Every XBox sale brings them one step closer to doing for the game console segment what they did to the PC segment.) Don't be fooled. Selling consoles cheap does not gurantee anything in software sales. I bought a laserdisk player long before DVD's became popular. The promise from the industry was the disks would be cheaper then video tape because they can be pressed cheaply in mass. I still have the player and only 3 movies. They didn't keep up their end of the bargan. Pre-recorded tape became cheap and Laser disks became more expensive (became an elete item). DVD's had the same promise. It also failed. Disney Old Yeller, Polyanna, The Parant Trap, Swiss Family Robinson, etc are all more than double the tape price for the DVD. (7.79 vs 18.99). How can something that is mass stamped cost more than a tape that has to be assembles from lots of small mechanical parts and recorded instead of stamped?
HP is trying to hit harder in the give the razor away stuff. My new PC came with a new HP printer. The color cartridge is over twice the cost of the cartridge for my old HP printer. (the cart is 1/4 the price of the printer) For printing web pages and articles, I use the old printer and refill the cartridges. The jump in price convinced me the gain was great while the risk of destroying the printer was low (price of 4 cartridges).
MS still has the barier of few titles at high prices to contend with plus the online subscription for network play. Sony and Nintendo can keep MS software unsold or selling at a loss for quite some time. The high price of the software will encourage piracy (note mod chip enables CDR and DVDR's to be used) The hardware (sold at a loss) may be popular as a DVD player that may have the Macrovision, region coding, and forced previews/warning screen issues fixed. (watch out for the MPAA, DMCA, & MS on this chip)
I just visited the website. Something I don't understand. I did not find any content belonging to the RIAA & Co. There appears to be no peer to peer theft of RIAA controlled content. All I could find was Indi labels with samples and links to buy the content. Just what exactly is it the RIAA is suing over? Are they just making noise because someone decided to produce content and not include them? Are these bands that they rejected. Do these bands have contracts with RIAA to only sell to them? I'll have to see if I can find the details of the lawsuit. I would think most courts would toss this one out.
From what I've been hearing, that's partialy true. You may either get a regular DVD, A copy once DVD, an uncopyable DVD, or a DVD CSS encoded to a unique key in that recorder, playable only on that machine. The details are still in the works.
Too busy reading slashdot to research links and press.
without any idiotic licensing Actualy it does have some of that. Ever notice how the OS on XBox is encrypted preventing backing it up? It is very much locked to the hardware even more so than XP. I also doubt it will play any of your existing (Non MS taxed) PC games.
Please correct me if I am wrong here. Will it play the PC versions of Daiblo II, Need for Speed, or Unreal? Will it work at a LAN party? If it will play my existing PC games at a LAN party, this dude will be my next LAN party box! I was under the impression it would play titles made for it (at about $50 a pop) and nothing else.
A good switch will tell you what mac addresses are coming from what port, so with some good accounting on the side, you can tell exactly which apt has a hub and is sharing with their neighbors, etc. That works as long as they are not using a router or proxey macnine. This method of spreading out the service has long been popular with DSL and cable modems for a long time. Be sure to sniff the wireless traffic. Some tenants may put up a DSL router and WAP to share your service. If you get matching traffic, try "planned outages" of each port for about 10 minutes and see which port is feeding the wireless traffic. Extend the outage if you find the connection. When the tenant complains, provide the evidence of the violation of terms of service. (your TOS does prevent WAP of your service doesn't it?)
My answering machine is all digital. I wonder how much a new machine will cost if this passes? Will this keep me from using the cassette tapes of celibraty impressions on my machine. Will I have to go back to a tape based machine? I know these questions sound stupid, but some bills are way too broad and may impact undentinded technology. Then again, they may resent the Rodeny Dangerfield anouncement on my machine.
I thought DeCSS was a clean room reverse engineering job. Actualy the program itself was reverse engineered. However the encryption key was not. Keys are lisenced to publishers and hardware manufactures. Xing slipped and did not encrypt the key in one of their products. The key was lifted from the product. So in a nutshell, the key was not properly protected by one of the lisencees and is now widely published. Sorry for the lack of a link. I'm too busy reading slashdot to hunt up a link to the original article. It is only one of several keys that has been compromised. It may be possible in the future to release DVD's that do not use the key used by the Xing product. That would break DECSS and all Xing products.
