Now, I'd expect Slashdot to have a little healthy journalistic skepticism when it comes to claims like this, especially if the post itself says "doesn't ring true".
If you're wondering why so many obvious hoaxes, like this one and the Raelian clone-baby, are making it into the news at all, I think I've found the secret: a couple of years ago, the Raelians had the foresight to lobby for removing the word "gullible" from most major dictionaries.
Strangely enough, the Ruby language was designed in Japan, by a Japanese person. The language is in English and makes a great deal of sense. It may help that the creator of the language is proficient in English, but the language's local popularity may have more to do with the idea that the world takes it for granted that people program in English.
On the one hand, it's only fair that people should be able to program in their native language. On the other hand, Microsoft translates Visual Basic into other languages, and the result is said to not always work well. I remember a Swedish-speaking Finn telling me the horrors of having to program in Finnish Visual Basic.
Then there's Perligata.
There is one non-game innovation that has come out of Japan that I find rather important: the Ruby language. It's an object-oriented language that's more accessible to those of us who grew up on C++, but it's as clean and legible as Python, and as expressive as Perl. It's apparently very popular over there, and its inventor, known culloquially as "Matz", is eerily parallel to Larry Wall. And it's open source; Slashdot has done many stories on it.
I agree that formatting these videos in RealVideo was a regrettable choice.
I also wish it weren't encoded at such a high bitrate. You 56k users will have a hard time looking at these, if these are in the same format as when they were first slashdotted; at times, even my cablemodem couldn't keep up. In fact, since it is a monochrome recording, isn't there a monochrome codec that could be used to archive this video with the same quality but without the bandwidth overkill?
One of the strong points of DeVry is that they give you a lot of group projects. Even writing assignments are sometimes a group project, though these usually similarly involve a group presentation. The senior project is almost always a group effort. Almost makes up for all the COBOL they teach.
Coding projects are usually done on an individual basis, but design projects are not.
This kind of news addiction is the precise reason that most network channels are on 24-hour news-barf mode.
To be truthful, when I absent-mindedly flip to the news channels, I hope that they're reporting on something other than the tragedy, or at least something new. I'm always disappointed.
It seems as if there's a nationwide effort to not let us think about anything else. Our minds aren't designed to take in that kind of horror for 24 hours a day, four days straight. Thank God for the Cartoon Network.
Cybernetics at its worst
on
Review: A.I.
·
· Score: 2
just saw A.I.
Call me insensitive, but it took all my willpower to not shout "Use the Force!" during that one scene. You'll know the one. It's really quiet, too. I probably would have, if it weren't for the higher-than-usual odds that, if I were thrown out, I'd be recognized and denied admittance to that theater in the future. And while there are probably ample opportunities to yell "I see dead people", wait until the very end.
Also, the theatrical trailer is right about the initial premise of an artificial child. He doesn't age. He is an artificial son. Now, call me insensitive a second time, but that sounds like the worst idea ever. Every parent would tell you that the best thing about having a child is that you're raising him, watching him grow, and building a future for him. Take all that away, and all you have left four-foot-fall Tamagotchi. Instead of growing old and dying after six weeks with careful attention, he lives forever and apparently runs on a perpetual motion device. Imagine a future where there are 80-year-old couples who have had an 8-year-old son for fifty years. There is only one reason a corporation would spend millions of dollars to develop such a contraption: to lure millions of moviegoers.
The child has still more examples of bad design. The imprinting being irreversible, for one thing. Suppose after 20 years, having a child running around the house with its emotional neediness begins to wear on you. There is no painless way to end the relationship. Even a pet dies on its own, but this child must be driven to the nearest Robot Shack to be destroyed. I'll bet they even have a little observation window where you can watch them put him in the guillotine. Were this robot released to consumers, this is probably the first question people would raise.
