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The Rise of Technology / The Fall of Trees?
cetan asks "Why is it that the further we get into this technological revolution, these incredible advances in communication, and begin to unfold the power of the internet that people (in general) insist on printing EVERYTHING out?? Everyday, I see more and more junk being sent to the print queues. Web pages, PDF files, auto-responder emails, the list goes on and on. And, this trend seems to have no end in sight. The further we advance, the more people seem to want to print. Why is this? What is driving this phenomenon? I, of course have my own hypotheses on this matter, but I'm curious as to what others think about it." Interesting thought. I have some thoughts on this matter. Click below to read them.
Although I agree that, technology has come far, we haven't come far enough to replace the simplicity found in holding information on paper. PDAs just don't have the display area to handle the density of information one can scratch out on a nearby notebook pad. Fact is, paper is still the primary medium of information transfer, although the internet is catching up. I think advances in wearable technology (display googles) plastics and LCD displays (think: roll up monitors) will be the things that may reverse this trend and make paper a thing of the past. What do you all think?
BINGO. I'm about to head to the head right now, and I'm going to take the printout from "Cyberclasm" earlier today to read. As for laptops, I don't have one. But I'd really like to see the Newspad from 2001. It's a beautifully minimalist approach to simply reading electronic content. The stylus is nice, but "creeping complexity" is to be feared, before it turns into a laptop.
Seriously, do your best to berate them for this activity. Taunt them. Belittle them. "Luddite! Luddite!"
If that doesn't work, take away their printing privs. :)
If you want to read something on screen, you have to sit motionless and stare at it. You can't sit on a comfy couch and shift around. Very few monitors are as good as a sheet of paper. I have a 21" trinitron, and I still find a sheet of paper more comfortable to read. Also, when reading source code, it's easy to stick your fingers in a few places and flip back and forth rapidly. Few electronic documents are as easy to navigate...
I think the backfire is from all the stupid fucking business people out there who don't have a clue. I work at a retail computer store. We have a fax, I turn it off frequently. When a sales person calls me to fax me something, I ask if they can email it. If they can't, why the hell would I do business with a company in the computer field that can't email?
And...wireless networking is proliferating..take that laptop anywhere...ANYWHERE.
The obvious reason that we still use paper is that the average display gives about one page. If you print it out you can open it out and get two or even 8 pages at once. The cost of doing that with Video or LCDs is still quite high. Matrox have multiheaded cards, but the monitors aren't cheap. Xerox and others are experimenting with reusable 'paper'- actually it will probably be closer to celophane or cardboard- that you can put through a special printer. That will be well cool if they can sort it out- the resolution at the moment is poor- like ~15 dpi but they're working on it! Lets face it, unless the thing you are looking at changes much- paper is still a superior technology- higher resolution, more colors, non volatile, and renewable.
Uh, I guess you've never used one then, Gramps. I haven't used a post-it note ONCE since I got my Pilot. And to someone who asked, yes, I DO use notepad.exe to jot notes, so there.
The vast majority of our paper usage is wastage because of ignorance. From a business perspective, this is bad not because of the environmental impact or the cost of paper and toner, but because of the amount of time people spend hanging around the printer, waiting for something to print, shuffling papers, wasted secretary time, etc.
If I were a manager, I'd keep my eye on the printer when it comes time to get rid of people. Usually the people with the longest time in the print queue are the people least productive.
Aww man, this one's so good, I think I need to print it out.....
When I was ignorant, I used to print a lot. Then I accidentally came across The UNIX Philosophy, and I learned how paper is the death certificate of data. It was one of many enlightening ideas to be found in that book.
I highly recommend it. --just another perl hacker
You can store different papers in different physical locations, making it very easy to find, and probably easier to remember that you even have it in the first place. The process of printing and physically moving the paper also helps us to remember it's existance. Plus people like to get these chunks of company paper out of the printer because it's something solid and makes you feel good about your job. :)
When we get VR and datagloves and HMDs where you can reach in, grab a bunch of data and physically move your arm to place the data in what appears to be a physical location, paper will be required less.
Yes, trees keep growing, but at the same time the volume of print jobs that have no reason to be printed keeps growing. Even if a resource is renewable does not justify needless waste. What really kills me, though, is when these useless B&W jobs are printer to my color laserwriter.
yeah makes just as much sense.
I'm not so sure. I for one would trust a good digitally signed document with strong crypto more than a piece of paper with someone's name at the bottom; forgery of paper signatures is easy, good digital ones are hard to forge and non-repudiatable.
I am using Linux for years now. So you are finally discovering that computer technologies are not green... They are not green because they are the child of people obsessed by technology and by gadgets. Adding technologies to solve communication problem is not the way to go
When guys asked me what portable organizer are you using.. then I would show them my filofax and told them that this is my "multi-language, with color graphics" of course, I 'm not gonna tell them that battery is not required and it'll able to withstand a shock of 20G force.
Paper is always needed, but if you want to save the tree, try making paper from the fibre from the one year crop grass, sort of bamboo paper. It might not be cheaper thou'
I agree. I think that people are printing out more material now than prior to the explosion of the Internet, because they still have a fundamental lack of trust of the Internet. Once the Internet gains more reliability and instills more confidence into the user community, they will desire less and less to have paper copies of materials they view on the Internet. "That which does not kill us, only makes us stronger." -Timberwolf
A big problem that I see (which some people solve by printing) is that there's no universal way of managing bookmarks across applications. For example, in the course of solving a problem, or doing some generic piece of work, I may want to look at X web pages, Y emails, Z source code files, and W api reference documents, switching between them frequently and randomly. The problem is that half of the apps don't have the concept of bookmarks, and those that do are disconnected and non-uniform.
What I'd like is a way to
It would make my life easier, and probably other people's as well. We might even use less paper.
19" monitors now cost as little as $350. But, for a dime, I can get enough paper to cover my whole work area. Plus, I can take any document in one hand and compare it to another document in my other hand, or even compare those two with a third one laying on the desk. Much easier than tiling &/or tabbing windows, changing workspaces, ttys, etc.
8.5"x11" is tiny! The entire surface of my desk is covered with notes and articles and books. The monitor that can replace dozens of pages of immediately available information on paper should be at least the size of a large desk, and preferably cover the walls too :) You are spot on that the paper-killer monitor needs to be touch sensitive. You need to be able to scribble on it with a pen, just like on paper.
Originals are not that important!
Right! The assurance of accuracy is important. This is why we should be lobbying our state legislatures for making digital hashed legally binding. It give you that assurance. This thread should be looking at that in more detail -- we may stop using trees, but we will never run out of a need for secure records, notaries, and so on. That is where biometrics really shine, not as passwords.
If I had an 8.5 x 11" keyboardless computer pad supporting 16bit color with 75 pixels per inch with handwriting recognition - I'd be the first to throw away my computer and printer for good.
I'd pay big bucks for it too.
Sony, Hitachi, DELL, IBM are you listening?
Try dumping water into your moniter. Could get a raging fire going.
Is there any BSOD paper out there somewhere ?
It's easier to do an "adequate" forgery of a written signature than a digital signature, because it just takes talent. It's easier to do a "perfect" forgery of a digital signature than a written signature because it just takes lax security by the legitimate signer.
The adequate written forgery is at least potentially susceptible to expert analysis. The perfect digital forgery really is identical to the true digital signature.
Anyone know why duplexing isn't standard yet?
It is my belief that all trees are evil and must be put to deth.
I have been looking for a solution to this for years. Info on a computer is WAY more flexible (greppable, animated, fits in a small space, etc) - printing it out is a step backwards; but info on paper is way more portable.
The solution will have to be either an affordable and unobtrusive wearable computer, or a dirt cheap webpad/ebook analogue.
I am the same way. I still have all of my old AppleII stuff! Backups are key, as is an interest in filing properly. I really, really don't see how people can not do this, but then again I don't see how people can not save for their retirement, not keep cars for 15 years in good running order, and so on.
I guess that the bottom line is more "moron code" in basic PC code (perhaps as a default setup with the more consumer-oriented distros like Dead Rat) to keep people from destroying things.
Of course, standards help here as well -- I have helped people go through several Win3.x/95/NT to UNIX migrations and they were painful, whereas UNIX to UNIX migration was only tough with proprietary databases (Oracle to Informix was a bear). The more people use UNIX, the easier it will be to help them later on.
Unlike most of the nerds on the list, I'm quite forgetful. I can't even remember what was the last link I clicked on and why. Writing things down on paper solidifies my thoughts. For some reason, electronic paper doesn't have the same effect. Electronic organizers make be feel deficient.
Forgive me, I'm a hopeless cause!
"Oh, and no, I'm not no stinking tree-hugging hippie, I'd just rather walk through a forest instead of a parking lot."
So, what do you think would happen if there was no longer money to be made from growing trees for paper but still money to be made from parking lots? (Hint : the answer isn't "people would plant more trees")
Trees for paper are grown like any other crop. Just as we won't run out of wheat because of people eating it, we won't run out of trees because of people using paper. These crops are grown because we use them. We stop using them, people stop growing them.
Does everyone's moniter really suck so bad? Or is everyone just having trouble adjusting the contrast and brightness? I mean I don't have any problems reading my moniter. Sure I spent $1350 for it but hey, I knew I was going to be spending some time reading stuff on it. As far as straining goes I've read text off of old paper in poor light I find that pretty straining after a few hours. (old paperback books) There's not much adjustment one can do there. You can get better light but that's not always as trivial as controlling one's CRT.
> It looks like paper is a winner
:-)
Except that you can't grep through paper.. I don't print out as much stuff as I used to, because I like grep-ing. In fact, come to think of it, the web is just one big GREP to me (à la google)
As nice as today's toys are, a it's a lot cheaper and easier to take a pencil-and-paper shopping list to Food-4-Less than to haul around a laptop or a Palm Pilot.
Use 'save as..' and select Postscript, such as in Netscape.
>And not to be marked as flamebait right away, but does anyone but me miss the days when a linux user inherently was a programmer?
No.
I don't know, I'm a toilet PalmPiloteer myself (er ...) and if you glance over when you're through and notice there's no toilet tissue on the roll -- -- you might wish you were holding a paper manual after all. AC
Well, I print out code, mainly other people's. Most of the time there's a problem that needs fixing, and the first step is understanding the code. This is made much easier, for me at least, by making notes next to the code and marking blocks. If I had to do that on-screen, I would to easily lose my train of thought... Just my 2 cents...
We can give our thanks to the dopers for making something that was a fringe drug into something that has HUGE numbers of people worldwide opposed to the widespread growth of hemp for productive use.
People laugh at the hippies trying to advocate cannabis for medical use, just as we laugh at the ones running the little counter-culture hemp clothing shops, etc.
Because we know it's really all about getting stoopid from the smoke.
Try reading 150 pages of PDF files and 150 pages of paper. Then you'll know why paper still counts
I was reading an article for english class a couple of years ago, and the author made the point that people are a lot more motivated to read a book when they don't have that little scrollbar on the corner of the screen distracting them from their work. I know for myself personally, I could never read a huge manual online, I would simply get bored and either skip around a lot or change to another URL. When they print it out, they have that and only that in their hands and therefore less distractions.
Seems logical, there where only thirteen states at the founding ;)
Give the kids more hemp products. That will keep them stoopid. But happy, of course.
I like to print the stuff that I want to save to Adobe Acrobat (if you buy the full Acrobat you can print to PDF files.) Back before I quit using Linux, I printed to Postscript files from Netscape.
By saving images of the webpages and other info that I wanted, I could burn it all onto CDROM disks. Saves a lot of paper, and keeps a digitally perfect copy around for those times when I do want something important on paper.
Press this button to add the new Client Address Book.
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|Press Me |
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I had one user who came to me with the note printed out. She said she didn't understand what to do. I finally was able to explain to her that she needed to press the button on the screen using her mouse. She then admitted that the note was already deleted.
Doesn't the white come from bleach, regardless of fiber type?
Hemp paper also has the advantage that you can smoke it, and get really, really high :P
Heehee. Yes.
(Homer Simpson voice) mmmmm...arrogance.
One thing I've found very useful is a multi-head display. I have this on my Macs and on a Linux box (using Matrox cards and Metro-X). It's quite convenient to have the documentation on a separate screen and has often saved me from needing printed documentation. If this is not possible, there are programs available that will compress two or four pages into one and save a few sheets. I've used Save-A-Tree on the Mac and have seen equivalents on Linux boxes. My only disagreement is that printing will eventually stop. I still love books and have shelves upon shelves of them. There's nothing like a wall of knowledge to fend of the ignorant. KL
How about a company that acts as a digital notary public? They could digitally sign the documents and keep a copy in near on-line storage in multiple safe places around the world. A one time fee should be all that is needed for perminate storage.
I don't know who said it either, but I remember reading a magazine article which quoted it and continued "... there are presently some Japanese companies which have both."
I thought the phenomenon you describe is only found in flourescent materials. Everything else is just a scattering of the photons not an absorbtion and readmission.
I often download web sites to my harddrive using the utility getwww. It remaps links to be local to a relative path. I have several gigs of websites that I want to retain a copy of and access on my laptop from CDROM even when I am far from any internet access.
Trees may be a renewable resource, but forests aren't. It takes hundreds of years to replace an ecosystem that was clear cut in a matter of weeks. The replacement plantings merely replace the trees, the rest of the ecosystem is destroyed forever. Most of the tree replacement strategies have just produced temperate deserts which happen to contain soft wood trees, the rest of the flora and fauna are gone forever.
Trees may be a renewable resource, but forests aren't. It takes hundreds of years to replace an ecosystem that was clear cut in a matter of weeks. The replacement plantings merely replace the trees, the rest of the ecosystem is destroyed forever. Most of the tree replacement strategies have just produced temperate deserts which happen to contain soft wood trees, the rest of the flora and fauna are gone forever. Little off topic, sorry, but the above comment got right under my skin.
Well, I think what you're really talking about here is porn. I love the variety of free porn I have access to on the Internet, but yet I'm still more inclined to print out a single nice 300k jpeg and take it to the bathroom with me than use my laptop. CRTs and LCDs are just too impersonal!
I used to work for a large company and we had to do a monthly report that was about 500 pages. It took about 5 people several hours each to produce this report.
One month we simply stopped sending the report in and no one ever called us to tell us that they needed our report.
We should all try and just stop printing reports.
Most reports are never even read anyway!
Do the reports in html on a web site and just give people links to the web page.
Actually, sdiff is a "side by side" comparison program that displays the two text files and highlights differences.
Try diff -y on a system if you don't have sdiff.
You can even have it ignore differences in whitespace and differences in capitallization.
Much faster and more accurate than any comparision a human could make!
I have no problem reading on-line.
People that do have problems reading a computer screen are nearly always farsighted and just need to wear reading glasses when they are on-line.
Consult your eye doctor at your next eye examination if reading a computer screen makes your eyes hurt. They can also recommend eye exercises to help your eyes.
Just put a terminal in your bathroom. So, save the trees, and smoke the hemp.
A lanyard would help for easy retrieval if it did fall in!
And I also wouldn't recomend eating paper that fell in!
- When you need to examine more than 60 or so lines of code concurrently. Specifically, when you are trying to understand some brain-dead idiot's 20 pages of spaghetti code. You know the sort: The ones who think why use local variables when we can use globals... Or while() when we can use GOTO. And that comments are a waste of time.
- When your employer insists on providing 14 inch monitors that can't display more than 20 lines of code at a time. (Which is one of the reasons why I bought a 19 inch monitor and now telecommute.)
- When you need to have the information available offline or when your computer is unavailable. Like the manual for a particular piece of software that "takes over" your computer, the documentation for your motherboard's jumpers, or a map to your friends house.
- For archiving purposes when you're a clueless newbie. I suspect folks will outgrow this phase once they realize that (1) They will never find their paper copy again after it's been filed. And (2) they can search for it online with grep. At which point I hope they will start performing regular backups, or burning CD's, or something... Of course, until we reach saturation, for every newbie that gets a clue, more clueless newbies will have discovered computers. Give it 50 years or so, and things should improve.
The biggest problem is trying to use the same exact metaphor for computers as for the real world.
A computer is not a desktop no matter what software you run on it.
I have seen some awesome technology that will do so much to expand the usablility of computers.
I have seen information on displays that use muliple (low-power) lasers to draw an image directly on the retina of the human eye. The dpi of this technology is simply unbelievable. Orders of magnitude over anything else.
More fesible is technology that allows you to fix your eyes at the center of the screen and then displays individual words approaching 900 words per minute with good comprehension. That is one typed page a minute.
Seems that most of the slowdown in reading is from having to track your eyes from word to word along a line and then jump down to the next line.
But it will take us many years to get the full use out of these new technologies. After all, looking at old printed manuals, they didn't have a very good word count per page either!
Yes, but at that point, your phone will be your PDA. A lot like the Star Trek comunicators.
It is funny that we were wireless for millions of years, then we strung up all of this wire and now everything is going wireless again.
I think that with carefull planning a person could build a solar powered home in the middle of nowhere and be just as connected as a person in downtown New York.
We had a very, very disgruntled employee who helped run one of the large printer/stuffer/mailer machines the size of a bus in the basement. When he left, he printed out and mailed 16,000 photocopies of his naked, hairy butt to the board of directors and everyone at the top of the org chart. After the mail came, they went a-lookin' for this redneck, attorneys in tow. When they found him, he was in jail (for pushing his next boss into an open manure pit that he couldn't get out of, forcing him to tread pig-manure for eight hours until he was found, and setting the tanker truck on fire and walking home)(he had difficulty accepting constructive criticism) and they elected to eat the postage.
Aren't employees fun?
Apart from that, there are things in my personal file cabinet from 20 and 30 years ago. Would the medium I stored them on still be around? Will Zips, floppies, DVDs, CDRs still be around? ARE YOU CERTAIN?
Mortality, longevity, incept date.
MIT's Digital Paper may solve this problem.
In a day "we'll" go through about 150 (avg) reams of paper, all eight and a half by eleven. Sounds ridiculous, but it's true... Lots of it gets mailed out, (legal stuff). A good portion is "development" waste... check out www.swiftview.com, they've got an excellent product to eliminate that! Internally we've made every effort to be paperless. Document management, imaging systems, and things like the swiftview product cut down on our use of paper almost entirely. Although I just found out that there is an offsite group that does nothing but print what's in our imaging database all day long! for records! I guess that's the only real Y2K proof solution? I hope it burns down!
No offense, but it sounds like your job sucks.
Yes I agree that printing everything from the web. It's the stupidiest thing to do, having an electronic way of working it is supposed to save space, paper,time,etc. But people insist on printing their email, I'm not sure that most of them understand what's this way of working is about. rob
there are rolling papers made of hemp. Ever hear of Bambu rolling papers? They are made of hemp
My feeling is that we NEED to hold things in our hands. We still get a great amount of input from the surrounding world through tactile contact. Until we evolve beyond this, some form of paper, or "thing we can hold in our hands", will always be necessary.
First the US government has to legalize hemp. Then we can make hemp paper. I have some hemp paper and it is no different from tree paper. It's expensive because it's not legal to produce it in most of the states (yet). When hemp is legalized nationwide we will then have an affordable product.
yes. The thing is hemp is not legal to produce in the United States with the exception of a few states. Canada produces hemp and so do many other countries. Hemp was made illegal in 1937 and since then farmers have been fighting for the right to grow hemp in the US. go to http://www.crrh.org and you can find out more info. Once hemp is legal you can then have high quality paper. It's not as expensive as everyone thinks.
Let me guess: you are about 35 or older. Not necessarily, but I noted a similar idea tended to predominate mostly among older workers where I worked once. All the info could be right there on the local network for them, nicely hyperlinked and browser accessible in seconds, and they'd spend hours printing and compiling 6 inch thick notebooks of the same info, because they had some sort of mindset that it was different on paper than on a screen. One explanation I've heard when I've inquired about this is that "stuff off a screen doesn't stick in my head like it will off paper." It's apparently totally some sort of mindset thing or maybe the brain damage caused by years of television :-) (stuff on a TV generally SHOULD be ignored, after all)
Saw something on TV while visiting my parents the other day about this guy who was writing a biography of Ronald Reagan, and he had literally thousands of index cards full of notes. I suppose when he started this project in 1980, it would not have been feasible, but all I can think of is how terribly clumsy this would be compared to keeping a database of the same info, which could be vastly more portable, faster to access, and not the least of which fully searchable.
