Thank you very much for the detailed information. It sounds like a well founded law to me, providing reasonable flexibility without opening the door to rampant theft.
A VCR is going to ignore the broadcast flag and record off of the RF or S-video or composite output of your cable box
Wrong. Cable boxes already Macrovision encode the protected content on their analog outputs, so your VCR won't record them as a result. Apparently your righteous indignation doesn't arise from actual experience.
per the broadcaster's request that your court-protected fair use rights (e.g., timeshifting) are illegally revoked
Nobody revoked your fair use rights. They just impeded your physical ability to make a certain type of copy using a particular device. There's nothing remotely illegal about that. The fact that you have a right to make a copy does not confer an obligation upon anyone to facilitate your doing so.
Among your laundry list of complaints, the only place where VHS really fills a niche that is not well served by DVD or DVR is the ability to record standard definition television in order to share it with your friends. If that were an important niche for typical consumers, DVD recorders would be at least modestly successful products. Compared with DVD players and DVR, they have utterly failed in the market. Evidence suggests that this feature isn't something people care about very much.
Since VHS cannot record HDTV, and in fact can't even record SDTV very well, I don't understand why you would mention HDTV and ATSC. A product does not need to support HDTV in order to compete with and displace VHS.
VHS does have rights management, it's just not digital. It's called Macrovision. A product does not need to be DRM-free in order to compete with and displace VHS.
I'm hardly an expert, but a little research suggests that you are wrong. Sweden passed legislation in 2005 to enforce EU copyright directives that prohibit file sharing. These directives permit a variety of protected uses but none of them include giving physical copies of protected works to your friends.
In any case, my impression was that even prior to legislation enforcing this directive, the apparent legality of online file sharing in certain Scandinavian countries did not extend to physical copies of entire protected works. I'd be very interested in evidence to the contrary.
Peak oil is an argument about the achievable extraction rate of conventional oil. In other words, the supply. It does not predict demand, price, or alternative energy sources. It is a matter of petroleum geology, not economics or geopolitics.
The authors do not assume that demand is constant. They do not assume anything about demand. They are predicting the achievable supply of conventional oil. That does not make the authors "fucking idiots," any more than they are "fucking idiots" for failing to address the impact of methane prospecting on the moons of Jupiter. It's just not relevant to their thesis.
You seem to be debunking a strawman that has nothing to do with the peak oil theory.
Peak oil is a theory regarding future rates of conventional oil extraction. It is not a prediction of impending doom or a crude oil price forecast, nor does it have anything to do with unconventional oil or alternative energy. Should some futuristic technology make petroleum obsolete, that would neither contradict nor prove peak oil; it would simply make it irrelevant.
Many people use peak oil as a foundation for their predictions of impending doom. Those predictions may or may not be nonsense. But debunking such predictions, as you seem to think you have done, hardly contradicts peak oil theory.
Spinning a smaller mass will ALWAYS mean a lower power input, from start to finish and everything in betweeen.
A major cause of energy loss in a hard drive is aerodynamic drag of the platters, which is proportional to surface area, but unrelated to mass. Bearing friction is proportional to platter mass.
I was always under the impression that most of the energy driving the platters is lost to aerodynamics, heating the air surrounding the platters rather than the spindle bearing. That suggests that the energy required would be largely proportional to the number of platters, not the mass of the platters. However Cringely's claim of power savings seems to contradict this. Anyone have hard data on this?
As long as you cover the whole dynamic range of a scene with a contast of several thousand to one, you have a HDR image.
You may have an HDR image, but it will not be a visually realistic HDR image, as I pointed out in another post. You must sacrifice either perceptual linearity or perceptual smoothness in order to fit a 200,000:1 contrast ratio into 8 bits. Few practical applications would consider that a reasonable tradeoff.
Human hearing covers about a 120dBA range. That's 20 bits. Not nearly as wide as our visual acuity range but it's considerably more than 16 bits. I do think that's pretty incredible. For example, it's quite a challenge to get a -120dB noise floor with room temperature electronics.
You can store an entire HDR image in one bit: the spotlight pointed into your eyes is either on or off. That seems to be the point you're making, and I don't think it's particularly relevant to any realistic HDR application.
