Slashdot Mirror
Pixel Qi Introduces a DIY Kit
jones_supa writes "Pixel Qi has just revealed their DIY kit for netbooks, planned to be out near the end of Q2 — sounds like June. This makes it possible to retrofit a screen to one fully readable in direct sunlight. In her blog, Mary Lou Jepsen says: 'It’s only slightly more difficult than changing a lightbulb: it’s basically 6 screws, pulling off a bezel, unconnecting the old screen and plugging this one in. That’s it. It’s a 5 minute operation.' She also talks about the 'laptop hospital,' a service depot started by kids in Africa."
A whole bunch of Pixel Qi running devices were demoed at CES this year. We'll probably never see half of them again, but the rest are all presumably coming out sometime. This shit is friggin NEW. Hasn't really been time to integrate into most laptop lines yet. My bet is that the high-end laptops will start offering this as an option soon enough.
And there are a few downsides. I'm assuming that they are still more expensive than a plain LCD screen. But from what I can remember from the CES videos, there's a distinct yellowish tint to the display (in color/video mode). It was very much as if it was all printed on newsprint. Now, nothing wrong with that for what the screen does, but I cannot see manufacturers pushing out a yellow tinted display across all their lines. There would be... backlash.
I used to believe everyone can learn quantum physics. That is what I literally said to people.
Then I started tutoring at a community college, and got hit with a big reality bat.
For a lot of these older people, they have an incredibly difficult time remembering to do the same thing to both sides of an equation. And don't even get me started on them figuring out how to manipulate negative numbers for adding, subtracting, multiplying and dividing. *shudder*
The best they can do is try to memorize lists of rules and apply them. Developing an intuition for things is way beyond them now. Not only that, but they never learned how to think for themselves, so they will never teach themselves anything, ever. Which means they require constant hand-holding through every class. Their strategy is essentially to attempt to memorize how to do every possible problem that could be on the exams, instead of just learning the concepts and applying them dynamically.
Sure, maybe if they spent their whole lives using their brain properly, maybe they could learn this stuff now. But I seriously think that their brains just can't handle learning things much at all anymore. They let their minds atrophy and the best they can hope for is holding off dementia.
If you think you can teach them quantum physics, have at it. I'm not stopping you.
The lesson I got from it is that if you want to know how to do stuff, keep your brain active your whole life, and learn things as you go. Your brain can and will, in a way, forget how to learn things, if you don't exercise it regularly.
And this isn't even accounting for the people who have had physical trauma causing brain damage. I've tried to help people like that, one person who actually got real migraines after thinking for over a half hour. On the one hand, I applaud them, because they are trying their best to do what they can to make the best of the situation. On the other hand, it is just sad watching them, because they are never, ever going to do it, without some kind of specialized therapy.