It's substandard as a gaming card, sure. But most Mac G4's get put into use as 2D graphic workstations with big high frequency monitors, and ATI puts out some of the best 2D image quality this side of Matrox.
I notice that Dell ships either the same Rage128 or a TNT2. If I was looking at photoshop and quark all day, I'd take the ATI. Nvidia's 2D is not-so-great.
Apple should be shipping the home-use iMacs with Voodoo cards, however, and they also should be an option on the G4. --
One thing to realize about the PowerPC platform is that it was intended to be a cheap, commodity platform just like Intel. It was not intended to be a high-end workstation platform like Sparc or Alpha. So, you are right -- it doesn't have an overwhelming price/performance ratio -- it was not intended to.
Now the main problem was that PowerPC as a commodity platform is that nobody bought it. If people had, there would be price-competitive PowerPC-based solutions available. Several manufacturers had PowerPC based systems and bare boards on the market a few years ago -- the platform just plain failed to make any money for them.
You guys seem to be putting the cart before the horse. Intel solutions are not popular because there are cheap loose parts available that you can roll your own with. Intel solutions have cheap parts because Intel solutions are popular.
If you think that cheap, bare PPC boards are going to ressurect the platform, think again. For every x86 motherboard sold to an individual, Intel sells several hundred thousand chipsets to Dell and Compaq and Gateway. The fact that you can get your hands on a $100 motherboard is a pure economy of scale issue. The guys at my Korner Klone store have no interest in PPC-based solutions. Their bread and butter is Windows 98 and NT and Novell, and they buy a hellava lot more motherboards than you and I put together.
Now, since this article is about Linux-on-PPC, why is this a flamewar? You have a source-compatible OS, so go and run it on the best damn processor you can find. If that's a homebrew x86 machine that's great; if it's an old Macintosh that's also great. Just don't expect something (a homebrew PPC machine) to come into existance just because you think it might be cool. --
You left out Solaris for PPC, NetWare for PPC, OpenStep for PPC, and probably a few others.
The big predictions in the early '90s was that Intel's architecture was too complex, and in the long run Intel wouldn't be able to scale. People produced nice powerpoint graphs showing Intel leveling off to a flat line while RISC chips continued their linear speed growth.
So, on the surface, PPC seemed like a good idea as a replacement for x86 PCs on low-end commodity hardware. The problem was all of those damn x86 applications. And that, so far, Intel and AMD have been scaling just fine, for some periods even beating Moore's Law. So while PowerPC has been a great chip, there's never been the enormously huge returns that would encourage people to switch architectures.
OS/2 wasn't exactly super popular even on Intel hardware, so no big shock the PPC version was killed. WinNT hasn't displaced Windows 9x yet even after 7 years of trying, and even on Alpha where the thing was fast, it wasn't exactly flying off the shelves. And Apple wasn't letting anyone port their OSes to their hardware anyway.
If LinuxPPC, Inc. was a commercial enterprise in the sense of Microsoft or IBM, their product would have been killed by the beancounters a long time ago. Fortunately, the LinuxPPC project is driven by volunteer hackers who just want to run Linux on their Mac hardware. It doesn't need to be 'viable' commercially. --
If it was your $400 Million, which would you have purchased -- BeOS (still in Beta), or OpenStep (at version 4.2)?
I mean, I like BeOS and all, but NeXT was just a far better deal even ignoring the personnel factor (especially because it included a bunch of dev tools and WebObjects). --
Atari successfully sued Magnavox for producing a Pac Man clone many years ago. Since Hasbro owns all of Atari's intellectual property, I don't know why they would start allowing Pac Man clones (except out of neglect).
EISA was plug-n-play, working in a very similar manner to MCA. Certain ISA cards could also be allocated on EISA machines (3Com NICs, for example).
And EISA did catch on -- in the pre-PCI days Compaq used it heavily in their successful server line up. Because IBM was basically MIA in the PC server market in those days, I would guess that by 1995, EISA had a much larger installed base than MCA. --
Microsoft was actually the biggest thing holding USB back for many years. They were in charge of writing the Windows drivers (duh), but they were years late and very buggy. --
Intel has done their best to quash Firewire
on
Will Rambus Go Bust?
·
· Score: 1
Intel initally agreed to include 1394 as a standard feature in their motherboard chipsets. This would give pretty much universal FireWire adoption for almost no cost to the end user, just like USB.