If you want to quantize HDR images with 8 bits per channel or less, you are going to lose one or both of two basic properties: perceptual linearity, and perceptual smoothness. In other words, you lose visual realism.
So if you want I can revise my statement:
Visually realistic HDR and color depth are joined at the hip. You can't get one without the other.
There is no such thing as a 0.0 - 1.0 visual range. The human visual system is floating point, pretty much literally. You have your exponent, which is how well adapted your eyes are to the light, how dilated your pupil is, etc. You have your mantissa, which is the relative intensity within your current visual field. Physiologially, we have about 28 bits of exponent and about 10 bits of mantissa. So, proper HDR is floating point. But we're not quite there yet.
In both audio and video, this whole idea of quantizing a 0.0 - 1.0 interval is a compromise wrought by insufficient numerical resolution. It has nothing to do with physics or perception or anything else. Once you realize that, you should also realize that the idea of "going outside" the 0.0 - 1.0 range is absurd. You don't go outside the range, you expand the range so as to better approximate the incredible human senses. As long as we're using fixed point image formats and digital video standards, there will always be a range, and we'll always be inside the 0.0 - 1.0 range, and it will always be a compromise.
Audio professionals have worked out their terminology far better than graphics guys have. Audio guys talk about dB, decibels. The reference point is 0db, which is as loud as your amp will go. When you add more bits, you're adding more quiet, not more loud. If you want more loud you buy a bigger amp. Each additional bit gives you 3dB more quiet, and you'd better hope your equipment has a low enough noise floor that you can hear all that fresh new quiet.
So what are you saying? What's the difference between HDR and 48 bit color? To use an analogy to audio, you seem to be saying that HDR is about more loud, and 48 bit color is about more quiet. But as you go on to point out, they're really just the same thing. No matter what, you've got a clipping level (the maximum luminance of your output device), you've got a noise floor (the minimum luminance of your output device), and hopefully you've got enough quantization levels in between for perceptual linearity. That's why HDR and color depth are joined at the hip. You can't get one without the other. There is no meaningful distinction.
In theory, you have a good point. In practice, I don't think it is particularly significant.
The original purpose of gamma correction is to quantize intensity in a way that is perceived as linear. Linear perceived intensity is very important. It results in the best information transfer in a given number of bits. It is also a bedrock assumption of most digital signal processing methods. For example, if you apply a typical smoothing filter to a nonlinear image you will change the overall intensity of the image in unintended ways.
Using a gamma curve which is too far away from linear intensity will cause all sorts of problems and in practice is seldom done. When it is done, I imagine it is a poor compromise chosen for lack of better alternatives. It's the exception that proves the rule.
That's short sighted. This technology seems highly amenable to economies of scale and low cost mass production. I'm sure there are challenges, particularly efficiency and cooling, but those are really only a problem if you need high brightness. I could see a product based on this technology costing only 20% or 30% more than equivalent LDR displays within a year or two - predicated only on market penetration.
Other HDR technologies I've seen involve far higher barriers to low cost production. Laser projection being a great example, stunning imagery, but inherently high cost for a long time to come.
The real barrier to this technology is not cost but video standards. Most standards for digital video have 8 bits of dynamic range.
The article opens with a rhetorical device where it contrasts two extreme, stereotyped viewpoints. The summary quotes only one of these viewpoints, portraying it as the author's voice. I think that's really appallingly lame. The submitter and/or editor should be ashamed of themselves for so grossly distorting the author's intent.
"If it was a big issue, you'd be using SCSI"... that is so bogus.
The SATA standard is entirely suitable for enterprise use and has a growing collection of enterprise class drives.
Reliability is a "big issue" for almost everyone. Reliability is more important than raw performance for most of the desktop market, indeed most of the hard drive market. If SATA drives were inherently unreliable, they would be unsuitable for any market.
The only reason reliability isn't the main benchmark for a drive is that it's so hard to measure or predict. If measuring reliability were as easy as measuring noise levels, it would be the most important buying criteria bar none. Particularly since other measurable criteria do not vary all that much between modern drives at a given price point and capacity level.
No, you can't get several minutes of weightlessness from a conventional aircraft.