It's totally a mental thing. My mom is finally getting out of the habit of making 'rough drafts' in Corel WP8 and printing them out, double spaced, writing corrections, and retyping them. I remember doing that sort of thing once, in high school (being forced to by certain old-method teachers,) but since then adapted to the much easier,and to me, intuitive-- process of modifying documents via word processor then printing out only the final copy, if necessary.
The only reason I used to still print stuff, for the most part was when I needed a technical doc to fix the computer(in which case the computer would not be working to display said document). This is only in the case of things having many incredibly tedious and exact details, though. Wish I were eidetic sometimes.
It has since similarly dawned on me to throw the info on the Palm and use it from there.
All this talk of printers vastly exceeding monitor resolution only applies to text for the most part though. Except in certain expensive cases, most printers suck at graphics compared to a monitor. A 720dpi bubblejet printer can make a nice JPG look like pixelized crap. I've never studied exactly what's going on, but 720dpi of color is obviously not even up to par with a 90-120 dpi monitor showing even a 256 color picture.
Well this should already be possible with caller ID. Someone calls displaying the number and ID. Simply tell the phone to save it.
Umm... *Guettenberg* did not create the printing press. He copied the design from some Chineese bloke that invented it years before him. All Guettenberg did was invent the use of metal stamps in the printing press reducing the cost of usage to somthing most of the people could afford.
mmm.. tasty.. nerves.. Huh?!? What?!? Oh... When we get tap-in devices like that, closed source audio players will be more watermarkable.
I dont know, Im 24 and a programmer and while I wont say stuff on paper sticks in my head better, I noticed long ago in school if I had to proof read something I wrote, I would notice mistakes on a peice of paper that I would read right past on the screen. I think a lot of it has to do with (1) display area on a sheet of paper being much larger than the content area on you averave 14-17" monitor. (Excuse me whilst I speak heresy) The Vadem Clio (yes, a WinCE product) I think has perhaps the best design for reading I have ever seen. It opens like a clamshell laptop then the screen continues to rotate around into a slate type display laying flat over the keyboard. I cant count the number of Gutenberg e-texts I have read on the can with this wonderful device, but I still find myself wishing the screen was 8.5 x 11.
=pr0n. especially .mpg/.avi/.rm/.asf
but how do you print a movie?
Actually, commercial hemp plants have a much lower concentration of "active ingredients". Having a lot of hemp fields will make cultivation of drug plants harder because the plants grown for seeds will have to be protected from the commercial hemp pollen. The commercial hemp will tend to weaken all nearby flowering drug crops. (Yes, I know that drug plants often are not allowed to go to seed, but some are used for seed for the next crop)
This is not a troll or flamebait, I really think this is a valid option, although I don't expect many here to like it much...
Actually, I've been doing e-mail and Internet for approx 15 years, and I'm on the verge of doing what many of my co-workers do - print everything first and then deal with it.
I'm in a job where I get hundreds of e-mails a day, and quite frankly, the e-mail software is not up to the task. I know it'll kill lotsa trees (sorry, hemp-smoking granolas), but the reality is that my co-workers print/read/reply cycle is MORE EFFICIENT for a high volume of e-mail.
I tried this for he first time the othre day and it cut my time to catch up on e-mail substantially. It seems wrong, but if it increases my efficiency, it more than offsets the minimal additional cost, and it lets me deal with e-mail in all those 2-minute periods when I'm waiting for something else. (Yes I have a fairly nice laptop that stays docked all the time. If I pull it out and suspend, it takes the better part of a minute to suspend and about the same to resume. Hell, I can reboot that fast. Might as not have a laptop.) Paper is available instantly, on the other hand.
A few years ago I saw a report on Beyond 2000 about a company in Venice, Italy which is using algae instead of wood pulp to create paper. This paper is said to be of high quality and has the added benefit of retaining it's white colour instead of yellowing as wood paper does. Also, algae can be replenished very quickly, in a matter of days instead of many years as for trees. I wonder what happened to this algae paper? Anyone with some more info?
>It's like giving everyone scissors and black felt pens and letting them run around in your library.
If someone let me and a bunch of other people loose in a library with felt pens and scissors, I'd use the bloody scissors to stab anyone who defaced any books.
I for one can say that it is not just a mindset of the old. I have been programming for 17 years (im 27) and I still rather read a large document in a paper format because for some reason I too havea problem absorbing large amounts of info from a screen, LCD or CRT. I know this sounds lame, but thats the way it is with me. It's probably related to something akin to dexlexia. Some folks have it... some dont.
I have colleagues that don't even read their email until they print it out. Pretty ridiculous if you ask me...
Actually, about 60% is farmed. The rest is periodically clear cut scrub pine. My family has been in Texas since it was Mexico and we own a lot of basically worthless pine scrub land in East Texas. Oil and gas on all side, but not under our property. Damn it. I could have used a Ferrari in high school. Anyway, about every 25 years, them pine scrub is dense enough to get Temple EastTex or someone (I actually think that they are some one else now) to come out and clear cut. They hydromulch the hills and do this before it rains. It annoys the deer, but a year later the whole place is over grown and there are lots and lots of critters all over. No, you certainly don't have an ecosystem like an old growth pine forest, but the animals are hardly wiped out. AFAIK, a lot of US timber off of private lots is used that way.
But I don't want to live in a time when the environment is trashed.
Looks like I have not choice, though. Thanks mom and dad for polluting the air. Thanks management for printing everything that goes through your computer.
You've touched on one of the best uses for paper, one area wheere computers could never possibly be superior...rolling.
People print stuff because printing is seen as providing a permanent copy. Computer copies are seen as impermanent.
Windows has made people believe that computers regularly self-destruct and irretrivably lose huge amounts of data. They would not believe that computers (with real OSes, even if the hardware is low-end) are normally limited only be a ready supply of power, even if an uptime stat jumped out from behind a bush and bit them on the ass.
The "PC revolution" has put huge amounts of data in the hands of people who would not recognize a tape drive if one jumped out from behind the same bush and bit them on the ass. Naturally, these people aren't familiar with fire safes, off site storage, backup procedures, or proper physical procedures (like mirroring disks).
People, thanks to two generations of pinko-weirdness with public education, would not recognize mathematical reality if it jumped out from behind that increasinly crowded bush and bit them, yet again, on their welt-covered ass.
Concepts like data integrity, scalability, and so on are completely unfamiliar to most people. Distributed Windows systems has merely distributed the fear.
I trust computer records to be around for years because I have spent most of my life on VAXen, mainframes, and UNIX. I regularly work with COBOL older than me (I am 29). I work with databases full of data that was on tape before I was born. As far as I understand, data is not supposed to ever go away. As far as people who have only worked with Windows understand, it goes away all the time.
This paranoia (justified with Windows) makes people who don't understand that math at all well very leery of getting digital signatures the same status as real ones or even photocopies. It is this lack of confidence that makes that job harder.
This is just another example of what damage Microsoft has done.
When the subject is still vague in your mind, there is no UI that works better than pencil and eraser.
1. It weighs less than a computer and is easier to carry around.
2. You can read it without having to go to the computer, turn it on, and wait for it to boot.
3. You can show it to other people easily.
4. Since paper is cheap, multiple paper copies of a document can be passed out and read by a number of people at the same time, e.g. for a meeting.
5. Paper holds more lines per page than a screen, which makes it easier to read source code.
6. Paper lasts for hundreds of years, as opposed to magnetic media, which have lifetimes measured in decades, CD-ROMs, which may last 50 years or so, and web sites, which frequently vanish without warning. This is an especially important property for legal documents.
7. Paper has no proprietary format to get in the way of its usefulness; anyone can read it.
8. Paper can handle any arbitrary two-dimensional image; you're not limited to certain specific fonts, line styles, geometric shapes, etc. This is not true of word processors or browsers, where moving a document from one program to another can result in fonts, columnation, etc. being messed up.
9. Printed documents will not become obsolete and therefore unreadable as technology advances. This is not true of disks, CD-ROMs, or other computer storage media. How many computers today can read 8" disks, or even 5.25" disks?
10. It is easy for some group of bozos to eliminate a web site that they don't like by bringing legal pressure to bear. It is not so easy for them to find and eliminate several hundred thousand printed copies of the pages from that site.
--- Brian
People who obsessively print things out do so in large part because they don't understand file systems and can organize and find things better on paper. This is not their failing; typical hierarchical file systems are fairly counterintuitive for new computer users. That is, from a user interface perspective, they suck, and there's lots of room for improvement. (look at all the half-hearted attempts products like Office make to keep track of your files for you so you won't have to navigate the file system). How many times have you had to help someone who told you "Word lost my files again!"?
Why not?
Seriously, I superglued my resignation (when I was leaving the country!) to my boss's door -- I used a lot of glue, then spray lacquer. They had to sand it off.
No, I couldn't have done that with a 21" Trinitron. At least, not easily and quickly.
Currently we place blank sheets of paper bought from elsewhere into a printer, printo them, and when done with the printed sheets either take them to a recycling center or a land fill. Instead, what if there was a printer that could take printed sheets, process them somehow, and the result would be freshly printed sheets? The technology to do this is not real clear or feasible at the moment, but since when has that stopped mankind before? :)
This reminds me a bit of Babylon 5 where they had small plastic sheets they used as paper (which appeared to be clear and difficult to read against anything but a solid, contrasting background). Something like that would be easy to recycle directly for re-use.
Anyway, just an idea.- ---------------------------------
------------------------------------------
-------------------------------
"For to me to live is Christ, and to die is gain." - Phil. 1:21 (KJV)
I think Guggenheim invented the museum.
slashdot broke my sig
It did remove the need for paper.
The problem is that it did not remove the desire for paper.
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
A display the size and thickness of a Sony Vaio
cover, running on battery for about 5 hours straight, with a pen interface like the pilot, and an infrared or shortrange radio connect to a base station, providing a resolution of 150 dpi or better.
If I had such a thing, I would never grep paper again. ht://dig rules. This would be just so Star Trek!
On another note however, I read just last week that the National Forest people are the only group in the country (private sectors included) that cut down more trees than they plant every year. So they're the biggest offenders anyway.
Werd.
Hey, that's easy, you've already got buy-in from upper management. Get him to mandate printing quotas, reduce the number of available printers, and place the available printers in locations where people have to walk as far as possible to get to them. Also, keep paper and toner supplies under lock and key, with very few people having the key. Then place only a minimum of extra paper near the printers, no toner.
People are afraid of technology, but they are also lazy. I am inclined to thing that laziness will win out, but it is worth an experimental try anyway.
Heck, you probably only need management buy-in to institute quotas, the rest you can do on your own.
Heh, I understand the bit about the internet account...Took me about a year to get him to have one. Now he uses it a lot, but kept saying back before he had it..."I will probably never use anything like that."
:)
Oh well..Eventualy he'll get it all right
Maby before he retires (he's like 58)
http://www.xpurple.com
That is true...one of the reasons I run in console on my notebook (other than the fact that X is slow with 8 megs of ram). But, It's still not as good, as being able to just look. Having both documents open at the same time, and just being able to glance over, and right back. Luckely wyse terminals are cheap...I think I paid like $25 for most of mine...a couple where just free.
Too bad they are all back, and green...I would kina like color sometimes...mostly for BitchX...crackrock, ya know?
http://www.xpurple.com
Ok, first off, I like to read in the bathroom. Mostly while taking a nice hot bath. Read many a fine novel in there. Not to mention various users manuals..But, oddly enough, I use my PalmPilot for this. I've got 4 megs of ram on it. So I can store quite a bit of information. And, the nice thing, is I can use it even if the light is not goodenough for paper. Thank the gods for backlighting. I fear droping it a bit, but not too much. I keep a backup, and water won't fry it too bad...probably just make me restore a backup, and take it apart, and clean it. Done that enough times already.
So, in general, I *NEVER* print anything off...heck, I don't even own a printer...I have 6 computers...monitors stacked/side by side...2/3. This works very well for comparing odds, and ends. I am still a bit dumbfounded how people can get by with just one monitor. Have slashdot up on one, icq on another, irc on the next, emacs the next, and one for mp3's...(note, most of these are dumb terms(Wyse baby!)).
Now, on the other hand, my father (who will remain anonymous), has a computer I put togehter for him (quite nice), and with it, a digital camera, scanner, and a nice printer. He prints off everything you can imagine. Gets email...prints it off, and deletes it (he doesn't want to fill the 12gig HD:). Same thing with pictures he scans in, or photos he takes with the camera. It's pretty cheesy in my opinion, but, he is so set in his ways. I don't know how to fix the probelm. Oh, the other thing he does, is when he saves a file, he saves to disk(yes, floppy). He has stacks of disks laying around bigger than I did when I was a kid (I only had a floppy drive on my first computer).
As much as I hope for a paperless office, I don't expect to see it at this rate...except in my own home...
http://www.xpurple.com
This problem will finally go the way of the Dodo when the internet is available in the bathroom. Now, no more need to print that Howto before I go for a sit. Just look it up in the john. Btw, I think the ibook and airport will be the beginning of this. Sure I can take a laptop to the bathroom now, but who wants to drag an ethernet/phone cable in?
Do not meddle in the affairs of sysadmins, for they are subtle, and quick to anger.
The ``abundance of paper'' phenomenon may be successfully "analyzed" via the economic perspectives of supply, demand, cost, and value.
Consider:
This means that the cost of wasting some paper is low.
The net result is that it's cheap to generate piles of paper, and computers have made it easier and increasingly efficient to do so.
If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.
What if rolling-papers were made of hemp?
"The number of suckers born each minute doubles every 18 months."
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
not neccessarily,
what we need is something the size of like, a car key, that has "enough" storage, and can holographically project a screen about the size of a sheet of paper.
Also probably should have wireless networking, etc.
hey, build one of those things, and I'll buy one! guaranteed!
"The number of suckers born each minute doubles every 18 months."
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
God, I know so many non-computer people who are like that.
My mother in law insisted that I set up Word on her PC to save to A: by default. Never mind that it crashes on startup if there's no disk in A:. Everything to floppies. She doesn't trust the HD, and won't pay for an internet acct.
The only way I could keep her daughter from printing, was I didn't buy a printer for the first two years we had a computer. She learned how to deal with stuff electronically, and not rely on a printer, despite my schenanigans (dinking with the machine, OS reinstalls, etc.) having occasionally set her work back. Luckily, I've always had tape backup. Yup, that's right, I bought a tape drive before I considered buying a printer.
"The number of suckers born each minute doubles every 18 months."
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
I agree. I was only suggesting using the monitor's controls because that's the only way I can think of doing that right now.
Some monitors with more digital controls can "save" profiles, yes? Do those profiles ever include brightness/contrast settings?
I'm not sure I understand what you mean by "color range". The main thing to account for from an ergonomics standpoint is a) eyestrain due to the differing brightnesses of a monitor as compared to ambient room lighting; and b) different definitions of "white". Your brain tends to "adapt" to different lighting conditions, changing its own internal definition of "white" to match it as close as it can to the room's lighting. Having your monitor's "white" be a bluish color relative to your room light causes your eyes and brain to have to do a bit more work keeping colors sorted out. Plus, for those of us that do screen -> print work, color matching becomes a necessity.
I'm not sure how this affects the "color range" per se. It should affect color *correction*, sure. If you're worried about dropping your brightness/contrast too low for good gaming (where a bright color is meant to be seen as an "uncomfortably" bright light source), adjust your monitor. The brightness/contrast controls are meant to be easy to get at. *shrug*. Many games also have an internal "gamma" setting that could be used to compensate a for a monitor's conservative settings in this fashion.
You're making this more complicated than it needs to be.
1. Set your brightness to maximum (100%) and contrast to a minimum (0%).
2. Slowly bring your brightness setting down until the color "black" on your screen is as black as it's going to get (in a well-lit room, this can easily mean leaving the brightness setting at 100%).
3. Starting with contrast at a minimum, slowly bright it up until the color "white" on your screen matches the brightness of things lit by ambient light in your room.
4. If you want to go a bit further (after you've installed new lighting or moved your PC to another place, for example) and want to do color correction, now would be a good time to do that as well by adjusting your monitor's "color temperature" until the color "white" on your monitor closely matches other "white" items in your room.
In most cases, all I ever adjust is the contrast control depending on the lighting. "Brightness" only really matters if you're in low light conditions (where "black" might actually appear "gray", sorta like your TV when you have the lights out), and color correction is a pretty constant thing.
Most people don't realize what the "color temperature" and brightness/contrast controls are really for. Most people have these adjusted at their highest (or default) values and never think to change them.
The general idea is to adjust the brightness and contrast controls so that the whitest white on your screen is no brighter than a piece of paper held up beside it, and the darkest black is the lightest black that appears "black" (i.e. as low as it'll go to the point where you can't tell the difference anymore). That gives you a full, rich contrast of brightness on par with everything else in the room.
In addition, most people will discover that the color "white" on their monitor is quite a lot bluer than a "white" piece of paper. This is due to lighting in the room and SHOULD be compensated for by taking advantage of the monitor's color temperature setting or through the use of software such as Adobe's gamma/color correction utility.
So basically, the white on your screen should match the color and brightness of a white piece of paper held up beside it.
If you change the lighting near your PC, at the very least adjust the brightness/contrast to match (that's why these controls are so accessible).
You'll find it's a LOT easier to stare at a monitor all day if it's properly configured.
Hemp is an even more renewable resource!
You can read it in the bath, in bed, on the train, upside down, on the loo, anywhere there's enough light and a comfy seat. (While you can read a palm pilot in the bath and all those other places, a chunk of paper is easier to replace if you drop it in)
:)). While electronic annotations are available, they're not nearly as good as being able to just draw an arrow up to another part of the text.
:)
:)
,hacker Perl another Just)'
You can write on it. Don't underestimate the value of scratching notes onto things - the number of notes I've made on my printouts of important RFC's is uncountable (well, I'm not going to count them
It's quicker to write on paper than fire up some application - even on a palm pilot. (NB: This requires the availability of pens - something most households and offices seem to have a vast shortage of - in fact I'm convinced of the existance of a pen demon somewhere that hordes pens).
You can bend paper. Paper aeroplanes are very theraputic - especially when made of some of the RFC's
You can eat paper. OK - it's not exactly a Whopper - but it's a "fun snack between meals" (TM).
It's healthier to read than a CRT. (and probably healthier to eat...)
It makes you look important and busy. Try looking busy with a cluttered WindowMaker. Now try it with a cluttered desk - much better
It keeps the office alive - think what a boring place it would be if no-one had to bash the printer or swear at the NT box doing print serving.
Paper is here for good. Let's hear it for paper!
perl -e 'print scalar reverse q(\)-:
Matt. Want XML + Apache + Stylesheets? Get AxKit.
Heh. PADD from Star Trek: The Next Generation?
Interestingly enough, the PADD is getting close to a reality. If someone could combine wireless networking and the Sun Ray 1 into a convenient hand held package with decent handwriting recognition input (no small trick), we'd be there.
"Flame away, I wear asbestos underwear"
There are more acres of forested land in the United States now than there were at the founding of this country.
Wordnik, a dictionary project which aims to collect
One of the reasons for paper's popularity is that you can put is somewhere other than at your monitor and leave it there.
Just last night I got a list of events around our state from the web, printed it, and posted it on our kitchen bulletin board. Why? So it would be a reminder whenever we're thinking of things to do. Likewise, class notes can go in my briefcase, spreadsheets can go in my financial files, etc., etc.
It's much faster to have what I want where I want than to have to go to the computer for it.
In the wider view (taking in books, magazines, advertising flyers, etc.), there are fewer places to look if they're in the real world. My programming texts go near the computer, but mysteries are in the bookshelves in the spare bedroom, impressive tomes are in the bookshelves in the living room, cookbooks are in the kitchen, and I know where to find them. There are just too many places to hide them on a hard drive.
Finally, I can move them so they're near each other but not overlapping, so I have instant access. (Don't kid yourself, two-keystroke access is not instant.)
Some of these problems can be solved by faster CPUs and graphics systems, some by better organizing methods, some by lighter computers. But, it's going to take a long time for all those to come to fruition, and in the meantime computing has made it easier to find information we would like to keep handy---thus, more printing for the forseeable future.
I refuse to believe corporations are people until Texas executes one. -- desert rain on http://www.dailykos.com/user/
Most inter-office communication is by e-mail (which actually improves tracking compared to photocopies).
I take all my quick notes with a "cat > " or notepad.exe depending on environment.
More and more general resources are on our intranet.
The rest are usually dumped on a network drive.
The only thing I printed all week was my timesheet, and that's because that still has to be signed off on by a supervisor.
-- perl -e'print pack"H*","6e656d6f406d38792e6f7267"'
...balancing a 17" under your bum whilst hovering over the toilet would just be plain messy.
