Imagine a DNCA (N for nano), anti-nano-copying... this car is nano-righted 2092. Any attempt to duplicate it is a violation of our nanorights...
Of course, this is exactly how it was in Diamond Age. Matter compilers could make anything, but the instructions necessary to actually produce something were incredibly complicated. A team of designers would have to work months to write to instructions so something as simple as a chair could be produced. In a world like this, intellectual property is everything and physical property is near worthless.
Of course, it's also important to note the limitations to compilers had in Diamond Age as well. The products they produced were limited in what materials could be used, they couldn't produce a wood chair for example, they could only produce a chair that felt like wood. Hence they couldn't really produce food.
I personally think Diamond Age is the best thought out book I've read on the subject of nanotechnology and it's uses, I recommend it to everyone who might be interested in such a subject. Neil Stephenson made reasonable assumptions about the first stages of nanotechnology (they won't be self replicating) and avoided the whole "nanomachines are magic" concept. He paints a world that is very similiar to our own, with it's own problems and own solutions.
From what I remember, Sony shipped an initial 500,000 units to the US and followed them up with an additional 100,000 per week. Those numbers are similiar with Nintendo's. A lot of people wanted a PS2 when they came out, Nintendo will have the same problems if the same people now decide they want a Gamecube to add to their collection.
Just scanned through some of the review sites. Most of them preferred to discuss the plot in detail rather than actually review the game, but FFX will indeed have recorded voices for every line in the game. I really, really hope the US division doesn't screw this up.
Anyway, my original point is still valid for the X games that come out each year which don't have a multi-million dollar budget. Final Fantasies are truly the big budget juggernauts of the game industry.
My understanding was that only some of the cutscenes would have voices. There hasn't been much info on it, I'm more than a little worried that the American voices won't be up to snuff. Can't wait to get my hands on it at any rate.
Voice acting has really limited the size of games; any game with a long playtime has had to stay away from it. It's just too much trouble to bring in voice actors for even the simplest parts, a Final Fantasy sized game would just be too expensive and time consuming to produce. A good voice synthesizer could replace all this, just add as much text as you want in the game and let the software do the rest. Another cool point is that without the cost of hiring voice actors, it would be one bit easier for small development houses to compete with large ones. And of course, voice acting in games is usually so badly done that this can't help but be a step up.
Voice synthesis is an option that game developers have been looking at for years. Let's hope it's time as finally come.
First off, I want to make the distinction that those popular NAT boxes aren't actually firewalls. They let you share a single IP, a firewall would protect a whole range of IPs. Just a pet peeve.
Anyway, if your concern is that a hacker might break through your NAT router, you can generally relax. At it's default setting, these boxes are very secure, IP packets just don't get through them. Of course there are a few caveats. The first is that the box itself can't be flawed. I've never heard of someone hacking one but it could be possible if the engineers that designed it really screwed up badly. More likely though, the only method of attack a hacker can realisticly do would involve any static routes you had set up.
For example, if you set all traffic to port 80 to route to your server because you wanted to host your own web site, and the web server you were using had a security flaw in it, then the hacker could still exploit it. So there really isn't any get-out-of-being-hacked-free card here, but it does cut down on the number of possible entry points.
My point is that buying a cheap NAT box is a very good security decision, I encourage everyone who doesn't have something already in place to get one.
Obviously, you aren't paying attention to what TM is doing for the high end market.
Evidently I wasn't, I was just paying attention to what I saw in stores. Since I bought my stick retail so long ago, I thought it was a fair enough method of measurement. Thanks for the info, I am pleased to see they're still producing quality products somewhere down the line.
So this is what Thrustmaster has been reduced to I guess. They used to make the coolest joysticks around, I bought one from them many years ago. Cost me ~$120, it was made of metal, and required 15lbs of force to push it forward. That was the low end too, they sold a full cockpit for the real flight sim enthusiast. My guess is that there was a change of management a while back, the stuff they're producing now is as cheap as anything else. It's a sad day when Microsoft is producing the best joysticks around.
Now, I'm quite poorly-read on such things, but wouldn't better multicast support, on the backbone and for the end-user, take care of network congestion for planned webcasts?
This is exactly what the mbone does, and it's been implemented for years. It's just that most ISPs don't want to upgrade their routers to support it. If you're lucky enough to have an ISP that supports it, I recommend you check it out. You can pull in streaming video of empty classrooms and stuff.
