I have been working with various e-ink displays and most of them offer these capabilities:
(1bpp black and white or 4bpp 16 shade scale from black to white displays are what I am writing about here. Color displays and or very basic displays probably do not have these same options)
Partial screen or zone
This is generally a rectangular zone that gets refreshed.
Whether one refreshes a zone or full screen, it takes a while to go through the usual black to white to text flashing we have all come to know well.
And this is roughly 2 seconds, with zones being a bit faster, but not by too much.
Complete refresh
This is the full flashing black to white to image cycle. Slow.
Partial Refresh
This one simply redraws changed pixels only and does not feature the flashing effects. The pixels are just changed.
Partial refresh time
Here we specify the pixel change time allowed. And it can be fast!
The faster we go, the more left over screen artifacts or "ghosting" remains on the display. In addition, all the e-paper displays I have tried say you need to perform a complete refresh every so often to avoid the display reaching some partially charged state, which can leave it unusable.
My experience is most displays can go a long time using fast partial refreshes with no damage. If one does appear damaged, with damage looking like persistent patterns of partially visible or even completely visible pixels, running the display overnight using full refresh on a simple full screen task will generally restore the display to factory performance.
I have abused mine a lot and have been able to recover each time by doing that. Just have it display a count, or any simple changing image each cycle and watch it improve.
Partial refresh times range from about 50ms on the extreme fast end of things, through 100 to 150ms for still fast but reasonably clean display images, ending at about 250ms for very good images.
All with no dark to light to image flashing!
The 50ms through 80ms times result in light grey, partially drawn pixels and lots of leftovers. I have found those left overs can be largely hidden by drawing the whole display with a black rectangle, which leaves it all light gray. Then draw your fast images from there and the leftovers are basically the same grey. Not perfect but more usable than you may expect!
For text, one could target 6 to 10 frames per second and get a very readable display with few moderate artifacts. The entire display is redrawn each frame.
Plenty fast for editing text.
If it were me, I would draw the text in high quality, high contrast 250ms draw time rate and that is 4fps for paging through, just reading, searching, etc...
Then, the moment editing is about to happen, simply redraw the region near cursor faster to allow for editing to happen above 10fps.
Anytime the user pauses for a full second, or some close enough time, draw it all high quality again.
Or maybe even just give the user two modes. Fast and slow.
Let them choose.
Given what I have seen, I would use slow for using text to read, and fast mode for edits and just let the screen contrast be reduced and artifacts be seen.
Any pause and those will just go away.
Put the full refresh on a long timer, say 5 to 10 minutes to make the display charge state stay happy.
Also put a high quality redraw on a hot key for the user to trigger anytime they want a cleaner display.
Done this way, a user never has to endure the black to white flashing update nobody likes, until it makes sense. And they get a fast display that looks as good as they need it to much like the AUTOCAD refresh/redraw comments here talk about.
I have a game tech demo running on one of these black and white, no grey scale, displays using these capabilities, and it is fast!
I will see if I can link some video, but I have a few hundred small moving objects and a player ship one can fly around. It runs at 13fps and is totally playable should it become a full shoot the other things Asteroids type game.
And that's just python with the display running over 20mhz SPI.
I think the author has great observations, and would be very curious for their thoughts given some knowledge of the many display options available to them.
Feels to me like they saw a Kindle and were approaching the topic assuming Kindle level draw capability, which is far less than what most e-paper can really do.
The Indigo Magic Desktop coupled with the 4DWM X window manager was among the top computing experiences I've had! At my peak, I was a sysadmin for our setup where I worked and as a reseller, was basically a remote sysadmin for a fair number of other installations.
Used to keep lists of Free Juno numbers while traveling just so I could get online in the days before fairly ubiquitous free or low cost wi-fi. Dial up on those was what? 2.5kbytes per sec, or thereabouts.
Plenty for that kind of support work, but I digress!
