I think it's geared to stop when enough change falls out of your pockets.
Isn't a robocoaster that little drink tray on wheels?
Howabout the cheap late-night TV movie where the arm remembers its humble beginnings as a Car Welder? Only Dumpy the robotic trash can knows the secret code to switch it back to "fun ride" mode!
Howabout we get two of these things in the same room and have'em wrassle!
Seriously, with a fan, some heat guns, a 270deg projector and a bunch of other tricks, this could be a neat ride.
Next Up: A computer that merely pumps sensory information into your head. Get your robo-jack installed today!
Tangent: I think we're seeing Free Software catch up because of a few reasons. One of the biggest is that the innovation around the internet is drying up. Everything that could be done (easily) has been done. Nobody wants a Big Investment for websites anymore without a cash model.
So, MS is a "value-added" portion of the industry. They take ideas and *sell* them as more convenient and supportable, but the ideas are free to begin with.
With the death of new (useful) ideas, MS has to race against the free world for adding value and making their own ideas:.NET, DRM, portable nonsense, Xbox
You'll see MS with their hand in everything just to see what sticks (remember MSWallet?). Now we simply have beat this race to prove them a plent of programmers is way smarter than the MS payroll. Not hard.
It seems there are a lot of opinions floating around the responses about how good/bad the book/author is. What I'm sensing is social impact, where posters are revealing more about themselves than the author. I know none of your authority on book review or writing skills, so I can't feel anything is objective here.
Okay, with that heady intro, that's what a MC book feels like to me: A study on the personal reactions to an event in a few character studies, rather than the sweeping impact on a society or world. Something in reality is altered, pulled from the pile of sci-fi-tech ideas that are culturally new, and a bunch of characters play the "how'd you do that?", "what happens if?", "is this goes haywire then don't you think..." The reader is expected (and usually does) fall into one of the book's character studies for reactions. Then, it goes haywire, and the rush to save the state occurs. Then, he wraps it all up and puts said emergency back on the shelf.
For me, a novel has to have a lot less said about reactions, and just present events and characters moving through the world. I may agree or disagree with any number of them. I mean, how many of you say something like "oh! thats very stupid Mr Character!" when reading his stuff? But the events have to world-altering, in a permanent way, to seem real to me.
For example, wouldn't it make a much more compelling read to take the Andromeda Strain concept and rewrite it like a history of the AIDS pandemic? Then, we'd be fighting time for a cure, studying the social and political viewpoints (and mis-educations), and really sweep through the planet. To me, this is one scary story. But we all know the details in that one, so fiction has to struggle to be stranger...
True enough! However, I am still in awe of the complexity of the machine to present a programer with a simple interface to build applications.
I've worked on IBM (4381/9370) with Rexx, COBOL and even RPG. These languages are clunky! They provide shite abstraction of physical layers to the logical, require arcane knowledge of storage mediums and format, and a slew of other things geeky but unnecessary in modern languages.
Ask anyone at AOL what it's like to find people to scratch-up a system with these bare boxes.
Now with that said, everyone knows C, Java, and all the fun thigns in the *nix world are on partitions (pardon the mis-use of the term) on these boxes. So why isn't everyone using one?
Because they cost you a zillion bucks (say it with me..."one ZILLLLYON dullors"). You can't escape it with monolithic design from a single vendor (ahem MS).
Essentially, people found out that systems could be built with other methods that allowed for fault tolerance, distributed processing, cheap hardware, and common tools. Support personnel stop having retirement parties, parts arrived through normal aquisition methods, and that quarterly ransom to IBM went down.
I don't think keeping a mainframe around it the only solution to 100.00% uptime systems. Furby Clusters are nowhere near the solution either, but perhaps designing the solution to a business problem differently could lend itself to a Better Way(tm). Who designs systems to run through a 10-million line VSAM file set 4 times nightly anymore?
One only has to read the latest marketing material from Oracle, Sun, HP, etc. to know that uptime is part of the game, and yes throughput as well, but SYSTEM DESIGN determines what's important.
mug
Re:About this concept car
on
239 MPG Car
·
· Score: 1
True. In fact, when thinking about this type of transportation, what separates converting society to support this infrastructure as compared to scooters and motorcycles?
As the race for fuel efficiency becomes mostly a "holier-than-thou" press release, these vehicles resemble shapes of cars and not much more. Remove the boot, shave weight everywhere, and tinker with the engine...It's much easier to start from a 2-wheeled vehicle. Plus, your upright position adds much more to the seen-and-be-seen factor which competes with SUVs in the US. "yes officer, I saw his face...he was mouthing..oohhh shiiiiii.."