<tim><
Ultimately, I find that I use paper on a few occasions.
First, for documentation. Bluntly, this is just because it is much easier to have the book to the left of the keyboard, the mouse to the right and the screen in the middle. Maybe if I got two monitors...
Second, for things that I want to study (and understand) deeply. For example, when I study religious matters (e.g. the bible) I almost always use paper copies, even though a lot of the materials I use are quite expensive on paper and cheap or free online. For whatever reason, I have a more solid connection to a paper document than to an electronic one.
This really isn't about paper, but I'll throw it out. Another reason I use paper for religious studies is because I find that I am tired of computers at the end of the day. I want at least one area of my life that is not computer oriented.
I guess that's the same reason I play a piano instead of a keyboard.
-- Slashdot sucks.
That's why you have to be careful. Even a forest is renewable, if you do it right. The tricks are as follows:
1) Plant one tree for every one you cut down. Better, in fact, to plant several in case some don't make it.
2) Cut a forest in sections, and do not touch the sections which are not currently being cut at all.
3) Make each section small enough that by the time the forest is finished, the trees that had been planted first will be at about the same size as the originals were (though probably not the same age). Furthermore, the flora and fauna, which were not disturbed in any section of the forest that was not being cut at any given time, are given a chance to repopulate the area.
The problem with this method is an economic one: it would take many forests to maintain current volumes. Nonetheless, I see no other way of doing this. I will say that some logging companies cut a forest in strips, such that the forest on either side of the strip is not touched; this seems to be a relatively sensible way of sectioning a forest to be cut.
You are right about one thing: humans have no more right to the planet than any other form of life. But keep in mind, we have no less right either.
Actually, that is what I use (thats who I work for), its still not enough though. Anything that isn't about twice the effective height of a letter in a typical text book looks thin and spindly. It's alright for the occasional bit of text, but prolonged reading is painful.
The problem is the lack of resolution. IEEE has a comendable online presense, I can download the last N years of articles for any periodicals I subscribe to. I do this frequently, they're Adobe PDF files which are pretty portable. The only problem is that they're fairly illegible even on the 21" monitor before me, so I end up printing them out.
You could zoom in and read that way but the charts are typically scattered and you end up zooming in and out for cross referencing and is generally just a pain.
There's just not enough dpi to legibly display a full page of text at the font sizes periodicals are published in.
For schematics and stuff I never print them out unless I'm going to go over something with somebody, it's nice to be able to mark things up on the fly.
According to the EPA faq, paper represents 36% of waste. It may not seem like it, but most of that is actually in the form of cardboard boxes, not printer paper.
I too print stuff out on rare occasions, like pdf or ps docs. With postscript, the problem is the blurry fonts, and with both pdf and ps my 17" screen is too small to display the whole page which is frustrating. You also can't mark up a pdf doc with highlighter.
And for goodness sakes, how long do Slashdotters take to shit? If it's more than five minutes, then eat more dietary fiber or just concentrate harder.
The real problem is faster printers, and cheaper printers too. Before, when the printer were slow, you carefully considered what to print out. Now that there's no penalty, you can just print it out.
Andrew Gardner
Outside of a dog, a book is a man's best friend. Inside a dog, its too dark to read.
I honestly doubt that even close to 'all' of the paper used in the US is from tree farms. I know that the pulp & paper industry in canada (especially on the west coast, where i'm from) does, indeed, cut down large swaths of untouched forest to make newsprint (and other fine products). At least they did when I was still watching.
:)
as many other people have commented, hemp would make wonderful paper. You get (i think) 4x as much product out of an acre of hemp as out of an acre of forest. And for some reason, hemp grows like a weed
This is an interesting contrast (which, by the way, paper does better, but I digress). Computers are better for things interactive - participatory activities like tutorials, surfing, email, and so forth. They are limited by environmental conditions (you can't use them in the damp outdoors, extreme heat or cold, bright sunlight) and battery life (paper gets much better battery life). Random access is generally faster on paper - the "indexing" technology is more sophisticated for books and newspapers, and is, in fact, an index (and/or table of contents).
Plus, paper is ideally suited to passive absorption of information - it's cheaper, more pervasive, and less sensitive to most conditions (neither most paper nor most computers work well underwater...). Society has built a massive infrastructure that is incredibly well-suited to the cheap manufacture and distribution of paper. Not to mention, paper producers that depend on advertising dollars make actual profits (newspapers and magazines), unlike those who use the computer screen as an advertising medium. Then again, the electronic folks have more valuable stock... (hello, Andover.Net!)
Many years back, I wrote a humor piece for a user group newsletter comparing the "first" PDA, the Newton MessagePad, to a similar device. The link is here, on my homenet server. Was I ahead of my time, or what?
- -Josh Turiel
-- Josh Turiel
"2. Do not eat iPod Shuffle."
Yes, yes, many posts have commented on the ease of reading paper over a monitor, and the portability, durability, disposability of paper over electronic media. If it is the case that people are printing things out to read on the bus/toilet/beach/etc., why do they not pickup their printouts? Every day when I go home I throw 10-100 pages of printouts into the recycle bin next to the printer. If I thought my computing budget would actually see any of the money, I would start lpd accounting.
I had no printer at home for a very long time, and finally bought one, which I used to print two time sheets. At work I print nothing, unless it is for a client to look at, and I always offer it in electronic format first unless the client is coming onsite.
If a book is available at Gutenberg's site, I read it online, or have my speech synth read it to me.
Now, the downside is we are still depleting resources, because of the electricity that allows you to be online anyway. Wasting trees to produce papers that will be referred to only once, however, seems so WRONG that I just can't bring myself to do it.
I know that my reams of printing is due to the fact that I sit at a computer many to many hours and that I like to get in my recliner and read technical stuff. I do have many binders full of useful information. Why not keep it pure digital.. I tire of a monitor. I look for comfort and quiet to do my reading. Paper people need to switch to hemp, bastards need to stop using such a limited resource.. That or get more genetic wacky on them.
"Life is all about strategy, mathematics and psychological perceptiveness."
It doesn't matter how quickly electronic paper and PDAs advance - until such technology is in the schools, and kindergarten students are learning to write the alphabet on it, people will still choose paper. It's the earliest "information technology" we are exposed to, so it's the one we're most comfortable with. Couple that with the general unreliability most folks think is inherent in computers (thanks to the abundance of crappy PC software), and they're far more likely to trust a pen and a daytimer than a Palm XVXIII.
Anyhow, that's my hypothesis, and I'm sticking with it.
Also, computer screens are still really low resolution compared to even a poor printout. Compare a 28 pitch monitor with a 300DPI printout, and it's no wonder hackers have such problems with their eyes...
Your Servant, B. Baggins
I currently have several issues with electronic documents that cannot be addressed with paper yet.
1) Electronic documents are far too easily modified and destroyed. I think this is the biggest issue I have with electronic data so far. I personally have accidentally blown away important docs by accident, and I think of myself as a pretty computer-savvy user.
Think about the FDA and thier regulation of bio-med companies. They still require all document control systems to be paper-based, since electronic document control systems have yet to prove themselves and viable alternatives.
2) Its not as convienent to use as paper... As listed in a previous post, you cannot scribble on an electronic doc like you can on paper. You cant take it with you in a convienent manner. PDAs are still not as simple and fast as a book or paper documents.
3) Believe it or not, electronic devices (such as computers) are not ubiquitous enough for handling electronic docs efficiently. There is nothing about a Windows PC, or any PC for that matter that makes it as easy to store and transfer documents like paper. I can tear off a piece of paper and stick it in my pocket if I need to write down some directions to get somewhere. I don't have a internet terminal in my car when Im driving places (yet).
To make it easy for me to get rid of paper documents, this is what I would need:
1. A ROCK-SOLID extremely easy-to-use document control system. Making it difficult to accidentlly blow away files...
2. an easy to use sort of PDA that allows quick access, editing, mark up and viewing of documents.
3. Access to my docs from anywhere.. I should be able to click a button at work and grab some documents off my computer at home securely. I realize that it is not possible to do this with paper, but it would be more incentive to rid ourseleves of it if we had these obvious atvantages of electronic documents. A secure NFS share from my computer at home (connected to the internet via always on high-bandwidth connection) and internet terminals at every corner, every store, every car would make this possible.
Gary Franczyk
I hate to nitpick but wouldn't it be
.)
?
Three Step Plan:
1. Take over the world.
2. Get a lot of cookies.
3. Eat the cookies.
It's interesting to see the desire to have a hardcopy of otherwise electronic documents. I posit that it is because of an innate human desire to have tactile input.
;-)
Tactile input is very important in our lives. It's no coincidence that, differences among languages aside, all of them refer to emotional contact in primarily tactile terms. ("He has a thick skin, I feel a certain way, she rubs me the wrong way," etc.) Studies show that babies who don't receive enough tactile input literally wither away.
This is why point-and-click-and-drag-and-drop is such a powerful concept in computing. When Alan Kaye (I hope I got that name right) at PARC designed Smalltalk, he was on to something. Language can be three things: kinesthetic (literal, seeing, doing, action), iconic (the sound "kat" means this meowy purry thing here), and symbolic (abstract concepts; icons of icons). Most higher language is symbolic, this includes computer languages 2GL and higher. The Drag and Drop computing paradigm made what I like to call 'symbolic kinesthetism' -- the little icons and menus were symbols, but they were accessed in a very 'touchy feely' sort of way, and that's why a Mac (for instance) can appeal to all ages.
Granted, it may not be as powerful, and granted, confusing the simplicity with inconsistency (a Start Menu to shut down??) can offset it, but on the whole, the desire for tactile -- or pseudo-tactile input -- makes such computing paradigms advance. Hence, the Apple and NeXT user interfaces.
But back to paper. The fact is, the human desire to FEEL the paper is very strong. Electronic pads, although just as portable as a notepad, just don't have the same feel. We, as animals, have lived our lives with the notion that to see the rest of something, we either move it or move our eyes or move ourselves. With a computer, scrolling, you don't move; the screen doesn't move; yet somehow the image changes. That's downright unsettling if you let your gut instincts think about it.
Here's a demonstration. Please don't hurt yourself doing it, and I take no responsibility for any injuries caused by this. Put your finger to the corner of your eye and VERY VERY GENTLY nudge the eye. You'll see a very weird thing happen. You haven't moved, the world hasn't moved, and your brain didn't TELL your eyes to move -- but because your eye has unwillingly been pushed out of the way, the image skews. Now you know what the reptile within you thinks when its sees words scroll but the monitor -- and you -- stay still.
In many ways, such desire to move things around as if we were kids or apes or whatever is a limitation, but it's also part of what makes us human. Call it a charming quirk, if you will. And although I can always sit and read at a terminal, the "Paperless Society" is not kinesthetically comfortable enough for me.
Three Step Plan:
1. Take over the world.
2. Get a lot of cookies.
3. Eat the cookies.
I would have to say that I agree with your hypothesis. I too used to be one of those print-it-out; hand-edit-it people, because I found my comprehension was higher on the printed page. That is until about 4 years ago when I gave my old 486 and printer to my brother. Without the printer I trained myself to read my code in the editor, and now, when I do print code out to review while in the john, on the plane, or in my bed, I find I cannot really read-and-comprehend without a lot more effort than before.
Kudos to your insight into the situation!
I wonder how these obtacles could be overcome - something like "electronic paper", maybe. It would have to be extremely easy to use, however, otherwise it won't catch on.
My 2 Eurocent,
Thomas
Which is *the* reason to get a copy. Who knows what kind of an idiot is running that webserver... It won't be the first time that I've made the mistake of relying on some website to stay up when it didn't. Webmasters can be just as likely to trash something, or rm -rf it if they don't think it's important.
If it's something important: Make a copy. Either hard or preferably backed up softcopy, but I *will* make a copy.
Maybe you shouldn't read manuals in the bathroom. In Illuminatus we were all reminded of the Zen proverb "Never whistle while you're pissing"!
You will not drink with us, but you would taste our steel? - Walter Matthau, The Pirates
With all the folks here extolling the virtues of paper, I'd like to take a moment to extoll the virtues of electronic media.
- Linking. I hate doing code reviews where everyone has piles of paper and can't find a definition, or even which file corresponds to which dog-eared clump. If we all were looking at checked out images in a development environment we could find things so much faster.
- History. Many document reading systems have some form of backtracking, which makes grouping the three pages you want to look at almost automatic. To look at three related pages in three different bound documents can be quite a chore.
- Color. Most folks do not have color printers. and if they do, they usually don't use them to generate listings or memos. Color cues in a well-designed GUI greatly enhance readability and navigation.
- Compactness. I can carry a huge amount of information on my Powerbook and it will never weight more than 8 lbs.
- Timeliness. I read Apple's documentation on line (I do Mac development for a living). I always know I have the latest docs just by virtue of them being read from Apple's developer site. If I print them out, they, may go out of date and I would never know.
Many of these virtues are the flip side of the Subject: line - paper just sits there, but electronic media can have arbitrary levels of functionality, from hyperlinks to odd things like built-in calculators in an electronic tax form.
I find paper so irritating to use that I am constantly puzzled by folks who print things out all the time. Unless I need driving directions or copies of my tax forms for a bank (this week's hard-copy) I almost never do.
As for the claims that paper is easier on the eyes, I think about half the problem is that everyone uses such terrible monitors. 17" pieces of crap with awful tubes seem to be standard just about everywhere. One of the advantages of owning my own business is that we have beautiful 21" monitors at a good ergonomic height with decent lighting. Makes all the difference in the world.
You will not drink with us, but you would taste our steel? - Walter Matthau, The Pirates
Throw it away, the paper easily decomposes
Actually it doesn't. Go check out the garbage project.
You will not drink with us, but you would taste our steel? - Walter Matthau, The Pirates
Lately I've been working as an editor rather than as a Unix sysadmin
(editing books on LaTeX, as it happens), and I can tell you that it is
infinitely easier to edit textual material using paper and pen than on
screen.
Why?
1. Screen resolution is still very low.
Macs have 72 dpi; Windows 96 dpi. X seems to use either 75 or
100 dpi, depending on what fonts you have installed. None of
these are very high quality for long-term reading, especially if
you consider flicker, sunlight (or room lights) bouncing off the
screen, and other related factors. Compare that with the output
of a modern laser printer. Mine does 1200 dpi, and it's fast.
Most printers these days produce output with at least 600 dpi
resolution. Even 300 dpi (from the bad old days) is better on
your eyes than staring at a screen.
2. Word processors and text editors encourage sloppy writing.
It's very easy to copy and paste, and equally easy to fail to
adjust the pasted text properly. Verbs and articles don't match
(``these objects was''), words are repeated (``the the''), words
are left out (``when Charlie he wanted''). Because you can't
see the whole text (see #3), it's also easy to repeat yourself,
or leave something important out.
Spell checkers don't catch most of these errors (some will catch
the repeated words). They also won't stop you from using a
properly spelled word in the wrong way (``It's over their!'').
3. You can never see the whole text at once.
When you're trying to remember what you wrote five pages back,
it's far easier to flip back five pages and compare them side by
side than to search out the phrase in an editor. Sure you can
open a new window and compare them, but you're still looking at
them on screen, and how much screen real estate do you really
have?
4. It's easier to reorganize physical objects than virtual ones.
While reading through a text, it's easy to spot how two things
in different sections relate, and recombine them, even using
scissors and tape, glue, or staples (the original cut and
paste!).
5. Reading material on paper encourages rewriting and rethinking,
which are almost always a good thing.
Sentences and phrases that seemed great when you wrote them
often pale when you read them again. Because a paper copy is
detached from the electronic version, you're forced to look at
the rewrite holistically, rather than concentrating on one or
two words.
Not only that, but reviewing what you've written may give you
some new insights into the material, allowing you to see how
some ideas fit together or complement one another.
6a. Printed material is cleaner than electronic material.
Assuming you're not using a WYSIWYG editor, it's much easier to
concentrate on the *content* of your writing when you don't have
all the markup instructions cluttering your view. This goes for
LaTeX, HTML, XML, SGML, and any other similar system.
6b. Printed material lets you see how things really look.
Even if you're using a tool that allows you to concentrate on
the content rather than the appearance of your document, you
often can't really see (WYSIWYG or no) what your document looks
like until you have it in front of you in its final form. This
comment doesn't really apply to HTML, of course, since you can
never really know what a page will look like on every user's
browser.
As for code, today's editors certainly make it easier to see what
various parts of your code are (through keyword coloring, changes in
typeface, etc.). Ultimately, however, extremely subtle problems can
often only be found after a detailed code review -- away from the
machine where you can be distracted by an endless number of tiny
changes you could try, where your code has to stand on its own. Such
code review encourages clear writing and the extensive use of comments
to explain what's going on. A really clever trick that saves you a
few milliseconds may, after examination, turn out to be completely
incomprehensible, even to you, and a nightmare to maintain. Having
your code spread out in front of you is also apt to give you more
insight into ways in which you can combine functions to reduce the
overall complexity of your program.
I have serious doubts that computers (in whatever form, even as
paper-sized screens with incredible resolution) will ever truly
replace pen and paper as the ultimate writing tool. Computers are
useful tools, especially for keeping track of citations and
references, and for producing high-quality (i.e., typeset) output, but
high-quality output depends on high-quality input, and in some very
important ways the strengths of the computer interfere with the
production of that high-quality input. (To sum up the last paragraph,
GIGO.)
If you've read about the stuff, e-ink (I'm probably wrong about the exact name), when it is readily and cheaply available, I'll stop printing things on paper. E-ink media gives you the freedom, flexibility, and ease of viewing to the eyes that paper does, without the CRT or LCD hassle. Simply put CRT/LCD technology just doesn't stack up to all the advantages that plain-old-paper has. Try folding up the web version of the NY Times when viewing it on your 19" monitor.
Ryan
I can't believe that there are so many paper apologists among slashdotters! Personally I could probably count the documents I've committed to paper in the last five years on one hand. Paper is just too slow, documents (source code especially) just too big, and you can't do searches or hit hyperlinks. With modern graphics cards and 500MHz processors, even the "flipping pages" argument doesn't hold water: the computer can keep up with my visual cortex now.
-- Andrew
When you hold a book, magazine or report in your hands, you have a lot of information about the object you'll never get from the same information presented on a screen. Whether you realize it or not, the mind makes associations as to WHERE past information was located on a page, how much further to the end of the article, the relationship of information in a work such as by chapters, etc., etc.
I think we underestimate the physical and visual indicators we get from physically handling media. I believe that if these types of cues can be reproduced in an electronic format that then -- and only then -- will we begin to see the decline in paper. Electronic bookmarking and highlighting and just too primitive at this point to replace these physical manifestations that indicate that "reading" is much more than just processing the information with the eye.
+-+-+-+-+-+-+ "I don't know what's wrong with you, but I'm quite sure it's hard to pronounce."
As a technical writer, I of course face this problem a lot :)
./'ers, rather predicably, called people who prefer paper to online "stupid" and "backwards." Question to you: of all the written correspondence that you have recieved in paper form, how much of it has been inadvertently lost or destroyed? Now, how much of your e-mail has suffered the same fate? As a simple practical matter, paper is more durable than electrons. If the network is down, I can still get at my paper printouts. If the hard drive crashes, I can still get at my paper copies of my documents. We're still not living in a totally fail-safe world computer-wise. And, especially consider many people don't know all that much about computers, and they have to rely on the guys systems to make backups and stuff like that. People who aren't geeks don't feel secure that they have control over their information unless it is printed.
There are quite a few reasons, some technology-related, some emotional/philosophical.
In general, you expect that things that are going to be read in-depth are going to be printed in my business. Why? Because people often want to read material such as this away from the computer, or want to be able to refer to it easily while they are doing something at the computer. It's still easier to look at a book you have open on your desk then to swap windows around so you can see a help window.
Also consider that the print-density of paper is such that we can pack more information into it. Online, you usually just have a single column of text. Any large diagrams will usually take up the entire reader window. On paper, we can have a single column of text, along with notes on the side. There is plenty of room for a diagram. Enough room, in fact (especially if you think of a book format, where there are two pages side-by-side) that we can actually *comment on it* along with just presenting it.
There's also the fact that reading paper is simply more comfortable for people. If my eyesight isn;t all that great (which it isn't, actually) I can bring the page closer so I can see it better, and still be able to read in a comfortable fashion. If I'm reading a screen, I have to lean in and crane my neck. Very unfomcortable.
