jon said:
>   BB, how about detumescing my optimism?

ok, if you think i'm not optimistic, you're crazy.

i am extremely optimistic, which is why i haven't
given up on e-books even after lo these 30 years.

the thing that i am _not_ is _unrealistic_...  no sir,
i look reality squarely in the eye, even stare it down.

but you, jon, you do not.  and that is your problem...


>   What I am thinking of is some kinds of heads-up displays
>   that can be worn like glasses, seeing the "screen" through
>   some sort of lens system.  I should think them to be perfect
>   for reading etc, and afaik they are mainly LCD based, and
>   accordingly power-conservative. 

have you ever seen such a heads-up display in real life?


>   I know it exists

oh really.  _how_ do you know it exists?
have you ever seen one out in the wild?


>   I know it exists, but much as epaper did for a couple of decades, 
>   it seems to be languishing, or at least limited to special purposes. 

e-ink didn't "languish".  researchers who were very well paid
were working very hard on it, for long hours, for a long time.

but sometimes the technology doesn't come along as fast as
you'd like it to.  sometimes you run into problems that were...
unforeseen.  sometimes the paths you pursue are false starts.

the problem with e-ink was very simple:  it was too easy to grok.

we know what paper is; we know what it can do, and it can do a lot.

so it was very easy for us to picture exactly what e-ink (or e-paper,
or whatever you want to call it) was.  it is something that is exactly
like paper, except that it's digital and can be constantly refreshed.

and because paper is so very simple, yet so remarkably versatile,
as well as being quite easy to understand, given our familiarity,
it was quite easy for the e-ink marketers to get us quite riled up.

consequently, they started feeding us the hype _far_ too early...
and -- to exacerbate the pain -- we bought into it _instantly_...

then when the engineers couldn't deliver, immediately, we got
impatient, and incorrectly viewed development as "languishing".

except technology makes its own timetable; we don't "decide" it.

plus then idiots like rothman kept pushing the unrealistic hype,
simply because the false promises kept people reading his blog.

they wanted to believe, just like you, so they flocked to his blog.
he told them what they wanted to believe, and they believed him.

he even started embellishing the ridiculousness, with promises
that this new wonder e-ink was going to be unbelievably cheap.

what a pile of steaming crap _that_ was!  anyone with one ounce
of sense who read the news about the money being pumped into
the e-ink coffers _knew_ -- without any doubt at all -- that this
technology would _not_ come cheap.  the e-ink companies were
financed, and refinanced, then refinanced again, every time at a
higher price to a new round of suckers on the basis of bigger and
better hype.  with that many investors that (still) need to be paid,
e-ink ain't gonna become inexpensive for another decade or so...

but rothman was busying peddling his lies, to build up his blog.

$50 is what he said the things would cost.  fifty fucking bucks!

he even came to believe that price himself.  what a dumb sucker.

plus, when the first e-ink came out, the contrast was just _awful_.
even rothman himself had to concede that it was plain unusable.
and, and it was expensive as all get-out.  and it had an ugly flash
on every pageturn, _and_ those pageturns were unworkably slow.

notice that, in all the hype that had come before, never was it even
_mentioned_ that contrast might be a problem, or that there would
even _be_ a flash on page-turns, or that pageturns would be glacial.

not one word.

there's an old saying that the only product that has no flaws is
the one that hasn't been released yet.  this was that, in spades.

we had envisioned e-ink/e-paper that was perfect in every way.
unfortunately, there were _lots_ of problems with the real thing.

of course, flash forward to 2009, and reality has set in, and hard.
we're looking at $300 machines -- $450 if you want a nice size,
and that's only the bigger companies with the bigger budgets...
(when you look at a little guy like iliad, it's more like $600-$800.)

there's still the flash, but it's not quite so bad.  and the pageturns,
well, they're still not very fast, but people have gotten used to that.
because, really, what can you do about it, except whine like a baby.

we're still at -- what -- 16 shades of gray?  that's pretty pathetic,
but color looks to be about 2-5 years away.  (for the last 14 years,
_everything_ with e-ink has _always_ been about 2-5 years away,
as that is a time-period which you can always keep pushing back,
but also short-term enough to scare off any competing products.)