Simply put, I think more people would appreciate the viability of a biogas scooter - we already have the infrastructure in large cites for these. Engine advancements are being applied to the worst possible designs - great for denting the environmental impact, terrible for adoption.
Most of the smart folks here will comment about Good Business Practices. As a concept, this one is flawed: AOL's membership is dwindling, and it's ability to enticing new users is limited as the general internet is really the goal for a growing number of people.
SO, this obviously looks like a piggy-back maneuver, not a public release of content. What everyone here already knows is that once digital, information leaks everywhere. Anything resembling a fence around it is surely to be a PITA to manage.
Example: I have AOL on broadband. I grab a movie and put it in the P2P until I see it's been downloaded a dozen times. Then I remove it from my library and try again. I'm one of 100 people doing this every week, for a few months. Hooray, useless content everywhere, then AOL's content pipe is shut down and TW is angry. End of story.
Now I have to be the one to break the ice at the Radio Shack Parties(TM). I've gotten quite a few good responses back when I ask for their address and phone number back.
"Comon over, and we can listen to my new clock radio!"
Now anybody here could scoff at the meager relative amount, or the fact that MS doesn't get a clue about gaming, or whatnot. I take this for what it is: Microsoft's Xbox is not going to ever be economically profitable.
Sure, they may capture the market, but consoling gaming is way too competative, and fast moving, to get swept by any single machine, IMHO. I believe this is simply news because MS is finding it tough to crack the market.
But let's combine the stories here, folks. We've seen the "all eyes on MS" comments from those involved in the anti-trust litigation. We have the new licensing scheme brewing in the pot, with poor suckers tasting the spoon now and then. Plus, we have the.NET, Palladium and LongHorn-now-LongAway initiatives.
I have no summation. Somebody tell me what this smells like altogether.. Errant direction-by-committee? Or is there a cohesive strategy?
Should we expect secure versions of Banking, Movies, Games and whatnot to be pouring through an xBox? Will they upgrade on push/demand via.NET components? Will the company split itself to streamline the most profitable sections and challenge the losing areas? Is Microsoft expecting to no longer make money with it's PC OS's?
Great comments, all. Mods have been dead on lately.
MS is pushing the wagon, remember that there are TONS of tiny tech companies (products/services) in this cart. It's very very big. BIG
Hollywood is dumping money to Congress to get permission and teeth to force this cart's direction.
What is the techie to do?
NOTHING. MS's licensing strategy shows how touchy its bread-n-butter income is about forced upgrades, subscription services and the like.
This won't work any more than AOL living 2 more years, or the "internet appliance" being useful, or WebTV garnering respect.
Palladium isn't going to fly. If it ever reaches the strip, it'll get up with a few people who are touting "WOW - I CAN DOWNLOAD MOVIES!"
Yawn. BFD. Palladium will simply be a different platform to exploit. Like a furby server. Can we rip movies off of it faster than Tivo-esque software grabbing my HBO?
This isn't outlawing Linux people. It's turning a junk box into a different junk box.
Hell, a lot of probably can't tell the difference between MP3 and CD.
Hell, most of the music we listen to isn't worth discerning over. You gonna buy the new system and pop in what? That "early years" B.B King album?
its not about sound quality first. its about musical presence. no matter what system is is, to see Sting live, buy a ticket. spending my money on the shows.
Gutting devices and mod'ing them is a part of life and innovation. Once you own an appliance, you own the guts too. Trying to stop the flow of Information That Wants To Be Free is niave.
Are we going to end up with a set of categories for appliances? Can Mod / Cannot Mod? Will I have to pay more for a dryer I want to hack to cook clothes for an extra 60 minutes? For an Xbox that I want to re-chip to play any copy from any source?
Hot rod your car; cut the annoying ringer out of the extra phone in the study; rip a few choice capacitors out of the TV (they make great joy-buzzers), etc.
I relaly don't see how this could be stopped. Stopping the info flow is silly, but thats all they can do.
How many of us are running machines with high-temp military/space grade chips? How often is the general public ripping CDs using a real-time OS/toolset?
There is some crossover, but this author doesn't understand hardware boundaries as they exist today. I don't buy the "propogation" theory either.