The question of love was raised at the beginning of the movie, but the Tamagotchi already answered those questions. The board member that would serve as the conscience of the meeting asked that if the robot could love, what responsibilities would the parent have to love a robot? At least some Tamagotchi owners loved their pets, and many of them mourn their death. But won't there also be people who bring the robot home, imprint him, and then abuse him? The Sims and Black and White allow you to abuse the residents of their particular dollhouses, and many people do.
And when Monica imprinted David, he started calling her "Mommy". Did he start calling his father "Daddy" and start asking to play catch with him? How long was it before anyone in the household referred to Martin as his brother? Did anyone raise the question of whether our robo-child would go to school, or whether it would make any of its own friends independently?
I suppose it works as a metaphor for how people bring children into the world without any consideration for the consequences.
Andromeda disappoints me.
on
Andromeda
·
· Score: 2
Too bad I actually read the article, otherwise I'd have 2nd Post.
But, for me, ANdromeda has failed to not suck for the most part. Or, to be clearer, it has not declined to prevent itself from avoiding not being the opposite of not blowing.
Or something.
They had a limitation to the Slipstream that I found neat: only an organic pilot could navigate it. This keeps it from being all magical like in Star Trek. They made a loophole to that in the tenth episode. And I think that they started the series with no transporters, but they invented one in episode three or four which, by the way, also lets you travel through time. And of course it was the second time travel episode so far.
I don't know. Maybe I'll catch a particularly good episode one of these days and get back on the wagon... but not today.
EVery time something weird or improbable happens, people will eventually call it a Sign of the Apocalypse. Pauly Shore marries a supermodel? Sign of the Apocalypse! Someone you don't like gets elected? Sign of the Apocalypse! They start selling Pepsi in recycled colostomy bags. Sign of the Apocalypse! Cartman says the S-word on cable TV. You get the idea.
It's popular, it's derivative of an existing show, how could they not make it in America?
Of course, it's impossible to say what the end result will be. It could either delight or alienate fans of the Japanese show, or it could pick up enough of a new audience to make the old audience irrelevant. And, as we all know, by the cancellation of Lone Gunmen, the quality of the show won't dictate how long it will stay on the air.
I will say that the show will probably suffer if they try to copy the show exactly. However, it's taking place in Vegas, so there's a good chance it'll look like that New York Battle, which would be much much worse.
I wouldn't say that this movie review is off-topic. I know there's a bunch of SCA nerds who would just love this movie. And a bunch of SCA nerds who would just hate this movie, as I bet it's full of inaccuracies. I wouldn't know, but if you're looking for accuracy in movies of any kind, you have a long search ahead of you.
I've heard many people who say that "We Will Rock You" playing during the opening credits sets the tone for the movie, and I think that's especially true on an individual level. If you see it as pandering, you'll see the rest of the movie as some teenager flick that might as well end at the prom. If you see it as an invitation not to take the movie too seriously, you'll see the rest of the movie as a fantasy that probably doesn't reflect history. Indeed, the repeated infusions of classic rock and other neologisms serves to reinforce this attitude.
That's probably a good idea because the story itself is really too implausible to buy at face value. The course of William's career, his rivalry with the Count, the fairy tale love story, all of it is an exaggeration. Without such dissonant elements as the classic rock sountrack, I don't think the movie would have succeeded. Silly things like that loosen up the audience and allow a movie to tell its story in its own way.
Compare it to Wayne's World 2, which had such dissonant elements as talking to the camera, multiple endings, an inexplicable room full of training ninjas, and the Bohemian Rhapsody. The movie was 67% filler, but most people I know loved it. That filler made us care about the characters enough to pay attention to the content. And in contrast, A Knight's Tale has far less filler.
That being said, I'd give the movie three stars. It's not probably going to make any critic's best-of lists, and I think some of the exaggerations might have gone a bit too far. I especially share Katz's sentiments about the love interest. But as long as you try not to think of it as a teen movie, you'll probably enjoy it.
Last night, a couple of my friends said they saw bright red lights in the sky. When the rest of us ran out there, there was still a faint red haze in the sky.