Is this a condition Microsoft set? The ban is to prevent having to deal with the audit. A single mac running MS Internet Explorer is enough of a license agreement to provide permission for MS to request an audit on all PC's and Mac's owned by the district and the personal machines owned by the employees used in their job. Read the license agreement. It was made clear in the audit request of the Washington and Oregon schools. Yes it does include machines not owned by the districts, but owned by it's employees. It reaches far beyond the one machine the software is installed upon. This is the reason for the ban. Your software license on your personal machine may be giving away my rights to privacy on my personal Linux machine.
needless to say, apple has not tried any heavy handed licensing tactics with them... YET You are not free and clear just because you run MAC's. If you read the original audit request, you will notice it's MS not Apple requesting the audit. A Mac is capable of running MS products. If any Mac or PC has any MS software (Windows, Internet Explorer, or Office) you have signed the agreement to allow an audit of all PC's and Mac's. You may want to rethink your district software selection next year due to the very high legal liability regarding some software license agreements.
Wow, using HTML and JavaScript can be patented! What will they think of next? Using the left button on a mouse to get something to happen? Ops, sorry that has already been patented.
and provide the proper discipline to encourage growth as a reponsible citizen. Unfortunately foster parents are not permited to use corporal punishment to curb bad behavior. MS may get passed from home to home leaving bad feelings behind while not getting the help they need to curb bad behavior. This established pattern of bad behavior will be their downfall when everyone stops playing with them.
Re:My Solution Was Simple:
on
Disconnecting
·
· Score: 2
My wife connected us to AOL when we moved back to the US while I shopped for a local ISP since they had a free month. I found I couldn't connect to a POP3 mailbox with AOL. Disconnecting was the same problem of having to find the right party who does the sore looser sales pitch begging you to stay. I complained about the inability to receive my mail. They of course offered to migrate my mail. I expressed concern of the volume of users exposing the system to dictionary spam attacks. I wished to keep my existing account as it was not subject to spam. I asked when they would permit receiving POP3 mail from another ISP and send my mail through AOL with a proper return address. They did not support that, so I repeated please disonnect me, I have found a local ISP with good ping times that does support POP3 mail. Find a valid technical reason to switch and the sales pitch dies. Use ping times, D/L speeds, poor first connect rates, anything!
The Flash plug-in is just about default on most browser installs, so few see that download message. Those who find it can not be configured to NOT autoplay the distracting ads may have removed the player. They always see the request to install flash. The popup request is almost as anoying as the ads. I won't reinstall flash until they have it user configurable to not run animations by default. If I want to run an animation, a play button would sufice. This lack of basic user control over the browser is the reason I removed flash completely. I choose what I want to run. If it runs without control, it gets removed.
Do you call right clicking an animation getting to the settings menu? Since when is only item on some animations "About macromedia flash" a setting? To me it was only a link to the website and nothing more. Is there a settings menu? Unchecking play and loop do not count as these "settings" can not be saved as default. These are player controls, not settings and are not avaliable on many advertising animations.
I wonder if sharing a drive or directory counts? Maybe they just outlawed the Microsoft OS off their system.
Snip POLICY. Peer-to-peer file-sharing programs may not be used on any computers connected to Blizzard or Blizzard North's networks without the express written approval of Mike Morhaime or Paul Sams. This policy shall go into effect immediately. Exceptions, if any, will be installed and tested in a controlled environment and properly configured to ensure an adequate level of security before implementation. If an adequate level of security cannot be established, such usage will not be approved, and an alternative method will need to be found. It sounds like MS might have a chance if Windows can be tested and approved in a controlled environment. ;-)
Thanks on the information to stop MS browser from begging me to install Macromedia flash. I almost stopped using the IE browser completely because of that persistant nagging.