Another factor is that it's easy to mark up a document when it's printed. I've yet to see an online system that does comments the right way. It would actually be easy to develop a system that would totally blow away the old-fashioned print it out and mark it with a red pen system... but no one has bothered to.
Of course, there are technological fixes that can take care of all these things. I won't go into them here.
The psychological reasons are harder to overcome. Some
Listen... we've been using print for archiving information for centuries (over a millenium, if you count the monks scribbling away in their scriptoriums). I think it's a wee bit premature to expect all of that to suddenly vanish with a poof overnight. And it has just been overnight. It's been barely 20 years since the desktop computer started to make inroads into the business and home. Without the long-term, large capacity storage options of CD-R, much of that history has seen the average computer simply unable to store the amounts of information that even a small business can generate.
And, with the move from print to online, we're not just going to see a revolution in the media, we're going to see a revolution in the way we all use and store information itself. If it was just a dead-tree to online edition transfer, we'd have no problems. No major uphevils in the fabric of many institutions. But, in this new era, we've got a load of questions to resolve.
In the past, we paid for "stuff." When I bought a CD, I had a physical object. You all, of course, have been hearing the dilemma of the music indistry and recording artists of late with MP3. Without "stuff" that actually has to change hands in order for their content to change hands, how do we make sure people can benefit from their labor? Should we just scrap the idea of selling information, be it a novel, a song, or your medical history, since that information can so easily be copied?
What about saving e-mail? Do companies have a requirement to store e-mail the same way they store other documents?
And, every few years, organizations switch from one platform to another: mainframe to mainframe, mainframe to PC, PC to PC, software program to software program. If a document you suddenly need wasn't converted from the system a few steps back, you're in trouble. Paper is always cross-platform.
Simply put: people know paper works. For sure.
And, there is the societal resistance to change. It's not really rooted in individuals, but in institutions.
Let me draw an analogy to the type of changes information technology can bring. Before Gutenburg invented the printing press, Europe had a single, fairly centralized religion: Catholocism. The word of God went from the Pope, down through the church hierarchy, and out finally to the unwashed masses. Why? Because that at the time was the best way to distribute the information. The masses couldn't read, since they had no need to. What they did from day-to-day could be accomplished without writing. God's word was in the bible, and bibles were rather scarce, as they took years, literally, to copy by hand.
Now, along came Gutenburg, and all of a sudden you could pop out hundreds of bibles in just days. People began asking why they needed the church hierarchy when they could read what God had to say for themsleves. "Wait," said the church, "you still need our guidence!" "Bull," said Martin Luther. And the Reformation began.
So... the changes that we have in our underlying information infrastructure can cause more than people to get anxious... they can cause wars. Institutions, government especially, will take time to catch up. I think it's actually a marvel that my bank, for example, lets me do my checking online through the Internet, when just 10 years ago that would have been science fiction. Human society and insitutions are simply not meant to work on Internet time. Nor should they.
Or in a shop that used to be a mainframe shop; I guess old habits die hard.
I used to admin in a bank and the operations people (and sometimes me if they were already swamped) used to get requests for multiple copies of a 1500 page financial report. And these reports were available online. The trouble was that the online reports were sucked into an imaging system and, using the Windows viewer software, you couldn't search for specific portions of the report unless you knew the page number you wanted. Viewing online documents will continue to be a major pain until they're more easily navigable.
Plus... When I stepped up to a 19-inch monitor & new video card at home and nearly quadrupling the # of pixels on the display the result was astounding. But, it's still a poor substitute to the readability of the printed page so I have to disagree with the poster who thought that 1600x1200 resolution monitors will solve the problem of people using paper. Sorry but my fairly low end laser printer can already print at 600x1200 per inch. My eyes really appreciate the higher resolution. When my computer can display at those sort of resolutions maybe then paper will become obsolete.
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
As the popularity and extensive use of the internet spreads out even more from the prototypical computer geek bunch, this effect will only increase. This is because people who did not grow up staring at a CRT, and feel threatened by, and mistrustful of, computers, are being reuired to use it. There is generally the sentiment by the average technophobe these days, and even people like my father who rely on computers to make their living, that something isn't real until they have hardcopy of it. This will go away over time as the generations of pre-computer-era people are slowly phased out (read that as a nice way of saying die off), but until that point I expect it to only get worse.
And not to be marked as flamebait right away, but does anyone but me miss the days when a linux user inherently was a programmer?
One thing to remember here. From a strict conservation standpoint, the internet is probably
:)
saving the world millions of trees every year by people not needing a book that contains each piece of information that they need. Even though people print things out off the internet, for every person who does it, there are probably thousands that don't.
As an example, if I had a cable modem or some other kind of dedicated internet connection at my home, I wouldn't really need a phone book anymore because I could just walk over to the computer load up a site and search the phone book over the net. I've just reduced the demand for phone books. The fewer phone books that need to be printed, the fewer trees that meet their untimely demise!
This works better for reference books than books that you are learning new information from, because like people have said, it's easier to curl up with a dismembered tree than a large CRT. (Though I'm still waiting for those LCD monitor prices to come down...
Just remember that when you see people printing stuff out that they would have needed to have the information on paper without the internet and most people don't print out every website that they look at!
The problem is two-part. We can spend forever debating about why technology hasn't replaced paper yet (although I understand Xerox has a few neat toys on the horizon). A second point to realize though, is that with the boom of information availability we suddenly have more TO print.
Think: Before the internet penetrated the average household/office, what was there on paper? Newspapers, magazines...couldn't print those. Books, same thing.
Now I can read articles from a hundred different newspapers and magazines online. I can go to Project Gutenberg and download some quality literature. Online documentation exists for everything from how to configure X to building my own solarium.
Certainly some of this material doesn't have a convenient technological method of reading. (try carting a laptop to your back porch so you can read the URL on how to build your own deck). But for the most part people are taking the new information and using it in ways that they are used to.
This is why Xerox and everyone is doing their best to come up with something book-like and/or paper-like in nature....because we'll use it because it is mostly what we are used to.
The problem is two-part. We can spend forever debating about why technology hasn't replaced paper yet (although I understand Xerox has a few neat toys on the horizon). A second point to realize though, is that with the boom of information availability we suddenly have more TO print.
Think: Before the internet penetrated the average household/office, what was there on paper? Newspapers, magazines...couldn't print those. Books, same thing.
Now I can read articles from a hundred different newspapers and magazines online. I can go to Project Gutenberg and download some quality literature. Online documentation exists for everything from how to configure X to building my own solarium.
Certainly some of this material doesn't have a convenient technological method of reading. (try carting a laptop to your back porch so you can read the URL on how to build your own deck). But for the most part people are taking the new information and using it in ways that they are used to.
This is why Xerox and everyone is doing their best to come up with something book-like and/or paper-like in nature....because we'll use it because it is mostly what we are used to.
- They cannot rely on the fact that their machine and/or email system will not crash in five minutes
- The standard resolution of a modern display cannot display a one page document really clear in reasonable size. Try to make Acroread zoom to fit page on a 1024x768 for example.
Overall the mad priniting will continue and there is nothing we can do about it until the average resolution on an end user display will go beyond 1600x1200 and the PC's become more reliable storage than paper.P.S.
- I am skipping any sort of discussion about any legal stuff.
- Being a rational being myself I skip any sort of discussion about people who invent office data flow that requires you to fill a spreadsheet, print it and than the accouting department to reenter this data again from the printed copy into a computer, and so on, and so on.
There is no way you can stop this kind of killing of trees without fire (to be more exact firingBaker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
"The paperless office will come soon after the paperless toilet."
Now if only I can remember who said that...
I do strongly disagree with your last paragraph, especially the strengths of the computer interfere with the production of that high-quality input. I find that I write much better on a computer than on paper. (By better I mean it's more coherent, less involuted, easier to read, more concise, more informative...) I would attribute a lot of that betterness to simply being more acclimatized to a computer than most people. However, the greater convenience, ease, and speed of writing that a computer allows make the computer a better writing "platform" than paper, even disregarding possible shortcomings. IMHO.
I spend about 3 minutes writing this comment and about 10 previewing it and editing it. :)
Just yesterday I had a similar experience. Once again I'm in a Java course for newbies. When we got together to work on an assignment in groups, everybody but me printed out our example code, edited it with a pen...
My hypothesis is that people who are not geeks print things because they learned to read on paper, and paper is the only environment within which they are used to reading - not checking to see if their friend emailed them that mp3 site, but in-depth, immersively reading.
I think this is one of the cultural differences between geeks and nongeeks that causes confusion about UI frequently. People who have the nongeek only-reads-on-paper mindset and have only seen computers with "illiterate" - graphic, metaphoric - interfaces do not grok CLIs like *NIX in the sense that they can't even understand why you would want a computer that you have to read to use.
Teach reading with a hypertext of Dick and Jane and see what happens.
I've abandoned print newspapers, many magazines,
many bills and tickets for their net versions.
Books haven't yet become as low-price as other
e-media or libraries. I wich they would.
Good lord. You must have murdered a few trees just by yourself. :) Pray tell, what matter of document has 74,000 pages?
:)
Some form of budget breakdown. I thought it sucked printing it all (it took 31 hours), but I feel REALLY sorry for the person who has to sort it and read it
Finkployd
I just finished printing a 74,000 page document that will probably never be read by ANYONE. It's just 9 boxes to collect dust in Penn State's basement :)
Finkployd
Paper will never crash or lock up. I can read a stack of papers in the bath-tub. I can print out the exact order in which I need to update files while I do repeated reboots. Paper is surge and blackout proof. In an emergency I can use the corners of a paper to clean steak particles from my teeth or dust from under my fingernails.
I've never folded a monitor into a hella cool airplane.
I get most of my daily information ration from what I see onscreen, but the important or amusing things that I see, I print out. You can't tack a monitor up to the wall.You can't slip a monitor under the boss' desk or onto a co-workers desk when nobody is looking so that you can stealthily pass the buck.
It'll be a LONG time before we all work in paperless offices.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
Can't have them thinking that, can we?
Even if you met the convenience and durability of paper with an electronic product, you still have to face the problem that the electronic product is expensive. Would you take a $1000 rollup electronic newspaper with you everywhere?
Paper can be produced more cheaply and more environmentally friendly from renewable resources. One of the primary ones would be (drug free) hemp.
In the book "When Things Start to Think", one of the things the author, a proffesor in MIT's media lab, discusses Electronic Paper. His idea, and I think it is a good one, is that that paper technology, although old, still good. It is very portable, can be read from any angle and in various lighting conditions. Instead of getting rid of paper, he says, we should improve it. They are developing Electronic Paper. A sheet of paper will be covered in "toner", that is really a tiny capsule that contains two even smaller particles, a white one and a black one. When exposed to a magnetic field, the paricles flip, displaying either back or white. When something like this comes out, I think it could really change the way we use paper.
I am a dynamic figure, often seen scaling walls and crushing ice.
OK, I can agree that *some* things are easier/prettier/more toilet friendly/etc. - but I think the point of the question is, why is *everything* still printed out. I can say, with great satisfaction and honesty, that I am just now down to the last 40 sheets or so of a 200 sheet ream of paper I bought along with my HP 6P printer - over a year and a half ago! I *only* print that which is absolutely necessary, partly out of environmental concern, mostly because I'm too cheap to keep buying nice laser-quality paper - and too honest to steal it from work! Just my copper bits...
I AM, therefore I THINK!
Incidentally, I read a lot more with Acrobat reader since I found out how to switch off this (@*%?$ font-smoothing...
You seem to forget that Hemp(and Marijuana) were leagal in the US until the 30s. Hemp makes very poor and extremely coarse paper. Trees are a much better, and extremely sense source of pulp. It is easier for them to Geneticly engineer better trees(for tree farms), than it is for them to make hemp paper.
I have worked for newspapers nearly ten years now. In that time, we have tried many different mediums for content delivery.
First, we started making content available over the telephone. Dial 511 and get the latest news, traffic, weather and sports. It works. Sorta. But folks still wanted their daily paper.
Later, we decided that we needed a television presence so we went 50/50 with Time Warner and started delivering our content over a regional 24-hour news channel. It works. Sorta. But a paper still hits my doorstep every morning.
(We would be doing radio, too, but the FCC has some reservations (good in theory) about one company owning all the media outlets in a town.)
Our latest medium has been the Internet. While somewhat profitable for us (and certainly a pain in the buttocks), it hasn't caused folks to cancel their subscriptions in favor of internet delivery.
It's not as though content is different between the platforms. A newspaper reporter writes the story and sends a copy to the online group and the TV station where they make it available in their respective medium.
What this tells me is that the medium is more important than the content (though I'm not prepared to say that the medium *is* the message) and that people like paper as their medium.
InitZero
I read documents under X (netscape, xPdf, whatever) and use the paging function of the Window Manager to have a large collection of documents available at once. Hitting a simple Ctrl+arrow key combo easily switches between documents, and I don't mind reading even large documents on screen.
Also when coding, I have many windows open - source browser, editors, reference documents, compile windows, program instances and have no problem flicking back and forth, which on my system, is nice and snappy. My source browser/editors also support split screen editing, so I can be messing about with several parts of a file at once, like keeping my thumb on a page of a book while I look at something else too.
Used properly, I can manage a lot more information at once on my computer than I ever could with paper.
eg, I go online, download all interesting looking pages from Slashdot, Linux Today, news sites etc and open each up in a separate window and possibly on a separate virtual screen. I then go offline and spend a while reading through each on screen.
I dont think that the post ofice will disappear, it will have to adapt and change but it wont disappear, i dont know what would happen without good old parcel post and COD, half my stuff would still be at me pearents house, and i bought my whole computer over the net and had it sent be COD
Paper is stupid. It doesn't do anything distracting. It doesn't offer features, facilities or toys to detract from the task at hand. It operates silently. It doesn't offer surprises, do unexpected things, crash or cause interruptions. Hence, it's perfect when one needs to focus one's thoughts.
I also believe in using old, slow computers (680x0 PowerBooks in particular) for similar reasons. And if I wanted to get seriously rich, I'd start a dealership in reconditioned manual typewriters.
The first thing I do when I get to the office is fire up the ONE pc we have connected to the internet (don't ask). Then I PRINT out all the e-mail (including spam (don't aks)) and route it to the appropriate people. Later in the day sitting in my in box will be hand scrawled notes from everyone telling me what to reply with (including requests from spammers to be removed from their lists (don't ask)). I finally convinced my boss that we didn't need a binder of all the e-mail messages from the past year because I moved the e-mail folder to the server so it was being backed up every night. ARGGGGGGGGGGG (don't ask).
----
"War doesn't determine who's right, just who's left"
"War doesn't determine who's right, just who's left"
Steven Wright
While I agree with the above statement, I also would point out that many people see paper as proof... or perhaps something to hold on to.
Perhaps some just feel that having a stack of paper on your desk *shows* that you are working, and have produced. If everything was confined to the digital insides of their machines, no one would see how much they have done/are doing. It is a silly notion, but I would bet there is a great deal of truth to it.
~fight the power >>-->kill your computer
We here at %company-name% have encountered a major problem with this. For most of our users, it was, and is for new folks, a matter of re-training themselves. But, of course some folks can't be taught.
The unteachables insist on printing everything that comes across their screen, whether or not they read it on screen and let it rot in the printer bin. We have even had some people, AFTER training, teaching, coaching and forced practice insist on paper communications; eg. composing a new email message in %mail-program%, printing the message, closing new message, retrieving printed message and hand-delivering it.
It certainly is difficult to change the patterns of a lifetime spent learning to read on paper, with pages that are manipulated in an ingrained manner.
And, has been mentioned before, screen-space is limited, not mention non-portable. Makes a difference in an office where walking around is a big part of the job!
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
My analysis exactly. But a couple of things could come to save the forests: one is the Xerox ePaper or similar developments, which you could rewrite, and hence could (not necessarily would) use for drafts, or stuff with a short shelf life.
In an addition to this, imagine rewritable wallpaper (real one, not the desktop metaphor one) - this should give you a few extra pixel to stare at!
Also plain A4 (or letter) sized displays to just read and store information would be incredibly handy. I'm still waiting...
Hurricane Application Group, Dept of Meteorology Control, Ministry of Proactive Defense
I consider myself pretty "up" on tech, and I still find myself printing out a useful tidbit here, a comic there... printing somehting out is just way too useful a way to keep it handy. It also is the best way to hand someone something for later review... I just don't see it going away anytime soon...
Now, since we will be chewing up our forests so I can have the latest Dilbert cartoon on my cube wall, lets talk about alternitives. Recycling is a good first step, now we need to make paper out of something else! HEMP! (no anti-drug crap pls, I am talking about the fibers the plant makes, not the 'buds' that can get you baked) you can make 4 TIMES! the paper from 1 acre of hemp, as you can make from 1 acre of trees... and next year, that hemp will be ready to cut down and make paper (or clothing for that matter) out of again, while the trees will be just saplings.
"Knoledge is power, anyone telling you differant is a politician"
when I was typing up my thesis, I found that I just could not review it on screen. I hated scrolling up and down to read a page. I had to print the damn thing out and only then I found I could make changes and review it more carefully (I know you can track changes ands add notes in MS Word). And each time I printed the damn thing out, I always had this guilt conscience that I was contributing to the more dead trees.
I think the main problem is that the aspect ratio of screen monitors are more in line with television screens. We need more monitors which have an aspect ratio which follows papaer sizes. Hopefully this will help the paperless office issue.
"I just can't sit while people are saying nonsense in a meeting without saying it's nonsense" J Watson, Sci Am 288:(4)51
This doesn't make any damn sense. Reflected light can be very painful (for instance, when its reflected from the snow) and it never hurt anyone to look at them light bugs (whatchamacallit). There is no conceptual difference between regular and reflected light.
-- ATTENTION: do not read this sig. It doesn't say much.
As for how I get by with one monitor (cheap daewoo 15") - I use the console. I mapped alt-h and alt-l to switch consoles to the left/right so I can do it with one hand while holding my tea in the other. It's funny how I wanted a huge Sony back when I was in Windows but had no money to get one and now that I have the money I'm much happier with console/ 15". Don't print nothing out either, cept to read in the subway.
-- ATTENTION: do not read this sig. It doesn't say much.
Anybody ever read "1984"?
Digital paper better be the best damn thing that ever came out of the Xerox PARC, otherwise, nobody will buy the promise. It has to be thin, lightweight, flexable, high-res, store a dictionary, and work for months, even years on only a little electricity. This sounds farfetched, but digital paper is farfetched! It's the stuff you only dream of.
Hopefully Xerox (or anyone!) will be able to deliver the future, and not some rehash of existing technology.
I have to agree with the author. About 18 months ago, we acquired a new CEO that is EXTREMELY technology oriented. One of his main goals is a totally paperless office. He refuses to accept anything on paper that could be given to him electronically. And while this attitude is virtually required to push the rest of the company, it's like pulling teeth. I (as the network admin) continue to see more and more paper wasted, especially now that my users have access to the WWW via our new T-1.
So what's the answer? How do we get people to stop printing things that don't need to be printed? I'm not talking about things that are easier to work with when printed, I'm talking about endless two-line emails et. al. that get glanced at then deleted (and printed, of course, so you have a hard copy for archives...)
My CEO has the right idea, but I think constant education on things like how to sort and file e-documents and how to find them later on is a requirement. I just don't see companies putting a lot of emphesis on training (especially something low-priority like this).
"Tell me doctor, with all of your defenses, are there any provisions for an attack by killer bees?"
No one (no I didn't read every last post - there were 377 of them ferchrissakes!) seems to have mentioned the ease of printing as one of the reasons the "paperless office" has been such a dismal failure. There's more paper - and more paper waste - now than there ever was before, and it's only getting worse.
It's an unintended consequence of making office life easier. Look into Why Things Bite Back for a bit of insight into how these unintended consequences strike. At the same time technology was enabling the paperless office, it enabled faster, easier, more perfect printing of office documents. What once required careful, time-consuming typing, and lots of carbon paper (remember that awful stuff?) now can be pounded out - and multiple high-quality copies made - in minutes. Correcting errors no longer requires retyping entire documents, but rather than reduce paperwork, this has only increased it. Miniscule errors that would have been tolerated (no sense in redoing that entire document because of one misspelling) in the past now require a complete reprint. And because the default settings on most word processors reprint the entire document, the whole thing gets reprinted for one typo on one page. It gets worse if the document gets photocopied before the typo is discovered. Suddenly hundreds of copies are wasted because of one barely-noticable (it didn't get noticed before it was photocopied) error.
Believe me - I know. I work for the gummint, and the amount of paper wasted where I work is obscene. Paperwork reduction act my ass!