Then they changed their mind, and instead have been chasing USB 2.0. One thing to realize that since IBM went off with the PS/2, Intel has basically been controlling the PC spec, especially since they basically control the chipset market. I wonder if they were afraid to let third parties, including Apple, control one of the standard features in a PC.
(As for camcorders being the most obvious application -- Sony plans to push iLink across their entire product lineup. As Digital TV and other things become more widely adopted, there will be more consumer pressure for 1394 on PCs. It's the applications, stupid! USB had much more obvious applications, because PCs had always lacked a good standard external expansion bus. All that parallel port crap was quickly and happily killed in the face of USB.) --
Moore's Law was intended to be a mandate (to Intel's engineering and marketing departments) as much as it was intended to be a prediction. So, it shouldn't be a shock that Intel has followed through on their promise to double performance/price every 18 months.
As an engineering road map, Moore's Law has made Intel one of the largest corporations in the world and very, very rich. Why change it? I'll guess that your forecast for 2004 will be spot on. --
It's not that Unisys is being particularlly unethical, just upholding their right to be greedy. It's that the on-line community (recalling the whole pre-internet Compuserve & BBS angle of this story) will adopt the easiest solution they can get away with. Big, slow minicomputer companies seem like especially fair game.
PNG could have been invented many year ago and fully supported by all software. However, the fact is that it's easier to be high minded, look the other way, and hire some lawyers. --
Instead of sending your password in cleartext as per the HTTP spec, IE will send the NT/LanManager password hash used by the currently logged-in user. The bad side is that you are transmitting your NT credentials over HTTP to anyone who might ask. The good side is that users don't have to login again to Intranet sites.
Not likely that Mozilla will ever support this, given their standards focus. BTW, any MS Proxy Server that requires NTLM has been (mis)configured to only support IE. I would bring this up with the Proxy admin to see if it was intentional. You can also try the Winsock driver client to transparently authenticate on Windows systems. --
Hmmm, I showed around M14 at the office, and the most common comment from the WinUsers was that the UI (or 'skin') was too simple. No dropdowns on the back and forward buttons, no customizable toolbar, right-clicking doesn't work much of the time and so on. Not to mention my dreams of "Disable/Enable JavaScript" buttons and the like. (I have to admit I am a horrible user -- I have 3x the normal buttons my MS Word toolbars and like it that way.)
If the current, simple skin is too complex to be rendered quickly, how are you going to build up the UI? I know that the panels are a solution for certain things like Radio and so on, but there's lots of room for featuritus on the skin itself.
There's already talk in the Mac community to write a native container to host the Mozilla rendering engine. (Well, you guys have got the menubar in the wrong place on a platform of very anal users, what do you expect?). I'm wondering if the native container approach is being seriously considered for the major platforms (Windows, Mac, X11), and 'skins' be left as a feature to be exercised by third parties. --
It is only recently that UNISYS has started to see gold and is trying to enforce its patents.
Incorrect. I recall reading discussions about Unisys and GIF just like this one on local BBSes in the late 1980s. Go ask Adobe how long they've been licencing LZW from Unisys so that they can support the "open" GIF format -- my guess is that it's been at least 12 years, if not more. --
They've actually been trying to enforce the patent for years. It is called the "CompuServe GIF" format, which should give you an idea how long this has been going on (since CompuServe had enough power to set standards). Big companies like Adobe and Corel have never had any problems with the licencing -- it's just never been accomodating to shareware and open source authors.
Unisys could give a rat's ass about their reputation, or inventing the graphics format (which they didn't). This is all about them trying to profit from a market that they completely neglected (aka pretty much everything). They did used to be the third largest computer company. Now they are what? A consulting group? --
Yeah they're evil. Whereas Compuserve, Netscape, and all of the other companies that standardized on GIF support are just plain stupid.
"Unisys Cracks the Whip" has been news for about 10 years. From a 1200 baud modem to DSL, this whole GIF drama never goes away. Personally, I'm glad that they are raising the fees. Maybe I won't have to hear about how evil they are for another three years. --
Well, it's not just that Navigator tends to crash, it's that JavaScript (specifically the navigator object) was pretty poorly designed to begin with.
For example, a page can trap the File+Exit event from your browser making it impossible to quit or close a window. Who thought up that feature? Your e-mail address and other browser settings can be uploaded to sites without you realizing it. Loads of other minor security flaws that can only be solved by disabling JavaScript can be found in both IE and Netscape.
