Aren't the Pentium pipelines all inside of the same integer unit? The EE's vector processesors are separate units entirely, not just pipelines inside of a unit.
Iridium has to be one of the most expensive communication flops in modern history. The idea was sound, it would be pretty cool to make a telephone call from anywhere on the planet, if it was affordable. I think Iridium could have played things a little better, theres not enough world travelers that can't use local telcoms to keep in touch. I think what they should have done is created an Iridium consortium of several countries with lots of land area but without a dependible telcom infrastructure. These countries could use Iridium as a quasi-nationalized telcom in return for the countries giving some cash to the company. Places like China could suddenly have an effective and pre-existing telephone infrastructure by merely paying a membership fee. Iridium could have easily paid for their satillites and been able to lower the connection fees for their damn phones. By the second satillite generation the Iridium phones would have been as cheap as PCS phones with a service that was only slightly higher.
People deciding to travel in the wildnerness alone often don't come back. Anyone who's even been on a day hike knows to never go out alone. If she hasn't had any wilderness survival training and isn't going with someone who has you might want to have her write up a will before she leaves. I would suggest for a communications medium she get herself a HAM radio license in the US and pick up a good handheld unit. She can DX signals off the ionosphere pretty well right now and could probably get good range of lower frequencies. A good radio will be a few hundred bucks but it's worth it when you need it.
If you want to add alot of speed to your system and are worried about disk I/O invest is ALOT of RAM. The fewer number of times the program hits the swap the less important the disk I/O is. You load everything once and let it fly from there. I run around with 384 megs of RAM and even Win 2k doesn't take swap hits very often. With BSD you would be set with 256 megs of RAM.
Buy the second best processor and a good motherboard. My Motherboard is an iWill Dual Slot 1. It has up to an 8.5x multiplier and up to a 133mhz bus speed. With a small adapter card I can pick up Coppermines and stick them in this puppy (along with new memory). Right now I've got a single P3 (Katmai) 500 and plan to get a second in July. I CAN with a little work have dual Ghz Cumines if I could afford it. Dual processors is definitely cooler than school because if your system is too slow with only a single processor, two doubles your processing power for a much lower cost than a faster processor. The Abit BP6 would be a good Coppermine board AFAIK since it's got the dual Socket 370s.
Shielding gravitons with photons? First of all, all particles in the universe have SOME influnece of gravity and gravity can influence them in some way. Secondly gravitons have never ever ever been observed or proved with any real scrutiny, they're akin to WIMPs (weakly interacting massive particles) in that they are ideas and not much else. Tp null out gravity (in a way that has been proven) is to use two very large masses. If you're interested in the subject pick up a book on LaGrange's theorems. Maybe I should send this guy a copy...
Put those grad students to work! Yah whipping boys yah! If you think a Uni is the only place where you see technical innovation take a gander at Lucent or IBM (IBM moreso before they went with research-only-profitable-stuff). Corporations that can make billions of dollars developing the technical stuff for the Net will because it will make them money. Alot of good ideas HAVE come out of universities but most of those are only ideas, they aren't really hammered out until a corporation adopts said technology. In case anyone forgets their history, Unix came out of Bell Labs (AT*T) but the gub'ment said they couldn't develop computer systems so they gave the code to the Universities and sold it to various corporations but did continue to develop their own version (you may know it as System V). As long as AT&T didn't market it the gub'ment left them alone.
Nice page you've got there, a real asthetic sense behind it all. You don't seem to be interested in publishing as an art form. I can't think of anyone who draws or paints in Braille, it is unfortunate some people lack the sense of sight but that doesn't mean I need to cater to them all of the time, especially in publishing design. Do you bitch at magazines for printing pictures on their pages that blind people can't see? What about CDs, are you boycotting them because a deaf guy isn't going to be able to listen to them so no one else ought to? Being as blatently ignorant I doubt you can grasp the concept of HTML, it was NOT designed for publish. HTML was designed to present and organize text. Because of it's simple rendering requirements it became popular and easy to use on just about any terminal. Go blow your rant out your ass.