I find that this is just a WRONG approach to monitor control, no matter how industry compliant it is. The fact is, there are many uses of monitors where the color range should be greater than the equivalent paper output. Think of things like first person games.
My ideal display would have a GUI widget set that used colors on par with their printed counterparts. However, staring into the sun of a first person game would look considerably brighter.
I believe the problem here is that there is no support in the graphics API to choose color filters. If there were, all GUI widgets could use the "paper" color filter, while games and other things could rely on "full-spectrum" color filters.
Unfortunately, I'm no color expert and wouldn't know how to tune such an API beyond some form of non-linear transform matrix. Any takers? Please contact me.
The converse of number 3 would be either improve the reliability of network storage (something large and small companies still need to work on), improve the reliability of network backup and differential network storage.
Or maybe improving the perception of storage reliability as perception is more important that actuality in many situations.
Devout follower of The Ferengi Rules of Acquisition.
Back in the days of the dinosaurs, when I was learning to program on Unix Vaxen, a single print page cost 1 cent from my account, which was still cheaper than staying logged on for hours wading through the code. So I always printed everything out, logged off, and spent those hours of wading in the student lounge.
I am trying to get out of this habit but it's hard. One thing that helps is a larger monitor, multiple windows, and a decent class browser. However, it's still nice to take the stack of dead trees and a red pen and go over them in the park under a live tree with the sun shining.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
The answer is that the typical computer user is ignorant. Being productive with a PC is not easy; it takes practice and training, just like any other tool humans have created. IS departments roll out PCs to the typical user and either: 1. don't train them, or 2. train them very poorly. Speaking as someone who it working on a PC implementation project for a governmental client, I've become a big supporter of a dumb client/NC solution for certain tasks.
Personally, I usually print out papers, projects, etc. that I'm writing for editing purposes. I find it harder on my eyes to read a computer monitor than a sheet of printed paper, and it's *far* easier to make editorial notes in the margins/line spacing when you're writing by hand. Erasing is still faster than backspacing (for me), and changing your mind is easier than having to cut and paste six or eight times.
When I've read through and edited things, then I go back and change them in the word processor. And print it out again, and go on from there. Editing is *far* easier on a hard copy than on a computer screen. Now, if I could make scribbles in the margins with a touch-sensitive screen and a pen, then *maybe* i'll stop doing that. But heck, it's only been the last few years that I actually can *compose* on a computer. Up until that point, I wrote everything long-hand first, then typed it, then went back to step A above in editing. So I'm saving *some* trees, at least.
Another note: when you're doing library searches, it's difficult to haul the monitor down the aisles with you. The librarians get upset if you mess too much with their computers, and the monitor cables aren't long enough anyway.
Of course these monitors must be touch sensitive, largeish (>=8.5"x11") conveiniently portable, and durable.
Then again, even this hypothetical technological marvel may fail to kill printers. I just printed off a web page so I could turn my head instead of hitting alt-tab while editing JS for that page ;)
License: By reading this you are agreeing that you agree with me.
Any computer with an Intel CPU and handwriting recognition.
All of the economic analysis of hemp as a paper substitute that I have seen assume that the political problems associated with industrial hemp agriculture are solved. In fact, N. Dakota recently passed a law legalizing this, and I believe Wisconson may also do so soon.
The problem is that most of the fiber is low quality. Hemp contains two types of fiber, bast and hurd. The bast is good, and can be made into high quality paper. The problem is that the hurd is crap, and accounts for 75% of the plant. For hemp to be competitive must be seperated from the bast. This both costs big bucks in the processing, but also generates a humungous waste stream. By comparison, groundwood softwood process fiber has an efficiency of 90+%. This means if you try to use hemp you are going to be stuck with a waste stream 7x larger than if you use softwoods.
People often think that because you are not cutting down trees hemp makes a better choice for papermaking ecologically. Well, the fact of the matter is that there are other ecological costs in the papermaking process that are at least as important - paper is a very energy, water and waste intensive business. The use of hemp instead of softwood in this picture would be an ecological disaster because of the overall life cycle efficiency.
Speaking as a paper scientist who has kept up with the research on alternative fibers, the sad fact of the matter is that hemp makes a LOUSY sheet of paper for the buck! It is very difficult to beat softwood tree fiber for phyical properties, especially fiber strength, economical processing and overall life cycle cost for papermaking. If it were an economically attractive fiber source you can bet your bottom dollar the paper industry would be using it; they are EXTREMELY cost sensitive.
If you are interested in this topic I would suggest the misc.industry.pulp-and-paper newsgroup.
Its really easy for prople to print these days.
Infomation that used to written on a notepad in the old days is now printed out via PDF/HTML in 15 + pages. The laser printer is fast and effective paper spouting machine. Statistics bear this out, we're using more paper.
Also documentation on CD is still a pain to use. I wonder if the amount saved in not printing manuals is made up printing them out in 8.5 x 11???
/Aram
Not to mention the fact that they went blind.
I think that projections are even easier to look at than computer screens. The projections are generally bright, but they are dull enough as to not annoy the eyes. Although a flat tft display may have better resolution (and digital quality) I wouldn't want a flat panel for the reason that it is 1.5 times brighter than my monitor. I don't need that at all. It's painful enough looking at a monitor (I get fatigued by this easily) and I'd rather look at something that reflects light instead of creating it.
Lowmag.net
or write on it, or stick it in my bag to take home. If Xerox can get me the paper from "The Diamond Age," I'll quit printing.
You have a point, even though I'm sure we will be moderated into flame bait hell. All the paper that us used in the US comes from tree farms that are grown. The paper industry doesn't go around cutting down acres of undesturbes forest (that territory is for the shopping malls to go). Personally from what I've read though, its the disposal of paper that is the problem. Throw it away, the paper easily decomposes, but the ink doesn't. Recycle, the process or cleaning the ink from the old paper is as dangerous to the environment as any other option. I just sounds a lot better :)
Pros:
Paper doesn't crash.
It's light and portable.
It's easily annotated.
When there's more light in the room, it gets easier to read.
It doesn't need recharging.
You don't need MS Word to view it.
You can pass out copies to your friends.
Cons:
It's hard to grep paper.
Not 'notepad', it's pathetic. Small files, lame text support, etc.
But, I do use an editor for taking most of my notes.
Editpad and UltraEdit are the two editors that I use. Editpad is very lightweight, and UltraEdit is very full featured. Editpad is a basic text editor that sits in the windows system tray and handles multiple documents open at once. UltraEdit does everything... unlimited size files, hex editing, syntax highlighting, etc. And it too sits in the system tray. Both have a small memory footprint and are reasonable to always have open, switching to with a hotkey.
Being able to always have an editor just a keystroke away make 'scribbles' easy.
I also threw a link to my reminder.txt file, which contains all my apointments, etc, into the startup folder, so when I start the computer it pops up. Unobtrusive, but easy.
Probably the biggest hurdle for electronic notetaking is having to reach for the mouse, go through the menus, open the program, type the note, and then save it with a good enough name that you can find it next time. My setup removes most of those problems.
One sentence from one of your 'test users' was interesting.
"If it doesn't come right out at me, I'm going to give up on it."
It makes me think of them as a dinosaur, unable to cope in the real world, without people distilling everything down into boss-words, with special fonts on all the big words.
If I ever had an employee tell me that they didn't bother to read something because it wasn't pretty enough, and didn't "come right out at them" I'd tell them to get a new job.
Some of the writing tips of the page make sense, like the use of objective rather than promotional text (When people read a paragraph that starts "Nebraska is filled with internationally recognized attractions," their first reaction is no, it's not, and this thought slows them down and distracts them from using the site.) are handy and make sense. Others are simply tips on how to cope with illiterate people.
These tips are handy, in some circumstances. Like with resumes where you're dealing with someone who probably doesn't know the job you're applying for, and will judge you only on the quality of the paper you printed the resume on, or when applying for a grant. In other cimcumstance, you can't (well, at least *I* can't) help but want to slap people for their arrogance in insisting that you spend more time making stuff beautiful just so they don't waste a few seconds actually having to read.
Well, he was right to a degree. Post-it notes make sense when you wish to communicate with a large, but unspecified group of people.
:)
For instance, putting a post-it note on one elevator telling people that it's broken. You don't know everyone who will want to use that elevator, and they might not check email until after they use it, so email doesn't work. A post-it note is perfect for that sort of thing, and probably always will be. (Well, until everything is covered in a thin LCD coating and you can just scribble the note onto the elevator...
You're right though, in that post-it notes are used in many roles that will become obsolete, such as storing phone numbers. When the PDA is the phone, and folds out into an electronic book, etc we won't have any need to write down this sort of info, and if these devices are as common as cell phones are among tech-types today, we should be able to just wirelessly network these notes to each other.
1) Paper is portable. For instance, if I am working on Machine A and the docs are on Machine B, I print them out and carry them over to A. Now that I have a Pilot this is already lessening. If/when I upgrade to something with more mem (not to mention buy another cradle) I may be able to stop this altogether.
2) Paper is proof. People are not comfortable saving, say, an email for later proof that they were told to do something. This is especially the case in the Windows world with it's a) less computer-savvy users and b) tendency to crash and lose files.
---
Linux MAPI Server!
http://www.openone.com/software/MailOne/
(Exchange Migration HOWTO coming soon)
In the Australian state of Victoria, there was a state government trial of growing hemp for commercial processes. This was a few years ago and there isn't any info I can find on the web about it, but from what I can recall there where a number of problems with this.
1. Hemp is a tougher ( i.e., harder to cut) plant than the normal crops harvested ( wheat, barley, canola....), and so the blades on the harvesters needed sharpening and changing more often. Yes, you could harvest it all by hand with a sickle, but that would take a hell of a lot longer ( scientific term meaning around a googleplex) than traditional crops. Note: This was done on "traditional farms" rather than forests areas.
2. The yield wasn't as good as was thought.
3. The government had to continually monitor the crops to make sure that there wasn't to much THC (the active chemical) in the crop. This is a bad thing because it meant extra money had to be spent and in these days of economic rationalisism and downsizing especially within this government department, meant the the powers that be didn't like it.
Sidenote: THC is the active component in marijuana and is normally around 10%, but these crops had to be less than 3%, so smoking these would give you nothing a headache.....
Hemp is actually considered a noxious weed that is the highest class of these weeds, and must be eradicated. NRE Info
There are definitely times that paper is the bes way to go, such as reading a book by the lake. However, there is NO reason to justify the huge quantities of paper that is being consumed.
As a case in point, there is at least one or two people in our office that just live in the print room. They print thick stacks of paper that I know they never really look at. Then why do they do it? Because paper is tactile. For people who grew up with paper rather than keyboards having paper the feel of paper is important - it makes them feel like they are accomplishing something.
The reason there is more of it now is simple, technology has given us more information and the ability to process it faster. More information means more paper.
And not just to copy the same old information like it use to be, now they can print and generate NEW information. It's heaven for those addicted to the substance.
Paper, like the post office, will slowly disappear. Give it a couple of generations.
True, but you could email him 10,000 copies of it!
DNA is a Turing machine. You, however, being dynamic and emergent, are not.
We've all heard about the "PC fridge" with the display on the door. Looks like that's missing the real goldmine: *networked toilets*. Yessir, according to this thread, there's a HUGE market of multitasking fanatics who want aren't content to "do their business" without a steady supply of computer generated content.
;-)
Of course, this only addresses one of the two primary uses of paper in this setting... but I am NOT going there...
The average monitor is 75DPI. The average ink-jet is 300DPI, the average laser 600DPI. It is easier to read a piece of paper than a screen.
Also, personally I tend to use my finger to mark where I am, something nearly impossible to do on a screen.
I would like to expound on your point that paper is easier on the eyes. Many in this discussion have pointed out paper has much better resolution than a monitor, and this is very true.
Just as important is that looking at a monitor all day is like looking straight into a light bulb all day.
It's only natural to not want to look straight at things that produce light. Our bodies aren't designed for it, and it's psychologically against our nature. That is, our evolutionary ancestors that enjoyed looking into the sun didn't hang around long enough to reproduce.
Why don't we just tap directly into our optic nervs... While were at it, why not tap our aural(right word?) nervs as well, that way we could listen to loud music without damaging our ear drums...
"Subtle mind control? Why do all these HTML buttons say 'Submit' ?"
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
Actualy, paper/inks and everything else that isn't a mirror *is* producing light on its own... sort of. (photons are comming out of the atoms when they are exsited by other photons)
anyway, if you're monitor is to bright why don't you just turn it down. both the brightness and the contrast. Most of the monitors I've ever seen can go all the way to black. You could probably set the brightness/contrast to the level of light that would be reflected, and there for easyer on your eyes
"Subtle mind control? Why do all these HTML buttons say 'Submit' ?"
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
I have my settings maxed out all the time, infact I can't *stand it* when there not. But then monitors have never really botherd me, even my horrible interlaced 47hz acerview 33d... (now *that* was a shitty monitor)
"Subtle mind control? Why do all these HTML buttons say 'Submit' ?"
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
I usualy don't have web browsers maximized, infact I rarely have anything maximized, and I'm only running at 1024x768. at 1600x1200 I can usualy keep two or three web browsers open and read them at the same time.
"Subtle mind control? Why do all these HTML buttons say 'Submit' ?"
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
Actualy, if you're using florecent lights, you're refresh is locked at 60, or 56 in england. Incadecants are a little better, but monitors may have 'higher' refreshes then paper in some places
"Subtle mind control? Why do all these HTML buttons say 'Submit' ?"
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
If your monitor is to bright, TURN IT DOWN, it's not that hard.
The light comming of a peice of paper is generated not reflected. When a photon hits an atom of a dye or somthing else that isn't a mirror, it excites the atom, witch will then relice an photon of its own. so the light is generated, just like a monitor.
It shouldn't be to hard to just set your monitor to emit the same amount of light that a peice of paper would.
"Subtle mind control? Why do all these HTML buttons say 'Submit' ?"
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
at least, thats what I learned in chem class.
"Subtle mind control? Why do all these HTML buttons say 'Submit' ?"
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
We need something with an LCD screen about the size of a sheet of paper, that could display plain text, PDF's, and maybe html. For static content a passive LCD would work fine. A PCMCIA port would allow for swapping out documents, connecting to a network or computer.
Trying to make such a device do everything [IE a computer] would make it nearly impossible to produce, so it should only do what it's desinged for: displaying text.
The party's over
There are two types of light. Additive and subtractive.
Additive is when you mix colours and the colours add to each other making a new
colour, and if you add all, you make white. You see this if you mix coloured sp
otlights. This is how monitors and tv's work. Mix all three to get an intense
white light.
Then there's substractive. It's the light that bounces off of things. When lig
ht bounces off a wall, you get all of the rest of the colours that don't get abs
orbed. The absorbed colour is what you see. Counter intuitive, yes. It works,
yes. Did I invent this, yes..well.. no. My cat did.
Anyway, anyone can stare at the sun all day or a piece of white paper. Well, of
course not. Think of your monitor as the sun. Bright when it's not filtered t
o say, black or green or your background. Remember DOS and it's black backgroun
d and grayish text? That's the problem. People don't realize that the bright w
hite formed by additive light is already hard to look at. It's like looking for
sun spots with your naked eye. IT HURTS. A lot.
So that's why I keep my backgrounds dim, contrast down or just plain black when
I can. People don't relize, it's easier when the fonts are bigger, the backgrou
nd is black and text is light gray. Try it with netscape and slashdot sometday.
It'll look ugly as sin, but its easier to read! Too bad people aren't intrins
ically smart and design their pages on black backgrounds, but black is aevil, eh
?
So why bother try this? Ever notice how e-books CAN use current technology, but
not only doesn't it do it for the cost of using LCD, but for the comfort? LCD
uses subtractive light, it's green with blacked out cells and a backlight. The
text doesn't radiate. So you see, the marketers are even smarter than they look
. Texts are always easier to read printed out. It uses that subtractive light
technology. If my palm pilot had a bigger display, i'd read off of it, but scro
lling drives me nuts.
Toodles!
sporty 'freebsd' o'one
---
Rolling cows gather now moss.
-
ping -f 255.255.255.255 # if only
This has happened many times: PHB sees something marginally interesting and relevant on the web. He prints out a bunch of pages and brings them to ne next staff meeting to talk about.
How many times have I wanted to make the case for a wireless net connection to a laptop with one of those overhead projector adapter thingies so PHB can impress us without printing out 10+ pages per employee!
I don`t know much about hemp, but I get the impression that the paper it produces is rather coarse. Would it be of sufficient quality for a decent laser printer output?
Simple answer. Monitors are pathetic. Despite getting down to .22 dot pitch, they are still nowhere near as crisp and as sharp as the "old" 300 DPI printers.
It's also the paradigm of work. Think of each screen on a computer as one sheet of paper. (You folks out there with giganto monitors, multiple monitors, or virtual desktops will comment that your workspace is bigger than one sheet of paper, but we're talking about the average user.) On the average desk, you can easily arrange 8 sheets of paper to work with. Writing on one, scribbling on another, and referencing the other 6 (3 open books?) is quite easy. Now, on the average 17" monitor, try reading one thing, and referencing another. The programs don't tile/cascade well while retaining their GUI (meaning the workspace-to-toolbar ratio changes).
The modern monitor is metaphorically the old one-room-schoolhouse slate board. You do something on it, erase it, then do something else. Except that it is required to be your source of information, not just your information input.
Until we get wraparound, gigantic, 300 DPI monitors with four times the area we have now, people will continue to print things out.
Seriously, it's a fact of life. Paper will not disappear. Can you hastily scribble something on even a Palm Pilot? Well, you got to boot it up first. Paper doesn't need to go through a boot-up sequence.
How long does your palm pilot take to boot up? Mine's instantaneous, bar the reminder alarms hanging around...
Obviously, printing out of documents and emails is a frivolous waste; what I don't understand is why some online applications (eg for bank accounts) also require a printed & signed paper copy to be sent back - won't a PGP-siged PNG image of my signature suffice?
~Tim
--
Rushing on down to the circle of the turn
Hope that this doesn't sound as a flame, but hemp and a lot of other grass like plants were the main resource for papermaking worldwide until the discovery that paper can be made from wood, and consumption artificially driven up in the sky.
China's paper industry is still based around a large number of small paper factories extensively with non-wood materials. This is soon to change, as all we know Big brother sees China as the big investment of the future, with its enormous population. That meaning that if they got our western consumption rate of useless paper - wrappings, nappies etc etc they would have to switch to pulp paper production, involved with lots of bucks.
And back to the beginning - for some reason we are accustomed to thinking of paper as being white. Yes, non-wood paper isn't that white, but that doesn't make it of a lower quality.
Let thee hath different desktopeth and readeth on screen.
-- Stupidity has a certain charm, ignorance does not. --Frank Zappa
delivered by the pallet
passes through an expensive printer
hourly worker breaks it apart
another hourly worker takes it to the "wheels"
"wheels" do what they do with it
hourly worker shreds it
I hate paper
Printed material is easier on the eyes, the contrast is better, its more portable and you can leave it somewhere and not worry about it.
Until we get some digital replacements that can meet these requirements, there will still be uses for printed material.
Hotnutz.com
I love to print out documents. PDF, PS, HTML, what-have-you.
Very simple reason: It's a helluva lot hard to sit in bed with a monitor on your lap than with even a hefty book like Cryptonomicon.
I like my PalmPilot. I use it to read fiction. I carry it into bed to read. Very good.
But for reference material, if it's going to be used often, I insist on a printout. Easy scribbling, better speed (scrolling through to find a page is much easier with paper than on screen. Faster too). It might be easier to search an electronic file, but I'd like to keep a paper copy handy, too. (My monitor runs at a very low resolution. 800x600. Reason? 60hz refresh hurts the eyes, and 75hz flickers too to me. Monitor only handles 85hz at 800x600.).
I'm printing out the web and all those PDFs I have on my HD so after the total global collapse brought about by y2k I'll still be able to surf the web by candlelight.
I wonder how many hamsters in wheels will it take to keep my box up after the ups dies. =)
Seriously thought, acid-free paper or vellum are probably the best, proven, long-term storage option currently available to protect knowledge against collapse of civilisation. Keep paper away from fire and water and you're doing okay. Microfiche is a close second, but in a total global collapse, it may be hard to read the little type. =)
Electronic archive methods need obviously electricity to be usable and a machine that understands the format the media is in. Data also has a habit of evaoprating off of magentic media.
I have a 17" monitor running at 1152x764. When I open up a couple coding windows and three or four xterms. There's not enough room on the screen for specs, tutorials, examples, etc. Until I have a dual head setup printing is a viable solution.