DRM will fail anyway, there are countless ways to hack a human interface, and digital content is too easily manipulated by the masses (the genie is out of the bottle). We here know this. Valenti will find this out after he pays for the tech industry to distribute his content securely and it still ends up shown free in our basements before box office release. More money to the servants of chicken little = us.
With any DRM, they fight not the spread of content but the spread of knowledge to manipulate content aka DeCSS. Can you imagine a day when acquiring and building a Linux bos from industrial parts (non-DRM components) is illegal, along with the knowledge of how and where to do this?
"Strange Days" and a handful of other thoughtcrime-esque movies portray such an environment. I don't see it being possible. Not without revoking a huge section of personal freedoms from people. Information wants to be free. Somebody needs to rebuild the model for rewarding the creation of information.
This technology has a bit to go to achieve commodity-level feasibility. However, its very promising. I would expect to see this in clubs, concerts, and tradeshows.
This isn't 3D. Its a flat image projected on a water-based screen.
The drawback continues to be the placement of a projection device and its medium (if not a wall). Here, you have a fog wall and a projection TV device. Until those two converge, we'll all still hope for those "Help Me Obi-Wan" shots.
Shouldn't there be a way to build a floating image from the interference of two separate light beams? Wherever the beams intersect would be brighter/changed. Hmm.. Maybe only good for vector displays.
This may be a simple case of equating new technology with waste, as opponents are apt to do. The truth is, we generate waste everywhere, doing everything.. I don't know of any effect from the waste that will cause governments to mandate producing less or recycling more. The US population seems to put up with any quality of air or water given them.
Eventually, someone must propose money-based incentives for production using waste materials. This is the only way to bootstrap such commerce. We had the aluminum can/glass/motor oil progress 20 years ago. It may be time for more, but who's picking up the bill?
Throw the phones in the garbage and solve the garbage problem.
Because of the increased power of CPUs through time, we SHOULD expect features of development environments to be expanded.
I'm in the camp that programming as a art should evolve to way beyond what we have today. GC may evolve to a more manageable version (defer/force intructions) but you can consider thick APIs and these features to be the norm in the future.
The business model to expect is The Show Is The Commercial...The Commercial Is The Show.
Imagine if advertisers simply paid for the Friends cast to drink Coke, eat Wheaties and wear Gap jeans. Logos everywhere...storylines about brands by name.
It's already been done. Shift it to moralizing and you have the anti-drug scandal that broke last year about plot line written just this way.
If you don't want to watch a commercial, turn your TV off.
A message from the other side: Life is fun and you won't miss it. Although I am the only one in the bar still giggling about the silly commercials that everyone else is bored of.
Killing The TV is just a slogan anymore. 12 years and going strong.
You may think this is a no-brainer, but if the viable source of income for TV producers is to "promise" a certain number of eyes watch your commercials, thats how they are priced. Otherwise, you'd be paying-per-channel of cable TV, which again is possibly a good idea...
With the corporations soon to be expecting a discount based on the market share/demogrpahic of owners of SB or Tivo-like devices, we'll see the budgets of TV constrained from their traditional sources. Of course, other sources will be built (look out for a tax bill).
So, the bottom line is the dollars are expeced out of the consumer's pockets somehow. If the ad rates drop and TV quality follow suit, will we watch less TV? I doubt it, although I hope so. If a tax-proposal fails for devices that manipulated recorded video, then perhaps we'll see everything sold through cable at higher rates. So, the cable bill goes up.
This will undoubtedly push the distribution faster into free methods: PTP video. But then again, this may positively impact broadband sales. Perhaps cable companies again here will reap the rewards (Telecomm cannot compete since there is too much infighting about open markets and DSL just cannot cut it long term).
So the eyes have it. Shows can be compressed to a cheap size (still huge by today's file sizes) and passed around. When the bandwidth is sold with an odometer-like billing model, we'll be here again, discussing the neighborhood radio networks and other private options.
Slashdot Mirror
I think it's geared to stop when enough change falls out of your pockets.
Isn't a robocoaster that little drink tray on wheels?
Howabout the cheap late-night TV movie where the arm remembers its humble beginnings as a Car Welder? Only Dumpy the robotic trash can knows the secret code to switch it back to "fun ride" mode!
Howabout we get two of these things in the same room and have'em wrassle!
Seriously, with a fan, some heat guns, a 270deg projector and a bunch of other tricks, this could be a neat ride.