Wow, I remember the web looking akin to Yahoo!, very few if any graphics and just really basic HTML script. There wasn't a great deal of styling but that was alright because people for the most part designed pages well. Now pages take several minutes to load on a 28.8 modem. I designed my site for small pipe connections. Before the SSI all the pages or only about 6KB with a 27KB title picture (yeah it'd be smaller if it were a GIF). The actual size of the page depends entirely on how lazy I've been that day/week/month. It's tough now to make pages that can be viewed well in every different browser and OS. All of the HTML except for the very small amount of scripting is all standards compliant. I don't bother with making it fully compliant with every browser because the lack of the scripted effect won't change the look or layout of my page. Web design right now is going through the same birth pangs that desktop publishing went through when we were first able to change the font and layout of a page. Some people go ape shit with fonts, colours, and images until their page is unreadable. Others go for an austere look that doesn't convey a sense of creativeness. Then of course is the medium range that isn't either of the extremes. What I would like to see something like PostScript for the web. HTML is being extended past the point of its usefulness as a publishing form. Remember HTML was originally designed for indexing large numbers of files in an archive, not driving sites like MSNBC. Whenever I do any sort of publishing I export it to a PDF (gotta love PDF) so none of my formatting or design is lost. This is mostly for my benefit, I'll take docs down to Kinkos to borrow their laser printers and I don't want to mess with the incompatibilities of word processors. Wanting a PS-ish language for the web is asking a bit much, afterall HTML is incredibly easy to render (hence it's initial popularity) but I think something new IS needed.
I think it's cool for any company to port their games to multiple OSes. What I would like to see is a single CD with multiple binaries on it. Games could easily use the same media files and such and only need different binaries for each different OS. Take for example Quake 3, the three binaries are written specifically for each OS but the game's media files are all basically the same. CDs are pretty large things and could easily store the necessary files to have multiple binaries, if the game had a good deal of media developers could package an installation CD with all the binaries and then have different CDs with just media on them. I figure this would save game producers a penny or two as they would be only physically producing a single CD that would be purchased by everyone.
This isn't bundling. Netpliance manufactuers the hardware and provides the internet service all as part of the same product. They are not letting someone else sell their product while they provide the OS or something with it. The i-Opener and online service are all part of the deal, your cable company doesn't sell you cable boxes without them providing cable to your house.
Darwin will be ported, as for the rest of OS X? I doubt it. As many other have pointed out there is a driver problem. Apple would need to spend beaucoup cash writing at least generic drivers for the plethora of PC hardware lying around. Sure there is alot of non-Apple hardware you can stick in a Power Mac but then again, Apple doesn't write drivers for these things. I'm not even really sure anyone would use OS X on an x86 system. I also don't think Apple had portability in mind when they decided to use the Mach kernel for OS X, rather they chose a Unix kernel they owned that was stable and powerful.
I had commercials on television and radio generally but the dot com commercials I hate even more. I know how these guys feel. Some of the most annoying commercials are dot coms second only to the Warehouse music commercials with the people singing out of tune. South side California probably isn't as bad but we've still got our load of dot com billboards. I'm making a blowitoutyourass.com t-shirt as I type. You're going to moderate this down.
Will MPPC chips become commodity in the next year? One can hope so. I'm a big fan of the PPC architecture, I'd love to see it become a little more widespread. It would be nice to click through buycomp.com and see MPPC 750 and 7400's along with motherboards for them. I think a great use for G3/4 MPPC chips on Linux (or just about any other free Unix) would be media production. High power graphic workstations are getting more commong but they are still high priced pieces of equipment, the media companies have just now been able to afford them in larger numbers due to their relative success. The free Unicies make a real good bed for media to come visit. Open sourced kernels lend themselves to a good deal of optimization which will result in faster system performance in an area where time is money. I don't know if Linux is mature enough yet but FreeBSD on a render-farm of G4s would kick some ass, like the one from The Matrix but larger (and on MPPC 7400's).
The ATi hardware isn't locked down or anything. ATi Provides VERY good colour control which many publishers and graphic arts people adore, these people also adore their Macs. The G4 has a 2x AGP slot that will work with any AGP video card, providing the video card has Mac drivers and extensions. By September when alot of the new video chipsets are out there will almost certainly be Mac versions of the hardware, these only require a different ROM and drivers.
posters have already answered the question about what a Unix really is (it has much to do with POSIX compliance) but I'm wondering something. From what I remember, either correctly or incorrectly, NT was based off of VMS. When MS decided to slap the GUI onto it around 3.x it became a good deal more like the NT of today. NT 3.51 was the first fully 32-bit MS platform IIRC. If I'm not having a neurological meltdown wouldn't this allow NT to trace its roots somewhere back to a true Unix? I'm not trying to advocate NT, I'm just wondering if I'm full of shite. A real server OS doesn't need a GUI. Speaking of which...would Mac OS X be considered a true Unix (I'm not sure if Darwin passes on the POSIX stuff or not)?