If the aurora borealis can make it to Arizona, anything is possible.
Well, for one thing, there are lots of appliances out there who claim to have used Linux, but of course never give up a Unix prompt. Either the TiVo or one of the TiVo-like devices does this; does anyone know how much Unix-like architecture goes on within those machines?
But this project goes to show us that we don't have to be designing set-top boxes to create something new for Linux. For example, I'd like a Linux version that boots from CD and serves as a front-end for MAME, that might be suitable for a PC installed inside an arcade cabinet. Perhaps it would run on a Dreamcast, too. Perhaps a whole new home-brew set-top box industry can begin.
Having grown up with the Atari 8-bit computers, I was one of the first to try any Atari emulator that came out, and see what programs have been written for it recently. In the 1990's, you'll still find many demo groups in Poland and the Czech Republic coding for the Atari 8-bit. It stands to reason that in such countries, where budgets tend to be tighter than in the far West, people would find all sorts of ways to keep old equipment alive. A few years ago I was watching Russian local news on C-Span, and there was a time display at the top of the screen; the font was unmistakably that of an Atari 8-bit.
While it is a shame that these machines are gathering dust in thrift stores in America, the truth is that almost nobody would know how to put one to really good use. As word processors, they're adequate as long as an 80-column dot-matrix printouts are adequate. As spreadsheet calculators, they're archaic and less intuitive than programs like Microsoft Excel. And, generally, in the workplace, if you find someone who can use a computer without a mouse, that person is worth enough money that you can as easily buy an Intel or Apple machine as hire them. The appropriate software for a given job might exist somewhere, but unless you've grown up reading Antic magazine and know all the websites and own an APE cable, good luck finding it. Though, at games, they rock as much as ever; cartridges don't bit-rot like disks do.
The Commodore 64 has done slightly better for itself, as at least it has GEOS, which supports mouse input and WYSIWYG sorts of applications. In that regard, though, even an original 1984 Macintosh is superior. In fact, an old Mac is perfect for a lot of modest tasks, because it has the GUI interface and WYSIWYG support that represents what people expect from computers. And the necessary software often does exist, even if it is outdated and hard to find nowadays. It will suffice, as long as one does not raise the question of the Internet.
The obsolescence of 8-bit computers is not a technological one; it is a cultural one. It is not that we need a faster computer to do the same things; we need a faster computer for the latest killer app. We needed to upgrade so that we could do desktop publishing, gaming, graphs, spell checking, the Internet, music sharing, or movie editing.
The exception, of course, is when you upgrade because the latest version of your favorite Microsoft program is slower than the last one, for some reason.
There are, so far, no such things as holograms that project into thin air. They can use optical tricks to fool your eyesight into thinking that the object you're looking at is closer than it appears, but as the video proves, you can't look at it from a 90-degree angle and see it floating in the air, with other objects behind it. So the end result is the same frustrating thing about all contemporary holograms: it looks great, but only from a very narrow angle.
This is why there's so much focus on surgery and computer-aided design, and not on entertainment. Look at www.3dmedia.com's website; all the news stories are talking about heart surgery. They're not talking about virtual lectures, where an auditorium full of students can watch a professor who isn't there. They're not talking about holographic user interfaces. And they're certainly not talking about ViRTüAL pr0n.
In fact, neither their website, nor their people, use the term "hologram" to refer to this technology. That's because real holography is limited to those CD-colored printed holograms. Those are traditionally created in a process slightly similar to photography, and are so commonplace as to be used as counterfeit protection on credit cards and drivers licenses today. Even in the late 80's, I ate Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cereal out of a box with a hologram printed on it. I also saw a TV news story once where they printed holograms on chocolates.
As a visually impaired person, I have embraced the low-resolution displays of computers in the 1980s. I loved the 40-column displays. And when I got an Amiga, I saw no problem with using 80-column mode on my TV, even though it seemed blurry to everyone else. Windows at 640x480, however, pushed it to what I thought was pretty much the limit of my comfort.