The theoretical maximum duration in zero G for a subsonic maneuver is less than 70 seconds. That would involve a ballistic trajectory initially going straight up at the speed of sound, only recovering once you are going straight down at the speed of sound. 331.5 m/s / 9.8 m/s/s * 2 = 67.65 seconds.
Practical zero-G maneuvers for conventional (i.e. subsonic) passenger aircraft typically get 15-25 seconds of weightlessness.
It seems like a relatively easy transition to me. In fact it is a transition that is already ongoing.
Less and less of the electronics in a modern PC can be powered directly off one of the PSU rails. The natural solution is point-of-load DC-DC converters. More and more stuff is using the 12v rail. More and more of a high end power supply's watt budget is going into 12v supplies. Graphics cards are powered largely from 12v with point-of-load regulation. The 3.3v and 5v supplies are naturally becoming vestigial over time, with the only barrier being existing PSU standards.
The PSU connector design and form factor doesn't need to change. Current design trends in motherboards and graphics cards don't need to change. You just need some incremental changes to standards in order to encourage a trend that is already ongoing. For example:
1) New platform standards with higher 12v current and lower 3.3v and 5v current would encourage motherboard and peripheral designers to source DC-DC conversion from 12v rail. PSU design would become somewhat simpler and more efficient even though all 4 rails would still be required. Many existing PSUs would be forwards compatible.
2) 12v-only motherboards could be developed that would operate either with existing power supplies or special 12v-only supplies. Hard drive connectors would come from the motherboard rather than the PSU. Overall system efficienty would be higher, driving adoption by energy-cost-sensitive customers.
3) Hard drive manufacturers would be encouraged to operate from 12v rail only, to eventually eliminate the excess regulation on the motherboard, further increasing system efficiency. (Hard drive controllers already use some DC-DC conversion.)
It's easy to imagine 12v-only power connectors which would be simple and basically interoperable with existing ATX standards, yet designed to prevent connection of incompatible devices.
The transition might not be quick, but there's no reason to expect it to be particularly painful, as long as the leadership is there.
Bruce, that's the exact reason that single rail 12v supplies make sense on the desktop - at least, more sense than 3.3v or 5v supplies.
Currently the power supply delivers 4 different legacy voltages, which are increasingly becoming useless to directly power any electrical device on the motherboard. More and more of the active electronics is using lower and lower voltages. So there is already a design trend toward voltage regulation at the point of load - that is, on the motherboard or video card.
If designers were completly freed from all existing legacy constraints, they would want a relatively high DC voltage so as to avoid resistive losses and simplify power routing. That is why more and more load is being moved to the 12v rail rather than 5v or 3.3v. That's why video cards use 12v power almost exclusively. Maybe with a blank slate design an even higher DC voltage would be used, like 48v, but that would entail a difficult transition with only minor advantages over 12v.
it took google's search engine 3-5 years to overcome inertia in a relatively new arena (web search).
That simply isn't true. When a new and better search engine comes out, it spreads like wildfire. Google search gained market share extremely quickly, as did Lycos and Alta Vista when they each introduced search products that were markedly better than what was available at the time. Google took only 3 years to go from first round financing to absolute leadership of a mature market. There's no significant inertia there, just wildly fast market acceptance, virtually unparalleled in any other business in history.
Now, it is competing against much longer established business (e-mail has been around for multiple decades).
Webmail is a newer, less well established, and less profitable business than web search. There is no reason whatsoever to expect steeper competition in webmail than in web search.
In any case, the reason investors are concerned about Google's multitude of services is not market acceptance but profitability. The overwhelming majority of Google's revenue comes from search and AdSense. I have no doubt that Google has achived and will continue to achieve good market penetration with GMail. The question is whether they can make money off it. So far, the answer is no.
Tell that to Lycos and Alta Vista. They were each at one point in time prohibitive market leaders in search. There is no evidence whatsoever that web search provides a durable competitive advantage to market leaders. People go where they get the best search results.
It's likely that this is changing in degree as Internet use widens to a less well informed public. Naive users will probably be more loyal than web users of the late 90s. However there's no reason to believe that this changes the fundamental dynamic of web services which has been observed again and again: it is a meritocracy where entrenched market leaders have only incremental advantages in the long term.
In the case of easily duplicatable information (which is all a recording is any more), supply is now the original work, not the copies!