I want a Zero 1 personally, or maybe a Talgeese. Geez, the fun I could have with a Gundam. The idea of human augmentation is a very good one, a single platoon could have the fighting capability of an infantry battalion. The drawbacks to more technological solutions are that a single soldier will cost millions of dollars to train and outfit. IIRC and M-16A1 (the front-line assult rifle of the US military) costs close to 16 thousand dollars per unit. How much would a basic exoskeleton cost? If a single soldier costs 100 million dollars they aren't going to use them. For 100 million dollars they could outfit several companies worth of standard foot infantry. Would a single exo-soldier be equivilent to a company of foot infantry? I doubt it, a mobile exoskeleton couldn't be too heavily armoured even with Chobham armour. A well places RPG or AT-4 would send one soldier and 100 million dollars worth of exoskeleton to the scrap heap.
my buddy but I think I ought to defend this innocent piece of hardware. I wouldn't expect MS to port the craptacular 95 kernel to this puppy, I think they're going to move CE onto it with some enhancements gleaned from NT. 1. Stop complaining about Microsoft not optimizing its code libraries, people who write REAL games are going to use their own stuff. 2. The hardware is most likely NOT going to be a problem. nVidia is damn good at the graphics processor stuff, I bet the chipset in there will be a modified GeForce processor. With stuff specifically written for the GeForce the T&L among other things till be done on the GPU, this means the processor doesn't have to handle the really intense graphical stuff. My guess is that as many of a game's functions as possible will be done with full hardware acceleration so the processing gets distributed to the stuff which does it best. 3. Another guess will be that MS is going to try to revitalize WebTV with the X-Box. The MSN and WebTV infrastructure already exists, this will just put a much more powerful front-end on it.
If you notice, the PSX has a "proprietary video output" meaning you buy the specific adapter for your television. If the X-Box is similar in this respect you'll be able to plug it into just about anything.
The stuff you're proposing would be VERY expensive. The TiVo itself is damn expensive, the only way it's managable is they produce it in bulk. To do the compression with a reasonable quality/size rate you'd need an MPEG2 compressor, find a free one.
My friend just got a DirectTV dish and she can get local stations for 6$ a month. If you can get the same thing I say satillite is the way to go, it beats the pants off of analog cable.
The most likely source of the extraterrstrial He-3 isn't beyond our solar system, more to the center of it. The Sun produces lots of He-3 and He-4 which flies out of the chromosphere, we call this the solar wind. AFAIK buckyballs form naturally when you flash-boil carbon (something that would be happening in lots of places in the solar system due to the heat of formation of the early solar system). During this time of the buckyball formation He would get itself trapped in the middle of these molecules. I highly doubt few if any of our atmospheric gases arrived by asteroid. Some of it would have been collected from the acretion disk and some would have been formed in chemical reactions from high energy particles (alpha particles and high energy photons) whacking into the surface of the Earth. Probably in the next two centuries He-3 will end up causing a Helium Rush to the moon. He-3 is VERY nice for fusion reactions and is also very useful for cooling things to very low temperatures, things like superconductors.
You've never come close to being killed by some asshole on a cell phone. I came off a light one day and some jerk ran the red and sped right in front of me. He was wearing a shirt and tie with a cell phone on his ear and looking over in his passenger seat at something (papers I suppose). Had I gotten off the light faster I would have had a Lexus symbol embedded into my skull. Lets analyze the phrase "watching a DVD". You are "watching" which is defined as paying attention to. What are you watching? A DVD movie in the dash of your car. Now correct me if I'm wrong but it is generally good form to "watch" the road in front of you rather than your dashboard. I would assume one wants to watch the area in front of your car being that the dangerous things are out there and not on the DVD screen. Geeks like gadgets, not being crippled from car accidents.
So many people on here are bitching about Qt. Qt (I find personally) is much better than GTK. I this this move by Trolltech is a very good idea. Removing Qt's dependancy on X would make it MUCH easier to port. It would be nice to be able to port *nix apps directly to other OSes GUI and all. I would also think it would be a boon to people wanting to put together embedded systems running Linux but don't have the cash to build their own GUI engine along with a graphics library. I don't like X anyways, why the heck does my display need to be networked? I don't ever use a remote client because my connection isn't nearly fast enough.
