The XB-70 just looks like a Concorde. Nothing special about that.
The SR-71 looks like a spaceship. It's got to be the most photogenic aircraft in history. There have been countless posters and T-shirts made of the SR-71. It's iconic.
Why is it that some company comes out with a new technology and then with a magic wave of a Slashdot poster's hand, there is some Achilles' heel in the technology which renders all the millions of R&D wasted?
How can these showstoppers exist without the engineers knowing this ahead of time?
But what do those dollars buy you? China has the largest standing army in the world. They could assign a soldier to personally follow every iraqi citizen to maintain the peace if they wanted to. Their military capability from a troop perspective is insane.
Re:Sounds like a lot of money for a little compute
on
OQO For Sale
·
· Score: 1
Business users have no use for USB 2 or wireless g?
-- 50% of the pesticides used in the USA are used on cotton. Hemp can grow with little to no pesticide use, produce stronger fibers (measured in feet compared to the inches of cotton), and has a higher yield. It also has a higher yield than trees when used for paper, doesn't require chemicals when making the paper, and it doesn't turn yellow with age. --
Dude, I've seed Dazed and Confused. The only reason you want hemp is so you can 'schmoke shum weed'.
Analog TV has to follow stringent standards otherwise you get no picture at all. Sure, the picture can get fuzzy, but generally you are guaranteed a certain standard of quality.
Compression is the downside of digital, whether it be digital standard def or high def.
When you leave it to the broadcasters/cable-companies to decide how heavily to compress their signals, they will ratchet it up as far as they feel the market can bear.
That's why digital cable and satellite cable generally looks WORSE than analog cable.
Just because it's a higher frame resolution doesn't mean you get even detail across the entire frame. If you compress it enough, you can make a 1080i image look like a 56K webcam because the blocks internally create effectively a lower visible resolution. You'll have small pockets of native res and large pockets of lower blocky res.
Not only that, but with no fixed resolution for HDTV, what incentive is there to go for the highest HDTV resolution? The lowest HDTV resolution is basically the same as NTSC, only progressive (think DVD's representation of stuff shot on film). That is not really progress, to me.
And big screen TVs, why is it that you see them in the store showing 4:3 content on 16:9 screens? You know, I find messed up aspect ratios to be completely ugly. I don't think there is any advantage in either cropping a 4:3 NTSC picture or stretching it to 16:9 but if you buy a big screen TV then people tend to do just that as a matter of routine because the vast majority of programming is in standard def. Or if you have a plasma you are concerned about burn-in so you wind up watching stuff in the wrong aspect ratio.
What the FCC should have done is enforced a minimum res on HDTV and a maximum compression ratio. The consumer is generally too blind to tell the difference between marketspeak and the actual picture quality so they get suckered into the hype.
Just wait until HD-DVD comes out. If it uses standard DVD disks with MPEG4 compression on it, it's going to such in comparison to blue-ray with milder compression. MPEG4 is great for bootlegs but its limitations are not acceptable for a videophile format.
The next leap is a moonbase. If we can get enough raw tools to the moon to start mining and manufacturing then we can build the base there instead of having to send every part there from the earth. That's the reason we can't make a 2001-style space station. It takes too many space trips to ferry the materials into orbit.
Maybe we could even send robotic missions to the moon first and have them set up a hydrogen mining facility so that when humans get there they will be sitting on top of a huge ready-to-use energy store.
It's basically a hybrid, hybrid hydrogen/gasoline.
The longer you leave the car sitting in the sun the more savings you are going to get over time because of the hydrogen build-up.
It sounds like one could retrofit existing cars to use this system.
The only thing I'm concerned about is the cost of the panels and the electrolysis units. Other than that I forsee a lot of people starting to go this direction when the inevitable oil shock hits us.
The problem with the internet is that there is TOO MUCH content and not a good enough way to find what you are looking for.
That's exactly why search engines like Google and Yahoo are the most popular fixtures of the internet.
The choice is overwhelming. Information overload.
The reason Kazaa became the most popular P2P engine out there had to have something to do with its categorization engine, something that is missing from most P2P applications. Filename alone tells you very little about content.
However, then people start categorizing content improperly/incompletely and you are still in trouble.
There is a convenience in consuming content from reliable commercial sources. You can trust that you are getting what you think you are. When I buy a song from iTunes or a DVD I know I'm not going to have any surprises. When I get something off of a P2P network I have less trust that the description matches the content. Even if real content is injected into the P2P network from people like the BBC that doesn't mean it can't be obscured by malicious individuals.