Ever since they made it so that play, loop and other right clickable consumer controls could be made unavaliable, I made the program unavaliable on my machine. Unlike IE past Win 98, it is still removable. The worst case I saw before I pulled the plug was a right click put the dialog box on the other side of the screen and not where you were trying to stop an annimation and where a right click brought up only one option "about Macromedia" I contacted the company concerning these trends in loss of control. I received no reply. I prefer Netscape over IE, because any page with flash content brings up a dialog box in IE, "do you want to install......" There is no option in IE "do not ask me again". I got tired of telling it "NO NO NO NO NO!" I would suspect MS and Macromedia have the same agenda to have your computer skip ads the same way your DVD player skips the FBI warning. Somebody is paying bucks to have the content delivered like it or not. Since most flash is used for forced advertising and not for content, my main machine is flash and IE disabled by choice. At the rare site with actual flash content, my standby machine still has it, but it's rare I fire up that antique.
In a nutshell, each time you double the power, the signal strength goes up by 3 db (by definition). An omnidirectional antenna has a typical gain of about 3 DB. (it doesn't radiate in some directions like straight up or down) A 36 DB antenna has 33 DB more strength in it's beam than the typical 3 db whip antenna. That is the same as 11 times more power transmitted. Use a directional high gain antenna to go a long distance in one direction. Use a one at each end for even better results. Many dish antennas have much more than a 36 db gain figure. Your milage may vary.
True, they want it to be like DVD players and cable boxes. Nobody would even bother buying a DVD player without a decoder in it because it would be very useless. There is very little DVD content not CSS protected. (I have seen one sold in Yellowstone National Park not region protected) They want computers to be the same as a Cable TV box. No protection, no new releases. New releases need content protected boxes to play. They are trying to legislate the chicken and egg sysdrone. There just isn't enough protected boxes out there to provide a market for their content. The answer is to force everyone to have a subscribable box. Then the content can be sold to the masses without them sharing it with each other. That's why they can't just leave the PC's alone. Unprotected content and players (PC's) destroys their sales distribution model. If I want Pay Per View, I know how to subscribe. Please don't make my PC a cable box!
Here'e the lowdown on the diffrence in a home projector and a better commercial projector, just to show the comparison as really apples and oranges and not apples and apples. Single LCD projector will never be as efficent as a 3 LCD projector because.... Red light must pass thru a red pixel in a single color LCD. This means all the white light that hits green and blue pixels is NOT adding to the brightness of the red. This absorbtion of the 2 colors not passed by a pixel filter means 2/3 of the light is lost in the filter and turned into heat at the LCD where it is not needed. This alone limits bulb size and projected lumens. In a 3 LCD projector, the light is split into primary colors with beamsplitting dichoric mirrors. Therefore all the red of the white light does hit the red LCD (actualy a B&W LCD without a color filter). The LCD then only changes the polorization of the light. The polorizers take the heat, not the LCD. The polorizers are spaced away from the LCD allowing cooling the polorizers while not heating the LCD unlike a color filtered single panel LCD. The same holds true for green and blue. The 3 beams are then recombined into one beam and exits the lens to the screen. This overlaying of the colors gives true full color pixels, not a color stripe matrix display of adjacent red green blue pixels. The heat not removed by the cold mirror at the lamp is now spread out over 6 polorizers, (one each in front and behind each LCD) not in the one LCD panel. This allows a brighter light source to be used.
Now the simple math.. Light not absorbed by pixle filters, but routed to proper LCD = 3 X brighness. Point source arc lamp with cold mirror = 4 X more visable light per watt. 6 polorizers instead of one pannel to lose the heat = 6 X brighter bulb can be used. Polorizers seprate from LCD keeping heat away = 4 X more watts in heat can be safely absorbed without overheating the LCD's. 1/2 light absorbed by polorizers 1/2 (OK it does lose light)
The totals Dichoric splitters 3X 6 polorizers 6X, 4X, 1/2X Arc lamp 4X more usable light Total 144 times brighter projected lumens. Any incandecent light source single LCD projector will not come anywhere close to the 3 LCD arc lamp commercial projector in projected lumens for these reasons. A commercial one can be used on a trade show floor, where a home built will never overcome the ambient light.