Next Up: A computer that merely pumps sensory information into your head. Get your robo-jack installed today!
mug
Tangent:
.NET, DRM, portable nonsense, Xbox
I think we're seeing Free Software catch up because of a few reasons. One of the biggest is that the innovation around the internet is drying up. Everything that could be done (easily) has been done. Nobody wants a Big Investment for websites anymore without a cash model.
So, MS is a "value-added" portion of the industry. They take ideas and *sell* them as more convenient and supportable, but the ideas are free to begin with.
With the death of new (useful) ideas, MS has to race against the free world for adding value and making their own ideas:
You'll see MS with their hand in everything just to see what sticks (remember MSWallet?). Now we simply have beat this race to prove them a plent of programmers is way smarter than the MS payroll. Not hard.
mug
It seems there are a lot of opinions floating around the responses about how good/bad the book/author is. What I'm sensing is social impact, where posters are revealing more about themselves than the author. I know none of your authority on book review or writing skills, so I can't feel anything is objective here.
Okay, with that heady intro, that's what a MC book feels like to me: A study on the personal reactions to an event in a few character studies, rather than the sweeping impact on a society or world. Something in reality is altered, pulled from the pile of sci-fi-tech ideas that are culturally new, and a bunch of characters play the "how'd you do that?", "what happens if?", "is this goes haywire then don't you think..." The reader is expected (and usually does) fall into one of the book's character studies for reactions. Then, it goes haywire, and the rush to save the state occurs. Then, he wraps it all up and puts said emergency back on the shelf.
For me, a novel has to have a lot less said about reactions, and just present events and characters moving through the world. I may agree or disagree with any number of them. I mean, how many of you say something like "oh! thats very stupid Mr Character!" when reading his stuff? But the events have to world-altering, in a permanent way, to seem real to me.
For example, wouldn't it make a much more compelling read to take the Andromeda Strain concept and rewrite it like a history of the AIDS pandemic? Then, we'd be fighting time for a cure, studying the social and political viewpoints (and mis-educations), and really sweep through the planet. To me, this is one scary story. But we all know the details in that one, so fiction has to struggle to be stranger...
mug
True enough! However, I am still in awe of the complexity of the machine to present a programer with a simple interface to build applications.
I've worked on IBM (4381/9370) with Rexx, COBOL and even RPG. These languages are clunky! They provide shite abstraction of physical layers to the logical, require arcane knowledge of storage mediums and format, and a slew of other things geeky but unnecessary in modern languages.
Ask anyone at AOL what it's like to find people to scratch-up a system with these bare boxes.
Now with that said, everyone knows C, Java, and all the fun thigns in the *nix world are on partitions (pardon the mis-use of the term) on these boxes. So why isn't everyone using one?
Because they cost you a zillion bucks (say it with me..."one ZILLLLYON dullors"). You can't escape it with monolithic design from a single vendor (ahem MS).
Essentially, people found out that systems could be built with other methods that allowed for fault tolerance, distributed processing, cheap hardware, and common tools. Support personnel stop having retirement parties, parts arrived through normal aquisition methods, and that quarterly ransom to IBM went down.
I don't think keeping a mainframe around it the only solution to 100.00% uptime systems. Furby Clusters are nowhere near the solution either, but perhaps designing the solution to a business problem differently could lend itself to a Better Way(tm). Who designs systems to run through a 10-million line VSAM file set 4 times nightly anymore?
One only has to read the latest marketing material from Oracle, Sun, HP, etc. to know that uptime is part of the game, and yes throughput as well, but SYSTEM DESIGN determines what's important.
mug
True. In fact, when thinking about this type of transportation, what separates converting society to support this infrastructure as compared to scooters and motorcycles?
As the race for fuel efficiency becomes mostly a "holier-than-thou" press release, these vehicles resemble shapes of cars and not much more. Remove the boot, shave weight everywhere, and tinker with the engine...It's much easier to start from a 2-wheeled vehicle. Plus, your upright position adds much more to the seen-and-be-seen factor which competes with SUVs in the US. "yes officer, I saw his face...he was mouthing..oohhh shiiiiii.."
Simply put, I think more people would appreciate the viability of a biogas scooter - we already have the infrastructure in large cites for these. Engine advancements are being applied to the worst possible designs - great for denting the environmental impact, terrible for adoption.
mug
Most of the smart folks here will comment about Good Business Practices. As a concept, this one is flawed: AOL's membership is dwindling, and it's ability to enticing new users is limited as the general internet is really the goal for a growing number of people.
