Samsung has developed a completely transparent solar-powered monitor that's designed to be used with ambient light. Though they're marketing it as a television, it's almost certainly going to be used initially as displays in commercial areas, and it apparently is also a touch-screen, opening it up for the coolest kind of kiosk you've ever used. See a video after the jump.
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Member since:2005-07-06
Member since:2008-11-27
Member since:2006-05-18
That's very much true, but I believe it's just something we've grown accustomed to, because there is absolutely no objective reason why we can't abandon paper.
The only reason I see is subjective: namely us.
Member since:2008-04-10
People have this idea that things like contracts, receipts, pay records, job records, and the like need to be retained in hard copies. About all email has been able to replace in the workplace is the hard copy memo (if that). If we had a legal provision for storing digital copies of contracts, for example, or better yet a legal provision for signing them in e form, rather than dead tree form, we could do away with paper.
I think the rise of the tablet computer will go a long way towards this. I already carry all my important documents around on my iPad (sort of, they're on Dropbox, and I can fetch them on cue). If I start job hunting any time soon, instead of carting around a physical copy of my resume to every interview, I can just email it from my iPad for them. Oooorrrr just hand the iPad over for a moment... When more people have tablet PCs, I'd like to see a standardised document passing protocol, so with my iPad, I could point it at someone, and just flick the document to them (or press an on screen button, but gestures are where it's at, man!), and on their Samsung they could accept or reject it, and have it appear right there on their screen.
Member since:2010-03-08
I think that paper is needed for several reasons :
-You can draw freely on it, not just write on a guided path
-It's light
-It's inexpensive
-It's easily transferable and disposable
-If you spill your cofee on a piece of paper, you only loose that piece of paper. Globally, paper is something which you don't have to care about, and can therefore more freely use. Frenzily scratching it with a bic crystal it is a valid option.
-It's the perfect medium for important letters, because using it shows that you care about the person.
-Considering the amount of security flaws which are discovered in mainstream OSs every year, do you really want to trust them to take care of your important documents ? I mean, seeing how quickly Elvis Presley was seen in an airport after biometric passports were introduced in the US should have some warning value...
Also, reading and writing is much easier on paper than on a computer screen.
Edited 2011-03-25 22:01 UTC
Member since:2005-08-09
Do you believe information stored electronically can live longer than paper?
There are hundreds or thousand-years papers around
but CD-Rs are usually unreadable after single digit age. And even shorter can be life of internet posted data.
It helps then your data was duplicated by some persons, though. But there are a lot of broken links and information lost due disconnected server with single data source.
The new WebKit Opera for Android has been released. "Opera 14 for Android is built on top of Chromium 26, with a total overhaul of the UI in native code, making it fit well with the latest Android design guidelines. Go get the build from Google Play or point your browser to m.opera.com, and give it a spin!"
The Verge pointed me to a blog post by Leap Motion - which reveals how their Kinect-like motion control works with Windows 8. "From the second you plug in your Leap Motion Controller, you'll be able to browse the web and interact with your computer just by moving your hands and fingers in the air. With Leap Motion technology and Windows, you can do everything that's possible with multi-touch inputs - without actually touching anything. This also means that existing applications in Windows 7 and 8 will respond to your natural hand and finger movements. Soon, we'll show you how Leap Motion will work with Mac OS X." Quite cool.
PocketNow interviews Marc Dillon, and there's an interesting note about why Jolla is keeping the display properties under wraps: "We're leaving some of those details out because we do understand that there are a lot of really big players in the market and they tend to take certain components in the market and dominate them. We created the ability to actually be able to run Sailfish on multiple hardware displays and be able to swap components, so this is part of the demand and supply planning phase. We are committed to this industrial design which is a 4.5-inch display, an 8 megapixel camera on the back and a front-facing camera at the front, and the exact specs of the display we'll provide when we're close to delivery." Something you rarely hear anything about.
"This is my NeXTstation Turbo Color booting the Mac System 7.1 Operating System using a hardware add-on called 'Daydream'. The Daydream has a Mac ROM and a few custom ICs in it and hooked up to the NeXTs DSP port. Turns your NeXT into a full fledged 68k powered Mac." So cool.
"The NetBSD Project is pleased to announce NetBSD 6.1, the first feature update of the NetBSD 6 release branch. It represents a selected subset of fixes deemed important for security or stability reasons, as well as new features and enhancements. Please note that all fixes in the prior security/bugfix updates (NetBSD 6.0.1 and 6.0.2) are also in 6.1."
"At the end of a week in which Electronic Arts confirmed it wasn't developing a thing for the Wii U, one of the software engineers in EA Sports' Canada studio, in a series of since-deleted tweets, disparaged the console as 'crap' and suggested Nintendo should give up on hardware altogether. 'The Wii U is crap. Less powerful than an Xbox 360. Poor online/store. Weird tablet', tweeted Bob Summerwill, listed as a senior software engineer at EA Canada, in a reply to a tweet posting a link about EA's no-Wii U news. 'Nintendo are walking dead at this point'." The Wii U is turning into the 21st century's Virtual Boy.
"In NixOS, the entire operating system - the kernel, applications, system packages, configuration files, and so on - is built by the Nix package manager from a description in a purely functional build language. The fact that it's purely functional essentially means that building a new configuration cannot overwrite previous configurations. Most of the other features follow from this." Interesting approach. A Linux distribution, sure, but with some very refreshing ideas about system configuration.
Appfour added, among other features, C/C++ support to its new version of AIDE. From Android-IDE, "Now you can write parts of your app or your whole app in C/C++ on your device. AIDE supports the Standard Android NDK toolchain (GCC 4.6 + Bionic, STL, ...). No changes are necessary if you want to build an app developed on a PC with Eclipse. C/C++ development is fully integrated: Build errors appear in the error list and files can easily be navigated to with Go to file. The editor supports C/C++ syntax highlighting."
Ars nails it: "The answer is that Google did announce what amounts to a fairly substantial Android update yesterday. They simply did it without adding to the update fragmentation problems that continue to plague the platform. By focusing on these changes and not the apparently-waiting-in-the-wings update to the core software, Google is showing us one of the ways in which it's trying to fix the update problem."
"It is good for programmers to understand what goes on inside a processor. The CPU is at the heart of our career. What goes on inside the CPU? How long does it take for one instruction to run? What does it mean when a new CPU has a 12-stage pipeline, or 18-stage pipeline, or even a 'deep' 31-stage pipeline? Programs generally treat the CPU as a black box. Instructions go into the box in order, instructions come out of the box in order, and some processing magic happens inside. As a programmer, it is useful to learn what happens inside the box. This is especially true if you will be working on tasks like program optimization. If you don't know what is going on inside the CPU, how can you optimize for it? This article is about what goes on inside the x86 processor's deep pipeline."
Member since:
2005-11-10
Nothing confronts you like a piece of paper can. I don't fear e-mails. I fear letters.
Paper is still the better medium IMO, for now.