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Aren't the Pentium pipelines all inside of the same integer unit? The EE's vector processesors are separate units entirely, not just pipelines inside of a unit.
Iridium has to be one of the most expensive communication flops in modern history. The idea was sound, it would be pretty cool to make a telephone call from anywhere on the planet, if it was affordable. I think Iridium could have played things a little better, theres not enough world travelers that can't use local telcoms to keep in touch. I think what they should have done is created an Iridium consortium of several countries with lots of land area but without a dependible telcom infrastructure. These countries could use Iridium as a quasi-nationalized telcom in return for the countries giving some cash to the company. Places like China could suddenly have an effective and pre-existing telephone infrastructure by merely paying a membership fee. Iridium could have easily paid for their satillites and been able to lower the connection fees for their damn phones. By the second satillite generation the Iridium phones would have been as cheap as PCS phones with a service that was only slightly higher.
People deciding to travel in the wildnerness alone often don't come back. Anyone who's even been on a day hike knows to never go out alone. If she hasn't had any wilderness survival training and isn't going with someone who has you might want to have her write up a will before she leaves. I would suggest for a communications medium she get herself a HAM radio license in the US and pick up a good handheld unit. She can DX signals off the ionosphere pretty well right now and could probably get good range of lower frequencies. A good radio will be a few hundred bucks but it's worth it when you need it.
If you want to add alot of speed to your system and are worried about disk I/O invest is ALOT of RAM. The fewer number of times the program hits the swap the less important the disk I/O is. You load everything once and let it fly from there. I run around with 384 megs of RAM and even Win 2k doesn't take swap hits very often. With BSD you would be set with 256 megs of RAM.
Buy the second best processor and a good motherboard. My Motherboard is an iWill Dual Slot 1. It has up to an 8.5x multiplier and up to a 133mhz bus speed. With a small adapter card I can pick up Coppermines and stick them in this puppy (along with new memory). Right now I've got a single P3 (Katmai) 500 and plan to get a second in July. I CAN with a little work have dual Ghz Cumines if I could afford it. Dual processors is definitely cooler than school because if your system is too slow with only a single processor, two doubles your processing power for a much lower cost than a faster processor. The Abit BP6 would be a good Coppermine board AFAIK since it's got the dual Socket 370s.
Dude, Intel chips are named after rivers. I doubt they named it after the Coppermine to fool dumbsh*ts into thinking it used copper interconnects.
Shielding gravitons with photons? First of all, all particles in the universe have SOME influnece of gravity and gravity can influence them in some way. Secondly gravitons have never ever ever been observed or proved with any real scrutiny, they're akin to WIMPs (weakly interacting massive particles) in that they are ideas and not much else. Tp null out gravity (in a way that has been proven) is to use two very large masses. If you're interested in the subject pick up a book on LaGrange's theorems. Maybe I should send this guy a copy...
Put those grad students to work! Yah whipping boys yah! If you think a Uni is the only place where you see technical innovation take a gander at Lucent or IBM (IBM moreso before they went with research-only-profitable-stuff). Corporations that can make billions of dollars developing the technical stuff for the Net will because it will make them money. Alot of good ideas HAVE come out of universities but most of those are only ideas, they aren't really hammered out until a corporation adopts said technology. In case anyone forgets their history, Unix came out of Bell Labs (AT*T) but the gub'ment said they couldn't develop computer systems so they gave the code to the Universities and sold it to various corporations but did continue to develop their own version (you may know it as System V). As long as AT&T didn't market it the gub'ment left them alone.
Nice page you've got there, a real asthetic sense behind it all. You don't seem to be interested in publishing as an art form. I can't think of anyone who draws or paints in Braille, it is unfortunate some people lack the sense of sight but that doesn't mean I need to cater to them all of the time, especially in publishing design. Do you bitch at magazines for printing pictures on their pages that blind people can't see? What about CDs, are you boycotting them because a deaf guy isn't going to be able to listen to them so no one else ought to? Being as blatently ignorant I doubt you can grasp the concept of HTML, it was NOT designed for publish. HTML was designed to present and organize text. Because of it's simple rendering requirements it became popular and easy to use on just about any terminal. Go blow your rant out your ass.
Wow, I remember the web looking akin to Yahoo!, very few if any graphics and just really basic HTML script. There wasn't a great deal of styling but that was alright because people for the most part designed pages well. Now pages take several minutes to load on a 28.8 modem. I designed my site for small pipe connections. Before the SSI all the pages or only about 6KB with a 27KB title picture (yeah it'd be smaller if it were a GIF). The actual size of the page depends entirely on how lazy I've been that day/week/month. It's tough now to make pages that can be viewed well in every different browser and OS. All of the HTML except for the very small amount of scripting is all standards compliant. I don't bother with making it fully compliant with every browser because the lack of the scripted effect won't change the look or layout of my page.