I loved it. The red pointer, which I continue to use to this day, crisp interactions, launch/event sounds, drop pads, and too many other niceties to list here, made for great experiences.
And IRIX itself was no joke. The scheduler is amazing! It remained responsive in almost all scenarios.
Once, for a training class, I had updated the software revision. But, on one machine I had left the app open with some action pending.
I saw one student appearing to run the old revision, which I thought impossible because those files were gone! Well, IRIX cached the whole damn thing. gr_osview showed a huge file cache, which I saw evaporate once the app was closed all the way.
Then things were just fine. Excellent!
And the tools. How many machines have you all used with a CD Player that had "Save Track As..." built in as a standard option.
Want to remote display a high end CAD package with 3D rendering and the works? 4DWM with the GLX extensions handled it nicely.
....
Anyhow, I hope this gets some momentum. I would love to run it and maybe show it off to some younger users in the building what computing was like.
> How many machines have you all used with a CD Player that had "Save Track As..." built in as a standard option.
The CD Player in BeOS could save all or parts of CD Tracks. Also, BeOS would show CDs as a directory of numbered AIFF or WAV files, I can't remember which. There was also some optional software that wold look up the CD info up with CDDB and would show the track names in the Tracker (the BeOS file manager)
If you connect an SGI DAT drive to an IRIX machine, you can save the tracks in the same way. And they get saved in the faster, native DAT sample rate. 48Khz, I believe.
I'm not 100% certain I never played an audio CD on a Mac.
The only Mac I've owned with an optical drive at all was a PowerBook G4. It's been 20 years, but I assume any audio CDs that went into it were to be meant to be ripped into iTunes and not played as audio CDs.
>"Severance is a completely optional practice that is based entirely on what the company wants to do. I would argue that severance is more accurately based on "The lowest safe number to pay to this particular employee to make sure their termination does not become a legal risk."
Almost right! I see it as an extension of what I call the basic rules, "I am as nice to you as you are to me", and "I care exactly as much as you do."
That does, in some cases, expand severance a little beyond the cold risk calculation. If the severance is going to someone who helped the company make it, then helping make sure they make it to their next gig is part of the equation.
Not everyone boils it all down that far, but a whole lot of us do!
Which makes your comment solid, and mine a quibble, but one I consider worthy of some discussion.
Once, while traveling in an RV for some work related marketing thing, the discussion turned to the lack of fuel economy...
The RV might perform better if the engine powered the RV by blowing fuel right out the tail pipe. Horrible efficiency, terrible for the planet, and, and all the negatives packed right into a quick expression.
Your comment is on point. Solid and I just felt like sharing my appreciation for the morbid fun it contains.
Does this not depend on how one sees the Arm transition matter playing out?
It at least conceivable and IMHO, plausible for Qualcomm to see Apple, phones on ARM and aging in demographics all speaking to a certain Arm transition?
I wouldn't be so sure. Windows on ARM has existed for more then a decade with almost zero adoption. Phones, both Apple and Android, have been ARM since forever. The only additional player is that Apple has moved their Macs to ARM. This to me means it would be pretty stupid for them to just throw up their hands and say "they will come". Because it didn't happen for a decade prior.
Maybe. Just trying to see it from other points of view.
A decade ago, Apple was on Intel and Microsoft had not advanced many plans in play today. Depending on the smoke they are blowing people's way, one could get an impression ARM is a sure thing.
Frankly, I have no desire to run Windows on ARM.
Linux? Yep.
And I am already on a Mac M1.
I sort of hope it fails personally. I want to see the Intel PC continue in some basic form.
Not sure what triggered it, but I began odd searches a while ago and want to echo many of the "feels like the good old days" type comments.
Video made without any real production intent is compelling. It is pure, raw, just human and many of us hunger for that because the big media players dominate hard for fear of losing to their peers it seems.
My current Raspi 400 desktop has that same setup. Menu items all italic and bold.
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