It's not just corporations that overuse the SSN as a form of ID - universities are guilty of this practice. I go to Carnegie Mellon, where the primary form of student ID is - you guessed it - the student's SSN. International students get (psuedo)random numbers, but we American citizens are not so lucky.
Yeah, I made the same mistake. The university I went to would've let me change my ID number if I had been thinking of it, but I was just a freshman and filled out the form anyway. I don't think they actually use your SSN for anything other than their internal records, so you could probably make one up and get away with it. In retrospect I wince at all the places I unknowingly gave my SSN to...
Hey moron, I was an A+ student in my history classes, so I should have some idea about past ideas that failed.
There is a difference between knowing history and understanding it. We have documented the human experiment for the last several thousand years, one can easily draw anecdotal evidence to support any idea. This is done using particularly bad forms of symbolic logic, if you can find a situation which has similarities to the current situation; ergo things will turn out the same way as they did in the past. What I have found is that many people (the Slashdot crowd included) search through the annals of history looking for proof that they are correct, then spout their findings as irrefutable proof. It is particularly vulgar way to put present an argument, it was this technique that I was railing against in my previous post.
Most specifically, as you pointed out above, is the tendancy to compare anything to the Nazi party. You pointed out the similarities between our gun laws and the actions of Hitler without mentioning any points that are dissimilar, you are hoping to prove that our current gun laws will lead to a similiar resolve as happened in Germany. No logic, no argument, just a meaningless spewing forth of facts. People can tell a difference between that and a good argument. If you ever have the desire to provide a compelling argument that might change peoples' minds on a subject you care deeply about, I suggest you use a different approach.
I'll be one of those annoying anal retentive Slashdot guys for a moment and point out that Chris Roberts left Digital Anvil a while ago.
But to focus on the crux of what you're saying, I have to agree that the game industry would be a good testbed for this kind of thing. A lot of people would've sent money hand over fist to John Romero when he started Ion Storm (and lost miserably) but a few would now be cleaning up on their investment with American McGee. Just seems like a neat idea, people would essentially be able to "bet" on their favorite game designers and companies, I think a number of gamers would go for this. While I doubt most developers could raise enough from the general public to fund the whole production, it would be a nice bonus. Interest in a certain bond could even attract additional dollars from a VC or publishing firm. Cool idea.
It seems to be in popular fashion now to prove something completely by an unrelated metaphor. Rather than generating a well reasoned argument you can just find ways in which something relates to the Nazi party and go from there. We all know that Hitler was the ultimate evil, so any connection between Hitler and some idea proves that idea to be evil.
I certainly agree with your mini rant for these reasons. The best arguments against the DMCA involve pragmatic reasons and comparisons, such as pointing out that IBM clones wouldn't have been made if a DMCA equivalent had been passed 20 years ago. I also think it's a poor idea to try to link the physical and informational worlds legally, there is a huge difference between restricting code and firearms (we have a seperate amendment for each).
Of course, this is all the price of reading Slashdot. I find some amazing conceptual gems scattered among these pages, but they're usually hidden behind the meaningless rants of someone with no sense of history.
Re:Is better TV definition needed ?
on
The Joys of HDTV
·
· Score: 2
Sorry just a pet peeve of mine - I hate it when people call it a sony "VEGA" when it is a "WEGA". They did a little double colored, double "V" logo, which (while trumpets are sounding) - is a "W".
Such a confusing issue because a number of the electronics stores I've gone to have it marked as "VEGA". I was told that it was named after the star Vega, which sounded reasonable.
I'll check my manual when I get home and see what that refers to it as. Such a nice TV, just a pain to get up a flight of stairs.
I'd like to point out that you still haven't explained what I'm missing at the lower resolution.
Well, as you've indicated there really isn't a quantitative analysis that can be done to prove that HDTV provides a better experience. All I can do is point at the general trend in the market today, specifically movie theaters and DVD. Theaters, for example, have expanded their sound systems significantly over the last decade because they found it attracts the audience. People can tell the difference and are willing to go drive a little further to get better sound and picture, even if they're going to see a comedy. DVD is probably a better example, the qualitative gains of DVD vs VHS are more in line with the improvements HDTV provides over normal TV. People wouldn't be spending ~$5-$10 more on a movie to buy it on DVD if they didn't see some definate gain. And these aren't just popular with the big screen/surround sound crowd, quite a few people attach their DVD player to a fairly cheap TV.