Web design right now is going through the same birth pangs that desktop publishing went through when we were first able to change the font and layout of a page. Some people go ape shit with fonts, colours, and images until their page is unreadable. Others go for an austere look that doesn't convey a sense of creativeness. Then of course is the medium range that isn't either of the extremes. What I would like to see something like PostScript for the web. HTML is being extended past the point of its usefulness as a publishing form. Remember HTML was originally designed for indexing large numbers of files in an archive, not driving sites like MSNBC. Whenever I do any sort of publishing I export it to a PDF (gotta love PDF) so none of my formatting or design is lost. This is mostly for my benefit, I'll take docs down to Kinkos to borrow their laser printers and I don't want to mess with the incompatibilities of word processors. Wanting a PS-ish language for the web is asking a bit much, afterall HTML is incredibly easy to render (hence it's initial popularity) but I think something new IS needed.
I think it's cool for any company to port their games to multiple OSes. What I would like to see is a single CD with multiple binaries on it. Games could easily use the same media files and such and only need different binaries for each different OS. Take for example Quake 3, the three binaries are written specifically for each OS but the game's media files are all basically the same. CDs are pretty large things and could easily store the necessary files to have multiple binaries, if the game had a good deal of media developers could package an installation CD with all the binaries and then have different CDs with just media on them. I figure this would save game producers a penny or two as they would be only physically producing a single CD that would be purchased by everyone.
This isn't bundling. Netpliance manufactuers the hardware and provides the internet service all as part of the same product. They are not letting someone else sell their product while they provide the OS or something with it. The i-Opener and online service are all part of the deal, your cable company doesn't sell you cable boxes without them providing cable to your house.
Darwin will be ported, as for the rest of OS X? I doubt it. As many other have pointed out there is a driver problem. Apple would need to spend beaucoup cash writing at least generic drivers for the plethora of PC hardware lying around. Sure there is alot of non-Apple hardware you can stick in a Power Mac but then again, Apple doesn't write drivers for these things. I'm not even really sure anyone would use OS X on an x86 system. I also don't think Apple had portability in mind when they decided to use the Mach kernel for OS X, rather they chose a Unix kernel they owned that was stable and powerful.
I had commercials on television and radio generally but the dot com commercials I hate even more. I know how these guys feel. Some of the most annoying commercials are dot coms second only to the Warehouse music commercials with the people singing out of tune. South side California probably isn't as bad but we've still got our load of dot com billboards. I'm making a blowitoutyourass.com t-shirt as I type. You're going to moderate this down.
Will MPPC chips become commodity in the next year? One can hope so. I'm a big fan of the PPC architecture, I'd love to see it become a little more widespread. It would be nice to click through buycomp.com and see MPPC 750 and 7400's along with motherboards for them. I think a great use for G3/4 MPPC chips on Linux (or just about any other free Unix) would be media production. High power graphic workstations are getting more commong but they are still high priced pieces of equipment, the media companies have just now been able to afford them in larger numbers due to their relative success. The free Unicies make a real good bed for media to come visit. Open sourced kernels lend themselves to a good deal of optimization which will result in faster system performance in an area where time is money. I don't know if Linux is mature enough yet but FreeBSD on a render-farm of G4s would kick some ass, like the one from The Matrix but larger (and on MPPC 7400's).
The ATi hardware isn't locked down or anything. ATi Provides VERY good colour control which many publishers and graphic arts people adore, these people also adore their Macs. The G4 has a 2x AGP slot that will work with any AGP video card, providing the video card has Mac drivers and extensions. By September when alot of the new video chipsets are out there will almost certainly be Mac versions of the hardware, these only require a different ROM and drivers.
posters have already answered the question about what a Unix really is (it has much to do with POSIX compliance) but I'm wondering something. From what I remember, either correctly or incorrectly, NT was based off of VMS. When MS decided to slap the GUI onto it around 3.x it became a good deal more like the NT of today. NT 3.51 was the first fully 32-bit MS platform IIRC. If I'm not having a neurological meltdown wouldn't this allow NT to trace its roots somewhere back to a true Unix? I'm not trying to advocate NT, I'm just wondering if I'm full of shite. A real server OS doesn't need a GUI. Speaking of which...would Mac OS X be considered a true Unix (I'm not sure if Darwin passes on the POSIX stuff or not)?