Sorry, I still don't think even the snazziest of these techno-dreams adequately captures what makes paper work well. Take something simple, like physical pages. While they can be quite limiting at times (and certainly a good electronic document should not be rigidly constrained by pagination except when it is actually printed), they also provide a very good and intuitive navigation mechanism.
If you're reading criticaly, one of the things you do frequently is flip back a few pages to review what was said there or see how it fits with what you just read, or perhaps you obviously missed a point back there. With paper, this is easy, and there is a natural and intuitive feel for how many pages back something is. It's not perfect, but it works well - much faster than searching, and it's fairly easy to mark your place at several locations at once, at least until you run out of fingers!
This is really the point of my criticism of the state of reading software: we could build good readers, but we haven't yet. Even the basics of navigation within a document don't work well yet. Unfortunately, the best thing out there so far is possibly Acrobat reader, and it only works because it lamely imitates paper. We can and should do much better.
"The future's good and the present is nothing to sneeze at." - Roblimo's last
This was tried a few years ago. There was a company offering net notary services (I think they were actually called NetNotary) that would do a hash of what you sent them and notarize it. Daily (or weekly, I forget which) they took a hash of all the hashes they'd done for that period and published it in the Wall Street Journal.
So far as I can tell, they went out of business - I can't find them now...
"The future's good and the present is nothing to sneeze at." - Roblimo's last
OK, I can't resist doing a quick little back-of-the envelope analysis on this one.
.5" borders around the page, you get a resolution of 30 Megapixels on a single A-size sheet:
I think most of us would like to use electronic versions more than we do. As with most things we talk about here, there are two problems: Hardware and Software. Both are big ones here. In order, then:
Hardware:
The bandwidth of even a really good screen is at best a tiny fraction of a *single* sheet of paper.
Do the math: At 600 dpi (the most common printer resolution these days) and assuming
600 dpi x 600 dpi = 360,000 dots/in^2
8 in x 10.5 in = 84 in^2
Pixel equivalent of page, then is:
360,000 x 84 = 30,240,000 (!)
Even at 300 dpi, it's still 7,560,000 pixels!
(84 in^2 x 90,000 dots/in^2 = 7.56 Megapixels)
Even with the most sophisticated HDTV monitor (1920x1280? = 2,457,600 Megapixels) you've still got only a fraction of the real estate that a mediocre printer provides, at a price point that puts them well out of reach. Granted, some of that resolution (particularly at 600 dpi) is not strictly necessary, but it does serve to reduce the strain of reading bitmapped fonts, which is another reason people prefer paper.
This has a secondary consequence which leads to the software considerations: We are all effectively working through portholes. This is a major reason the desktop UI metaphor doesn't work as well as we initally think it should: The area of your virtual desktop is a very tiny fraction of that of your real desktop. I currently have over a half-dozen pages of paper on my desk that I'm working on. (Actually, way over, but I'll leave it at 6 for those of you neat enough to have only that many...) The equivalent resolution of my real desktop then, is substantially in excess of the 300 dpi equivalent (for 6 pages) of 45 Megapixels!
In reality, counting the papers on the reference table behind me and the things I have pinned up on the wall, my immediate work area (the "real" desktop) has an equivalent resolution at 300 dpi of probably around a gigapixel. Oh, and many of the documents are in full color, too, so triple or quadruple that if you really want to build the Sun "Starfire" wraparound workstation that Bruce Tognazzini did a UI film for a couple of years back. It's no wonder we want eight virtual desktops and that still doesn't work!
Software:
This problem is every bit as recalcitrant as the hardware. Bottom line (because I'm running out of time and the envelope must be getting quite full now): we don't have any good software for reading. Some of the posters here have mentioned the PalmPilot and its Doc format readers. While considerably more awkward than real paper, they are much better readers than are available for PCs. Most PC software is optimized for writing - precious little consideration has been given to reading! (I haven't tried the RocketBook or eBook gadgets, since I can't see toting such weight and complexity simply for reading.) The ability to quickly "flip" pages (gee, that would allow true browsing!) is vital. People will continue to use paper instead of screens until it's not a PITA to read on a screen.
Oh and there's one more thing: Books and paper don't need batteries or recharging, they have indefinite shelf life, they rarely if ever require bckups, they survive incredible physical abuse, and I haven't yet run into a file format incompatibility that wasn't rooted in an insufficiency in the training of the warmware.
Bottom Line: Without MAJOR improvements in hardware AND software, screens aren't even in the game. I've found that only a very few people are capable of dealing effectively with large amounts of electronic documentation. This is not just a cultural issue - I've expressed here fundamental reasons why it's just not reasonable to expect people to prefer screens to paper anytime in the near future.
"The future's good and the present is nothing to sneeze at." - Roblimo's last
Just dump (no pun intended :) to your Palm Pilot, and you can have all sorts of stuff to read on the can...
It seems that it's the older people that tend to print more things off.
Your example, well, makes me sick. Trees are not nearly as renewable as I wish. Hemp is a damn near perfect solution to this but many governments are horribly misinformed/fearful. It's a good thing they're growing it in Ontario. I hope the practice gets more popular. I've seen the effects of clear-cutting and it disturbs me.
Older people tend to be set in their ways. They resist change.
I started working at a place in January and I did a fair bit of research. I would grab items from various sites, generate plots of data I collected (They let me use GNUPlot and Cygwin, yay), etc. When I would tell someone that I had an item or a piece of data, I would tell them what directory to find it in. Invariably, they would say, "print it off."
I didn't like doing it, but, well, I had to.
Documents are about content. You want to bring a book or article with you, not the means of representing it. Paper's low cost, disposability, portability, foldability, durability etc all make it a pretty transparent way of representating content. PDA's and even the emerging e-paper do not have these attributes - the representation gets in the way of the abstraction ("document") that we are really interested in.
/. :-)
When a piece of e-paper with integrated storage, electronics and battery costs around 25c - cheap enough to be thrown away or left lying around, then it may start to replace paper. How about a copier that rather than spitting out a stack of paper instead spits out a single e-document, and in a fraction of the time! Please forward royalty payments to Spiny Norman, c/o
It's no coincidence that, differences among languages aside, all of them refer to emotional contact in primarily tactile terms.
I believe this is more a matter of embodied cognition and convergent evolution of languages than it is reflective of the (undisputed) importance of touch. IMHO all of our abstract thought is metaphorical, and the "chosen" metaphors come from the best match with our embodied experience. Emotion and touch just happen to have a lot in common.
That's interesting. Personally, I don't seem to have much trouble with information on a screen rather than on paper. As a matter of fact, it's been so long for me that I actually had to borrow real paper from my friend yesterday when my German professor wanted an essay turned in (perish the thought!). The main reason I can see to use printed copies is so you don't have to waste your money on a crummy laptop.
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Silly rabbit. Sleep is for class!
- Screen real estate is too valuable a commodity. If you're going to have some piece of info up for awhile, it economizes your usage of screen real estate to print it out, keep it next to your for that while, then throw it out when you are done.
- Reading locations. I like to read in the bathroom, on the sofa in front of the tv, or in bed. I do have a laptop to help out in these cases, but what goods a system with no net connection these days? Until wireless LAN connections are cheaper and more plentiful printing out will always be an attractive option.
- Compatibility. Send someone a
.ps file, and chances are they won't know what to do with it (and if they do, they're likely to print it out). Send someone a MS Word file, if they're on a *nix system forget it. Print it out and hand it to them and you are sure they can read it. Plus the effort they have to expend to read it is negligible compared with the slight hassle of getting the document up and running in the proper viewer. - Its there. Most people have access to printers. Often the printer access and usage is free. So why not use it if the mood strikes you? If the printer is a laser printer (likely) then you can look forward to publishing quality output.
- Arbitrary editing and corrections. A document on paper is easy to mark up with edits, modifcations and corrections. In an online document you can do that but your changes tend to get lost so that the original author has no way of going over just your additions/modifications. Sure you can do this with text files and a diff program, but in word processors its a bit more difficult.
OxrylyHemp is one of the best plants to make paper out of. It has a much higher yield than trees for making paper. Too bad it's illegal to grow it in the United States. Read William Bartrom's "Travels" (all 400+ pages!!!) to see just how much it was grown and accepted just over 200 years ago:)
SGIs running IRIX have a much better on-screen DPI. They are much more pleasant to look at. Of course, they cost a little more;)
I was just ponmdering this the other day while helping someone with a web-based homework problem. When I had them, I just did it and turned it in without printing, but a lot of people insist on printing them out to look at them before they have a clue as to how it works. Based on my observations of the people who tend to do it these ways, is that the people who dislike or have ny sort of computer phobia tend to believe that any problem is ten times harder if it is on a screen on not on paper. On my 19", when people print, the paper is actually smaller, and they don't even need to write on the paper, they just need the paper to read.. It seems really odd to me... I understand sometimes it helps you to scribble stuff on scrap paper, but having to read the original information off of paper seems extreme.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
If its on paper, its easier to read and reference. Also resolution is great and you can *ahem* pee and read at the same time.
i use a duplexer on a hp laserjet 4MP and laserjet 4000 to print double sided pages..works great with linux...The duplexer is a physical device BTW that sticks on the back of the printer.
Why do people still buy newspapers when there's a plethora available online. Why do people still buy books?
I believe there's still this generation/or perhaps just a majority of users who grew up learning that the cutting edge means getting paper cuts from "information technologies".
I don't believe people see computers as information appliances, or toaster's with brains. The conventional computer is still a complicated type writer. The product of thousands of keystrokes is a paper copy of that work. Eventually paper needs and is required to come shooting out the other end. We're still a paper based society, and I fear the only way that might change that is through higher paper costs or fewer printers. The last time I checked printers were still on sale, because they were cheaper and easier to use than any PDA currently on the market.
--Matt
When you're at work it's even more free than at home - you don't have to pay for it! Face it, you buy a computer these days, and you get a printer with it; to print letters or have a medium you can take with you. Once you have it, you might as well use it.
I would LOVE to see an expose' on how much money is actually wasted on paper, and then to see companies take it seriously - but all the printing products just get cheaper anyway, so I doubt it will happen.
I'm looking forward to EPaper. I'd love to store many pages on something flimsy that I could take with me... I think EPaper will finally help solve the printing crisis.
Dan Huffnal was right. It's all because of the Lumber Cartel
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
Face it -- paper is universal. Every time some clueless twit sends out a broadcast e-mail in Word2000 format we all just send it over to our AA, who faithfully kills a few trees so that we can read it and discover that it's an announcement that someone we've never heard of will be out of office next Tuesday.
It's not accidental that two of the top industries in the State of Washington are lumber and MICROS~1
TINLC
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
I think the main reason we still use so much paper is that monitors make lousy display devices, compared to a piece of paper.
Hard on the eyes, hard on the neck, hard to lug around and read when you're on the john.
Once we start getting some "ubiquitous computing" style display pads, I suspect paper use will drop off.
--
Clear, Dark Skies
i've been paperless since 1979 and my trs80 model i. i've kept everything as a text file, and this last year i backed up every text file, email (from BBS systems before internet and fidonet) onto one searchable CD-ROM. i've been consistent at forwarding data from system to system and always made backups. the system works, it just takes training users how to live filing electronically instead of with wasteful old paper. i had to use xmodem and a rs-232 cable to get it out of my trs80 into a PC (xt8088), then a few years later into a macintosh plus, and from then on in all my creator dates and filenames have been long filenames. i still use text files (with bbedit) for writing everything, because then you can easily search it on the mac using GREP (built-into bbedit). the system works great. just the other day i emailed a friend of mine a 30k text file entered in 1981 - he didn't even remember it existed, but my text search found it in less than ten seconds. if only people could be weened off their archaic reliance on paper. i think its just a comfort thing. they're tought how to files with paper, but they "don't trust" electronic filing, because they don't know how to backup properly, nor how to create a useful directory structure with DESCRIPTIVE and useful filenames for when they have to search. its all a matter of learning good filenaming and directory structuring, but people keep crazy electronic file structures, while they don't think twice about spending HOURS organising paper files in a cabinet. if people would just take the care they did in filing things electronically as they did in a real paper filing cabinet, there would be no problem!
2cents.
johnrpenner@earthlink.net
I think we all might be missing a small and subtle point in this debate. I run a lab on my college campus, and see this quite a bit, too. Most of the time that printing is done for non-classwork is email, most of that comming not from our campus email system, but from web-based email like Hotmail.
That aside, I have often wondered why it was that the other students would want to print their email. Granted some of it was humor, some of it was classwork, but a large majority of it was personal. Some of it really, really personal. But also, the email mostly printed out, was not email sent to them, but the responses to email as well as email originated by them.
I have also found myself printing out draft copies of stories and letter I have to submit for class and pleasure. Things that most definately did not need to be printed.
I think, therefore, that part of the reason that so many people want to print things out, is to be seen in print. Think about it, how often would you like to see something like a byline, in print, next to your name? Look at email. It has a byline right next to your name.
It's the real thing. You can doodle on it, highlight it, add information to it, cross out things, indicate where revisions go, use different colors.
And, best of all, it has no spellchecker or grammatical software to tell you that you're a doofus. It doesn't care if you like to write in French with an Arabic twist. You can cut it in pieces.
And, no matter what you say, if it's printed then it's more real than if it's electronic. Who knows where those electrons came from? But we hewed the tree with our bare hands and mushed it in chemical soup before spreading it out on giant rollers. It has substance. It can be abused. If you roll it, you can abuse substances.
And, thanks to Peter Maxx, you can throw it at people.
Will in Seattle
Many people print out paper for a simple two-fold reason: they grew up making corrections that way. The kinesthetics (and ergonomics!) of pen-on-paper are 'better' than those of a strictly digital correction, and most monitors /still/ aren't large enough to fit a full page of text on the screen at once (at a readable size), which means it's quite frequently /faster/ to read something hardcopy, especially if you're going to be doing a whole lot of back-and-forth page flipping. (Not to mention you've had much more practice reading hardcopy than screencopy.) The physicality of hardcopy makes it easier to remember where a particular sentence is and go back to it.
/look/ a lot better); paper doesn't have compatibility problems, or need power; on a character-per-gram basis for anything under a million or so words, paper is lighter than a computer. And of course, you can do free-hand sketching on paper much easier than you can the computer, unless you're sickly good with the mouse.
/quite/ disposable, but they're close, and to displace paper, you just need instant copying. Stick a hundred-pack (same size as a 500-pack of 20-bond) into your digital copier, and el-blammo, you've got 100 perfect copies. If you need to put your sketch up on the overhead, put your paper down on it and hit the 'copy' button; instant transparency. Transfering information from page to page would work the same way. If communication is surface to surface (which make intuitive sense to me), then you can dispense with expensive wireless circuitry; and the nv-ram doesn't have to be very large -- find out what the average length of the average business memo is (I'd guess under ten pages) and make that the storage size. Flipping the page over changes which page is displayed.
The other reason, suprisingly enough, is that paper works better. (No, really!) Tools like PDAs don't, and shouldn't, try to implement the entire functionality of paper, just the small subset of it concerned with scheduling (and contact information, usually). It's not substantially easier to make massive modifications on a computer than on paper (though it's true that they tend to
In terms of saving trees, look at the continual predictions of 'disposable computers' in the media. As usual, they've taken a perfectly legitimate trend (Moore's Law) and distorted it out of recognition, but it can make a certain kind of sense*. 'Disposable' processors aren't terribly useful without 'disposable' memory and displays; but what if you went ahead and ran off a hundred 8.5x11 plastic (touch sensitive) LCDs on which are burned (with the same process) a 386-class processor and (using tech from, IIRC, 3M) a plastic battery strip? (Assuming that some futuretech will handle non-volatile memory for us...) They're not
Yeah, it's pretty much a standard vision of the future, but what's scary is how close it is...
* I'm already in medium-term disposable computing. I overclock my celeron, which burns out about four months later, at which point I buy a much faster one; the price per time-performance ratio is unbeatable.
-_Quinn
Reality Maintenance Group, Silver City Construction Co., Ltd.
My roommate and I have been pondering a perfect solution (as far as we can tell) to the problem of needing paper: Star Trek tablets! Those little things that Captin Picard and the other officers are always reading off of. I want one. Here are a few advantages:
1. A big screen, with really good display/resolution. This could be made just as nice as paper, and could even be adjusted to one's eyes.
2. You could scribble on it. The biggest advantage of paper that I can see right now is that you can whip out a pen and right things on it. My hope is that in the future, we will be able to take a printable document format and just scribble all over it. If you've done a lot of editing essays and such for school, you know that the only way to do this is with actual paper. Now, with a good editable format, we would no longer be limited in that way. Anybody could email their buddy a rough draft, have him scribble some stuff on it, and email the diff back. It would be great.
3. You can take it anywhere. If you make it steardy, you could fit it in a back pack, or a brief case. Scribble down some ideas or read a book on the bus. Look through some notes while waiting in line at the fast food joint.
4. Back-ups. If you throw in some wireless networking, you could easily save a back-up to your computer or your favorite FTP site. That way, you can always get to you file, and it will never be losed.
Most of what I outlined above is already possible with different devices, but I can't think of anything that combines them all. I really would be willing to blow 300-500 dollars and something this usefull. Any body else think a Star Trek tablet would be really cool?
Got HTML? Want LaTeX? Try html2latex
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Yes, but I find that I lose papers much more easily than files, esp. personally files -- why? On the computer, if the user has any bit of sanity, the files are organized such that there is a semantic track to it. For example, if I want a file with the itinerary of a trip I took last year to see a cousin, I go to "~/Private/personal/travel/1998/" and it's magically there. And anyway, there's always "find," which is a very painful option in the real world.
Plus you can make 100% fidelity back ups of gigs of data effortlessly; 1 gig ~ 1000 bibles -- try xeroxing that!
*** Proven iconoclast, aspiring bohemian. ***
BINGO. I'm about to head to the head right now, and I'm going to take the printout from "Cyberclasm" earlier today to read....
and probably to wipe with soon after.
Bill Clinton: Pimp we can believe in. - The Shirt!!!
The only thing I like being printed are manuals, which I can easily flip through or bookmark without losing screen real estate or time, and whatever misc. stuff I need to use away from the computer (novels, etc.).
Nowadays I'm more prone to visiting http://www.m-w.com than actually finding and taking out my dictionary.
Long-term use materials though are definately better on paper (you can't be bombarded by electrons forever...).
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
Just before hemp was outlawed in the US, Dow Chemical had patented a paper-manufacture process working with wood pulp... and they had enough money to have the ear of the legislative branch. You can draw your own conclusions from that if you like.
The US government was faced with a problem in WWII of running out of fabric sources to make things like paper, parachutes, etc, for military operation... they didn't have a problem re-legalizing hemp at that point to get their soldiers outfitted in things. Parachutes that saved soldiers' lives, American flags, and many copies of the Bible were all made out of hemp from that era. Farmers were actually required to grow their fair share for the US government. It was never actually re-legalized, the law was just suspended for the period of the need.
I use the computer screen exclusively for any document or drawing that is in work or in any other way not static. But if it is static it gets printed. I have found that this is some small part relieves my eye strain. My crt is adjusted fairly bright so that I can more easily see detials (I'm a CAD draftsman by trade). But this makes text, which is usually black on white, difficult to read.
/. to look more like http://slashdot.org/tacohell/
I just wish I could adjust
It's much easier on my peepers
1. Postscript (the standard for academic papers). Using Ghostscript/Ghostview these documents are almost always horribly ugly onscreen. Moving around a document with Ghostview is also extremely primitive.
2. Adobe's PDF viewer. This program is an anomaly in that no matter how much processor speed you throw at it, it the rendering speed remains impossibly slow. Like Postscript, PDF files also tend to be designed for the printed page, and are almost always a poor fit for a monitor that's wider than it is tall. People seem to always have their PDF readers configured with some huge zoom factor--so the text fills the width of the screen--or they have a difficult to read scaled page in the middle of the screen surrounded by a huge, empty border.
3. HTML. This is better than the previous two options, but a web browser is too large and unreliable an application to have open all the time just to view documentation. Having to click around with a mouse to read mostly-sequential documentation is non-intuitive. Lynx is an option, but not a pretty one.
4. TeX/DVI. Again, very oriented to the printed page.
5. Microsoft Word. Platform specific; file format changes too frequently.
The are some other schemes out there, but none that have caught on enough to be generally useful.
Seriously, it's a fact of life. Paper will not disappear. Can you hastily scribble something on even a Palm Pilot? Well, you got to boot it up first. Paper doesn't need to go through a boot-up sequence.
