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Xerox Reveals Transient Documents
Heartless Gamer writes "Xerox has lifted the veil from some of its research and development work in the field of printing. They demoed the very intriguing 'transient documents.' These offer the prospect of reusable paper in the sense that the content is automatically erased after a period of time, ready for fresh printing. Inspired by the fact that many print outs have a life-span of a few hours (think of the emails you may print out just to read, or the content you proof read on the train journey back home), the specially prepared paper will preserve its content for up to 16 hours."
I've got receipts which fade if left exposed to air, off those stupid thermal printers. And, as a bonus feature, they turn utterly black if you set something very hot on them. Possibly useful for taking pictures of the sun with a magnifying glass, if done with care.
We have a practice in our shop of taking non-sensitive documents and flipping the paper over and running it from a tray for re-use on the blank backside. Fine if people haven't scribbled on it or added a staple.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Meanwhile, the Disney and Circuit City folks are trying to figure out how to leverage forward-frame synergies and shift new paradigms into cross-functional matrix adaptive committee clusters so they can provide new proactive technology-centric solutions to use this in a new "pay to see" limited shelflife consumer product.
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After you run a piece of paper through a printer and then handle it, even a little, it isn't suitable to run through the printer again. Usually it causes jams.
If you could reason with religious people, there would be no religious people
The next use of this paper will be for printing those Microsoft Genuine Advantage certificates with your Windows registration code on them. Made expecially for those rare folk who do know where their documentation is.
Laughter is the Spackle of the Soul.
This memo is set to self-destruct in 16 hours.
If this signature is witty enough, maybe somebody will like me.
Who speaks for the trees?
I do. They're pleased these printers aren't made of wood.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
This will make for awesome practical jokes. "What do mean I just turned in blank pages professor!?"
Interesting, but how many times can you reuse paper that has been out in the real world?
Spilled drinks, people drawing on it with pen, folding, crumping, tearing, chewing.
I know most printers can't handle the paper if it's not in 100% perfect condition.. I can just imagine the kind of paper jams this thing could produce when someone thwoes in 6 pages stuck together with bubble gum, corners torn off and grease from their lunch calzone smeared all over it.
Neat idea with the UV though. I love the idea of inkless printing, as long as the paper doesn't end up being more expensive than gold.
As for destroying the environment that's just FUD.
What kind of documents do hobos need, aside from IOUs, and you might want those to last a while...
Hey, guys. Big gulps, huh? Cool. All right! Well, see ya later.
A really good way to play a practical joke on someone...
:)
- Term papers
- Contracts
- I could go on forever
DRM'd paperback books!
This seems like it can (and therefore will) be used to add "DRM" to paper.
Seriously, think how bad some of the OOPSes will be....
I printed off your email before deleting it, but now I can't find it!
What happened to those photos I printed?
If you don't have your receipt, we can't take it back.
No, that section of the contract never existed. Can you prove it did?
Reading code is like reading the dictionary - you have to read half of it before you can go back and understand it.
An interesting application for this would be for printable coupons. You get a piece of this paper in the mail with some sort of promotion. The instructions tell you feed the paper into your printer and visit a certain URL to print a "special one day only" coupon.
Sure, expiration ("expiry" for the rest of the world) dates have been around forever. However, knowing that your coupon will literally disappear tomorrow would be an added psychological incentive to use it. (I've *got* to stop giving marketers new ideas...)
Entrepreneur : (noun), French for "unemployed"
Well, Demolition Man introduced The Three Seashells.
Now I just have to find out how to use them.
This sig does not contain any SCO code.
I am the Lorax. I speak for the trees!
Edward@Tomato - /home/Edward/ man woman
man: no entry for woman in the manual.
"Qua!?"
"Print is dead."
He said that in 1984, mind you.
At my age I find coming up with a witty signature too exhausting.
It's not FUD.
not all paper products come from tree farm, probably not even half.