I like the core idea of the DOM and JavaScript. Too bad it's not sandboxed better.
But, to stay on topic, none of the scripty menus seem to work with Netscape 6PR1. It's probably IE-specific stuff. --
Yeah, except they're catching on to the fact that people have caught on to the two second delay. I got put through by a predictive dialer almost instantly the other day.
(Strangely enough, it was the phone company trying to sell me caller id and other blocking services... At least in CA, PacBell is one of the worst telemarketing bastards of the lot.) --
Your right. While I agree that a little 'community pressure' might be necessary to get a company in line, these Slashdot 400 message spasms are way more than is required.
I'm sure that months from now, long after Be has fixed the problem, people will be still be yelling that they will never use that horrible GPL-violating OS.
There's still people out there that believe that QT or Apple Darwin is not under an Open Source(tm) licence, long after those problems have been fixed. People still have bile for Corel after what was a minor and debatable mistake.
Once Bruce Perens has branded somone a infiltrator or an enemy, it's hard to get the word out that they are not. I think he should keep his warnings off of Slashdot and stick to more cozy and rational places like Technocrat or the Debian maillists. --
My "DVDs are obsolete" comment was an attempt at a reference to the early "Linux is obsolete" flamewar. Obviously, DVDs (and VHS) are not obsolete in the sense of 8-Tracks. Hell, you can still buy new LPs, and that's 1950s technology.
Everyone talks about freedom, but where are the companies' freedom.
Well, according to their bottom line, they're doing OK and I'm not too worried. Their current VHS market is huge and very profitable. And with no copy protection. Do they really need a whole set of encryption technologies to protect their profit base? No -- what they are really protecting is their distribution system. Digital media and the Internet and high bandwidth have logical conclusions, and they are not selling $20 or $100 DVDs to video stores and end users. They wanted "convergance", and they are getting it. Now they don't want to play by the rules -- the outcome of the personal computing revolution that the end user has control over the resources and data on their computer.
The whole point of CSS and other forms of encryption is to prevent unauthorized access to some content
Look, I have no problem with them if they want to sell a sealed box (like a component DVD player) and have it talk to my computer through known, documented interfaces (S-Video, 1394, whatever). What I dislike is that they want to turn my computer into that sealed box, simply because software is cheaper for them to produce than hardware. We've already got a situation where you can play a DVD on your computer, but the software won't let you take a screenshot. At what point does DIVX resurrect itself?
(As for my boss reading my e-mail, that's a silly example. The company owns the computer, the e-mail system, and my 'work product'. Hollywood owns the content on the DVD and that's it. They don't own the hardware, the player, the CPU, my time or anything else.)
I'm not trying to make this a crusade. Obviously, what you want to do with your computer is up to you, and I respect your well-stated opionion on the matter. I just think there's quite a bit of moral inconsistancy on Slashdot about DVDs (People buy them and watch them but don't like the terms of the deal.) DeCSS is only a band-aid here. Hopefully a more fair longterm solution will be realized.
16:9 DVDs look great on current widescreen technology. HDTV, however, will be 16:9, but will also be capable of much higher resolutions than DVD currenly provides.
So, your widescreen DVDs will look OK on HDTV, but not as "_REAL_ good" as upcoming HD-DVDs.
(I have a bunch of widescreen laserdisc stuff, and to me the quality difference isn't really worth 'upgrading; to DVD. I'll have to wait and see what HDTV looks like -- word has it that the difference is immense. As for anamorphic being "enhanced", it's more like not dis-enhanced for 4:3 pan-n-scan. However, since video is such a big market, most movies seem to be shot nowdays with all of the action in the 4:3 box to make pan-n-scan easier.)
I also have the big THX box with the original trilogy on LD. Yes, there are some crappy blue screen effects visible in the first movie, but that is way better than having to look at a bunch of cute squishy digital aliens. No need to upgrade... --
Slashdot Mirror
It's substandard as a gaming card, sure. But most Mac G4's get put into use as 2D graphic workstations with big high frequency monitors, and ATI puts out some of the best 2D image quality this side of Matrox.
I notice that Dell ships either the same Rage128 or a TNT2. If I was looking at photoshop and quark all day, I'd take the ATI. Nvidia's 2D is not-so-great.
Apple should be shipping the home-use iMacs with Voodoo cards, however, and they also should be an option on the G4.