Yes, that's exactly the sense that I was using in my post. This is also the sense in which "piracy is killing PC gaming," since it is harming the incentive for game developers to supply new PC titles.
To be more specific, the supply curve we're talking about is "number of unique titles or works" versus "gross revenue."
You claimed that, beyond a certain point, "it does not matter how many people experience the work of art without paying the artist" because "the use of the work does not deprive anyone of anything." This can only be true if, beyond the point you are talking about, supply of new titles is completely inelastic with marginal revenue, and the supply curve becomes horizontal. Unless the human race runs out of creativity, that seems like an unlikely outcome. The more society as a whole is willing to pay for creative work, the more creative work will be done.
Instead, what is happening is that unpaid "use" of commercial works absorbs demand without providing any revenue to the suppliers. Since supply is elastic, this will reduce the supply of titles (quantity or quality or both), with a negative impact on both the game industry and the legitimate purchasers of games. The only people who benefit, even in the short term, are the pirates.
I'm honestly a bit baffled by your entertainment choices. You routinely play mindnumbingly boring games half way through? Why would you play them at all if they're so boring? Are you getting any entertainment value at all out of your time, or is it just an act of periodic masochism to expose yourself to the current state of the game industry?
If you are being entertained, then I would say you should pay for that entertainment rather than stealing it.
If you aren't being entertained, I suggest that computer gaming may not be your cup of tea. Perhaps a good book?
My personal interpretation, which seems to best explain the available facts, is that you play games because they are fun while they are easy, then you reach a challenge which frustrates you and and decide to cheat instead of rising to the chanllenge. This eliminates any remaining entertainment value and leaves you with boredom as your final impression of the game. You delete the game and use your dissatisfaction to rationalize your theft.
Slashdot Mirror
Thank you very much for the detailed information. It sounds like a well founded law to me, providing reasonable flexibility without opening the door to rampant theft.
A VCR is going to ignore the broadcast flag and record off of the RF or S-video or composite output of your cable box
Wrong. Cable boxes already Macrovision encode the protected content on their analog outputs, so your VCR won't record them as a result. Apparently your righteous indignation doesn't arise from actual experience.
per the broadcaster's request that your court-protected fair use rights (e.g., timeshifting) are illegally revoked
Nobody revoked your fair use rights. They just impeded your physical ability to make a certain type of copy using a particular device. There's nothing remotely illegal about that. The fact that you have a right to make a copy does not confer an obligation upon anyone to facilitate your doing so.
Among your laundry list of complaints, the only place where VHS really fills a niche that is not well served by DVD or DVR is the ability to record standard definition television in order to share it with your friends. If that were an important niche for typical consumers, DVD recorders would be at least modestly successful products. Compared with DVD players and DVR, they have utterly failed in the market. Evidence suggests that this feature isn't something people care about very much.
Since VHS cannot record HDTV, and in fact can't even record SDTV very well, I don't understand why you would mention HDTV and ATSC. A product does not need to support HDTV in order to compete with and displace VHS.
VHS does have rights management, it's just not digital. It's called Macrovision. A product does not need to be DRM-free in order to compete with and displace VHS.
I'm hardly an expert, but a little research suggests that you are wrong. Sweden passed legislation in 2005 to enforce EU copyright directives that prohibit file sharing. These directives permit a variety of protected uses but none of them include giving physical copies of protected works to your friends.
v e
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EU_Copyright_Directi
In any case, my impression was that even prior to legislation enforcing this directive, the apparent legality of online file sharing in certain Scandinavian countries did not extend to physical copies of entire protected works. I'd be very interested in evidence to the contrary.
You might be interested to know that in other parts of the world it actually might be legal to take a few copies of a CD and pass them on to a friend.
OK, I'll bite. Where?
(In the first world, please. There are countries where honor killings are legal, too.)
And that's it man, the geeks have won then, and Microsoft just don't get that.
There's a difference between being a geek and being a pirate.
Geeks are concerned that Microsoft's business practices stifle legitimate software innovation.
Pirates just want to copy shit for free.
You're talking about the latter, so please don't make it a geek thing.
Peak oil is an argument about the achievable extraction rate of conventional oil. In other words, the supply. It does not predict demand, price, or alternative energy sources. It is a matter of petroleum geology, not economics or geopolitics.