14 years ago, jon noring was claiming that cheap hi-res screens
would be available "in 5 years".  about 10 years ago, he was still
claiming that they were "5 years off".  when i finally pointed out,
6 years back, that he was _still_ predicting they were "5 years out",
just as he had been doing for the _previous_8_years, he stopped...

ironically, about the time he finally stopped spouting the nonsense
that's when hi-res screens started appearing.  just as i had predicted,
-- not that this "prediction" was anything more than common sense --
they first appeared in expensive early-adopter toys, things like g.p.s.,
and also in commercial settings, such as cash-registers at mcdonalds.

because that's how it happens in the world of commercial products.

the first iteration of _everything_ is going to be priced far too high.
ostensibly this is "to recover the research-and-development costs",
but that's just a rationalization.  the fact is they charge a premium
because they know that they can extract one from early adopters...
they charge a lot because they can.  they always have.  always will...

then, over the course of the next 5 years or so, they drop the price.

they do this like clockwork.  you can depend on it.  so it's _easy_
to see what technology is going to be available, cheap, in 5 years.
it's the technology that is available _now_, but only at a premium.

ergo, that's the answer to your question about heads-up displays...

are they available now?  do you see them on _any_ products now?

if not, then the technology isn't there yet.  sure, just like e-paper,
it's easy to _grok_ heads-up.  we have no trouble _visualizing_ it...
but just because _we_ can "visualize" it doesn't mean the engineers
can _build_ it, let alone build it at the kind of price we'd like to pay,
let alone build it at the price we want without performance flaws...

you want to know where the heads-up displays are right now?

they're in jet fighter-planes.  the military is paying _huge_ dollars
for 'em.  so if you're a company that's making heads-up displays,
you're going to keep selling them for huge dollars to the military.
it's only when the military starts ordering the stuff in _buik_lots_
that the manufacturers will drop the price, and start trotting out
the technology to other lower-margin users.  but again, they'll be
the early adopters, from whom the companies can get a premium.
if you're wanting it to be _affordable_, to the masses, wait 5 years...

(in case you're curious where the hi-res screens pulled down their
huge money at their outset, it was in medical imaging equipment.
why sell hi-res color screens to the public for pennies when you
can instead sell 'em to hospitals who will pay exorbitant prices?)


>   Or am I too optimistic?  What  am I missing? 

you're being unrealistic.  that's what you're missing.  realism.

reality doesn't care one whit about your optimistic "hopes".
(then again, it also doesn't care if you do pessimist "doubt".)

***

>   it is all very well to be satisfied with tiny screens, but
>   it does bad things to one's capacity for effortless,
>   comfortable, non-injurious, reading for hours and hours.

i was going to comment on this earlier, when someone made
a point about a 300-page book turning into a 600-page book
when the screen is only half as big.

now, on the one hand, who cares how many "pages" there are?
the machine itself doesn't get any "heavier" with more pages,
and pageturning is simple enough, so why should that matter?

well, it ends up that the one place where it _does_ matter is in
whether you can "disappear" into the book, and not even notice
the machine.  the more often you turn pages, the harder that is.

it's not really a _deal-breaker_, but it does impact _comfort_...

(this is "comfort" over and above the "eye strain" factor.  i don't
get eye-strain, but that doesn't mean that nobody else suffers.
i _do_ have the problem that most old people have, which is that
my eyes need bigger letters, so that's yet another "comfort" factor.)

but the fact remains that some people do fine with small screens.


>   BB made some good points as usual,

gee, jon, that's the nicest thing you've ever said about me...


>   but some rather unconvincing ones also as usual.

that's more like it...          ;+)

but i'm sure if you're not convinced, you just weren't reading closely...


>   Eg: " but don't focus on _books_ per se, because the number
>   of book-readers in the population is very small.  (and it's getting
>   even smaller every day.) book-readers won't drive this revolution."

that's absolutely true, jon...  if you think that is "unconvincing",
then there's not very much i can do to get you to see the light...


>   See, BB, I do indeed focus on book reading,
>   not because I am selling, but because I read. 

well, that would be fine if you were producing the products.
but you're not...  the sellers are...  so _their_ interest is what
brings products to market, or leaves them in the back room.


>   Only if I change my market do I change my focus. 
>   I don't much care about the other things the gadgets
>   can do because I don't do them much. 

but it's not _about_ you or your focus, jon.  it's about making money,
and if you're not a part of a critical mass that can make them money,
then they aren't going to produce the products that serve your focus.

so, when i said "don't focus on book-reading", what i meant is that
book-readers don't have enough purchasing power to produce the
kind of product that they need, so they're going to have to suffer with
the "leftover" use of some other product that _does_ fill a mass need...


>   Does anyone know why such heads ups are not common yet? 

here we go again...