There is some reasons for the high bulb cost. As noted in other comments, heat is a killer to LCD's. The high lumen projectors have 3 things special about the bulbs. 1 is point light source. Light from a point can be focused with the mirror to get most of the light to the LCD's instead of scattering. (A mag light can be focuesd to a bright narrow beam. a flourescent tube can not focus tightly and is not useful for projectors). Porjector lamps are usualy manufactured as a prefocused assembly so it is user installable without a difficult alignment procedure. 2 is a cold mirror. The light from the bulb has to hit a cold mirror reflector to get to the LCD's removing the IR component. This allows a higher power bulb to be used without killing the LCD's. The light from the arc does not directly go to the LCD. The end of the bulb with a terminal faces the LCD's shielding them from the IR output of the bulb. Cold mirrors are not inexpensive. Try buying one. 3 is it is a discharge lamp. This produces more visable light over an incandecent lamp of the same power. Discharge lamps are usualy rated for 2000 hours instead of the typical 8-24 hours for a 3400 degree incandecent. They also have better daylight color tempeture (5600 degree typical) for better color so the pictures can provide a true rendition of the blue screen of death.;-)
Instead of the UPC, use the ISBN number. It's much quicker to identify the book if you check it out to a friend who fails to return it. Then you can bill for the replacement in court.
structure is falling apart much quicker than my presure-treated-wood ad brick home? Actualy that is a very valid question. A lot has been learned in building domes in the last 40 years. The biggest lesson learned is that roofing the thing to keep the water out does cause problems trapping condensation in the shell promoting decay. The shape was good. The early ventilation was poor. Almost all new domes now have building code requirements to have the shell ventilated to prevent condensation from building up inside the outer shell. If you built a traditional home and didn't put in eve and roof vents, they also would rot out due to condensation under the shingles in the winter. Roof ventilation is required in both types of homes. More information on dome wall cavity ventilation using a cupola can be found here; http://www.domesnorthwest.com/Explanations.htm
Slashdot Mirror
Every XBox sale brings them one step closer to doing for the game console segment what they did to the PC segment.)
Don't be fooled. Selling consoles cheap does not gurantee anything in software sales. I bought a laserdisk player long before DVD's became popular. The promise from the industry was the disks would be cheaper then video tape because they can be pressed cheaply in mass. I still have the player and only 3 movies. They didn't keep up their end of the bargan. Pre-recorded tape became cheap and Laser disks became more expensive (became an elete item). DVD's had the same promise. It also failed. Disney Old Yeller, Polyanna, The Parant Trap, Swiss Family Robinson, etc are all more than double the tape price for the DVD. (7.79 vs 18.99). How can something that is mass stamped cost more than a tape that has to be assembles from lots of small mechanical parts and recorded instead of stamped?
HP is trying to hit harder in the give the razor away stuff. My new PC came with a new HP printer. The color cartridge is over twice the cost of the cartridge for my old HP printer. (the cart is 1/4 the price of the printer) For printing web pages and articles, I use the old printer and refill the cartridges. The jump in price convinced me the gain was great while the risk of destroying the printer was low (price of 4 cartridges).
MS still has the barier of few titles at high prices to contend with plus the online subscription for network play. Sony and Nintendo can keep MS software unsold or selling at a loss for quite some time. The high price of the software will encourage piracy (note mod chip enables CDR and DVDR's to be used) The hardware (sold at a loss) may be popular as a DVD player that may have the Macrovision, region coding, and forced previews/warning screen issues fixed. (watch out for the MPAA, DMCA, & MS on this chip)
I just visited the website. Something I don't understand. I did not find any content belonging to the RIAA & Co. There appears to be no peer to peer theft of RIAA controlled content. All I could find was Indi labels with samples and links to buy the content. Just what exactly is it the RIAA is suing over? Are they just making noise because someone decided to produce content and not include them? Are these bands that they rejected. Do these bands have contracts with RIAA to only sell to them? I'll have to see if I can find the details of the lawsuit. I would think most courts would toss this one out.
From what I've been hearing, that's partialy true. You may either get a regular DVD, A copy once DVD, an uncopyable DVD, or a DVD CSS encoded to a unique key in that recorder, playable only on that machine. The details are still in the works.