The authors do not assume that demand is constant. They do not assume anything about demand. They are predicting the achievable supply of conventional oil. That does not make the authors "fucking idiots," any more than they are "fucking idiots" for failing to address the impact of methane prospecting on the moons of Jupiter. It's just not relevant to their thesis.
You seem to be debunking a strawman that has nothing to do with the peak oil theory.
Peak oil is a theory regarding future rates of conventional oil extraction. It is not a prediction of impending doom or a crude oil price forecast, nor does it have anything to do with unconventional oil or alternative energy. Should some futuristic technology make petroleum obsolete, that would neither contradict nor prove peak oil; it would simply make it irrelevant.
Many people use peak oil as a foundation for their predictions of impending doom. Those predictions may or may not be nonsense. But debunking such predictions, as you seem to think you have done, hardly contradicts peak oil theory.
Spinning a smaller mass will ALWAYS mean a lower power input, from start to finish and everything in betweeen.
A major cause of energy loss in a hard drive is aerodynamic drag of the platters, which is proportional to surface area, but unrelated to mass. Bearing friction is proportional to platter mass.
I was always under the impression that most of the energy driving the platters is lost to aerodynamics, heating the air surrounding the platters rather than the spindle bearing. That suggests that the energy required would be largely proportional to the number of platters, not the mass of the platters. However Cringely's claim of power savings seems to contradict this. Anyone have hard data on this?
As long as you cover the whole dynamic range of a scene with a contast of several thousand to one, you have a HDR image.
You may have an HDR image, but it will not be a visually realistic HDR image, as I pointed out in another post. You must sacrifice either perceptual linearity or perceptual smoothness in order to fit a 200,000:1 contrast ratio into 8 bits. Few practical applications would consider that a reasonable tradeoff.
Human hearing covers about a 120dBA range. That's 20 bits. Not nearly as wide as our visual acuity range but it's considerably more than 16 bits. I do think that's pretty incredible. For example, it's quite a challenge to get a -120dB noise floor with room temperature electronics.
You can store an entire HDR image in one bit: the spotlight pointed into your eyes is either on or off. That seems to be the point you're making, and I don't think it's particularly relevant to any realistic HDR application.
If you want to quantize HDR images with 8 bits per channel or less, you are going to lose one or both of two basic properties: perceptual linearity, and perceptual smoothness. In other words, you lose visual realism.
So if you want I can revise my statement:
Visually realistic HDR and color depth are joined at the hip. You can't get one without the other.
There is no such thing as a 0.0 - 1.0 visual range. The human visual system is floating point, pretty much literally. You have your exponent, which is how well adapted your eyes are to the light, how dilated your pupil is, etc. You have your mantissa, which is the relative intensity within your current visual field. Physiologially, we have about 28 bits of exponent and about 10 bits of mantissa. So, proper HDR is floating point. But we're not quite there yet.
In both audio and video, this whole idea of quantizing a 0.0 - 1.0 interval is a compromise wrought by insufficient numerical resolution. It has nothing to do with physics or perception or anything else. Once you realize that, you should also realize that the idea of "going outside" the 0.0 - 1.0 range is absurd. You don't go outside the range, you expand the range so as to better approximate the incredible human senses. As long as we're using fixed point image formats and digital video standards, there will always be a range, and we'll always be inside the 0.0 - 1.0 range, and it will always be a compromise.
Audio professionals have worked out their terminology far better than graphics guys have. Audio guys talk about dB, decibels. The reference point is 0db, which is as loud as your amp will go. When you add more bits, you're adding more quiet, not more loud. If you want more loud you buy a bigger amp. Each additional bit gives you 3dB more quiet, and you'd better hope your equipment has a low enough noise floor that you can hear all that fresh new quiet.
So what are you saying? What's the difference between HDR and 48 bit color? To use an analogy to audio, you seem to be saying that HDR is about more loud, and 48 bit color is about more quiet. But as you go on to point out, they're really just the same thing. No matter what, you've got a clipping level (the maximum luminance of your output device), you've got a noise floor (the minimum luminance of your output device), and hopefully you've got enough quantization levels in between for perceptual linearity. That's why HDR and color depth are joined at the hip. You can't get one without the other. There is no meaningful distinction.
