult than mono.
I'd suggest that reaching perfection with a color page/screen is a false goal. When I'm reading a book, I don't get upset that the page doesn't have web-style [font color=x backcolor=y] attributes, especially when x=RED and y=BLUE. In fact, the last thing I want in an eBook is something like this!
Yes, there's surely a need for fully illustrated books. But I won't be terribly upset if the first commercial applications are simple black and white. Heck, I'm doing just fine with green and black with my Palm Pilot.
Stressed? Me? Of course not. Stress is what a rubber band feels before it breaks, silly.
Err...
help me i've cloned myself and can't remember which one I am
take one sheet of electronic paper, and put it in a case with a slim battery and componets for embedded linux, and add a usb port at the bottom for a miniturized qwerty keyboard, or maybe 2 or 4 for extras! demensions 8.5"x11"x.05". basicly an imbedded linux tablet!
You are confusing me with someone who cares.
For CRT refresh rates, it seems like 60 Hz is about the minimum for a display in the center of your vision (at least to my NTSC-tuned eyes, PAL looks noticably flickery), and for peripheral vision, it seems like about 75 Hz is required. However, for *frame* rates, it seems like 24 fps is acceptable to most people (e.g., movies), although I think that while 30 fps for CG looks "smooth", 60 fps has this additional "glasslike" quality. The worse cases are rapid pans or trains moving past the screen horizontally. There may be an argument that temporal antialiasing could make a 30 fps rendering look almost as good as 60 fps.
I also wonder whether a true 24 Hz device would display a 24 fps movie better than an interlaced 60 Hz device due to the annoying 3:2 "beat" pattern you can see on NTSC conversions of movies.
I say screw books, I want a Pocket PC with one of these displays. Sounds thrifty on battery power.
my karma will be here long after I'm gone
Nature's "popular summary" doesn't describe what the actual state of the technology is. It's not clear whether this is "Volume shipments started today", or "interesting technology being explored that might turn out to work", or, worse, "vague lab result being used to hype stock".
Nature's writeup is so bad that the Philips press release is better. Now that's bad journalism.
It's encouraging to hear this from Philips, though. They might actually make it work. E-Ink seems to be more hype than product. I hope we get big displays out of this. I'm tired of hearing about zowie new "big screen" display technologies like OLEDs that end up only on cell-phone sized screens.
http://ntstream2.ddns.ehv.campus.philips.com/efi/8 6090/electro_wetting/philips.wmv
Still have a little way to go!
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They have been showing this all the time in Harry Potter haven't they... Its just that you muggles thought that was magic and this is sciene...
Moving picture chocolate frog cards!
...and he grinned, like a fox eating shit out of a wire brush.
Is there any current technology that would relate to this - with reflected instead of projected light. I just can't imagine what a video on paper would look like, without any backlighting.
There's something very disturbing about the whole idea, although I still think it's the first real advance in ultra-low power static displays for electronic newspapers, books, maps and things that can be read outdoors. Exciting. After that comes the ability to fold them up, update the contents like a real PDA.
I can't wait.
Sun-Earther Dougal Ithika Stanton of Dunbar.
the layman's guide to computer science
All you need is about 100 of them, and something to flip them with...
Moderators are on their usual crack. I wasn't trolling at all, I was just trying to be helpful. I read the mentioned Straight Dope article, but it all wasn't clear enough that I could give the explanation in my own words. That's why I just posted the link with the warning that it's not very clearly written. And you moderate this as troll?!
Future Wiki -- If you don't think about the future, you cannot have one.