Then, I went to a LAN party, and saw all the 20/20 people doing Windows at 1600x1200, on 15-inch monitors, and complaining that "It starts to get a little blurry on my monitor when I try that..." Then I tried installing Linux and X-Windows on my own machine, and found that X-Windows was meant to never ever NEVER run in 640x480, because all the applications I found seemed to be designed for 1024x768 -- even though they had 7-pixel-high fonts.
This new era of high-resolution displays struck fear into my heart, that in ten years all computer applications will run at 3000x2000 resolution, with 10-pixel-high fonts. And do you seriously believe that people won't design web pages to be "best viewed at 5000x4000"? Or that they aren't already?
But, in the short term, while a 640x480 or 800x600 large-fonts display is still a realistic option, a display like that might actually be a good thing. See, most LCD screens only work at a certain resolution -- 800x600, 1024x768, etc. If you try to decrease the resolution, you get either a big black border of wasted space, or you get random patterns of thick and thin pixel rows and columns. Either way, it's ugly. But if you start at 3000x2000, it becomes less ugly, because you're not alternating single rows and double rows of pixels anymore; you're alternating quadruple and quintuple rows of pixels. This would be good, not just for me, but for gamers who might want to play different games at different resolutions. Starcraft, for example, still plays only at 640x480 if I'm not mistaken.
Of course, the best option would be if people designed everything to be actually scalable for a change. MS Windows has some support for scalability; you can set 800x600 for "Small Fonts" or "Large Fonts" and it works fine with most, but not all, apps. Other objects change size too, such as icons. Bitmaps, however, will always be bitmaps, and that affects web pages. Have you ever played Sissyfight? A 200-pixel-high window, but 6-pixel-high fonts abound. Or Pixeltime -- only usable because the pics can be zoomed and the text is largely inconsequential. Hopefully, when people think in inches instead of pixels, we'll see fewer sites like those. I just hope the backlash doesn't create pages that say "Optimized for a 22-inch display," though such a thing would better expose the inherent arrogance of such a design choice.
Now, I imagine some of you are drooling over this display for the reason my friends always give for their insanely-high resolution: "Just think of how many more windows I can have open at once!" Of course, after a certain point, it would be easier on the eyes and wallet to just use two displays. Break that down into cost-per-pixel, cost-per-square-inch, etc. Perhaps dual displays might even have organizational advantages: "The 17-inch display is for code, the 15-inch display is for man pages and instant messages."
Of course, none of this applies to desktop publishing, where the situation demands something as close to paper as humanly possible. Or video production, in which having a pixel-perfect HDTV display window would be very useful. But for mortals, well, we'll just see whether we use this power for good or evil.
Slashdot Mirror
Now, I'd expect Slashdot to have a little healthy journalistic skepticism when it comes to claims like this, especially if the post itself says "doesn't ring true".
If you're wondering why so many obvious hoaxes, like this one and the Raelian clone-baby, are making it into the news at all, I think I've found the secret: a couple of years ago, the Raelians had the foresight to lobby for removing the word "gullible" from most major dictionaries.
Strangely enough, the Ruby language was designed in Japan, by a Japanese person. The language is in English and makes a great deal of sense. It may help that the creator of the language is proficient in English, but the language's local popularity may have more to do with the idea that the world takes it for granted that people program in English. On the one hand, it's only fair that people should be able to program in their native language. On the other hand, Microsoft translates Visual Basic into other languages, and the result is said to not always work well. I remember a Swedish-speaking Finn telling me the horrors of having to program in Finnish Visual Basic. Then there's Perligata.
There is one non-game innovation that has come out of Japan that I find rather important: the Ruby language. It's an object-oriented language that's more accessible to those of us who grew up on C++, but it's as clean and legible as Python, and as expressive as Perl. It's apparently very popular over there, and its inventor, known culloquially as "Matz", is eerily parallel to Larry Wall. And it's open source; Slashdot has done many stories on it.