--
One thing to realize about the PowerPC platform is that it was intended to be a cheap, commodity platform just like Intel. It was not intended to be a high-end workstation platform like Sparc or Alpha. So, you are right -- it doesn't have an overwhelming price/performance ratio -- it was not intended to.
Now the main problem was that PowerPC as a commodity platform is that nobody bought it. If people had, there would be price-competitive PowerPC-based solutions available. Several manufacturers had PowerPC based systems and bare boards on the market a few years ago -- the platform just plain failed to make any money for them.
You guys seem to be putting the cart before the horse. Intel solutions are not popular because there are cheap loose parts available that you can roll your own with. Intel solutions have cheap parts because Intel solutions are popular.
If you think that cheap, bare PPC boards are going to ressurect the platform, think again. For every x86 motherboard sold to an individual, Intel sells several hundred thousand chipsets to Dell and Compaq and Gateway. The fact that you can get your hands on a $100 motherboard is a pure economy of scale issue. The guys at my Korner Klone store have no interest in PPC-based solutions. Their bread and butter is Windows 98 and NT and Novell, and they buy a hellava lot more motherboards than you and I put together.
Now, since this article is about Linux-on-PPC, why is this a flamewar? You have a source-compatible OS, so go and run it on the best damn processor you can find. If that's a homebrew x86 machine that's great; if it's an old Macintosh that's also great. Just don't expect something (a homebrew PPC machine) to come into existance just because you think it might be cool.
--
You left out Solaris for PPC, NetWare for PPC, OpenStep for PPC, and probably a few others.
The big predictions in the early '90s was that Intel's architecture was too complex, and in the long run Intel wouldn't be able to scale. People produced nice powerpoint graphs showing Intel leveling off to a flat line while RISC chips continued their linear speed growth.
So, on the surface, PPC seemed like a good idea as a replacement for x86 PCs on low-end commodity hardware. The problem was all of those damn x86 applications. And that, so far, Intel and AMD have been scaling just fine, for some periods even beating Moore's Law. So while PowerPC has been a great chip, there's never been the enormously huge returns that would encourage people to switch architectures.
OS/2 wasn't exactly super popular even on Intel hardware, so no big shock the PPC version was killed. WinNT hasn't displaced Windows 9x yet even after 7 years of trying, and even on Alpha where the thing was fast, it wasn't exactly flying off the shelves. And Apple wasn't letting anyone port their OSes to their hardware anyway.
If LinuxPPC, Inc. was a commercial enterprise in the sense of Microsoft or IBM, their product would have been killed by the beancounters a long time ago. Fortunately, the LinuxPPC project is driven by volunteer hackers who just want to run Linux on their Mac hardware. It doesn't need to be 'viable' commercially.
--
If it was your $400 Million, which would you have purchased -- BeOS (still in Beta), or OpenStep (at version 4.2)?
I mean, I like BeOS and all, but NeXT was just a far better deal even ignoring the personnel factor (especially because it included a bunch of dev tools and WebObjects).
--
Lets try this
--
Atari successfully sued Magnavox for producing a Pac Man clone many years ago. Since Hasbro owns all of Atari's intellectual property, I don't know why they would start allowing Pac Man clones (except out of neglect).
--
More like dope up a MCA bus for a 286. Meanwhile Compaq is benchmarketing your ass on with a ISA 386 machine.
One of big the reasons the PS/2 line never caught on is that the CPUs were consistantly behind what others were shipping.
--
EISA was plug-n-play, working in a very similar manner to MCA. Certain ISA cards could also be allocated on EISA machines (3Com NICs, for example).
And EISA did catch on -- in the pre-PCI days Compaq used it heavily in their successful server line up. Because IBM was basically MIA in the PC server market in those days, I would guess that by 1995, EISA had a much larger installed base than MCA.
--
Microsoft was actually the biggest thing holding USB back for many years. They were in charge of writing the Windows drivers (duh), but they were years late and very buggy.
--
Intel initally agreed to include 1394 as a standard feature in their motherboard chipsets. This would give pretty much universal FireWire adoption for almost no cost to the end user, just like USB.
Then they changed their mind, and instead have been chasing USB 2.0. One thing to realize that since IBM went off with the PS/2, Intel has basically been controlling the PC spec, especially since they basically control the chipset market. I wonder if they were afraid to let third parties, including Apple, control one of the standard features in a PC.