Of course, the paper farm also destroy the local trees to make way for special trees.
Also, you can pull things out of the soil for so long before nutriens are used up. What's their plane for maintaining the soil?
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Xerox must be using inspector Chief Quimby's (gadget's boss) technology: "This message will self-destruct in 5... 4... "
You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it dissolve.
Just remove the fuser from your printer, make a printout, and when you're done reading, take a "can of air" and blast the toner off the page.
Finally, contracts that aren't worth the paper they're written on.
Now when people send me paper documents, I will require digitally signed digital copies as the authentic "masters". Because the "paper trail" could disappear after I accept the paper copy.
Apparently Xerox is trying to get all the electronic voting business that Diebold is losing because the people are demanding paper trails.
--
make install -not war
I'm sorry, this article has been misrouted. You meant to send it to my boss.
I'll print out a copy and show it to him.
I have been sending out hundreds of resumes lately... and not ONE return phone call or job offer!
Of more concern is compatibility. I mean, will you be able to use Paper-RW in a Paper+RW Printer?
And let's not get into Paper-RAM.
What's their plane for maintaining the soil?
I wasn't aware this involved aviation. Maintaining soil by plane does sound interesting though. It sorta happens when chutes don't open if only those pesky next of kin and their friends would stop removing the remains.
If my grammar and spelling are off, I am [distracted/tired/careless] (take your pick)
They're not quite the same.
:)
The DIVX stupidity was based on electronic DRM. It required (for those who don't know) a special DVD player that was authorized to play an triple-DES-encrypted disc for up to 48 hours for a fee. After that, additional 48 hours periods could be purchased electronically. The main key is that you bought the disc, which gave you 48 hours from the start, but after that you would pay and play for another 48 hours as often as you wanted.
Disney's abomination was a format called EZ-DVD. These were regular DVDs that were coated with a special chemical that darkened after approximately 24-48 hours once it was exposed to oxygen after breaking the seal of the disc case, rendering the disc unplayable. It would then have to be trashed or "recycled", but the customer had to pay for the recycling postage and I sincerely doubt that it would have been truly recyclable anyway. Because it was priced to be about half that of its "normal" DVD counterpart, it made little to no sense to pay 1/2 the cost of the real thing but get only two days of playability.
Both had their benefits and drawbacks, but the overall consensus is that both formats had far more negatives than positives, which is why both formats failed miserably; however, I'd love to get my hands on an unopened EZ-DVD, open it while submerged in clear polyeurethane, take it out, wait until it dries, then see if the coating still darkened.
The Overrated mod is for reversing inappropriate, positive mods, not for voicing disagreement with a post.
Just throw away the used paper and print on new paper.
Paper is a crop. It grows on trees that are specially planted by paper companies on paper-company land. They're chosen to grow quickly and produce good paper pulp. Cotton is also used in most papers. Cotton is also a crop that's specially planted for this purpose. Paper is also extremely inexpensive.
This technology reminds me of waterless urinals. There are places locally that have them. They don't work well. I live within 5 miles of the 5th largest river in the world. Water is not scarce.
There's no reason to invent expensive, new technologies to be inferior substitutes to the use of cheap abundant resources. Why not fix a real problem instead?
Speaking as part-owner of one 450 acre tree farm, and part-owner of another 778 acre tree farm, I can assure you that most paper does actually come from tree farms. The best and most obvious reason is that it's simply a lot easier to harvest wood from tree farms. Undergrowth is controlled, quality and yields are known, roads are available... the good reasons go on and on. In fact, in order to make paper, you only need trees that are about two years old. Three to five is better, but two works just fine. It's very, very easy to indefinitely sustain the production of paper.
Generally tree farming is most profitable when you can do it nearly year-round, so it is done more often in the southeast. Slash pine occurs naturally. About the only thing that is displaced by most tree farms in this area is a bit of uninteresting (and certainly not endagered) undergrowth of various types. So no "local trees" are destroyed for "special trees".