SO, this obviously looks like a piggy-back maneuver, not a public release of content. What everyone here already knows is that once digital, information leaks everywhere. Anything resembling a fence around it is surely to be a PITA to manage.
Example: I have AOL on broadband. I grab a movie and put it in the P2P until I see it's been downloaded a dozen times. Then I remove it from my library and try again. I'm one of 100 people doing this every week, for a few months. Hooray, useless content everywhere, then AOL's content pipe is shut down and TW is angry. End of story.
Now I have to be the one to break the ice at the Radio Shack Parties(TM). I've gotten quite a few good responses back when I ask for their address and phone number back.
"Comon over, and we can listen to my new clock radio!"
Now anybody here could scoff at the meager relative amount, or the fact that MS doesn't get a clue about gaming, or whatnot. I take this for what it is: Microsoft's Xbox is not going to ever be economically profitable.
Sure, they may capture the market, but consoling gaming is way too competative, and fast moving, to get swept by any single machine, IMHO. I believe this is simply news because MS is finding it tough to crack the market.
But let's combine the stories here, folks. We've seen the "all eyes on MS" comments from those involved in the anti-trust litigation. We have the new licensing scheme brewing in the pot, with poor suckers tasting the spoon now and then. Plus, we have the
I have no summation. Somebody tell me what this smells like altogether.. Errant direction-by-committee? Or is there a cohesive strategy?
Should we expect secure versions of Banking, Movies, Games and whatnot to be pouring through an xBox? Will they upgrade on push/demand via
Oh the drama. Pass them chips.
Yes, this is a good idea. Let's explore it further:
- Wireless roaming P2P + standardized protocol.
- Artists consider publishing skills as important as playing their instruments
- Joe Rockstar finishes his mix and sends it out into the network directly. He asks for money.
- He gets none and goes back to work at the music store giving guitar lessons.
I'm a bit confused where the money will come from.
Great comments, all. Mods have been dead on lately.
MS is pushing the wagon, remember that there are TONS of tiny tech companies (products/services) in this cart. It's very very big. BIG
Hollywood is dumping money to Congress to get permission and teeth to force this cart's direction.
What is the techie to do?
NOTHING. MS's licensing strategy shows how touchy its bread-n-butter income is about forced upgrades, subscription services and the like.
This won't work any more than AOL living 2 more years, or the "internet appliance" being useful, or WebTV garnering respect.
Palladium isn't going to fly. If it ever reaches the strip, it'll get up with a few people who are touting "WOW - I CAN DOWNLOAD MOVIES!"
Yawn. BFD. Palladium will simply be a different platform to exploit. Like a furby server. Can we rip movies off of it faster than Tivo-esque software grabbing my HBO?
This isn't outlawing Linux people. It's turning a junk box into a different junk box.
Hell, a lot of probably can't tell the difference between MP3 and CD.
Hell, most of the music we listen to isn't worth discerning over. You gonna buy the new system and pop in what? That "early years" B.B King album?
its not about sound quality first. its about musical presence. no matter what system is is, to see Sting live, buy a ticket. spending my money on the shows.
Oh, great. So for the 99% of the population that doesn't listen to Pat Metheny, we get pop-rock at "better quality".
"Oh, I'll just pop this SACD into my bookshelf boombox and whisk off to music nirvana!"
Dude, remember that for most of us, our headphones primary material is tape.
Ya gotta be kidding me! They're still talking about moving sound on little plastic things??
Have any of you done the math? WAR-driving + PTP + digital sound = connectionless music transfers!
The house tranceives with the headset, the car, the neighbors.
Other pithy remarks:
"6 channels? dude, i can't afford to get more ears."
"BUY NOW! Better quality format of the same bad radio fodder!"
Um, dude. the TV is not going on after that.
FYI: I think that Xbox production has reached volume levels where the Cost Per Unit is no longer -$50 to MS.
Gutting devices and mod'ing them is a part of life and innovation. Once you own an appliance, you own the guts too. Trying to stop the flow of Information That Wants To Be Free is niave.
Are we going to end up with a set of categories for appliances? Can Mod / Cannot Mod? Will I have to pay more for a dryer I want to hack to cook clothes for an extra 60 minutes? For an Xbox that I want to re-chip to play any copy from any source?
Hot rod your car; cut the annoying ringer out of the extra phone in the study; rip a few choice capacitors out of the TV (they make great joy-buzzers), etc.