Barring a radical change in display technology, I don't think the prices for HDTV's are going to decline quickly any time soon. While the technology to build CRT's for computer monitors may be similar to that needed to make CRT's for HDTV use, the tooling is different and the details are different (there are significantly more holes in the shadow mask and each one must be very precisely drilled) and the production lines are not optimized for the 16:9 aspect ratio CRT's.
I rather like the idea of converted monitors, hobbiests are already doing this. The 16:9 ratio is really the only problem with them, and this can be fixed by simply "scrunching" the image so it fits on the screen (Sony offers TVs that are already doing this). Not the ideal solution, but as LCD becomes more popular in the business world the prices for CRTs are going to plummet. As for standard HDTVs, their prices are going to continue to be forced down by the manufacturers simply out of survival. As I said before, it's going to get harder to improve on standard TVs so these will be offered to entice people to upgrade.
Really the main reason no one buys these monsters is the lack of promotion. With the exception of a few commisioned salesmen, there hasn't been a desire to push these things out the door. The root of this obviously is the lack of support from the networks, until most of the nation has access to HDTV programming interest will be lacking. But once the manufactures sense that the interest is there, they'll push these puppies as fast as they can. It may not happen according to the government's schedule, but it will happen.
The point is that most people think that their televisions work well enough and don't see any crying need to make any significant changes. This is not the same as color television because it was generally acknowledged by the great unwashed masses that color was enough better than black and white to justify paying a hefty (at one point, on the order of 3-5 times the cost of the B&W TV) premium.
I would argue that this is very similar to the arrival of color television. As you said, "how many of Jay Leno's jokes am I going to not get because I'm still watching him on an analog TV." Content of course doesn't drive this advancement, but the same factors that pushed people towards color TVs still exist. A big part is manufacturing costs, and really HDTVs are priced a lot higher than they need to be. Essentially they're made with the same technology as standard computer monitors, it's just a matter of time till some manufactuer just changes the circuits of a CRT display and sells it as a $500 low end HDTV. But this goes hand in hand with the functioning of our economy, that is to say the interest Americans have in luxury goods. A lot of people buy "cool toys", the trick is to price things so that the average American can buy it with just a paycheck or two. Manufactuers are going to be all over this because they've almost run out of enhancements they can stick on the newest TVs, at this point they're doing more with the look of the box than it's contents.
Of course, I look forward to HDTV myself, but then that's because I want to plug my computer into my TV. For people like me, this stuff is almost a justification in of itself. But even though this technology is dependant on the acceptance of most of America, I still feel pretty confident. The US continues to drive itself forward in all aspects and when this isn't possible it drives in circles. The point is that no industry here stays stagnant for long, something as well loved as TV will be forced to progress like everything else.
When you think about it, why does one need a better TV definition ? really, it's only to get a better picture on large TV sets.
There is a shortage of stores that actually show HDTV samples on their HDTV sets, but if there's one near you go take a look. The differences are apparent, especially on standard CRT TVs (most of the rear projection, big screen models look like CRAP IMO). Now you may question whether the improvement is worth the cost, and at the moment it probably isn't. But the future will bring cheaper and cheaper manufacturing techniques, HDTV displays will start to be pushed by the manufacturers to replace peoples' old TV sets. The progression will be as inevitable as color TV was. In 20 years you'll be so used to the higher definition, the older sets will look bad in comparison.
One of the things I've noticed in general terms is: the more common a security device is, the more people know how to defeat it. This is true of any form of security, both cyber and physical.
There are many examples of this in the real world. Several methods have been developed to open Masterlock brand pad locks, not because they're inferior but because they're popular. The same goes for standard deadbolts, they can be opened in seconds with a vibration pick. And in the electronic world it's the most popular mail servers and web servers that get hacked. The point is that any thief is going to research the most common methods of protection and ways around them.
This validates the idea of security through obscurity in my mind. Once you've got some good, fundamental, popular security set up, throw something different into the mix. Something no one is going to expect, something that is not necessarly as effective as it is unique.
I question how well an AI would function with these things. I'm sure the calm, zero gravity environment of the ISS is more ideal for practical autonomous robots, but it still seems like several years of work before they could do anything useful.
