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Well riddle me this, Batman... The entire fucking world of government and business runs on paper. I have to print out literally reams of shit for regulatory re

Well riddle me this, Batman... The entire fucking world of government and business runs on paper. I have to print out literally reams of shit for regulatory requirements, shit that could be easily stored in multiple locations, on tiny ass microSD cards that could be filed away into a single filing cabinet, potentially holding billions of records, damn near indefinitely, and near-immediately accessed on ePaper displays, with the color documents being displayed on color ones and the black & whites being displayed on greyscale displays... instead we have an enormous off-site filing warehouse to retain documentation for up to seven years. Hell, my corporation probably has several of these. And it sure as shit isn't the legal framework holding all this up... everyone I deal with in government and business hates having to shuffle all this shit around, and would much rather be tossed an 8.5" x 11" eInk display with all relevant documents than having to shuffle through manila folder after manila folder of printed pages, and they'd all gladly lobby to have these laws and regulations changed and revised to allow for that. I guaran-goddamn-tee you the market for eInk is there.

glangdale 6y ago
I'm not sure I follow the logic. A setup where you are not allowed to store a document on a disk of some kind is not going to be friendly to a solution where you instead can store the document on a little microSD card hooked up to a eInk display instead. If there's a fetish for a "this document is an actual physical object" somewhere (with all the usual security theater about security from theft and alteration), it's not going to be helped by taping eInk to a disk.
robomartin 6y ago
I don't think you understand how government works, how they buy things, what data archiving/security requirements they have and, well, frankly, the value of paper as an archival medium. About thirty years ago I worked on a sizeable archival project. Technology deemed "modern" at the time was very hard to justify. Why? Because nobody could truthfully answer a simple question: What happens when the hardware/readers go obsolete? Well, the first thing that happens is that you have to migrate ALL of your data from the old medium to a new medium before the old one goes out of style. That's all the bean counters had to hear to know they'd rather keep things on film. Film, as the argument went, is good for a long time if stored properly and all you have to do is shine a light through it. The started a slow transition to digital some 20 to 25 years after that conversation. Guess what? They were right. The film was --and still is-- in pristine condition.

glangdale 6y ago

I'm not sure I follow the logic. A setup where you are not allowed to store a document on a disk of some kind is not going to be friendly to a solution where you instead can store the document on a little microSD card hooked up to a eInk display instead. If there's a fetish for a "this document is an actual physical object" somewhere (with all the usual security theater about security from theft and alteration), it's not going to be helped by taping eInk to a disk.

robomartin 6y ago

I don't think you understand how government works, how they buy things, what data archiving/security requirements they have and, well, frankly, the value of paper as an archival medium. About thirty years ago I worked on a sizeable archival project. Technology deemed "modern" at the time was very hard to justify. Why? Because nobody could truthfully answer a simple question: What happens when the hardware/readers go obsolete? Well, the first thing that happens is that you have to migrate ALL of your data from the old medium to a new medium before the old one goes out of style. That's all the bean counters had to hear to know they'd rather keep things on film. Film, as the argument went, is good for a long time if stored properly and all you have to do is shine a light through it. The started a slow transition to digital some 20 to 25 years after that conversation. Guess what? They were right. The film was --and still is-- in pristine condition.