Finally, a great deal of effort goes into the care and maintenance of even small tree farms like mine. To some degree this is even regulated by various state and federal forestry groups.
Your entire post is speculation, and isn't even remotely close to accurate.
Slashdot quality declines as the number of hot grits posts decreases. - Provolt's Law, Apr-09-2005
Still, a good chunk of nutrients in a forest (the majority, actually) are held in standing biomass (trees). When you take out the trees, you take out a lot of nutrients that would go on to enrich the soil for more trees in the future. You get a net decrease in soil productivity. This is why a lot of tree farms inject your standard gassified NPK fertilizers. Ironically enough, these gasseous fertilizers easily and readily convert to nitric acids, which are not only detrimental to foliage, but are easily oxidized to produce NOx and Ozone. Ozone is also very detrimental to foliage, and NOx is again oxidized to yield...guess what...more ozone and more NOx. What you end up with is a weakened, stressed stand of trees that's highly susceptible to disease and pests, along with soil that's sub-par. You basically get an economic loss to tree farmers and a huge fire hazard.
And i didn't mention the impact of soil perturbation as a result of mechanized tree harvesting (the way it's mostly done now-a-days). Soil takes decades to centuries to form and be productive. If you disrupt it on a large scale, as is done in mechanized tree harvesting, you basically get a retarded growing environment, as well as allow a small fraction of the worlds largest CO2 sink to let loose some scruptious heat-trapping gas. Basically, what this all boils down to is tree farms are bad news for disposable goods (paper products). It is extremely costly to run a tree farm that can sustain itself for more than a few decades, and they're usually run at a loss. Economically, you get your tax dollars used to aid tree farmers because paper pulp is seen as a neccessary good in our economy (and it is). A much better solution, economically and environmentally, is hemp. Hemp will grow in just about any soil condition, use markedly less water and fertilizer, and can be used to produce just about any disposable paper good you can think of.
And if you don't believe me about the tree farm stuff, do a little googling. This is all standard, undergrad level environmental chemistry. Or, just look at your original statement and try and remember the first law of thermo: energy/matter can not be created nor can it be destroyed. If Nutrients in a system prduced a tree, then you take that tree out of the system, you've taken nutrients out of that system. That's a net loss, and in this case it's a net loss directly to the soil as that's where most of the nutrients would have ended up had that tree stayed in place. Thus, the soil composition would not be like that of a normal forest. It would be poorer.
Enter key. Use it.
".. can I um.. borrow the sheet of paper tonite?"
"Ok, Son, just have it clean by my meeting at 9:30 am.""Enjoy what you're doing! If it becomes drudgery, you're doing it wrong!" - Jim Butterfield
The recycling of paper is bad for the environment. Paper represents carbon that a tree took from the air by converting CO2 to O2. If you bury that paper, the carbon remains sequestered, and then a new tree can take new carbon from the air to make new paper.
Recycling reduces the demand for this cycle, and therefore reduces the rate of atmospheric carbon removal rate.
Ditto for lumber.
FATMOUSE + YOU = FATMOUSE
That assumes you either need no corrections, or you annotate using a UV pen. And, that you are able to carry a stack of papers around the subway without creasing and wrinkling them.
There are only two good reasons to print a document:
* you want to scribble on it.
* you want to carry it somewhere that its likely to get lost or damaged or where an electronic reader is inappropriate.
In either case, this paper is unlikely to be useful.
Personally, I'd much rather see the Xerox R&D folks working on light weight, high-contrast electronic readers with robust note-taking features.
I see serious problems with the idea that the information on this paper is "lost" after 16 hours. We all know how hard it is to "lose" data on a hard drive. It seems to me that if a printer has printed on this paper, then some kind of indelible information is now stored on this paper. How long will it be until this paper is thrown away and that data is then stolen?
Great warrior...hrmph! Wars not make one great.