Too busy reading slashdot to research links and press.
without any idiotic licensing
Actualy it does have some of that. Ever notice how the OS on XBox is encrypted preventing backing it up? It is very much locked to the hardware even more so than XP. I also doubt it will play any of your existing (Non MS taxed) PC games.
Please correct me if I am wrong here. Will it play the PC versions of Daiblo II, Need for Speed, or Unreal?
Will it work at a LAN party? If it will play my existing PC games at a LAN party, this dude will be my next LAN party box! I was under the impression it would play titles made for it (at about $50 a pop) and nothing else.
A good switch will tell you what mac addresses are coming from what port, so with some good accounting on the side, you can tell exactly which apt has a hub and is sharing with their neighbors, etc.
That works as long as they are not using a router or proxey macnine. This method of spreading out the service has long been popular with DSL and cable modems for a long time. Be sure to sniff the wireless traffic. Some tenants may put up a DSL router and WAP to share your service. If you get matching traffic, try "planned outages" of each port for about 10 minutes and see which port is feeding the wireless traffic. Extend the outage if you find the connection. When the tenant complains, provide the evidence of the violation of terms of service. (your TOS does prevent WAP of your service doesn't it?)
My answering machine is all digital. I wonder how much a new machine will cost if this passes? Will this keep me from using the cassette tapes of celibraty impressions on my machine. Will I have to go back to a tape based machine? I know these questions sound stupid, but some bills are way too broad and may impact undentinded technology. Then again, they may resent the Rodeny Dangerfield anouncement on my machine.
I thought DeCSS was a clean room reverse engineering job.
Actualy the program itself was reverse engineered. However the encryption key was not. Keys are lisenced to publishers and hardware manufactures. Xing slipped and did not encrypt the key in one of their products. The key was lifted from the product. So in a nutshell, the key was not properly protected by one of the lisencees and is now widely published. Sorry for the lack of a link. I'm too busy reading slashdot to hunt up a link to the original article. It is only one of several keys that has been compromised. It may be possible in the future to release DVD's that do not use the key used by the Xing product. That would break DECSS and all Xing products.
Remember That ALL Default settings in Microsoft's Browser points to thier own in jouse web sites
Who uses the MS search? Only newbies and those who want to find the highest paying advertiser use it.
Is this a condition Microsoft set?
The ban is to prevent having to deal with the audit. A single mac running MS Internet Explorer is enough of a license agreement to provide permission for MS to request an audit on all PC's and Mac's owned by the district and the personal machines owned by the employees used in their job. Read the license agreement. It was made clear in the audit request of the Washington and Oregon schools. Yes it does include machines not owned by the districts, but owned by it's employees. It reaches far beyond the one machine the software is installed upon. This is the reason for the ban. Your software license on your personal machine may be giving away my rights to privacy on my personal Linux machine.
needless to say, apple has not tried any heavy handed licensing tactics with them... YET
You are not free and clear just because you run MAC's. If you read the original audit request, you will notice it's MS not Apple requesting the audit. A Mac is capable of running MS products. If any Mac or PC has any MS software (Windows, Internet Explorer, or Office) you have signed the agreement to allow an audit of all PC's and Mac's. You may want to rethink your district software selection next year due to the very high legal liability regarding some software license agreements.
Wow, using HTML and JavaScript can be patented! What will they think of next? Using the left button on a mouse to get something to happen? Ops, sorry that has already been patented.
and provide the proper discipline to encourage growth as a reponsible citizen.
Unfortunately foster parents are not permited to use corporal punishment to curb bad behavior. MS may get passed from home to home leaving bad feelings behind while not getting the help they need to curb bad behavior. This established pattern of bad behavior will be their downfall when everyone stops playing with them.
My wife connected us to AOL when we moved back to the US while I shopped for a local ISP since they had a free month. I found I couldn't connect to a POP3 mailbox with AOL.
Disconnecting was the same problem of having to find the right party who does the sore looser sales pitch begging you to stay.