Are you afraid paper will crash? It's easier to keep a piece of paper going (say, keep it out of your pocket jeans before doing the laundry :) ) than to make sure your data will not be lost in some freak accident.
Paper has been used for centuries, because it's simple, convenient, cheap and practical. Why would you expect it to disappear?
What paper doesn't do, however, is where electronic media come in: you can't transmit paper over long distances quickly (well, there's Fax, but who uses that old junk when you can just make an attachment?); you can't carry a whole lot of information on paper conveniently; you can't share projects by constantly rewriting paper.
It's easy to go all Star Trek on everyone, and expect that age-old technologies will disappear. These technologies were discovered early on because they're universal, simple and practical. But I bet you that no matter where we get to in a thousand years, a few things will remain basically unchanged: beer, paper, the wheel and goood old fire.
Might as well ask why fire is still used in the age when we have electrical heating... :)
"There is no surer way to ruin a good discussion than to contaminate it with the facts."
"There is no surer way to ruin a good discussion than to contaminate it with the facts."
The white comes from the process of bleaching, oxidizing the colored compounds. In the past typically using "chlorine" bleach and producing such poisons as dioxins.
At least in the production of newer "Environmentally friendly" papers this has been replaced by other methods like exposing the pulp to ozone (O3).
I don't know what the relative needs are for the two fibers being compared, but I believe the brown comes from lignins in wood pulp, which shouldn't be present in high quantities in herbaceous plants.
Chinese paper is reputedly a real pain in the rear for printer manufacturers trying to sell products that must handle it. Given the problems with embedded objects, uneven thickness, and the fiber grain running side-to-side instead of lengthwise (accompanied by side-to-side paper curling), adopting modern paper-making methods might actually be necessary for the tech advances they are trying for there.
I don't know--if this was a huge factor, then why hasn't some other country without the United States' limitations done it? You seem to be assuming that the only paper production/printing companies in the world are in the United States... If there are companies out in the rest of the world doing exactly this, I'll happily stand down, but I haven't seen anything along these lines myself...
This seems to answer the problem of screens causing eyestrain as well as the whole paper glut issue. That is -- if it can ever be made practical, affordable, and easy-to-use.
Just a thought that seems to have been neglected.
-cf
After reading what you'v all said it sounds to me like what we really need is an 8 1/2 x 11 in PalmPilot. It wouldn't solve the issues with comparing two pieces of paper that are layed out on your desk, but at least you could read a book or some source code it the bathroom. Sure it won't fit in your shirt pocket but neither will your notepad(unless you have one of those tiny ones, and then a palmpilot should work just fine).
Secondly, PDF's are completly Evil(TM). I'd much rather have an ASCII text file than a pdf, there is just no comfortable way to read one on a computer screen. They're probably the only thing that i print out on a regular basis.
Non gratis rodentus anus
I'm no paper scientist, but I think if companies were able to purchase cheap, DOMESTIC hemp, they would be able to develop the technology necessary to process it economically. Since farmers in the US aren't able to grow hemp, how can they selectively breed it for properties like " fiber strength, economical processing and overall life cycle cost for papermaking" ?
file:
what about the Ken Starr report?
*insert pithy sig here*
The source of the study? Couldn't tell you. Although I do think there is something like this cited in Jerry Mander's book.
(Sorry to use Amazon link, I was in too much of a hurry to go digging for something more informative.)
--
I seem to recall from an article back in X-Mas (I think SJ Mercury News, but not sure) about this.
The idea presented is generally that Human's can remember information easier if it is in a static form. ie: The information is halfway down on page 15.
Seems that the scroll bars aren't static enough for most people.
On the converse side of things, if electronic-ink takes off, I would think this may reduce the paper consumption. Why? Well if you have a book of e-ink, the words & data should all show up on the same location of the page you are looking for. (At least that's my theory)
I hope we will find out before we run out of trees.
Oh, and no, I'm not no stinking tree-hugging hippie, I'd just rather walk through a forest instead of a parking lot.
Gee, seems that while I was writing my post, Everyone else was writing about it as well...
Although my opinions are probably scattered in other replies, after having thought about this for much of my life I can't help but reply.
I'm with you, I dislike paper for many many reasons just a few being lack of a search tool, bulky, degradation, and difficulty to disseminate (photocopy). The printing press has seen its day and that day has passed!
That said I have been looking into this problems for more than a decade and here are the reasons I have come up with. Mind you I feel they are all surmountable and with luck we may soon see the fall of paper.
1)Standardization (the same reason Microsoft is beating Linux and we all know that's wrong!) People don't want to have to mess around with formats. We need concise format definitions not myriad variations even from version to version with simple filters for format conversion. Thanks to the web I think this is on the way.
2)Ease of use. It must be simple. Paper is very very simple. Emacs is not. Once again, kudos to the web html and all that good stuff on attacking this one.
3) Customization. A format that allows one person to choose fonts and colors that they like. Personally I prefer white text on black and every web browser I've tried doesn't handle this as well as needed. People are used to paper so they accept it as is, but to overcome it the customizability has got to one up paper.
4) Portability. All but the smallest laptops are a bit bulky, and this has to work just as well for people replacing binders as well as people who have those cute little notepads that fit nicely in their pocket (me).
5) Cost. Get all these features into an affordable ($200?) package and were good to go!
All of the above! Any less and too many people won't be willing to switch.
Hopefully awaiting a paperless world.
lowsix
There exists an electronic paper that can display (inked) pixels, just like you would view on a normal paper, it is not light irradiation. I think it works by flipping small balls that have one side painted in black and other side painted in white.
If this enters mainstream, you would never bother to print something... just take it with you to the toilet and plug to your e-books or palms...
-- You are in a twisty maze of passages, all alike.
I print a lot of stuff out, and I have bought quite a few books for computer docs, such as the various O'Reilly volumes. I have a colleague who can't understand why I do that. "Books", he once told me, "are so superfluous."
I cannot agree. What I despise about reading at the monitor is trying to look at two different things that don't fit on one screen. If you scroll to the one place, you can't see the other; and hence you can't easily compare a definition with its application, can't easily compare a figure with its explanation, can't easily compare a function API with the sample code. You're constantly scrolling up, trying to remember what it says up there, then scrolling back down, and trying to remember what the hell you were just looking at. Usually you can't scroll to exactly the same spot on one try, so you waste considerable time fine-tuning your scroll.
Opening two windows to the two spots you want to read isn't necessarily good enough either, because usually one window obscures the other, so you can still only see one passage at a time. You could narrow the windows and place them side by side, or split a window in half, but that reduces the space you have to display your two passages, and they may be too big for that to be workable.
With printed pages, the problem is easily solved. You jam your thumb in where one passage appears, and your index finger in where the other one is, and flip back and forth. Piece a cake.
Don't ever take my paper away.
Always keep a sapphire in your mind
As a paper chemist, I've often gotten a laugh driving to a company in Maine, when I see this bumper sticker:
"Want to Save a Tree?
Wipe Your Butt with Plastic."
Nuff said, paper's here to stay; and provides a lot of jobs in Europe and in the States.
Now I've done it, in admitting that I'm a Paper Chemist, not a republican Nazi who works for the FBI...or worse. (Even thought I have friends at places like that).
Anyway, the facts are simply this: Paper useage will grow at a rate of 4-7% for the next 20 to 25 years. The paper industry will see a shift to the use of digitally printed paper when folks like Scitex figure out how to do 4 color process (like a printing press) at 250 ft/Min. They are very close, and should announce that this fall( but they've said that before too). Each Scitex machine will print 10,000 tons of paper a year; so the day may come where it's faster to digitally master and print publications like USA Today on a Scitex. It is already used to print those magazine inserts with your name on it.
Finally by the year 2015, digitally printed paper will account for 37% of the worldwide paper markey, as opposed to 4-5% now (and that's being generous, it's actually lower). It will do this at the expense of paper being printed by flex or rotogravure. However those markets won't go away, in the ensuing years they will become static as the overall market doubles in size; allowing digitally printed paper to become more of a commodity market than it is today.
Oh, and don't expect a paperless office, we in the paper industry have seen a 2 fold increase since Xerox announced that in the 70's. Paper is always going to be there, as technology plods on new uses will replace those that fall by ther wayside.
That's my $0.02, but it's an accurate one.
I don't mean to trivialize the topic or anything, but until I can CONVENIENTLY grab a clipboard-or-similar-type device and take it with me to the bathroom, we're still going to have paper. Even then, there are other paper products in that room that come in really handy, too.
A couple years ago my friends and I were getting progressively more hyper while drinking pots of hot chai, and we decided to invent a display that had the easy-reading qualities of paper, such as being solid-state, reflective rather than projective, and all-angle viewable. What we came up with was essentially a Magna-Doodle on speed. Little cells filled with an opaque background fluid would be polarized a certain degree and a certain density of metallic particles would be drawn to the top of the cell, showing up against the jelly medium. When I researched our idea on the net, I found that of course it had been thought up of a while ago by some famous inventor. We also thought there could be a color version, if only the proper RGB magnetic flecks existed...
I've seen e-Books and of course the Palm, but LCD is just too hard to read in comparison with good 'ol paper, so I wanted to know if anyone has seen a similar device in use anywhere, or knows of any companies developing such a device. I guess it would probably be Xerox, right?
a prophet on the burning shore
If you ask me, we'd save a few forests if people just learn how to adjust brightness and contrast, and STOP BUYING CRAPPY MONITORS!
Also, stock your printing room with once-used paper! Print on both sides! Provide recycle bins! And by all means, encourage copying and pasting, and not printing images on webpages! The ink problem is just as bad as the paper problem.
a prophet on the burning shore
The reason I'm always spewing out hardcopies is because online doco doesn't fit on the screen. Sure, I've got 1152x864 on a nice 17", but there just isn't enough room for your average HTML doco alongside a couple xterms.
Now, this isn't ALWAYS the case. There is standards-compliant documentation out there that will properly wrap to a narrow browser window -- but it's unfortunately far too rare. That and no matter whether you get the standards right or not, any graphical screenshots or tables you do are going to be pretty much unreadable at less than 400 pixels wide.
Besides, let's not forget that most paper doesn't come from the bad guys in Captain Planet tearing down rainforests just for the sheer orgasmic thrill of it. It comes from a combination of the reconstituted scraps from the last paper runs and tree farms, among other things.
I admit I am guilty of this crime, there has been many a time that I printed a tutorial from some online website. I guess my main reason would be that I didn't want to keep an open web browser and have to keep on flipping between a web browser and the whindow in which I was working. But my younger cousins don't seem to have any such problems. Maybe it's because I grew up with printed books, I think as time goes on the whole printing thing will stop.
Vidi, vici, veni. (I saw, I conquered, I came)
Absolutely. A printout fits in the pocket, doesn't hum, whirr or get hot. It is almost instantly accessable and rm -rf won't unwittingly destroy it.
Now there is one thing folks could be doing: use the pstools psbook command to print stuff out as booklets - four pages to an 8.5 by 11 piece of paper. I wrote a trivial STk script that pops up a little window when my wife or I prints from netscape. It allows printing the first (odd) side then prompts you to put the paper back in for printing the even side. We also have a long reach stapler so you just print, fold and staple to make very handy little booklets for reading where and when you want. A four-X reduction in paper and I find the booklets MORE convient than regular printouts.
90% of the wealth is in 2% of the pockets. Bummer to be in the majority.
What is the expected life of data on a floppy? Of data on a CD? How do we know that even if the data still exists in 500 years that we will have the technology to read it? BAckwards compatibility for centuries old technolgy certainly isn't a given.
Now, think about paper. The dead sea scrolls are what, about 2000 years old and still very readable. The language may change, but the transer medium, paper (or stone) to the human eye, is backwards compatible to at least 10,000 years or so if start counting with the various prehistoric man cave drawings that have been found...
for IP, GP, and UPM stock!
When it comes down to it, you can't take your monitor with you. Just yesterday I was tempted to print a manual pdf file, becuase I could not get the jist in my head. Reading on paper is a different mental process than on screen. The sad thing is I have the manual "somewhere."
And more than once I have printed a manual to take it away so I can read it "away from the situation."
Oh and I have taking my laptop to the John with me, its a bit dangewoues/
1) It might get wet (or worse).
2) You legs fall asleep after 1 hours of solataire.
And I am hyper about recycling and reducing paper usage.
--
Zot O'Connor
I was discussing this trend with a friend of mine who lives in Japan. He does nearly all of his work through his PDA and Laptop. I think part of the problem here is PDA stadardiazation and affordability. Paper is easily transferred from one hand to the other for a very low cost, and, (let's face it) it's just convenient. Until PDA's become more common and can all talk to one another I think that we'll still be seeing a lot of papers around the office. Besides a binder is a lot easier for me to lug aroun then my laptop, palm-V, docking port and cell phone. Give me convenience or give me death.
______________________ There is no
It's very distressing to consider the vast quantity of paper that is used for mere hours or, at best, days. To support such wasteful habits, we cut down trees that have been growing for years and comsume additional biomass to generate the energy needed for processing.
Perhaps technology will one day reduce the daily reliance on paper for print needs. E-ink and the like come to mind. Unfortunately, I think we are a very long way from witnessing such a radical shift from hardcopy to "e-copy". We need a change of mindset as much as anything else. In the mean time, I try to think before printing and then use a utility to print multiple pages of output on a single page. Which, now that I think about it, begs the question. I know of such print utilities for Macs and PCs, is there something for Linux?
Fact is, if I want to show something to a coworker, it's easier to print it out (assuming it is small), walk down there, and discuss it, than to forward them the file, open ICQ, discuss a paragraph that they may or may not be looking at, and hope they understand. The physical-ness of the paper makes it easier to get my point across.
Paper is just way more useful. If I want to jot down a phone number, all I need is a pen and a second. But to do the same thing on my computer, I have to get a text editor running to open the proper file, type it in, and save, then find it again later when I need it, whereas that post-it is still stuck to my monitor staring me in the face.
I think anyone that prints out email or webpages needs to be punished, though. It reminds me of an old Dilbert:
Boss: "Send me two copies so I can print them out."
Dilbert: "But it's an email... never mind, I'll do it."
Communication is only possible between equals
Since people like to print stuff, because it's handy (I can't quite take the PC into the bathroom and read something), people will keep on printing.
If you are concerned about the environmental impact, try using recycled printer paper. Advocate the use of recycled paper. Write your gub'ment representatives and tell them to at least legalize the farming of hemp for paper production (the process to make paper out of hemp is far better for the environment than making paper out of trees. Of course, it will be the THC-less hemp though...).
Ungh
I realize that this has been commented to death, so I'll attempt to be concise.
Ever been surfing the web at work, stumble across a nifty page, and then your boss walks in? Or you are called away for some urgent business? Bye-bye, nifty page. Ever receive an email at work that you didn't want to leave on a server for fear that someone else would read it? Print the baby out, and hit Delete. This is at least one direction from which the "print out everything in sight" mentality comes from.
I'm not endorsing this kind of activity. Personally, I think it's ridiculous. It all boils down to a basic lack of trust in electronic formats. Stop your average guy on the street and ask him how you make paper. Chances are he can tell you to some rudimentary degree. However, ask him how a computer stores his email, and he'll probably look at you like you're speaking Swahili. When given a choice, many, many people are going to choose a legal pad and a Bic over their PDA.
> Trees for paper are grown like any other crop. Just as we won't run out of wheat because of people eating it, we won't run out of trees because of people using paper. These crops are grown because we use them. We stop using them, people stop growing them.
I think you're forgetting the fact that we need trees to produce oxygen for us to live?
that 75% supposed waste can be used for other textiles such as building materials, industrial cloth, rope and don't foroget all that cardboard that ISV's are so fond of over-rapping themselves with :-)
Printed materials offer a conveinance and storage factor that computers will not substitute unless they become omnipotent and completely secured. Why fill up disc space with a 200k bitmap screenshot when I can print it out on one piece of paper and work from that? Why keep personal correspondance on a drive where admin can gain access to it? And what about printed documentation to show your boss that you have addressed each point outlined in his/her work-flow plan when it comes time for performance reviews (which are printed out also)?
One does not need replace the other. This is not a competition.
Technology has already replaced the written contract. Almost all contracts include a 'photocopy' clause, which basically says that for all legal matters requiring the original signed contract, a photocopy/scan/faxsimile will be judged original. At my company, as soon as the contract is signed it is sent to be scanned, indexed and added to the database of thousands of others. The original is destroyed, no longer being needed.
.sig: Now legally binding!
One of the people I work with, a woman in her late forties, has the horrible habit of tying up the printer first thing every morning. (So badly, in fact, we ended up installing a personal printer for her.) On the way past her desk recently, I asked her what was so darn important it had to be printed every morning. 'Oh, I print my email.' was her response. I asked why. 'Well, if the message was kind of important, I file it. If it has something in it I have to do later, I fold it up and stick it to my calander with a push-pin. If its something I want my secretary to handle, I'll stick it in her 'in-basket'.' My jaw dropped. I told her 'You know, you can forward the relevant messages to your secretary, put the 'important' ones in their own mailbox, and drag the time-sensitive ones right into your scheduler! I'd bet it would take you a lot less time, and it would certainly kill fewer trees!' She looked at me with an evil glare. 'Listen, hon. I've had my system for mail for almost twenty years, and I'm not going to change it just because it doesn't come pre-printed anymore.'
.sig: Now legally binding!
Court documents != contracts. Besides, if I were to lose my original copy of my divorce settlement, I can walk into the county clerks office and get for a certified copy for four bucks. Originals are not that important!
.sig: Now legally binding!
You can grab a pen and mark,underline, or scribble on the printout.
Also, the information printed on paper can outlast the expected magnetic media lifetime by at least one order of magnitude.
hmmmmmmmmmmmm You can grab a pen. Sounds like a project to me. A word processor that allows you to use a pen like mouse to make notes and scribble on it. Just a thought.
I'm sorry, I'm to tired to be witty at the moment so this message will have to do.
Paper is used becasue:
1: Losing Items on a computer:
a: sys-admin deleted it.(up-grade)
b: cann't find it because I keep 1 gig of old email.
c: Random deletion by user.
d: Hard drive got reformated.
2: Losing Items on paper:
a: The barn burned down and destroyed all my hard copy.
b: It's lost in this pile of hard copy.
c: My dog ate it. (Best for school).
It looks like paper is a winner
people scared of losing info they can't touch.
wasn't that Guettenberg?
3) Make each section small enough that by the time the forest is finished, the trees that had been planted first will be at about the same size as the originals were (though probably not the same age). Furthermore, the flora and fauna, which were not disturbed in any section of the forest that was not being cut at any given time, are given a chance to repopulate the area.
that will kill the forest. or at least the animals. small sections of many types of forests don't survive; they need a large area and an intermediate area between the forest and whatever borders it (grassland?)
The shareholder is always right.
but the feeling of a hefty paperback in one hand while youre drinking your coffee is just so pleasant. a flap of plastic that you scroll through cant replace it
A roll up monitor might be nifty, but it will take years and years for technology to yield something as useful and practical as a piece of paper.
A sheet of paper has infinite resolution, is virtually weightless, is double sided, can be highlighted, bent, folded, creased, crumpled up into a ball, and erased. Nothing computerized can come close to the practicality of paper. Also, two sheets of paper can be laid side by side, and can be used to make comparisons. In order to do so on a computer, it is necessary to get a second monitor, or shrink the size of the pages. Shrinking pages often makes text unreadable.
As for printing everything, many people probably don't realize how wasteful they are being. At my college, each student gets 110 pages for free each semester. After that they cost money. Having that limit really makes people count what they are printing, and most people print everything but final drafts on both sides of the page.
Not to mention how much easier it is to read text off a page. Ever try reading a book online? It's damn near impossible.
Nowadays I don't use paper almost at all. Should a non-geek ask me about this I always answer I have given up all analog storage devices.
Reasons I print things out:
1) To read them where I don't have a computer - often the toilet. Although at home, I have a laptop, so that's not so much an issue.
2) To give them to people who don't have internet access.
3) To deal with a document which is extremely self-similar. I often find, when reading someone else's code, that I need physical cues to be able to keep my place in the document. The scroll bar isn't as strong a cue as a real location on a real page.
4) Computer monitors still not as easy on the eyes as laser-printed text.
Reasons other people I know print things out:
1) Hard drive too poorly organized to find something which is just saved to disk.
2) Navigating Microsoft Outlook too difficult - must print all e-mail and immediately delete it before finding out that the shared printer is offline and all the printed e-mail has been lost forever.