On the other hand, stick a person on the other end and it might be all kinds of useful. I'm sure the engineers on the ground would love to be able to check things out themselves by remote rather than bother the residents. It'd be so easy to adapt for this purpose, I'd be surprised if this didn't wind up to be their function.
Oh wait. I forgot. 99.999% of the people on/. staunchly refuse to use Mac's so they would never know just how simple it is to accomplish this task and that Mac users have had this luxury for well over a decade.
I've never seen a Mac used in this configuration. Of course, some Unix derivatives had multiple monitor support for just as long and I never saw them used in that way either. I just think it's a cool idea and don't understand why it isn't used more - by users of any platform. Especially with LCD displays starting to take off, they don't take up much room and it's cheaper to buy 2 15"ers than an 18". If not Matrox, somebody should capitalize on this idea, I think it's time has come.
I bought a Matrox 450 a while back and played around with it's dual monitor support. I personally think that's one of the coolest things you can have in a desktop environment, you can maximize your main application on your primary monitor and use your secondary for a variety of other tasks. People are forever turning up their resolution to barely tolerable levels just to get that additional screen real estate but you still don't gain that much. Having two monitors not only doubles the available screen space, but it does so in useable ways.
I suspect a lot of people would be up for this configuration if they only knew about it and had a chance to try it out. Matrox's 3D support is questionable but their dual monitor stuff works pretty well, this is what they should be marketing on. I think it could be a decent hit in the business community, it's all about marketing.
Let's see, at 10MB a person, times 280 million people, that's 2,800 terrabytes. I think we should wait till disk space becomes really cheap before we worry about government subsidized web pages.
But more to the point, I think.us geographic domains should generally be available to the public for free. People and businesses should be able to call up their city/county clerk and grab a domain. If I own a Joe's pizza in Plano, TX, I should be able to get joespizza.plano.tx.us for free. It just seems so cheap to implement and would help pull the Internet towards some semblance of organization.
I've been waiting for someone to come out with something like this for a while. What I've wanted is a secondary method of controlling my computer that was completely dynamic, it looks like that's what this thing can do. Basically this thing provides a quick and easy way to access common computer functions, anything from muting the sound to switching between tasks to monitoring the heat of your motherboard.
Now this specific model may not be ready to do all that, but either someone will figure out how to hack it or future products will fill in the gaps. $300 is alot to spend on something like this, but hopefully they will come down in price enough to warrant buying multiples.
In case my rant isn't making any sense, what I'm talking about is moving the computer's interface from beyond the monitor and the mouse to the surrounding work area. Accessing computer functions in a graphical environment would be alot easier if I were simply able to tap a pad on my desk rather than navigate through hierarchical menus with my mouse. Just another step towards the ultimate computer workstation.
What I want to know is why should universites and such start a whole new internet when the money could be better spend upgrading current hardware. the Internet2 is fine and dandy, but it's really just an extension of the internet(1) and we should upgrade speeds to that of internet2 with our existing hardware.
Before the Internet went commercial, the backbones were maintained by the NSF (National Science Foundation, part of the US Government). For the Internet to become commercial meant that the US government couldn't be involved financially, so the NSF shut down their backbones and forced everyone to move to commercial providers. Things got bad as every ISP hooked into the same overloaded backbones and the providers refused to upgrade.
Internet 2 is separated from the Internet for a variety of reasons, but primarly so it can be paid for by government funds again. It is the Internet as it used to be, a controlling authority maintains it and guarantees bandwidth upgrades and reliability. Hopefully it is also a model of things to come, and probably the technology it uses will be implemented in the Internet eventually. It's guiding philosphy is very different from the chaotic, democratic, and commercialistic Internet we know today.
Omniweb's taking care of the browser, the email app is written already (and called Mail), and they are likely to have MS-Office itself for the forseeable future.
The problem is that these are all 3rd party software. In order to design a truly user friendly machine, I mean a whole lot simpler than the PCs that are available today, you can't rely on a bunch of different pieces of software. Not only do they need to be preinstalled on the machine and easily accessible, they need nearly identical user interfaces. Essentially Apple (or somebody else, Microsoft isn't doing it) needs to provide a single, unified user interface that a trained monkey could figure out. Any machine should of course be expandable but the essential design should be very, very simple. One click internet and all that. There is a definate market here, but it is evidently beyond Apple's grasp.