I complained about the inability to receive my mail. They of course offered to migrate my mail. I expressed concern of the volume of users exposing the system to dictionary spam attacks. I wished to keep my existing account as it was not subject to spam. I asked when they would permit receiving POP3 mail from another ISP and send my mail through AOL with a proper return address. They did not support that, so I repeated please disonnect me, I have found a local ISP with good ping times that does support POP3 mail.
Find a valid technical reason to switch and the sales pitch dies. Use ping times, D/L speeds, poor first connect rates, anything!
The Flash plug-in is just about default on most browser installs, so few see that download message.
Those who find it can not be configured to NOT autoplay the distracting ads may have removed the player. They always see the request to install flash. The popup request is almost as anoying as the ads.
I won't reinstall flash until they have it user configurable to not run animations by default. If I want to run an animation, a play button would sufice. This lack of basic user control over the browser is the reason I removed flash completely. I choose what I want to run. If it runs without control, it gets removed.
Do you call right clicking an animation getting to the settings menu? Since when is only item on some animations "About macromedia flash" a setting? To me it was only a link to the website and nothing more. Is there a settings menu? Unchecking play and loop do not count as these "settings" can not be saved as default. These are player controls, not settings and are not avaliable on many advertising animations.
I wonder if sharing a drive or directory counts? Maybe they just outlawed the Microsoft OS off their system.
Snip
POLICY. Peer-to-peer file-sharing programs may not be used on any computers connected to Blizzard or Blizzard North's networks without the express written approval of Mike Morhaime or Paul Sams. This policy shall go into effect immediately. Exceptions, if any, will be installed and tested in a controlled environment and properly configured to ensure an adequate level of security before implementation. If an adequate level of security cannot be established, such usage will not be approved, and an alternative method
will need to be found.
It sounds like MS might have a chance if Windows can be tested and approved in a controlled environment.
;-)
Thanks on the information to stop MS browser from begging me to install Macromedia flash. I almost stopped using the IE browser completely because of that persistant nagging.
Ever since they made it so that play, loop and other right clickable consumer controls could be made unavaliable, I made the program unavaliable on my machine. Unlike IE past Win 98, it is still removable. The worst case I saw before I pulled the plug was a right click put the dialog box on the other side of the screen and not where you were trying to stop an annimation and where a right click brought up only one option "about Macromedia" I contacted the company concerning these trends in loss of control. I received no reply. I prefer Netscape over IE, because any page with flash content brings up a dialog box in IE, "do you want to install......" There is no option in IE "do not ask me again". I got tired of telling it "NO NO NO NO NO!" I would suspect MS and Macromedia have the same agenda to have your computer skip ads the same way your DVD player skips the FBI warning. Somebody is paying bucks to have the content delivered like it or not.
Since most flash is used for forced advertising and not for content, my main machine is flash and IE disabled by choice. At the rare site with actual flash content, my standby machine still has it, but it's rare I fire up that antique.
In a nutshell, each time you double the power, the signal strength goes up by 3 db (by definition). An omnidirectional antenna has a typical gain of about 3 DB. (it doesn't radiate in some directions like straight up or down) A 36 DB antenna has 33 DB more strength in it's beam than the typical 3 db whip antenna. That is the same as 11 times more power transmitted. Use a directional high gain antenna to go a long distance in one direction. Use a one at each end for even better results. Many dish antennas have much more than a 36 db gain figure. Your milage may vary.
True, they want it to be like DVD players and cable boxes. Nobody would even bother buying a DVD player without a decoder in it because it would be very useless. There is very little DVD content not CSS protected. (I have seen one sold in Yellowstone National Park not region protected)
They want computers to be the same as a Cable TV box. No protection, no new releases. New releases need content protected boxes to play. They are trying to legislate the chicken and egg sysdrone. There just isn't enough protected boxes out there to provide a market for their content. The answer is to force everyone to have a subscribable box. Then the content can be sold to the masses without them sharing it with each other.
That's why they can't just leave the PC's alone. Unprotected content and players (PC's) destroys their sales distribution model. If I want Pay Per View, I know how to subscribe. Please don't make my PC a cable box!