In theory, you have a good point. In practice, I don't think it is particularly significant.
The original purpose of gamma correction is to quantize intensity in a way that is perceived as linear. Linear perceived intensity is very important. It results in the best information transfer in a given number of bits. It is also a bedrock assumption of most digital signal processing methods. For example, if you apply a typical smoothing filter to a nonlinear image you will change the overall intensity of the image in unintended ways.
Using a gamma curve which is too far away from linear intensity will cause all sorts of problems and in practice is seldom done. When it is done, I imagine it is a poor compromise chosen for lack of better alternatives. It's the exception that proves the rule.
That's short sighted. This technology seems highly amenable to economies of scale and low cost mass production. I'm sure there are challenges, particularly efficiency and cooling, but those are really only a problem if you need high brightness. I could see a product based on this technology costing only 20% or 30% more than equivalent LDR displays within a year or two - predicated only on market penetration.
Other HDR technologies I've seen involve far higher barriers to low cost production. Laser projection being a great example, stunning imagery, but inherently high cost for a long time to come.
The real barrier to this technology is not cost but video standards. Most standards for digital video have 8 bits of dynamic range.
Truth be told I'd much rather see the color depth approached first.
Color depth is HDR. They are one and the same. A monitor which can faithfully display 48 bit color is an HDR monitor by definition.
The article opens with a rhetorical device where it contrasts two extreme, stereotyped viewpoints. The summary quotes only one of these viewpoints, portraying it as the author's voice. I think that's really appallingly lame. The submitter and/or editor should be ashamed of themselves for so grossly distorting the author's intent.
You lost me at "literally almost astronomical."
"If it was a big issue, you'd be using SCSI"... that is so bogus.
The SATA standard is entirely suitable for enterprise use and has a growing collection of enterprise class drives.
Reliability is a "big issue" for almost everyone. Reliability is more important than raw performance for most of the desktop market, indeed most of the hard drive market. If SATA drives were inherently unreliable, they would be unsuitable for any market.
The only reason reliability isn't the main benchmark for a drive is that it's so hard to measure or predict. If measuring reliability were as easy as measuring noise levels, it would be the most important buying criteria bar none. Particularly since other measurable criteria do not vary all that much between modern drives at a given price point and capacity level.
No, you can't get several minutes of weightlessness from a conventional aircraft.
The theoretical maximum duration in zero G for a subsonic maneuver is less than 70 seconds. That would involve a ballistic trajectory initially going straight up at the speed of sound, only recovering once you are going straight down at the speed of sound. 331.5 m/s / 9.8 m/s/s * 2 = 67.65 seconds.
Practical zero-G maneuvers for conventional (i.e. subsonic) passenger aircraft typically get 15-25 seconds of weightlessness.
It seems like a relatively easy transition to me. In fact it is a transition that is already ongoing.
Less and less of the electronics in a modern PC can be powered directly off one of the PSU rails. The natural solution is point-of-load DC-DC converters. More and more stuff is using the 12v rail. More and more of a high end power supply's watt budget is going into 12v supplies. Graphics cards are powered largely from 12v with point-of-load regulation. The 3.3v and 5v supplies are naturally becoming vestigial over time, with the only barrier being existing PSU standards.
The PSU connector design and form factor doesn't need to change. Current design trends in motherboards and graphics cards don't need to change. You just need some incremental changes to standards in order to encourage a trend that is already ongoing. For example:
1) New platform standards with higher 12v current and lower 3.3v and 5v current would encourage motherboard and peripheral designers to source DC-DC conversion from 12v rail. PSU design would become somewhat simpler and more efficient even though all 4 rails would still be required. Many existing PSUs would be forwards compatible.
2) 12v-only motherboards could be developed that would operate either with existing power supplies or special 12v-only supplies. Hard drive connectors would come from the motherboard rather than the PSU. Overall system efficienty would be higher, driving adoption by energy-cost-sensitive customers.
3) Hard drive manufacturers would be encouraged to operate from 12v rail only, to eventually eliminate the excess regulation on the motherboard, further increasing system efficiency. (Hard drive controllers already use some DC-DC conversion.)
It's easy to imagine 12v-only power connectors which would be simple and basically interoperable with existing ATX standards, yet designed to prevent connection of incompatible devices.
