541–550 of 1001 posts
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I'm out of date. Does E-ink still have ~500ms latency of refreshing the screen? If so, that's the #1 reason I believed it wouldn't be successful when I used them 6 years ago.
There is a Norwegian startup that has decreased the latency dramatically. https://remarkable.com/ https://youtu.be/zpUPpiV7gAo
Peer-to-peer file sharing. There was a time when Napster, Kazaa, eMule were king. The content industry fought against it, but developers came up with decentralized solutions like DHTs or supernodes. I was convinced the next step would be friend-of-a-friend sharing. You only share files with your direct friends. But they can pass on these files automatically, so their friends can get the files, too. The friends of you…
> was convinced the next step would be friend-of-a-friend sharing. You only share files with your direct friends. But they can pass on these files automatically, so their friends can get the files, too. The friends of your friend don't know that the file is originally coming from you, it is completely transparent. The goal is to not let anybody you don't trust know what you are down- or uploading. This very thing exi…
What I envision is more like a modern version of Kazaa. The experience would be like iTunes or Spotify. Select your media folder, give it access to your contact list, and voila, "Pirate iTunes". The closest current analogue would be RetroShare.
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That's the GP's point. Of course the update rate sucks because enough research hasn't been put into it. There are already E-Ink displays with much a faster update rate: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wsY3T1uzjAI Who knows how much faster this could get with enough investment? Unless there's some fundamental physical limitation to the update rate that I'm not aware of.
Ha that video is not a fast update rate. It's just only updating a small bit of the screen at a time so you can't really see the slowness. Modern kindles are pretty fast but not video speed, and they still have to blank the screen after a few updates.
The video serves to demonstrate that given some technological development the entire screen could be like that, and aside from that there are E-Ink screens in common use that can't refresh even such a small area that fast.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/02/130220084442.h...
It described what seemed like an incredible advance in capacitor design that would allow xenon flashes to be installed in even the slimmest of smartphones.
I consider xenon flashes, which are found in most cameras that aren't smartphones, to be wildly superior to LED flashes, which are used in phones, and assumed that within a couple of years, the new technology would be ubiquitous.
But it never happened. So far as I know, the partnership between Nanyang Technological University and Xenon Technologies never really went anywhere.
After a couple of years of waiting, I even went so far as to try to contact the researchers to find out what happened, but never got a response.
I hope that someday this tech does hit the mass market. Although LED flash quality has improved somewhat, xenon flashes are still so much better.
GWT. To create client-side web apps, rather than writing Javascript, write Java and have it transpiled to Javascript. Java has IDEs, isn't a new language to learn (like Dart), has static type checking, support for refactoring in the IDEs, etc. GWT could do tree shaking, obfuscation, etc. You could write your server code in Java, and "call" remote server methods from your client code, "passing" Java objects transparen…
There also was a huge impedance mismatch between Java and JavaScript at the time. Nowadays you can write decent functional code in Java but back then you needed anonymous classes for that.
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English is a surprisingly versatile language. You can get your point across with pidgin english just fine, and it's the most spoken language in the world. On the other hand you have people who master the language on a whole new level, like Douglas Adams.
Chinese is #1 according to Wikipedia.
E-Ink. It is the "correct" choice for display technology, and with enough research money put into it, it could replace these abominable light-emitting displays. But what we already have is "good enough", despite all of the hidden costs, and so we're stuck with it.
The Kindle and it's e-reader kin are pretty successful? I think the problem is that a device with an e-ink display is necessarily single purpose. General purpose devices can't use e-ink, they need to support video playback and browsers with full colour.
Imagine reading news above your sink while doing the dishes.
Imagine the entire walls constructed with e-ink displays in your home and being able to change the wallpapers in your living room depending on what's currently in your mind.
All of those could have a "read-only" mode until you push a button, they would use pretty much no electricity, and would ideally be water-proof.
Instead, what I have right now, is an e-book reader. Which is nice and all. I'm often sending articles to my Kindle (kudos https://p2k.co/) and all sorts of things, but I had much higher hopes from e-ink technology (and still kind of do). The hope of having my home filled with e-ink displays is much greater than having a home filled with sensors.
I don't know if this has a name, but... ICQ-like "searchable" instant messaging. Let me explain myself. In the late 90s, there was an IM client called ICQ. For starters, its UI was leaps and bounds ahead of anything to be seen in the next decade, and it had functionality like bots or groups, that has again become widespread a few years ago. But what I'm talking about is the fact that I could look for "female, age bet…
After a few years, setting your status to "Skype me" meant every few minutes a chat from a new person advertising porn sites or other scams. So I stopped using it. Presumably so did everyone else; at some point they disabled the feature. And now Skype is just a tool to talk to people you already know.
I'm disappointed none of the various constructed "universal" languages (like Esperanto) ever took off. Having a single common language spoken by everyone would be enormously useful. As it is, the closest we have is English, but it's a natural language and therefore complicated and difficult to learn.
yes, but the English spoken by most non-natives is actually something like an Esperanto. the pronunciation, vocabulary and grammar is almost normalized and an artificial dialect. i think English is a very good compromise. the only problem are French people and other communities who disdain English for patriotical, historical, or political reasons.
GWT. To create client-side web apps, rather than writing Javascript, write Java and have it transpiled to Javascript. Java has IDEs, isn't a new language to learn (like Dart), has static type checking, support for refactoring in the IDEs, etc. GWT could do tree shaking, obfuscation, etc. You could write your server code in Java, and "call" remote server methods from your client code, "passing" Java objects transparen…
GWT was quite complex. You had to write a lot of code for achieving very little. There also was a huge impedance mismatch between Java and JavaScript at the time. Nowadays you can write decent functional code in Java but back then you needed anonymous classes for that.