Why do I print more now than I used to? The dot matrix printer made too much noise and took too long. And I have more information available online.
-=Best Viewed Using [INLINE]=-
It's much easier to write in the margins and in between the lines on paper for most people, as well. If you just need to correct the document, it's easier to do it all on the computer, but if you need to suggest changes to someone else, especially if there are layout elements, the quickest way is to print it out and get out the red pen.
"On page 3, paragraph 2, the 3d sentence is too wordy."
-=Best Viewed Using [INLINE]=-
I personally like that HTML prints so badly. It lessens the temptation to print a web page and take it into the bathroom for a little reading time. Otherwise, I'd just print out a whole slashdot thread and be in there for a half-hour. It's better for me and my personal life that I can't access slashdot away from my computer. Otherwise, I'd be in there all day!
It is *literally* harder to read from a screen. There are all kinds of usability problems associated with reading from a screen. Here are some interesting things to read:
Vision, Reading and Computer Users (from my site):
http://webword.com/interviews/williams.html
WHY Web Users Scan Instead of Read
http://www.useit.com/alertbox/whyscanning.html
HOW Users Read on the Web
http://www.useit.com/alertbox/9710a.html
John S. Rhodes
How to Download YouTube Videos
I agree -- as of right now, a nice piece of 8.5x10 paper and a pen are the best way for me to mark up code, write comments, and so on. I haven't seen a word process with an "annotate" function that doesn't suck. It's hard to add notations to code in Emacs except by adding comments and that just gets tedious.
I think the biggest reason people are still printing stuff out is because the Windows-dominated desktop forces a Windows-like workflow on everything anyone does.
With an OS that operates in the way NewtonOS does, or PalmOS, where the OS doesn't get in the way and the device doesn't try to do everything for the user - just does what it's supposed to do well - people wouldn't have these problems. By trying to make your computers work like a Windows box instead of like a digital notepad or a digital organizer, and by making it difficult for them to operate that way, you force people to back up into older modes of operation with which they are comfortable.
My ideal device for this sort of thing is a Newton Messagepad (I [heart] my Newton Messagepad 2100 and still use it as much as possible.) with an 8.5x10 screen, or something like the Cyrix WebPad mentioned here a while ago with a pen interface than can handle the combination of textual data and "gestural" scribbles the way Newton's OS does.
Newton really should have been the PDA of the future, and in many ways it still is. It's just too bad it was a Scully-originated project and Jobs wanted to kill it out of sheer hatred for Scully once he took over the helm.
If you took a legal pad-sized Newton and added something like Apple's new AirPort wireless networking, you'd have an ideal base for building the "Newspad" a-la Arthur C. Clarke and 2001. Keep everything NewtonOS can already do and add a better EMail client, a better web browser, and come up with a good wireless combination of Palm's docking capabilities and Newton's IR "Beaming" and you would have an ideal portable digital notepad that people could use to share information easily.
-=-=-=-=-
-=-=-=-=-
My mom's going to kick you in the face!
Okay, I read the high level posts, and saw the header for the 8-1/2x11 PADD, and think (to reiterate): If you really want to replace paper, the device will *have* to be at least 8-1/2x11, have high (TFT) brightness and contrast, and be really thin. The device will also have to have a setting to flip through the content one full page at a time. Another model will have to be sold with four screens! Hear me out here: 1. Reader reads page one and two, flips the page, and turns the device over. 2. Reader reads page three and four, flips the page, and turns the device over. Sure, all this flipping will cause major headaches, but it will seem a lot more....proper....to the average Joe than to press a button or scroll down the screen....now if only I could figure out how flipping back would work.....
Is this post not nifty? Sluggy Freelance. Worshi
1. Reading from paper is easier on the eyes. (In my case anyhow)
2. You can take it anywhere. Read it outside in the sunshine, or even in bed.
3. People feel safer with a hard copy than just having a file on a computer which could easily be trashed if they are not competant users.
Two things here:
1) The majority of mainstream computer users these days grew up and learned to read, write, spell, etc. on good old fashioned paper. We get used to that, and whether we like it or not, that is analogous to our native language. Our native "information interface" so to speak. As time goes on, more and more of the little shits will be integrating the computer into the electronic contraptions that we stay linked into all day, so I feel that the printing dilemma will decrease (but not go away).
2) You just can't beat paper. You can jot things down on it in a big hurry, highlight the important points, pin it up on your bulletin board, etc. We aren't sophisticated in our human / computer interface to accomplish this.
2b) Electronic information is harder to get to than physical paper. You can shuffle around on your desk for a few seconds and produce the information you want, whereas previously stored information on the web for example requires that you go searching through bookmarks or whatever to get to it. For example, how many times have you typed in a web host and navigated back to some information that you knew was there as opposed to looking it up in your bookmarks file in your browser?
Chris
I'm not concerned with what you prefer (paper or screen). There's a bigger issue here. If you do print out onto paper, do you actually recycle it? Many companies are going electronic, but have no policies for how much an employee can print out, and even more so, no conveinient ways to recycle those printouts.
Recycling is the key. You can print things out, just do your part and help cut down on the environment's problems.
When my wall is a screen is the day that I will stop using paper. When I can 'Think and drop' articles onto these screens and layout my documents on the floor, table and wall is when screen technology will truely match that of paper.
:)
Case in point: We have 3 whiteboards in our office (I work for a Systems Integrator so we *should* be able to use all this technology) and they have the next 3 months schedules on them so we can get an idea of what everybody is up to. Works fine. Just go up to the board and discuss changes and a quick wipe 'o the rag and cross of the pen and things are updated.
Compare that with a computer: Crowd around a 17 inch monitor with 3 people to discuss schedules and then
- select the entry
- change project code (search routine in here)
- change employee (another search)
- select File|Save
- Reboot after crash
[Please type your sig here.]
Printers are completely overused; electronic documents have a number of advantages over paper for most computing circumstances. Intranets save time, space, and money, while keeping your data more secure. In the workplace, paper adds up to a lot of money.
Convenience
The act of pulling up a web browser and navigating through a series of links is much more convenient than sifting through a file cabinet, or going to the coffee machine, then down the hall to wait for your 20 page document to come out of the print queue, or a little less time if you want a crummy looking photocopied version. Should there be a change to be made, you just open a file, make the changes, and save it (dare I say that Office 97 made this *extremely* easy?).
Cost Efficient
Startup costs for a sufficient Linux intranet server (e.g. Cobalt Qube) with 6GB of storage space will cost ~$1500. At a generous 200k per page (with graphics), that holds 30,000,000 pages of information. You can't steal enough file cabinets to hold that many pages for less than $1500, then tack on the cost of printing!
Space Saving
Over the long term, file cabinets take up room for at least one desk, while you may never see that Cobalt Qube again until you move! Whether your office space is expensive or not, you've saved some money by not wasting floor space for dozens of file cabinets.
Security
Any server OS, including NT, is much more secure than lock and key, though you can do this additionally. If there's a fire that destroys your building, a recent offsite backup (you do keep important info in multiple locations, right?) can get you back into the swing of things. I don't think it's quite as easy to update thousands of pages in offsite archive than it is to send a CD-R or tape of a recent backup to your bank's safe deposit box.
A basic intranet handles virtually all the necessary print work of most businesses -- when you need hard copy for proof reasons (though I'd argue that most of this is software-generated and editable anyway), go ahead and print. PDF's look terrible onscreen, and the Adobe reader sucks, so I can accept printed Acrobat files, as well. As far as taking printing stuff for the bathroom, if you're gonna be in there that long, you should probably apply some vegetable fiber to your diet, not to paper...
--
--
E2 IN2 IE?
I think we all have a good grasp of why paper is here and why it is so prevalent in whatever office or work environment.
We know paper is simple, convenient and universal. We also know that not everyone can cope as effectively with certain information assimilation tasks on a computer (desktop, laptop or palmtop). We know that the current technology just cannot compete with paper's simple and tactile qualities. Finally, we know that as the amount of information a person has access to increases, their need to absorb that information by traditional, hard-copy means also increases.
However, the one issue that has not been really addressed was not really stated in the question, but more implied. What can we do to reverse the growth of paper consumption? I guess that question assumes that we all have the goal of reducing paper consumption. Is that true? Is it desirable? Is is valuable?
I think it is. The natural resources used in paper production are not easily renewable. While we can recycle paper, we are still consuming natural resources to make new paper. Digital information and its presentation has no bounds, on the other hand. Sure, it may be bounded right now. But it is a matter of time before our technology can compensate for older, more resource intensive, technologies.
For a long time, the mentality of our society has been to push the advancement of technology at the cost of natural resources. Is this trend reversing? Now we have the means to advance our technology without impacting the environment so much. We even have the means to use technology to help conserve our resources.
I think that is the issue here. I think it is our responsibility to adapt to the newer technologies. especially if they directly or indirectly conserve the environment and our resources. Rather than just saying, "we like paper for reasons A, B, and C and that's that" we need to make a concerted effort to work with better alternatives.
But that's just me.
Nothing can possiblai go wrong. Er...possibly go wrong.
Strange, that's the first thing that's ever gone wrong.
Tyler's words coming out of my mouth.
So WHAT if people are printing more... :)
Trees ARE a renewable resource
Technology will never totally replace a written contract.
Any court documents you have if they dont have an official seal on them (meaning they are the originals) they really dont mean squat.
So they are very important.
Say like a Settlement in a lawsuit.. Name change..
divorce paperwork.
All very needed for the original.
and if something happens to them like happend to me. Divorce. I lost paperwork in move.
no problem i thought.. just drive over to the courthouse and get copies.
Courthouse had bad leak in a storm. Ruined comp systems AND 80% of documents dating back to the mid 1800s.
Now I still dont have any way to prove im divorced besides my word.
I was so moved by the great debate over cutting trees that I printed out all of the posts. I am planning to put them on my wall and photocopy them for the ecology department at the university.
nachoman
Ahem...
I think I'll go print a few more copies of the OMG CORBA Reference...
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Does anyone remember the PADDs from Star Trek? The whole issue of mobile, manipulatable information makes me think of those. They were about paper-sized, and they were portable. True enough, they were fictional, but they seem very similar to today's PDAs.
I also remember Geordi and Wesley (etc) carrying them around and touching them to access and manipulate information. It would be no sweat to add a stylus and perhaps a 3.5" floppy drive. I just think that a paper-sized and highly tactile information display would be better than the smaller PDAs that we have right now. Also, this unit should enable a user to take notes at any time, perhaps through a background layering protocol that associates the document and the notes.
It is my opinion that manufacturers should take the advice of the Slashdot masses and produce an electronic equivalent to paper.
Not when you build a farm or house or parking lot where the trees where.
I'm sick of this statement! People keep saying that trees are a renewable resource. I hate to break it to you folks, but while it's possible for trees to be renewed, almost no one is renewing them!
Who moderates the meta-moderators?
In the old days, people had to physically send printed (or written) documents to people. This is inherently inconvenient, so they didn't send stuff out unless it was pretty important. When in doubt, don't send it. Now that it's so easy just to e-mail a word processor file to someone or post a PDF on the Internet, people post and send stuff much more often, simply because it's easier. So now it's when in doubt, send it, post it, whatever.
Unfortunately, a lot of people don't like reading off of computer monitors. Some people complain that it's harder on the eyes. Personally, I think it's easier to proofread a printed copy of a document than to proofread what's on the screen. In the old days, when everything was paper, they had less to read. But now that people are swamped with web pages, PDFs e-mail messages, and so on, the people who'd rather read it on paper have a lot to print out and use a lot of paper to do so.
And computers were supposed to bring us a paper-free office, too.
Take care,
Steve
...you can't staple a resignation email to your boss's head.
"Just once, I'd like to meet an alien menace that wasn't immune to bullets." -- The Brigadier, Dr. Who
I would suspect that most /.'ers would be used to reading text online....otherwise, we would single handedly be destroying the world's population of trees by printing out some of these comment threads :)
my name is larry, i'm 23 y/o, and i programmed COBOL for two years (i'm not proud of what i did, but it paid the bills)....no one has seen paper wasted the way it is done in a mainframe shop. everyone in the department literally had reams of paper from the line printer on their desks, sometimes 8-10 feet high.
at least with the apparent shift to online reporting mechanisms (there seems to be a healthy market for web front ends to mainframe systems), the mainframe shops of the future may save a few trees.
I agree with you completely. But this will change. 1. Reading from paper is easier on the eyes. Reading on a TFT screen is much easier on the eyes than a CRT. Once the TFT shortage is overcome, prices will finally drop so so we can all give our eyes a rest. 2. You can take it anywhere. Read it outside in the sunshine, or even in bed. True enough. But wait until laptops/PDA and wireless data communications become more prevelant. Then you could take your laptop/PDA anywhere you want (and hopefully we can get a machine with less glare in the sun). 3. People feel safer with a hard copy than just having a file on a computer which could easily be trashed if they are not competant users. Ah... but that fades with time. Power users (such as most of us here) know that this is not a problem. Plus... if it is on the web, who cares if it gets trashed because you can always retrieve it later. Paper will die eventually, just not as quickly as everyone thought! --- " Progress is the God of the Machine "
-rt-
** Evil Canadians are taking over the world. Learn about the conspiracy
It's amusing to remember that the computer revolution was supposedly going to remove the need for paper at all. How's that for a backfire? - Seth Finkelstein
I don't have time to read it now, so i'll print this article out and read it later.
Demonstrant's Open Source Tools
No idea. But he wasn't first either...
I'm an employee in a company which pretends to be a paperless office - I know better then that.
It may be an attractive idea, but it doesn't work. This simply is human. Even the technologically-oriented people sometimes prefer paper.
Who uses 'notepad' to make notes?! I still prefer the real (paper) thing. Another problem is that many people simply don't trust the technology. And it's nicer to read a howto on paper than on your display (unless you have an XLQ-24" Ueber monitor maybe), but I'm not that rich. And even then... you can't take an online-manual with you to read it in -for instance- the train.
The increase in size of the net means an increase of information available, which means an increase in printed paper. It may not be good for the rainforest; it's just Human nature.
I wish I knew everyone's reasons. But here some surprising things where I work: The Financial Aid department MUST have a paper copy on file (even though we have an electronic copy filed on the mainframe that can be produced in, oh say about 5 seconds.. This is not their rule, but the Federal Governments rule. Payroll department prints a 3 page report that they only use two lines of it. Basically, I think the problem is taht people "think" something isn't official until the read it in a paper form. Weird huh? I try to read somethings totally online. Other things, I don't. A good example is that NOONE has a PDA that can have grease, flours, eggs or whetever splattered on and stay in good shape while you are making something in the kitchen. I store my recipes electronically, then, after I prepare the food, I usually toss the recipe into the recycling bin. Joel
Gorkman
sorry, had to. anyway, experience speaking, just because someone reads email, doesnt mean they check it themselves. Ive been to countless businesses that have ONE person checking email, printing it out, distributing it, and when it comes time to reply, each person TYPES out their reply, hands it to the secretary, who in turn, emails what they typed. some people dont, nor will they ever, get it..
Paper is the ultimate standard in information sharing. No batteries, drivers, software or manuals needed to read it, or to make notes or doodle on it. Also, if it is an often-used piece of paper (such as an office phone list), it is much faster to glance at the list on the wall of your cubicle than to open or switch to any program on the computer.
Check out http://www.publish.com and select the link on the home page titled: "Electronic Books:..." Lots of good info on the state of the current technology and where it's headed.
Just think of this....when you're reading a piece of paper you can take it to the beach, to the bathroom.....you can walk the paper if you want put it almost everywhere, roll it and stuck it in pocket, kill insects, make annotations, you can fan yourself on a hot day.... Now try slapping some annoying mosquito in a wall with some of today's hitech electronic-books and you'll see.
The reasons are different for each person, but they all boil down to the fact that people find it easier to deal with certain documents on paper. For some people - may be the more technophobic - that means they print everything.
Other people try to avoid printing where possible. For me, paper causes clutter, but that is precisely because you can spread paper out all over your desk. And walls and floor (I can't reach the ceiling). So I avoid printing a document out unless I'm going to need to flick through it, pull out interesting pages, scribble on it or hole punch it and put it in a tabbed folder.
Most existing software makes it difficult to interact with documents in these ways. There's no reason why a PDF reader shouldn't let you achieve similar things, but providing a comprehensive set of interactions would require a fairly beefy user-interface, with corresponding learning curve. If you aren't totally familiar with one user-interface, it takes a lot of mental effort to avoid switching back to the more intuitive alternative.
And paper is about as intuitive as you can get. There isn't a little button in the corner that you have to interact with before you can use the paper for anything. You don't need to search through the available options before you can start a game of tic-tac-toe.
So I think it boils down to the fact that if you are happy using the features available for manipulating an online document, the less likely you are to print it out.
Hmm. Windows has a lot to answer for too. By forcing the active window to the front, and by generally cluttering the screen so much with menubars, toolbars, statusbars and multiple-document interfaces that you have to maximise most applications, it takes you about as far as possible from the metaphor of windows as documents on a desk that you can shuffle about however you like.
Electronic paper will come eventually, you'll be able to scribble on it, fold it, spread it out over your desk, browse the web, play hangman or Quake, and the world will be a wonderful place.
Til then, join the queue of people trying to fiddle with the printer to get their documents to come out.
There has been a major scientific break-in
Back when Guggenheim invented the press, everyone was dying to get their hands on the hip new media. They still are. Chock it up to the stupidity of people and their quest to hold in their hand that which they perceive as valuable.
Well, the reason I have been given by many end-users is reliabality. Most business systems have a tendency to loose important info every once and a while. I am currently looking into a problem like this. The data seems to have several ways to get lost. Other users changing it, the transaction never really went through, good old data corruption, lack of portabality of a PC, etc. Several people here have palm devices, but those do not interface with the legacy system. I hope one day that there are true paperless offices, but we, the S.A.s must provide complete seemless and accountable systems to provide the end user with the sence of reliabality that they had with paper systems. As of yet, I have not seen a system like this in operation.
I think in large part it's because it's much easier to read and digest information from a paper source than from computer display.
Paper currently has many advantages over digital information display...
- Higher contrast and much higher resolution, coupled with an infinite refresh rate makes paper a much easier source to read.
- The random access and review capabilities of
paper are much stronger than those of digital content, even with well designed web pages.
- Higher content density. You have much more information on one printed 8.5x11 page than on an 800x600 web window.
- Static content. Paper is static. That makes it good for keeping records (i.e., of online transactions).
And last but not least, you can take a printout of a page to the can, but you can't take yer pc (or if you do, you get really odd looks).
It's just too straining to read things off of a CRT. LCDs help a little but I think that it all boils down to one thing: Cool Waves (reflected) vs. Hot Waves (luminescent). It's just too straining to read something that's hot. Printed paper is so easy to read because it's all reflected light. That's why we all print this stuff out.
Recent studies have suggested that only a few decades from now we will already be loosing access to the mountains of data that have been accumulating for the past two decades as business and education and government moved to electronic storage media. Why? 1) Turns out the life span of all those tapes and disks is shorter than envisaged. They lose the charge required to render information available over a relatively short time; 2) Media formats have begun to change so rapidly that you have 20 or more year old tapes, and in some cases, only 10 or so year old tapes and cartridges, for which it is becoming difficult if not impossible to find the hardware to mount and read the media! Ditto for drives. 3) Legal issues still want to see that contract and that evidence in some sort of written form, on paper; 4) When was the last time you cuddled up with a good book? Vs. cuddling up with a good computer to read a novel, or anything for entertainment, in depth digestion of information, etc. For me, cuddling up at my terminal just doesn't get it. Never has, never will, and I am now coming up on 18 years in this profession.
I am one of those members of the older generation who have a *much* easier time reading things on paper. I can cross reference much faster, and even read a document much faster when I'm holding the paper it's written on. So.. I recycle what I use, and use recylced paper in my printer. I've tried using the Online manuals and such, but I just become frustrated with them because their layout is abyssmal.. Just my 2Cents..
until external storage tech slows down or stops paper is still the ubiquitous cross-platform medium... i tried... scanned in all impt documents and stored to tape, then MO, then zip, now am burning CDs?!!?! we are probably losing data ---how much data from 70s mainframes got transfered to more modern media ---or even got tested for a 'restore'?
This is an interesting article in New Scientist about current developments in electronic paper. If this stuff is as nice as it looks, it could be the answer to many of the problems which prevent electronic media usurping paper. And, being less absorbent, electronic paper should be even better for reading in the bath than wood-pulp :-).