Does it force you to play them?
And what's stopping stations from turning off the commercial-skipping feature through similar bribery?
What about thoe bogus "firemen" that call up asking for donations?
I agree that formatting these videos in RealVideo was a regrettable choice.
I also wish it weren't encoded at such a high bitrate. You 56k users will have a hard time looking at these, if these are in the same format as when they were first slashdotted; at times, even my cablemodem couldn't keep up. In fact, since it is a monochrome recording, isn't there a monochrome codec that could be used to archive this video with the same quality but without the bandwidth overkill?
One of the strong points of DeVry is that they give you a lot of group projects. Even writing assignments are sometimes a group project, though these usually similarly involve a group presentation. The senior project is almost always a group effort. Almost makes up for all the COBOL they teach.
Coding projects are usually done on an individual basis, but design projects are not.
This kind of news addiction is the precise reason that most network channels are on 24-hour news-barf mode.
To be truthful, when I absent-mindedly flip to the news channels, I hope that they're reporting on something other than the tragedy, or at least something new. I'm always disappointed.
It seems as if there's a nationwide effort to not let us think about anything else. Our minds aren't designed to take in that kind of horror for 24 hours a day, four days straight. Thank God for the Cartoon Network.
just saw A.I. Call me insensitive, but it took all my willpower to not shout "Use the Force!" during that one scene. You'll know the one. It's really quiet, too. I probably would have, if it weren't for the higher-than-usual odds that, if I were thrown out, I'd be recognized and denied admittance to that theater in the future. And while there are probably ample opportunities to yell "I see dead people", wait until the very end. Also, the theatrical trailer is right about the initial premise of an artificial child. He doesn't age. He is an artificial son. Now, call me insensitive a second time, but that sounds like the worst idea ever. Every parent would tell you that the best thing about having a child is that you're raising him, watching him grow, and building a future for him. Take all that away, and all you have left four-foot-fall Tamagotchi. Instead of growing old and dying after six weeks with careful attention, he lives forever and apparently runs on a perpetual motion device. Imagine a future where there are 80-year-old couples who have had an 8-year-old son for fifty years. There is only one reason a corporation would spend millions of dollars to develop such a contraption: to lure millions of moviegoers. The child has still more examples of bad design. The imprinting being irreversible, for one thing. Suppose after 20 years, having a child running around the house with its emotional neediness begins to wear on you. There is no painless way to end the relationship. Even a pet dies on its own, but this child must be driven to the nearest Robot Shack to be destroyed. I'll bet they even have a little observation window where you can watch them put him in the guillotine. Were this robot released to consumers, this is probably the first question people would raise. The question of love was raised at the beginning of the movie, but the Tamagotchi already answered those questions. The board member that would serve as the conscience of the meeting asked that if the robot could love, what responsibilities would the parent have to love a robot? At least some Tamagotchi owners loved their pets, and many of them mourn their death. But won't there also be people who bring the robot home, imprint him, and then abuse him? The Sims and Black and White allow you to abuse the residents of their particular dollhouses, and many people do. And when Monica imprinted David, he started calling her "Mommy". Did he start calling his father "Daddy" and start asking to play catch with him? How long was it before anyone in the household referred to Martin as his brother? Did anyone raise the question of whether our robo-child would go to school, or whether it would make any of its own friends independently? I suppose it works as a metaphor for how people bring children into the world without any consideration for the consequences.
But, for me, ANdromeda has failed to not suck for the most part. Or, to be clearer, it has not declined to prevent itself from avoiding not being the opposite of not blowing.
Or something.
They had a limitation to the Slipstream that I found neat: only an organic pilot could navigate it. This keeps it from being all magical like in Star Trek. They made a loophole to that in the tenth episode. And I think that they started the series with no transporters, but they invented one in episode three or four which, by the way, also lets you travel through time. And of course it was the second time travel episode so far.
I don't know. Maybe I'll catch a particularly good episode one of these days and get back on the wagon... but not today.