Where are the consumers going to go? ;-)
Those who abuse the system? I hope they would go offline
Here'e the lowdown on the diffrence in a home projector and a better commercial projector, just to show the comparison as really apples and oranges and not apples and apples.
Single LCD projector will never be as efficent as a 3 LCD projector because....
Red light must pass thru a red pixel in a single color LCD. This means all the white light that hits green and blue pixels is NOT adding to the brightness of the red. This absorbtion of the 2 colors not passed by a pixel filter means 2/3 of the light is lost in the filter and turned into heat at the LCD where it is not needed. This alone limits bulb size and projected lumens. In a 3 LCD projector, the light is split into primary colors with beamsplitting dichoric mirrors. Therefore all the red of the white light does hit the red LCD (actualy a B&W LCD without a color filter). The LCD then only changes the polorization of the light. The polorizers take the heat, not the LCD. The polorizers are spaced away from the LCD allowing cooling the polorizers while not heating the LCD unlike a color filtered single panel LCD. The same holds true for green and blue. The 3 beams are then recombined into one beam and exits the lens to the screen. This overlaying of the colors gives true full color pixels, not a color stripe matrix display of adjacent red green blue pixels. The heat not removed by the cold mirror at the lamp is now spread out over 6 polorizers, (one each in front and behind each LCD) not in the one LCD panel. This allows a brighter light source to be used.
Now the simple math..
Light not absorbed by pixle filters, but routed to proper LCD = 3 X brighness. Point source arc lamp with cold mirror = 4 X more visable light per watt. 6 polorizers instead of one pannel to lose the heat = 6 X brighter bulb can be used. Polorizers seprate from LCD keeping heat away = 4 X more watts in heat can be safely absorbed without overheating the LCD's. 1/2 light absorbed by polorizers 1/2 (OK it does lose light)
The totals
Dichoric splitters 3X
6 polorizers 6X, 4X, 1/2X
Arc lamp 4X more usable light
Total 144 times brighter projected lumens.
Any incandecent light source single LCD projector will not come anywhere close to the 3 LCD arc lamp commercial projector in projected lumens for these reasons. A commercial one can be used on a trade show floor, where a home built will never overcome the ambient light.
There is some reasons for the high bulb cost. As noted in other comments, heat is a killer to LCD's. ;-)
The high lumen projectors have 3 things special about the bulbs. 1 is point light source. Light from a point can be focused with the mirror to get most of the light to the LCD's instead of scattering. (A mag light can be focuesd to a bright narrow beam. a flourescent tube can not focus tightly and is not useful for projectors). Porjector lamps are usualy manufactured as a prefocused assembly so it is user installable without a difficult alignment procedure.
2 is a cold mirror. The light from the bulb has to hit a cold mirror reflector to get to the LCD's removing the IR component. This allows a higher power bulb to be used without killing the LCD's. The light from the arc does not directly go to the LCD. The end of the bulb with a terminal faces the LCD's shielding them from the IR output of the bulb. Cold mirrors are not inexpensive. Try buying one.
3 is it is a discharge lamp. This produces more visable light over an incandecent lamp of the same power. Discharge lamps are usualy rated for 2000 hours instead of the typical 8-24 hours for a 3400 degree incandecent. They also have better daylight color tempeture (5600 degree typical) for better color so the pictures can provide a true rendition of the blue screen of death.
Instead of the UPC, use the ISBN number. It's much quicker to identify the book if you check it out to a friend who fails to return it. Then you can bill for the replacement in court.
structure is falling apart much quicker than my presure-treated-wood ad brick home?
Actualy that is a very valid question. A lot has been learned in building domes in the last 40 years. The biggest lesson learned is that roofing the thing to keep the water out does cause problems trapping condensation in the shell promoting decay. The shape was good. The early ventilation was poor.
Almost all new domes now have building code requirements to have the shell ventilated to prevent condensation from building up inside the outer shell. If you built a traditional home and didn't put in eve and roof vents, they also would rot out due to condensation under the shingles in the winter. Roof ventilation is required in both types of homes. More information on dome wall cavity ventilation using a cupola can be found here; http://www.domesnorthwest.com/Explanations.htm