Slashdot Mirror
Imagine a DNCA (N for nano), anti-nano-copying... this car is nano-righted 2092. Any attempt to duplicate it is a violation of our nanorights...
Of course, this is exactly how it was in Diamond Age. Matter compilers could make anything, but the instructions necessary to actually produce something were incredibly complicated. A team of designers would have to work months to write to instructions so something as simple as a chair could be produced. In a world like this, intellectual property is everything and physical property is near worthless.
Of course, it's also important to note the limitations to compilers had in Diamond Age as well. The products they produced were limited in what materials could be used, they couldn't produce a wood chair for example, they could only produce a chair that felt like wood. Hence they couldn't really produce food.
I personally think Diamond Age is the best thought out book I've read on the subject of nanotechnology and it's uses, I recommend it to everyone who might be interested in such a subject. Neil Stephenson made reasonable assumptions about the first stages of nanotechnology (they won't be self replicating) and avoided the whole "nanomachines are magic" concept. He paints a world that is very similiar to our own, with it's own problems and own solutions.
From what I remember, Sony shipped an initial 500,000 units to the US and followed them up with an additional 100,000 per week. Those numbers are similiar with Nintendo's. A lot of people wanted a PS2 when they came out, Nintendo will have the same problems if the same people now decide they want a Gamecube to add to their collection.
Just scanned through some of the review sites. Most of them preferred to discuss the plot in detail rather than actually review the game, but FFX will indeed have recorded voices for every line in the game. I really, really hope the US division doesn't screw this up.
Anyway, my original point is still valid for the X games that come out each year which don't have a multi-million dollar budget. Final Fantasies are truly the big budget juggernauts of the game industry.
FFX has full voice acting.
My understanding was that only some of the cutscenes would have voices. There hasn't been much info on it, I'm more than a little worried that the American voices won't be up to snuff. Can't wait to get my hands on it at any rate.
Voice acting has really limited the size of games; any game with a long playtime has had to stay away from it. It's just too much trouble to bring in voice actors for even the simplest parts, a Final Fantasy sized game would just be too expensive and time consuming to produce. A good voice synthesizer could replace all this, just add as much text as you want in the game and let the software do the rest. Another cool point is that without the cost of hiring voice actors, it would be one bit easier for small development houses to compete with large ones. And of course, voice acting in games is usually so badly done that this can't help but be a step up.
Voice synthesis is an option that game developers have been looking at for years. Let's hope it's time as finally come.
First off, I want to make the distinction that those popular NAT boxes aren't actually firewalls. They let you share a single IP, a firewall would protect a whole range of IPs. Just a pet peeve.
Anyway, if your concern is that a hacker might break through your NAT router, you can generally relax. At it's default setting, these boxes are very secure, IP packets just don't get through them. Of course there are a few caveats. The first is that the box itself can't be flawed. I've never heard of someone hacking one but it could be possible if the engineers that designed it really screwed up badly. More likely though, the only method of attack a hacker can realisticly do would involve any static routes you had set up.
For example, if you set all traffic to port 80 to route to your server because you wanted to host your own web site, and the web server you were using had a security flaw in it, then the hacker could still exploit it. So there really isn't any get-out-of-being-hacked-free card here, but it does cut down on the number of possible entry points.
My point is that buying a cheap NAT box is a very good security decision, I encourage everyone who doesn't have something already in place to get one.
Obviously, you aren't paying attention to what TM is doing for the high end market.
Evidently I wasn't, I was just paying attention to what I saw in stores. Since I bought my stick retail so long ago, I thought it was a fair enough method of measurement. Thanks for the info, I am pleased to see they're still producing quality products somewhere down the line.
So this is what Thrustmaster has been reduced to I guess. They used to make the coolest joysticks around, I bought one from them many years ago. Cost me ~$120, it was made of metal, and required 15lbs of force to push it forward. That was the low end too, they sold a full cockpit for the real flight sim enthusiast. My guess is that there was a change of management a while back, the stuff they're producing now is as cheap as anything else. It's a sad day when Microsoft is producing the best joysticks around.
Now, I'm quite poorly-read on such things, but wouldn't better multicast support, on the backbone and for the end-user, take care of network congestion for planned webcasts?