The transition might not be quick, but there's no reason to expect it to be particularly painful, as long as the leadership is there.
Bruce, that's the exact reason that single rail 12v supplies make sense on the desktop - at least, more sense than 3.3v or 5v supplies.
Currently the power supply delivers 4 different legacy voltages, which are increasingly becoming useless to directly power any electrical device on the motherboard. More and more of the active electronics is using lower and lower voltages. So there is already a design trend toward voltage regulation at the point of load - that is, on the motherboard or video card.
If designers were completly freed from all existing legacy constraints, they would want a relatively high DC voltage so as to avoid resistive losses and simplify power routing. That is why more and more load is being moved to the 12v rail rather than 5v or 3.3v. That's why video cards use 12v power almost exclusively. Maybe with a blank slate design an even higher DC voltage would be used, like 48v, but that would entail a difficult transition with only minor advantages over 12v.
Single rail = less copper (among other things).
it took google's search engine 3-5 years to overcome inertia in a relatively new arena (web search).
That simply isn't true. When a new and better search engine comes out, it spreads like wildfire. Google search gained market share extremely quickly, as did Lycos and Alta Vista when they each introduced search products that were markedly better than what was available at the time. Google took only 3 years to go from first round financing to absolute leadership of a mature market. There's no significant inertia there, just wildly fast market acceptance, virtually unparalleled in any other business in history.
Now, it is competing against much longer established business (e-mail has been around for multiple decades).
Webmail is a newer, less well established, and less profitable business than web search. There is no reason whatsoever to expect steeper competition in webmail than in web search.
In any case, the reason investors are concerned about Google's multitude of services is not market acceptance but profitability. The overwhelming majority of Google's revenue comes from search and AdSense. I have no doubt that Google has achived and will continue to achieve good market penetration with GMail. The question is whether they can make money off it. So far, the answer is no.
Tell that to Lycos and Alta Vista. They were each at one point in time prohibitive market leaders in search. There is no evidence whatsoever that web search provides a durable competitive advantage to market leaders. People go where they get the best search results.
It's likely that this is changing in degree as Internet use widens to a less well informed public. Naive users will probably be more loyal than web users of the late 90s. However there's no reason to believe that this changes the fundamental dynamic of web services which has been observed again and again: it is a meritocracy where entrenched market leaders have only incremental advantages in the long term.
Martin
In the case of easily duplicatable information (which is all a recording is any more), supply is now the original work, not the copies!
Yes, that's exactly the sense that I was using in my post. This is also the sense in which "piracy is killing PC gaming," since it is harming the incentive for game developers to supply new PC titles.
To be more specific, the supply curve we're talking about is "number of unique titles or works" versus "gross revenue."
You claimed that, beyond a certain point, "it does not matter how many people experience the work of art without paying the artist" because "the use of the work does not deprive anyone of anything." This can only be true if, beyond the point you are talking about, supply of new titles is completely inelastic with marginal revenue, and the supply curve becomes horizontal. Unless the human race runs out of creativity, that seems like an unlikely outcome. The more society as a whole is willing to pay for creative work, the more creative work will be done.
Instead, what is happening is that unpaid "use" of commercial works absorbs demand without providing any revenue to the suppliers. Since supply is elastic, this will reduce the supply of titles (quantity or quality or both), with a negative impact on both the game industry and the legitimate purchasers of games. The only people who benefit, even in the short term, are the pirates.
I'm honestly a bit baffled by your entertainment choices. You routinely play mindnumbingly boring games half way through? Why would you play them at all if they're so boring? Are you getting any entertainment value at all out of your time, or is it just an act of periodic masochism to expose yourself to the current state of the game industry?
If you are being entertained, then I would say you should pay for that entertainment rather than stealing it.
If you aren't being entertained, I suggest that computer gaming may not be your cup of tea. Perhaps a good book?
My personal interpretation, which seems to best explain the available facts, is that you play games because they are fun while they are easy, then you reach a challenge which frustrates you and and decide to cheat instead of rising to the chanllenge. This eliminates any remaining entertainment value and leaves you with boredom as your final impression of the game. You delete the game and use your dissatisfaction to rationalize your theft.
Martin