In fact the categorization can be used as a trojan to get attention. New album from Velvet Revolver coming out, right? Are you a struggling band looking for attention? Put your album on Kazaa using the names of the songs from the Velvet Revolver album and bingo, millions of people will wind up hearing your music!!! This kind of intentional mislabeling is a HUGE problem right now on P2P networks.
The problem with integrity ratings is that they are bound to the file, but what does someone do when they realize they downloaded a bogus file? Do they drop the integrity rating and leave it up for sharing? No, they immediately delete it. So the fact that the file is bogus doesn't propagate. Meanwhile the file still circulates like a virus because people still think it's genuine.
This is a critical piece that needs to get solved within the P2P domain.
The solution seems to be moving towards using hashes and special links (magnet, etc...) on database-driven websites as a way to separate things. But then you are at least in part moving BACK to a central server rather than a P2P model. You still need an authoritative website as a search engine and authenticator. And these sites are getting shut down by the RIAA/MPAA faster than they can go up so this is not a long-term solution.
Not only that, but as for news and political viewpoints, the problem is again too much diversity of opinion. There are billions of people on this planet and I simply have no desire to hear all of their opinions all at once like some kind of Godlike psychic. Journalism as we know it dies, to be replaced by individual opinions masquerading as journalism. Opinions are nice, but everyone's got one and not everyone's worth listing to. So you don't trust Fox News? I'm not sure an unabashedly liberal outlet is any more unbiased. On the net you NEVER know who to take seriously because there are no fact checkers, no regulations, nothing. Anyone can say whatever they want. It's the perfect environment for some kind of Orson Welles War of the Worlds type hoax.
You know, I've actually seen some UFO clips on Kazaa. How the heck do we know if they are real or not? Where is the context? Where did they come from? These things are disassociated from context.
I simply can not see this as a purely positive development in mass media. For these reasons, there are serious drawbacks!
The same slashdotters who were rooting for SS1 invariably turn out to be the ones to immediately whine about it when SS1 lands and the high wears off and they are pissed that they can't beam up to the Enterprise and go off to Vulcan or something.
Come on, people! What kind of ungrateful ADD losers are you?
You know it takes some amount of engineering to build even a 747 and keep it in the air. Something as exotic as this is not a "toy" as you call it. If they make it look easy, that is to their credit. Just because it doesn't fit in with your maturbatory SF fantasy idea of advanced space travel doesn't mean it isn't an engineering marvel.
This is starting to get to be an old argument. Haven't hardware designers been working on low-power small-size for a while now?
Don't laptops use off-the-shelf components from 3rd parties such as the processor and the graphics subsystem? Aren't these produced at a high enough scale to be as affordable as desktop equivalents? How much custom work is really necessary anymore besides the wiring on the board and the casing?
I think the main thing with price is PERCEIVED value. The public is used to thinking of notebooks as these ultra-rare ultra-high-tech things when they are now becoming mainstream consumer items.
It's like not that long ago people were used to paying $1,500-$2,000 for a new PC. Then finally we entered into the sub-$1,000 PC era with companies like eMachines and the other PC vendors were forced to follow them to the bottom.
Now we're finally starting to see sub-$1000 notebooks but some companies still want to charge an ultra-premium for their hardware because they feel the market will bear it.
It's not a given that the price they want is truly reasonable.
Why is it that Dell can sell PDAs at 624MHZ (which is probably fast enough to run Windows 2000 if it were x86 based) for less than $500 but when you throw a hard drive and a few other ports and switch to x86 suddenly the price skyrockets?
The next Dell PDA is going to be VGA resolution also.
The price gap between PDA and subnotebook is a constant but the performance gap is shrinking.
That's not true. Scriptwriters generally know how long a movie is going to be when they are writing it. It's roughly 1 minute per page average.
While most movies have at least one or two cut scenes, they are usually only a few minutes long total.
This extended edition stuff is probably only going to be the domain of adaptations that require a lot of cutting down for screentime, and only in the case of productions which intentionally shoot large chunks of story they know they can't get into the theatrical edition.
Perhaps PJ will influence this kind of moviemaking, but not everyone follows that path.
Compare the cut scene percentage of LOTR vs. the Harry Potter DVDs for instance.
Most filmmakers are too disciplined to shoot so much footage they know can only potentially be shown on DVD. It won't happen unless there is a mandate from the studios to spend the time and effort on it.
Lensing the pages of LOTR was seen as a civic duty by PJ which is why he pushed to do it that way. Most other literature adapted to screen is seen more as a product and not so much a sacred cultural artifact.