This is exactly what the mbone does, and it's been implemented for years. It's just that most ISPs don't want to upgrade their routers to support it. If you're lucky enough to have an ISP that supports it, I recommend you check it out. You can pull in streaming video of empty classrooms and stuff.
It's not just corporations that overuse the SSN as a form of ID - universities are guilty of this practice. I go to Carnegie Mellon, where the primary form of student ID is - you guessed it - the student's SSN. International students get (psuedo)random numbers, but we American citizens are not so lucky.
Yeah, I made the same mistake. The university I went to would've let me change my ID number if I had been thinking of it, but I was just a freshman and filled out the form anyway. I don't think they actually use your SSN for anything other than their internal records, so you could probably make one up and get away with it. In retrospect I wince at all the places I unknowingly gave my SSN to...
Hey moron, I was an A+ student in my history classes, so I should have some idea about past ideas that failed.
There is a difference between knowing history and understanding it. We have documented the human experiment for the last several thousand years, one can easily draw anecdotal evidence to support any idea. This is done using particularly bad forms of symbolic logic, if you can find a situation which has similarities to the current situation; ergo things will turn out the same way as they did in the past. What I have found is that many people (the Slashdot crowd included) search through the annals of history looking for proof that they are correct, then spout their findings as irrefutable proof. It is particularly vulgar way to put present an argument, it was this technique that I was railing against in my previous post.
Most specifically, as you pointed out above, is the tendancy to compare anything to the Nazi party. You pointed out the similarities between our gun laws and the actions of Hitler without mentioning any points that are dissimilar, you are hoping to prove that our current gun laws will lead to a similiar resolve as happened in Germany. No logic, no argument, just a meaningless spewing forth of facts. People can tell a difference between that and a good argument. If you ever have the desire to provide a compelling argument that might change peoples' minds on a subject you care deeply about, I suggest you use a different approach.
I'll be one of those annoying anal retentive Slashdot guys for a moment and point out that Chris Roberts left Digital Anvil a while ago.
But to focus on the crux of what you're saying, I have to agree that the game industry would be a good testbed for this kind of thing. A lot of people would've sent money hand over fist to John Romero when he started Ion Storm (and lost miserably) but a few would now be cleaning up on their investment with American McGee. Just seems like a neat idea, people would essentially be able to "bet" on their favorite game designers and companies, I think a number of gamers would go for this. While I doubt most developers could raise enough from the general public to fund the whole production, it would be a nice bonus. Interest in a certain bond could even attract additional dollars from a VC or publishing firm. Cool idea.
It seems to be in popular fashion now to prove something completely by an unrelated metaphor. Rather than generating a well reasoned argument you can just find ways in which something relates to the Nazi party and go from there. We all know that Hitler was the ultimate evil, so any connection between Hitler and some idea proves that idea to be evil.
I certainly agree with your mini rant for these reasons. The best arguments against the DMCA involve pragmatic reasons and comparisons, such as pointing out that IBM clones wouldn't have been made if a DMCA equivalent had been passed 20 years ago. I also think it's a poor idea to try to link the physical and informational worlds legally, there is a huge difference between restricting code and firearms (we have a seperate amendment for each).
Of course, this is all the price of reading Slashdot. I find some amazing conceptual gems scattered among these pages, but they're usually hidden behind the meaningless rants of someone with no sense of history.
Sorry just a pet peeve of mine - I hate it when people call it a sony "VEGA" when it is a "WEGA". They did a little double colored, double "V" logo, which (while trumpets are sounding) - is a "W".
Such a confusing issue because a number of the electronics stores I've gone to have it marked as "VEGA". I was told that it was named after the star Vega, which sounded reasonable.
I'll check my manual when I get home and see what that refers to it as. Such a nice TV, just a pain to get up a flight of stairs.
I'd like to point out that you still haven't explained what I'm missing at the lower resolution.
Well, as you've indicated there really isn't a quantitative analysis that can be done to prove that HDTV provides a better experience. All I can do is point at the general trend in the market today, specifically movie theaters and DVD. Theaters, for example, have expanded their sound systems significantly over the last decade because they found it attracts the audience. People can tell the difference and are willing to go drive a little further to get better sound and picture, even if they're going to see a comedy. DVD is probably a better example, the qualitative gains of DVD vs VHS are more in line with the improvements HDTV provides over normal TV. People wouldn't be spending ~$5-$10 more on a movie to buy it on DVD if they didn't see some definate gain. And these aren't just popular with the big screen/surround sound crowd, quite a few people attach their DVD player to a fairly cheap TV.
