Those are better on consumables cost and durability; but, alas, do no save you from the…no doubt wonderful in other respects…people responsible for HP’s firmware and drivers. I don’t know how this happened; but despite laser printers being north of 30 years old; we still(as in, last week was the most recent incident I had to clean up) have HP’s own print drivers emitting PCL so malformed that it hard-locks their printers, including the management interfaces, until somebody goes in and yanks the power. Somehow, despite coping with OpenGL and Direct3D, GPUs manage to churn out bitmaps more reliably and with lower odds of taking down the OS than PCL RIPs do. It’s pitiful.
When dealing with a civilized OS where you can just feed it a PS PDD and call it a day, the HPs from the Heroic Age aren’t bad; but if you have to deal with the “HP Universal Print Driver” things aren’t going to be pretty. Xerox’s drivers are less overtly dreadful; but they can’t seem to manufacture a scan unit that lasts more than a couple of years, despite that being sort of what they made their name on.
I’d like to point out that everyone in the episode has a remarkably narrow view of “never.” They’re all thinking in terms of people sitting or standing in front of screens. Instead of, say, us having displays embedded in contact lenses (which is already a thing, at least I’ve held working prototypes in my hands) or our retinas (not yet) that dynamically display information (augmented reality style), or virtual reality interfaces. With VR we could still have the sense of physically exploring while shopping, or using our augmented reality devices we could automatically display the things that would today be printed on labels and signage. And if we care about being able to drop papers on a desk or a couch so we can bump into them later, then we could tag files with GPS coordinates or time stamps so they become visible when appropriate. Or hey, computer interfaces that can provide tactile and olfactory feedback as well as visual.
I say this as someone who still prefers reading on paper and taking paper notes in meetings. Do I think we’ll completely eliminate paper? No, nor should we. Napkins, tissues, toilet paper, and paper towels especially I have a hard time thinking we’ll eliminate (though that isn’t what the episode focuses on, either). Labels on packages are very useful, as is cardboard. But to claim we’ll never have digital archival formats as good as paper, or ways to duplicate paper’s advantages (for reading) in the digital world, is very shortsighted.
Digital is very convenient, but it’s not necessarily stable.
What if something ever happens to the grid?
One distinct advantage of books and other printed media is that they don’t require any kind of power source to use them, other than enough light to read by.
There have been some promising experiments in using lasers to build highly durable nanostructures into glass, which has the advantage of being much cheaper than most corrosion-resistant metals(aside from getting somebody to OK the project’s budget today; you don’t really want to give criminals/barbarians/tomb robbers/whatever an incentive to grab your archive and melt it down because it is worth a moderate size fortune as scrap) and still quite resilient against most flavors of environmental attack.
The really high density approaches are far from obvious, or readable, to the casual observer; but you could go with a multilayered approach, with some text large enough to be easily visible “RTFM!”, some text requiring simple magnification informing you that there is a text block you should read with an optical microscope, that text block telling you that the data block consists of polarization sensitive voxels and a description of the format.
The larger challenge is more likely to be linguistic than anything else: if you can solve the problem of making the text readable for the speakers of something-three-millenia-from-now, the challenge of providing a mathematical description of some of our saner audio, image, and video encoding schemes such that basically any culture/species familiar with ‘computation’ as a concept could implement it would be the relatively easy part.
Now, just try to get permission to actually include an audio or video not protected by a DRM scheme…
I saw somewhere an example of such storage medium that had a spiral of text, which started a well-readable, gradually quickly got smaller and smaller, until microscopic. A nice hint what is done.
Don’t ask for a stinkin’ permission. Do it, don’t get caught. Couple decades later ask for forgiveness.
The obvious albeit sophomoric counterpoint to that would be, “well I’d like to see you wipe your butt with an e-book after a particularly nasty bout of diarrhea,” but I’d be lying.
I never want to see anything like that, not even if I actually knew you personally.
Again, you do whatever works best for you. I’ll do the same.
Use anything else, including bare hand (there’s a reason why left hand is considered unclean in some cultures located in geographies with low availability of water). Though I think waterproofed version of the ebook could work to a certain low-satisfaction degree.
Yes. I think for the very least notes, hard copies, and pictures books. Forms and business type stuff, it can go away.
In the West End Star Wars RPG they said their was no paper used in the universe, which I scoffed at and said that while most people used data pads, paper was still handy for certain things.
But will a machine with the appropriate drive, codec and program to read optical discs be available to the people who uncover the data trove?
The trick is to make the data self evident and decipherable to a viewer that doesn’t have continuity with our culture. If the data isn’t obvious, it may never be discovered. Optical discs and records are not obvious, and reqiure machines to access the data. Any digital storage requires a lot of infrastructure and assumptions.
Perhaps the data could be stage unlockable. The primers teach how to make the machines and programs to unlock further data stores.