EVery time something weird or improbable happens, people will eventually call it a Sign of the Apocalypse. Pauly Shore marries a supermodel? Sign of the Apocalypse! Someone you don't like gets elected? Sign of the Apocalypse! They start selling Pepsi in recycled colostomy bags. Sign of the Apocalypse! Cartman says the S-word on cable TV. You get the idea.
Of course, it's impossible to say what the end result will be. It could either delight or alienate fans of the Japanese show, or it could pick up enough of a new audience to make the old audience irrelevant. And, as we all know, by the cancellation of Lone Gunmen, the quality of the show won't dictate how long it will stay on the air.
I will say that the show will probably suffer if they try to copy the show exactly. However, it's taking place in Vegas, so there's a good chance it'll look like that New York Battle, which would be much much worse.
s/Wayne's World 2/Wayne's World/
s/dissonant/extraneous/
Would that I had edited the post better.
I wouldn't say that this movie review is off-topic. I know there's a bunch of SCA nerds who would just love this movie. And a bunch of SCA nerds who would just hate this movie, as I bet it's full of inaccuracies. I wouldn't know, but if you're looking for accuracy in movies of any kind, you have a long search ahead of you.
I've heard many people who say that "We Will Rock You" playing during the opening credits sets the tone for the movie, and I think that's especially true on an individual level. If you see it as pandering, you'll see the rest of the movie as some teenager flick that might as well end at the prom. If you see it as an invitation not to take the movie too seriously, you'll see the rest of the movie as a fantasy that probably doesn't reflect history. Indeed, the repeated infusions of classic rock and other neologisms serves to reinforce this attitude.
That's probably a good idea because the story itself is really too implausible to buy at face value. The course of William's career, his rivalry with the Count, the fairy tale love story, all of it is an exaggeration. Without such dissonant elements as the classic rock sountrack, I don't think the movie would have succeeded. Silly things like that loosen up the audience and allow a movie to tell its story in its own way.
Compare it to Wayne's World 2, which had such dissonant elements as talking to the camera, multiple endings, an inexplicable room full of training ninjas, and the Bohemian Rhapsody. The movie was 67% filler, but most people I know loved it. That filler made us care about the characters enough to pay attention to the content. And in contrast, A Knight's Tale has far less filler.
That being said, I'd give the movie three stars. It's not probably going to make any critic's best-of lists, and I think some of the exaggerations might have gone a bit too far. I especially share Katz's sentiments about the love interest. But as long as you try not to think of it as a teen movie, you'll probably enjoy it.
"So, if the Matrix GPFs, you die in real life?" "The body cannot live without the mind, the high memory manager, and the system tray."
If the aurora borealis can make it to Arizona, anything is possible.
But this project goes to show us that we don't have to be designing set-top boxes to create something new for Linux. For example, I'd like a Linux version that boots from CD and serves as a front-end for MAME, that might be suitable for a PC installed inside an arcade cabinet. Perhaps it would run on a Dreamcast, too. Perhaps a whole new home-brew set-top box industry can begin.
While it is a shame that these machines are gathering dust in thrift stores in America, the truth is that almost nobody would know how to put one to really good use. As word processors, they're adequate as long as an 80-column dot-matrix printouts are adequate. As spreadsheet calculators, they're archaic and less intuitive than programs like Microsoft Excel. And, generally, in the workplace, if you find someone who can use a computer without a mouse, that person is worth enough money that you can as easily buy an Intel or Apple machine as hire them. The appropriate software for a given job might exist somewhere, but unless you've grown up reading Antic magazine and know all the websites and own an APE cable, good luck finding it. Though, at games, they rock as much as ever; cartridges don't bit-rot like disks do.
The Commodore 64 has done slightly better for itself, as at least it has GEOS, which supports mouse input and WYSIWYG sorts of applications. In that regard, though, even an original 1984 Macintosh is superior. In fact, an old Mac is perfect for a lot of modest tasks, because it has the GUI interface and WYSIWYG support that represents what people expect from computers. And the necessary software often does exist, even if it is outdated and hard to find nowadays. It will suffice, as long as one does not raise the question of the Internet.
