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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?
I think Guggenheim invented the museum.
slashdot broke my sig
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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.)
"The paperless office will come soon after the paperless toilet."
Now if only I can remember who said that...
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 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
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.
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
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
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.
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 :)
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.
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.
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
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!
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.
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
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
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.
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
Well, I'm 47 and do not have a printer. I got tired of wondering what to do with 3 ft high stacks of paper back before recycling was easy. But I'm a big fan of paper for some things.
My eyes aren't great, and reading on a 14" screen for hours is out, it gives me headaches. So I bought a 21" screen and things are fine. But it's still too much strain to read for hours at a time for pleasure, for example a book, though I will if the book is good enough and not available offline. I'd rather have a printed book.
The other thing is documentation. I really, really prefer a printed manual containing the instruction set and processor architecture rather than having to browse some awful interface for the information. After you know where things are it's easier to open a book to exactly the right place than to click your way there, and you can still see what you were working on that caused the question in the first place. You can make notes and correct errors in a printed manual.
For mail, slashdot, usenet, regular news, I want hypertext and/or threads and that is very hard to get on paper. Some types of overview help are also better hyperlinked than printed. Each medium has it's uses, we don't *have* to choose one or the other. Let's just not create a demand for new tree farms, that's all.
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.
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
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
Perhaps, but the planet still needs more trees than currently exist. They also help to clean the air. Your point is probably very accurate though, afterall they are mowing down the Amazon Rain Forest (one of earth's more important forests) for land development. Now if I could just understand why an old boss I had printed out each and every web page he visited. That is a classic example of waste that is an order of magnitude beyond stupidity!
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!
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
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.
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.
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.
basically, printing is the only option most mortals have for making a persistent note of web content. "save as text/source" or "send page" don't work well because the layout, images and other graphical information are lost. "save as " burns a lot of disk space and introduces a big file management problem.
...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