(As for camcorders being the most obvious application -- Sony plans to push iLink across their entire product lineup. As Digital TV and other things become more widely adopted, there will be more consumer pressure for 1394 on PCs. It's the applications, stupid! USB had much more obvious applications, because PCs had always lacked a good standard external expansion bus. All that parallel port crap was quickly and happily killed in the face of USB.)
--
Moore's Law was intended to be a mandate (to Intel's engineering and marketing departments) as much as it was intended to be a prediction. So, it shouldn't be a shock that Intel has followed through on their promise to double performance/price every 18 months.
As an engineering road map, Moore's Law has made Intel one of the largest corporations in the world and very, very rich. Why change it? I'll guess that your forecast for 2004 will be spot on.
--
whatever the Internet wants, it takes
Someone finally hits on the truth of the matter!
It's not that Unisys is being particularlly unethical, just upholding their right to be greedy. It's that the on-line community (recalling the whole pre-internet Compuserve & BBS angle of this story) will adopt the easiest solution they can get away with. Big, slow minicomputer companies seem like especially fair game.
PNG could have been invented many year ago and fully supported by all software. However, the fact is that it's easier to be high minded, look the other way, and hire some lawyers.
--
Thanks for the reply. I'll just have to hope for a more flat and simple skin to support my 'featuritus' disease!
Either that or dig in and roll my own. (I wonder how hard it would be to create a MS Word-like toolbar/menu editor in XUL...)
--
NTLM has nothing to do with 128-bit SSL support.
Instead of sending your password in cleartext as per the HTTP spec, IE will send the NT/LanManager password hash used by the currently logged-in user. The bad side is that you are transmitting your NT credentials over HTTP to anyone who might ask. The good side is that users don't have to login again to Intranet sites.
Not likely that Mozilla will ever support this, given their standards focus. BTW, any MS Proxy Server that requires NTLM has been (mis)configured to only support IE. I would bring this up with the Proxy admin to see if it was intentional. You can also try the Winsock driver client to transparently authenticate on Windows systems.
--
Let me add one --
4) Make the Backspace key act like the back button.
Why? No reason, except the backspace key is big and doesn't require me to press a modifier. And IE muscle memory, of course.
(Netscape PR1 does nothing with BackSpace. NS 4.x does a Page Up!?)
--
Hmmm, I showed around M14 at the office, and the most common comment from the WinUsers was that the UI (or 'skin') was too simple. No dropdowns on the back and forward buttons, no customizable toolbar, right-clicking doesn't work much of the time and so on. Not to mention my dreams of "Disable/Enable JavaScript" buttons and the like. (I have to admit I am a horrible user -- I have 3x the normal buttons my MS Word toolbars and like it that way.)
If the current, simple skin is too complex to be rendered quickly, how are you going to build up the UI? I know that the panels are a solution for certain things like Radio and so on, but there's lots of room for featuritus on the skin itself.
There's already talk in the Mac community to write a native container to host the Mozilla rendering engine. (Well, you guys have got the menubar in the wrong place on a platform of very anal users, what do you expect?). I'm wondering if the native container approach is being seriously considered for the major platforms (Windows, Mac, X11), and 'skins' be left as a feature to be exercised by third parties.
--
It is only recently that UNISYS has started to see gold and is trying to enforce its patents.
Incorrect. I recall reading discussions about Unisys and GIF just like this one on local BBSes in the late 1980s. Go ask Adobe how long they've been licencing LZW from Unisys so that they can support the "open" GIF format -- my guess is that it's been at least 12 years, if not more.
--
They've actually been trying to enforce the patent for years. It is called the "CompuServe GIF" format, which should give you an idea how long this has been going on (since CompuServe had enough power to set standards). Big companies like Adobe and Corel have never had any problems with the licencing -- it's just never been accomodating to shareware and open source authors.
Unisys could give a rat's ass about their reputation, or inventing the graphics format (which they didn't). This is all about them trying to profit from a market that they completely neglected (aka pretty much everything). They did used to be the third largest computer company. Now they are what? A consulting group?
--
Yeah they're evil. Whereas Compuserve, Netscape, and all of the other companies that standardized on GIF support are just plain stupid.
"Unisys Cracks the Whip" has been news for about 10 years. From a 1200 baud modem to DSL, this whole GIF drama never goes away. Personally, I'm glad that they are raising the fees. Maybe I won't have to hear about how evil they are for another three years.