The obsolescence of 8-bit computers is not a technological one; it is a cultural one. It is not that we need a faster computer to do the same things; we need a faster computer for the latest killer app. We needed to upgrade so that we could do desktop publishing, gaming, graphs, spell checking, the Internet, music sharing, or movie editing.
The exception, of course, is when you upgrade because the latest version of your favorite Microsoft program is slower than the last one, for some reason.
This is why there's so much focus on surgery and computer-aided design, and not on entertainment. Look at www.3dmedia.com's website; all the news stories are talking about heart surgery. They're not talking about virtual lectures, where an auditorium full of students can watch a professor who isn't there. They're not talking about holographic user interfaces. And they're certainly not talking about ViRTüAL pr0n.
In fact, neither their website, nor their people, use the term "hologram" to refer to this technology. That's because real holography is limited to those CD-colored printed holograms. Those are traditionally created in a process slightly similar to photography, and are so commonplace as to be used as counterfeit protection on credit cards and drivers licenses today. Even in the late 80's, I ate Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cereal out of a box with a hologram printed on it. I also saw a TV news story once where they printed holograms on chocolates.
Then, I went to a LAN party, and saw all the 20/20 people doing Windows at 1600x1200, on 15-inch monitors, and complaining that "It starts to get a little blurry on my monitor when I try that..." Then I tried installing Linux and X-Windows on my own machine, and found that X-Windows was meant to never ever NEVER run in 640x480, because all the applications I found seemed to be designed for 1024x768 -- even though they had 7-pixel-high fonts.
This new era of high-resolution displays struck fear into my heart, that in ten years all computer applications will run at 3000x2000 resolution, with 10-pixel-high fonts. And do you seriously believe that people won't design web pages to be "best viewed at 5000x4000"? Or that they aren't already?
But, in the short term, while a 640x480 or 800x600 large-fonts display is still a realistic option, a display like that might actually be a good thing. See, most LCD screens only work at a certain resolution -- 800x600, 1024x768, etc. If you try to decrease the resolution, you get either a big black border of wasted space, or you get random patterns of thick and thin pixel rows and columns. Either way, it's ugly. But if you start at 3000x2000, it becomes less ugly, because you're not alternating single rows and double rows of pixels anymore; you're alternating quadruple and quintuple rows of pixels. This would be good, not just for me, but for gamers who might want to play different games at different resolutions. Starcraft, for example, still plays only at 640x480 if I'm not mistaken.
Of course, the best option would be if people designed everything to be actually scalable for a change. MS Windows has some support for scalability; you can set 800x600 for "Small Fonts" or "Large Fonts" and it works fine with most, but not all, apps. Other objects change size too, such as icons. Bitmaps, however, will always be bitmaps, and that affects web pages. Have you ever played Sissyfight? A 200-pixel-high window, but 6-pixel-high fonts abound. Or Pixeltime -- only usable because the pics can be zoomed and the text is largely inconsequential. Hopefully, when people think in inches instead of pixels, we'll see fewer sites like those. I just hope the backlash doesn't create pages that say "Optimized for a 22-inch display," though such a thing would better expose the inherent arrogance of such a design choice.
Now, I imagine some of you are drooling over this display for the reason my friends always give for their insanely-high resolution: "Just think of how many more windows I can have open at once!" Of course, after a certain point, it would be easier on the eyes and wallet to just use two displays. Break that down into cost-per-pixel, cost-per-square-inch, etc. Perhaps dual displays might even have organizational advantages: "The 17-inch display is for code, the 15-inch display is for man pages and instant messages."
Of course, none of this applies to desktop publishing, where the situation demands something as close to paper as humanly possible. Or video production, in which having a pixel-perfect HDTV display window would be very useful. But for mortals, well, we'll just see whether we use this power for good or evil.