Barring a radical change in display technology, I don't think the prices for HDTV's are going to decline quickly any time soon. While the technology to build CRT's for computer monitors may be similar to that needed to make CRT's for HDTV use, the tooling is different and the details are different (there are significantly more holes in the shadow mask and each one must be very precisely drilled) and the production lines are not optimized for the 16:9 aspect ratio CRT's.
I rather like the idea of converted monitors, hobbiests are already doing this. The 16:9 ratio is really the only problem with them, and this can be fixed by simply "scrunching" the image so it fits on the screen (Sony offers TVs that are already doing this). Not the ideal solution, but as LCD becomes more popular in the business world the prices for CRTs are going to plummet. As for standard HDTVs, their prices are going to continue to be forced down by the manufacturers simply out of survival. As I said before, it's going to get harder to improve on standard TVs so these will be offered to entice people to upgrade.
Really the main reason no one buys these monsters is the lack of promotion. With the exception of a few commisioned salesmen, there hasn't been a desire to push these things out the door. The root of this obviously is the lack of support from the networks, until most of the nation has access to HDTV programming interest will be lacking. But once the manufactures sense that the interest is there, they'll push these puppies as fast as they can. It may not happen according to the government's schedule, but it will happen.
The point is that most people think that their televisions work well enough and don't see any crying need to make any significant changes. This is not the same as color television because it was generally acknowledged by the great unwashed masses that color was enough better than black and white to justify paying a hefty (at one point, on the order of 3-5 times the cost of the B&W TV) premium.
I would argue that this is very similar to the arrival of color television. As you said, "how many of Jay Leno's jokes am I going to not get because I'm still watching him on an analog TV." Content of course doesn't drive this advancement, but the same factors that pushed people towards color TVs still exist. A big part is manufacturing costs, and really HDTVs are priced a lot higher than they need to be. Essentially they're made with the same technology as standard computer monitors, it's just a matter of time till some manufactuer just changes the circuits of a CRT display and sells it as a $500 low end HDTV. But this goes hand in hand with the functioning of our economy, that is to say the interest Americans have in luxury goods. A lot of people buy "cool toys", the trick is to price things so that the average American can buy it with just a paycheck or two. Manufactuers are going to be all over this because they've almost run out of enhancements they can stick on the newest TVs, at this point they're doing more with the look of the box than it's contents.
Of course, I look forward to HDTV myself, but then that's because I want to plug my computer into my TV. For people like me, this stuff is almost a justification in of itself. But even though this technology is dependant on the acceptance of most of America, I still feel pretty confident. The US continues to drive itself forward in all aspects and when this isn't possible it drives in circles. The point is that no industry here stays stagnant for long, something as well loved as TV will be forced to progress like everything else.
When you think about it, why does one need a better TV definition ? really, it's only to get a better picture on large TV sets.
There is a shortage of stores that actually show HDTV samples on their HDTV sets, but if there's one near you go take a look. The differences are apparent, especially on standard CRT TVs (most of the rear projection, big screen models look like CRAP IMO). Now you may question whether the improvement is worth the cost, and at the moment it probably isn't. But the future will bring cheaper and cheaper manufacturing techniques, HDTV displays will start to be pushed by the manufacturers to replace peoples' old TV sets. The progression will be as inevitable as color TV was. In 20 years you'll be so used to the higher definition, the older sets will look bad in comparison.
One of the things I've noticed in general terms is: the more common a security device is, the more people know how to defeat it. This is true of any form of security, both cyber and physical.
There are many examples of this in the real world. Several methods have been developed to open Masterlock brand pad locks, not because they're inferior but because they're popular. The same goes for standard deadbolts, they can be opened in seconds with a vibration pick. And in the electronic world it's the most popular mail servers and web servers that get hacked. The point is that any thief is going to research the most common methods of protection and ways around them.
This validates the idea of security through obscurity in my mind. Once you've got some good, fundamental, popular security set up, throw something different into the mix. Something no one is going to expect, something that is not necessarly as effective as it is unique.
I question how well an AI would function with these things. I'm sure the calm, zero gravity environment of the ISS is more ideal for practical autonomous robots, but it still seems like several years of work before they could do anything useful.