--
Well, it's not just that Navigator tends to crash, it's that JavaScript (specifically the navigator object) was pretty poorly designed to begin with.
For example, a page can trap the File+Exit event from your browser making it impossible to quit or close a window. Who thought up that feature? Your e-mail address and other browser settings can be uploaded to sites without you realizing it. Loads of other minor security flaws that can only be solved by disabling JavaScript can be found in both IE and Netscape.
I like the core idea of the DOM and JavaScript. Too bad it's not sandboxed better.
But, to stay on topic, none of the scripty menus seem to work with Netscape 6PR1. It's probably IE-specific stuff.
--
Yeah, except they're catching on to the fact that people have caught on to the two second delay. I got put through by a predictive dialer almost instantly the other day.
(Strangely enough, it was the phone company trying to sell me caller id and other blocking services... At least in CA, PacBell is one of the worst telemarketing bastards of the lot.)
--
Your right. While I agree that a little 'community pressure' might be necessary to get a company in line, these Slashdot 400 message spasms are way more than is required.
I'm sure that months from now, long after Be has fixed the problem, people will be still be yelling that they will never use that horrible GPL-violating OS.
There's still people out there that believe that QT or Apple Darwin is not under an Open Source(tm) licence, long after those problems have been fixed. People still have bile for Corel after what was a minor and debatable mistake.
Once Bruce Perens has branded somone a infiltrator or an enemy, it's hard to get the word out that they are not. I think he should keep his warnings off of Slashdot and stick to more cozy and rational places like Technocrat or the Debian maillists.
--
My "DVDs are obsolete" comment was an attempt at a reference to the early "Linux is obsolete" flamewar. Obviously, DVDs (and VHS) are not obsolete in the sense of 8-Tracks. Hell, you can still buy new LPs, and that's 1950s technology.
Everyone talks about freedom, but where are the companies' freedom.
Well, according to their bottom line, they're doing OK and I'm not too worried. Their current VHS market is huge and very profitable. And with no copy protection. Do they really need a whole set of encryption technologies to protect their profit base? No -- what they are really protecting is their distribution system. Digital media and the Internet and high bandwidth have logical conclusions, and they are not selling $20 or $100 DVDs to video stores and end users. They wanted "convergance", and they are getting it. Now they don't want to play by the rules -- the outcome of the personal computing revolution that the end user has control over the resources and data on their computer.
The whole point of CSS and other forms of encryption is to prevent unauthorized access to some content
Look, I have no problem with them if they want to sell a sealed box (like a component DVD player) and have it talk to my computer through known, documented interfaces (S-Video, 1394, whatever). What I dislike is that they want to turn my computer into that sealed box, simply because software is cheaper for them to produce than hardware. We've already got a situation where you can play a DVD on your computer, but the software won't let you take a screenshot. At what point does DIVX resurrect itself?
(As for my boss reading my e-mail, that's a silly example. The company owns the computer, the e-mail system, and my 'work product'. Hollywood owns the content on the DVD and that's it. They don't own the hardware, the player, the CPU, my time or anything else.)
I'm not trying to make this a crusade. Obviously, what you want to do with your computer is up to you, and I respect your well-stated opionion on the matter. I just think there's quite a bit of moral inconsistancy on Slashdot about DVDs (People buy them and watch them but don't like the terms of the deal.) DeCSS is only a band-aid here. Hopefully a more fair longterm solution will be realized.
--
16:9 DVDs look great on current widescreen technology. HDTV, however, will be 16:9, but will also be capable of much higher resolutions than DVD currenly provides.
So, your widescreen DVDs will look OK on HDTV, but not as "_REAL_ good" as upcoming HD-DVDs.
(I have a bunch of widescreen laserdisc stuff, and to me the quality difference isn't really worth 'upgrading; to DVD. I'll have to wait and see what HDTV looks like -- word has it that the difference is immense. As for anamorphic being "enhanced", it's more like not dis-enhanced for 4:3 pan-n-scan. However, since video is such a big market, most movies seem to be shot nowdays with all of the action in the 4:3 box to make pan-n-scan easier.)
--
I also have the big THX box with the original trilogy on LD. Yes, there are some crappy blue screen effects visible in the first movie, but that is way better than having to look at a bunch of cute squishy digital aliens. No need to upgrade...
--