>   Note that they need not be dedicated machines, any more than PCs are.

this doesn't really make sense...

the p.c. is the prototype of a non-dedicated machine.


>   You say: " i always said this idea was ridiculous, because a
>   reader has to have a screen and a chip and an operating system,
>   and those are the most expensive parts of any computer,
>   so if you're going to pay for those for a dedicated reader,
>   you might as well get a full-fledged computer instead..."

that's right.


>   But you see BB, we do not all have your thews and sinews
>   and built-in power sockets.  We cannot sit and read in the train
>   or in bed or on a hilltop and read a comfortably sized screen
>   or image weighing a couple of kilos for hours on end. 

i don't really know what all of this means.

you _might_ be saying that a full-fledged computer would be
_heavier_ than a dedicated book-reading machine, but that
is not true.  at least it doesn't _have_ to be true.

you might also be saying that a full-fledged computer would
need more electricity than a dedicated book-reading machine,
but again, that's not true, or at least it doesn't _have_ to be true.

i know that it's really hard for people to _grasp_ these facts,
so i will try to explain it to you so that it becomes obvious...

let's take the kindle as our example, ok?

the kindle has a chip and an operating system and a screen.
in that sense, it _is_ a full-fledged computer.  or _could_ be.
except that it has been neutered.  the operating system has
been hacked so that it will present a very limited appearance.
all of the regular o.s. possibilities have been sandboxed out.

some enterprising crackers have reversed this hacking and
uncovered the linux underpinnings.  but the fact remains that
you can't just install linux programs and run them effortlessly.

yet if amazon simply decided to let you do that, you _could_.

but -- obviously -- amazon doesn't want to let you do that.
indeed, amazon had to _pay_ techies to _do_the_neutering_...

that's right, the kindle costs _more_ because amazon _paid_
to make it _less_useful_ to the customer.  think about _that_...

so, for the very same weight, and with the very same screen,
and the very same cost (or _less_), amazon could've handed
customers a full computer instead of a "dedicated" machine.

indeed, with wireless bundled into the price, the kindle could
be an _awesome_ computer, at least in some ways, although
the chip in the thing would be a little pokey for some apps...

and sure, the battery juice would go faster if you were doing
word-processing or web-browsing, not just book-reading,
but that's one of those laws of nature that we cannot repeal.

but do you understand what i'm saying now?

the only reason we can now build a $350 e-book machine
is because we can now build a $350 _computer_.   voila...
(because an e-book reader-machine _is_ a computer!)

if we could build some kind of an e-book reader-machine
that was _not_ a computer -- an e-book machine which
didn't have a chip or an operating system -- then maybe
we could make one that was _cheaper_ than a computer.
but we can't, not given the model of e-books we're using.

(you might be familiar with jon jermey, who has argued for
a long time that -- by converting our books into _images_ --
we could build a much simpler _image-viewing_machine_
that would indeed be cheaper than a "real" computer, but
nobody has really followed up that good idea in a big way.
closest thing was "juicebox", which woulda done the job...
however, with google serving up 10 million scan-sets now,
it might be productive to seriously consider jon's suggestion.
no, you can't search images, but google does search for you.)


>   So far epaper has it all its own way.  I take your point about
>   its price ans a specialised device, but why should it be
>   specialised?  It looks to me like a perfectly usable screen
>   for many purposes.  Maybe more than LCD...?

well, no, you haven't "taken my point" about the price of e-ink.
it's expensive.  and it's not going to get any cheaper very soon.
l.c.d. is much less expensive, which is why it's in more products.

and e-ink looks to me like it could end up as a stinky stinker,
because mary lou and her pixel qi screen can do _both_ day
_and_ night viewing, and -- because it's made in l.c.d. fabs --
it's gonna be significantly cheaper than e-ink from the get-go.

but again, it hasn't been released yet -- at least not any wider
than the o.l.p.c. distributions -- so we don't yet know its flaws.
that's the lesson:  don't believe anything until you actually see it.

-bowerbird

p.s.  if mary lou does get her pixel qi screens out to the world,
i would seriously nominate her to receive the nobel peace prize.
she shortcircuited the whole american corporation greed thing,
in both the _development_ of these cheap-and-green screens,
and in their _roll-out_.  since that corporate greed is the _main_
fire that fuels anti-american sentiment on our planet, thereby
leading to global unrest, the fact that mary lou derailed greed
might be the biggest reason we have a peaceful future, if we do.



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