I relaly don't see how this could be stopped. Stopping the info flow is silly, but thats all they can do.
Yeah, spend the rest of your life listening to wavetable music. Wha?
How many of us are running machines with high-temp military/space grade chips? How often is the general public ripping CDs using a real-time OS/toolset?
There is some crossover, but this author doesn't understand hardware boundaries as they exist today. I don't buy the "propogation" theory either.
DRM will fail anyway, there are countless ways to hack a human interface, and digital content is too easily manipulated by the masses (the genie is out of the bottle). We here know this. Valenti will find this out after he pays for the tech industry to distribute his content securely and it still ends up shown free in our basements before box office release. More money to the servants of chicken little = us.
With any DRM, they fight not the spread of content but the spread of knowledge to manipulate content aka DeCSS. Can you imagine a day when acquiring and building a Linux bos from industrial parts (non-DRM components) is illegal, along with the knowledge of how and where to do this?
"Strange Days" and a handful of other thoughtcrime-esque movies portray such an environment. I don't see it being possible. Not without revoking a huge section of personal freedoms from people. Information wants to be free. Somebody needs to rebuild the model for rewarding the creation of information.
mug
First interpretations:
This technology has a bit to go to achieve commodity-level feasibility. However, its very promising. I would expect to see this in clubs, concerts, and tradeshows.
This isn't 3D. Its a flat image projected on a water-based screen.
The drawback continues to be the placement of a projection device and its medium (if not a wall). Here, you have a fog wall and a projection TV device. Until those two converge, we'll all still hope for those "Help Me Obi-Wan" shots.
Shouldn't there be a way to build a floating image from the interference of two separate light beams? Wherever the beams intersect would be brighter/changed. Hmm.. Maybe only good for vector displays.
This may be a simple case of equating new technology with waste, as opponents are apt to do. The truth is, we generate waste everywhere, doing everything.. I don't know of any effect from the waste that will cause governments to mandate producing less or recycling more. The US population seems to put up with any quality of air or water given them.
Eventually, someone must propose money-based incentives for production using waste materials. This is the only way to bootstrap such commerce. We had the aluminum can/glass/motor oil progress 20 years ago. It may be time for more, but who's picking up the bill?
Throw the phones in the garbage and solve the garbage problem.
Because of the increased power of CPUs through time, we SHOULD expect features of development environments to be expanded.
I'm in the camp that programming as a art should evolve to way beyond what we have today. GC may evolve to a more manageable version (defer/force intructions) but you can consider thick APIs and these features to be the norm in the future.
Ok Time's Up!
The business model to expect is The Show Is The Commercial...The Commercial Is The Show.
Imagine if advertisers simply paid for the Friends cast to drink Coke, eat Wheaties and wear Gap jeans. Logos everywhere...storylines about brands by name.
It's already been done. Shift it to moralizing and you have the anti-drug scandal that broke last year about plot line written just this way.
If you don't want to watch a commercial, turn your TV off.
And just what business model do you think will replace it?
Here's a hint: Big Hollywood will like it more than you.
A message from the other side: Life is fun and you won't miss it. Although I am the only one in the bar still giggling about the silly commercials that everyone else is bored of.
Killing The TV is just a slogan anymore. 12 years and going strong.
You may think this is a no-brainer, but if the viable source of income for TV producers is to "promise" a certain number of eyes watch your commercials, thats how they are priced. Otherwise, you'd be paying-per-channel of cable TV, which again is possibly a good idea...
With the corporations soon to be expecting a discount based on the market share/demogrpahic of owners of SB or Tivo-like devices, we'll see the budgets of TV constrained from their traditional sources. Of course, other sources will be built (look out for a tax bill).
So, the bottom line is the dollars are expeced out of the consumer's pockets somehow. If the ad rates drop and TV quality follow suit, will we watch less TV? I doubt it, although I hope so. If a tax-proposal fails for devices that manipulated recorded video, then perhaps we'll see everything sold through cable at higher rates. So, the cable bill goes up.
This will undoubtedly push the distribution faster into free methods: PTP video. But then again, this may positively impact broadband sales. Perhaps cable companies again here will reap the rewards (Telecomm cannot compete since there is too much infighting about open markets and DSL just cannot cut it long term).
So the eyes have it. Shows can be compressed to a cheap size (still huge by today's file sizes) and passed around. When the bandwidth is sold with an odometer-like billing model, we'll be here again, discussing the neighborhood radio networks and other private options.
Oh the drama.
signal