On the other hand, stick a person on the other end and it might be all kinds of useful. I'm sure the engineers on the ground would love to be able to check things out themselves by remote rather than bother the residents. It'd be so easy to adapt for this purpose, I'd be surprised if this didn't wind up to be their function.
Oh wait. I forgot. 99.999% of the people on /. staunchly refuse to use Mac's so they would never know just how simple it is to accomplish this task and that Mac users have had this luxury for well over a decade.
I've never seen a Mac used in this configuration. Of course, some Unix derivatives had multiple monitor support for just as long and I never saw them used in that way either. I just think it's a cool idea and don't understand why it isn't used more - by users of any platform. Especially with LCD displays starting to take off, they don't take up much room and it's cheaper to buy 2 15"ers than an 18". If not Matrox, somebody should capitalize on this idea, I think it's time has come.
I bought a Matrox 450 a while back and played around with it's dual monitor support. I personally think that's one of the coolest things you can have in a desktop environment, you can maximize your main application on your primary monitor and use your secondary for a variety of other tasks. People are forever turning up their resolution to barely tolerable levels just to get that additional screen real estate but you still don't gain that much. Having two monitors not only doubles the available screen space, but it does so in useable ways.
I suspect a lot of people would be up for this configuration if they only knew about it and had a chance to try it out. Matrox's 3D support is questionable but their dual monitor stuff works pretty well, this is what they should be marketing on. I think it could be a decent hit in the business community, it's all about marketing.
Let's see, at 10MB a person, times 280 million people, that's 2,800 terrabytes. I think we should wait till disk space becomes really cheap before we worry about government subsidized web pages.
But more to the point, I think .us geographic domains should generally be available to the public for free. People and businesses should be able to call up their city/county clerk and grab a domain. If I own a Joe's pizza in Plano, TX, I should be able to get joespizza.plano.tx.us for free. It just seems so cheap to implement and would help pull the Internet towards some semblance of organization.
I've been waiting for someone to come out with something like this for a while. What I've wanted is a secondary method of controlling my computer that was completely dynamic, it looks like that's what this thing can do. Basically this thing provides a quick and easy way to access common computer functions, anything from muting the sound to switching between tasks to monitoring the heat of your motherboard.
Now this specific model may not be ready to do all that, but either someone will figure out how to hack it or future products will fill in the gaps. $300 is alot to spend on something like this, but hopefully they will come down in price enough to warrant buying multiples.
In case my rant isn't making any sense, what I'm talking about is moving the computer's interface from beyond the monitor and the mouse to the surrounding work area. Accessing computer functions in a graphical environment would be alot easier if I were simply able to tap a pad on my desk rather than navigate through hierarchical menus with my mouse. Just another step towards the ultimate computer workstation.
What I want to know is why should universites and such start a whole new internet when the money could be better spend upgrading current hardware. the Internet2 is fine and dandy, but it's really just an extension of the internet(1) and we should upgrade speeds to that of internet2 with our existing hardware.
Before the Internet went commercial, the backbones were maintained by the NSF (National Science Foundation, part of the US Government). For the Internet to become commercial meant that the US government couldn't be involved financially, so the NSF shut down their backbones and forced everyone to move to commercial providers. Things got bad as every ISP hooked into the same overloaded backbones and the providers refused to upgrade.
Internet 2 is separated from the Internet for a variety of reasons, but primarly so it can be paid for by government funds again. It is the Internet as it used to be, a controlling authority maintains it and guarantees bandwidth upgrades and reliability. Hopefully it is also a model of things to come, and probably the technology it uses will be implemented in the Internet eventually. It's guiding philosphy is very different from the chaotic, democratic, and commercialistic Internet we know today.
Omniweb's taking care of the browser, the email app is written already (and called Mail), and they are likely to have MS-Office itself for the forseeable future.
The problem is that these are all 3rd party software. In order to design a truly user friendly machine, I mean a whole lot simpler than the PCs that are available today, you can't rely on a bunch of different pieces of software. Not only do they need to be preinstalled on the machine and easily accessible, they need nearly identical user interfaces. Essentially Apple (or somebody else, Microsoft isn't doing it) needs to provide a single, unified user interface that a trained monkey could figure out. Any machine should of course be expandable but the essential design should be very, very simple. One click internet and all that. There is a definate market here, but it is evidently beyond Apple's grasp.