I want a Zero 1 personally, or maybe a Talgeese. Geez, the fun I could have with a Gundam. The idea of human augmentation is a very good one, a single platoon could have the fighting capability of an infantry battalion. The drawbacks to more technological solutions are that a single soldier will cost millions of dollars to train and outfit. IIRC and M-16A1 (the front-line assult rifle of the US military) costs close to 16 thousand dollars per unit. How much would a basic exoskeleton cost? If a single soldier costs 100 million dollars they aren't going to use them. For 100 million dollars they could outfit several companies worth of standard foot infantry. Would a single exo-soldier be equivilent to a company of foot infantry? I doubt it, a mobile exoskeleton couldn't be too heavily armoured even with Chobham armour. A well places RPG or AT-4 would send one soldier and 100 million dollars worth of exoskeleton to the scrap heap.
my buddy but I think I ought to defend this innocent piece of hardware. I wouldn't expect MS to port the craptacular 95 kernel to this puppy, I think they're going to move CE onto it with some enhancements gleaned from NT.
1. Stop complaining about Microsoft not optimizing its code libraries, people who write REAL games are going to use their own stuff.
2. The hardware is most likely NOT going to be a problem. nVidia is damn good at the graphics processor stuff, I bet the chipset in there will be a modified GeForce processor. With stuff specifically written for the GeForce the T&L among other things till be done on the GPU, this means the processor doesn't have to handle the really intense graphical stuff. My guess is that as many of a game's functions as possible will be done with full hardware acceleration so the processing gets distributed to the stuff which does it best.
3. Another guess will be that MS is going to try to revitalize WebTV with the X-Box. The MSN and WebTV infrastructure already exists, this will just put a much more powerful front-end on it.
If you notice, the PSX has a "proprietary video output" meaning you buy the specific adapter for your television. If the X-Box is similar in this respect you'll be able to plug it into just about anything.
The stuff you're proposing would be VERY expensive. The TiVo itself is damn expensive, the only way it's managable is they produce it in bulk. To do the compression with a reasonable quality/size rate you'd need an MPEG2 compressor, find a free one.
My friend just got a DirectTV dish and she can get local stations for 6$ a month. If you can get the same thing I say satillite is the way to go, it beats the pants off of analog cable.
The most likely source of the extraterrstrial He-3 isn't beyond our solar system, more to the center of it. The Sun produces lots of He-3 and He-4 which flies out of the chromosphere, we call this the solar wind. AFAIK buckyballs form naturally when you flash-boil carbon (something that would be happening in lots of places in the solar system due to the heat of formation of the early solar system). During this time of the buckyball formation He would get itself trapped in the middle of these molecules. I highly doubt few if any of our atmospheric gases arrived by asteroid. Some of it would have been collected from the acretion disk and some would have been formed in chemical reactions from high energy particles (alpha particles and high energy photons) whacking into the surface of the Earth. Probably in the next two centuries He-3 will end up causing a Helium Rush to the moon. He-3 is VERY nice for fusion reactions and is also very useful for cooling things to very low temperatures, things like superconductors.
You've never come close to being killed by some asshole on a cell phone. I came off a light one day and some jerk ran the red and sped right in front of me. He was wearing a shirt and tie with a cell phone on his ear and looking over in his passenger seat at something (papers I suppose). Had I gotten off the light faster I would have had a Lexus symbol embedded into my skull. Lets analyze the phrase "watching a DVD". You are "watching" which is defined as paying attention to. What are you watching? A DVD movie in the dash of your car. Now correct me if I'm wrong but it is generally good form to "watch" the road in front of you rather than your dashboard. I would assume one wants to watch the area in front of your car being that the dangerous things are out there and not on the DVD screen. Geeks like gadgets, not being crippled from car accidents.
So many people on here are bitching about Qt. Qt (I find personally) is much better than GTK. I this this move by Trolltech is a very good idea. Removing Qt's dependancy on X would make it MUCH easier to port. It would be nice to be able to port *nix apps directly to other OSes GUI and all. I would also think it would be a boon to people wanting to put together embedded systems running Linux but don't have the cash to build their own GUI engine along with a graphics library. I don't like X anyways, why the heck does my display need to be networked? I don't ever use a remote client because my connection isn't nearly fast enough.