I have to disagree with you. The average running time of movies is going up, driven largely by Titanic and other movies that claim to be epics.
It's just that once you pass the 3 hour mark you really limit how many times you can show a movie. However, up to that point you can compensate pretty easily by dedicating multiple screens to the same movie.
Kill Bill was never epic enough to justify Tarantino's requested running time, which is why it was split into two.
I also think the two Civil War movies that Ted Turner did went over the line on running time.
But in general I think the studios are okay with releasing movies up to 3 hours long if they are genuine spectacles.
PJ said that he wanted Frodo to be the focus of the theatrical editions, the character and the changes he goes through.
The EE is more all-encompassing, giving more importance to the various places, people, and things to help flesh out the world.
The irony here is that the pacing of the theatrical editions also wound up removing some of the slower, more character-driven scenes that would have benefitted a more character-centric edit.
So in addition to these expository "diversions" like the Bilbo scene you have many other details like the extended fencing thing with Boromir that really help make the characters more three-dimensional rather than just running from one chase to another.
There isn't much more footage that can be intercut.
Remember that in most cases, the additional footage also required new effects and new scoring, and editing decisions on which take to use, etc..
PJ was busy enough with King Kong that it seemed to me like he was somehow rushing the ROTK EE out the door so he could get on with the new project.
I don't think he wants to revisit the material anymore. And Howard Shore and everyone else are on other projects too.
I think an HD edition is inevitable (hopefully blu-ray instead of hyper-compressed MPEG4 HDDVD) but I don't see much in the way of special material. The only "fix" I'd like to see is reducing Frodo's size when he looks out the balcony in Rivendell. I think they goofed the proportions up on that one.
There is a dream sequence where Frodo turns into a Gollum-like creature. It's not really necessary.
I'd love to see some way to insert Radagast into the picture, but that would be pretty expensive to pull off, I think.
I would like them to insert a cut-in of Denethor's palantir. Suppodely that was deliberately not shot and I think that's a big creative mistake on PJ's part, one they repeatedly make excuses about.
I'd rather have footage with Denethor's palantir vs. Aragorn's.
I'd also like them to re-insert the scene where Eowyn kills an orc in the glittering caves. That was taken out in order to hold back on showing Eowyn as a warrior, but I also think that was a creative mistake.
But most of the unused footage left over would not fit in with the chosen continuity of the adaptation. You have Arwen at Helm's Deep, Aragorn fighting Sauron, perhaps alternate death scenes for Saruman. Stuff like that.
50 minutes of additional footage is not a marketing gimmick. That's an enormous amount of new footage to add to a film and I'm sure it's all worth it as all the theatrical versions, as long as they are, have rushed pacing (up to the epilogue of ROTK).
The fact of the matter is that PJ filmed the equivalent of more like 6 movies vs. 3, and that's why they are so long. There is an established maximum running time even for epics and PJ just decided to go over the limit, knowing that this was the only chance we were likely ever going to have to film this stuff.
What may have seen like a risky luxury at the time on the part of the studios will return huge dividends in the end. PJ got his actors together and rolled film endlessly (not to mention multiple pickup sessions) which is what I or any other Tolkien fan probably would have done in that case. The allure of Lord of the Rings is the immersion into the world and you only get that feeling when you're in there for a while and feel like a part of the journey. You don't get that book-like feeling with even 3 90-minute movies. Regardless of the limitations of theatrical movies (no pause button), DVD is the ultimate venue for this sort of extended immersion.
You really are not supposed to try to digest the entire story in one large feast.
You really have to watch the films episodically over a longer span of time, which is how most people read the trilogy in book-form.
It's just that so many people have such poor memories and their lives are so hard to schedule that they'd have a hard time committing to follow a storyline that took 12+ hours to watch over the course of a week or two of viewings.
Slashdot Mirror
The XB-70 just looks like a Concorde. Nothing special about that. The SR-71 looks like a spaceship. It's got to be the most photogenic aircraft in history. There have been countless posters and T-shirts made of the SR-71. It's iconic.
Just to throw a little guilt on... Moore's law also seems to relate to the rate of Arctic melting.
Why is it that some company comes out with a new technology and then with a magic wave of a Slashdot poster's hand, there is some Achilles' heel in the technology which renders all the millions of R&D wasted?
How can these showstoppers exist without the engineers knowing this ahead of time?
But what do those dollars buy you? China has the largest standing army in the world. They could assign a soldier to personally follow every iraqi citizen to maintain the peace if they wanted to. Their military capability from a troop perspective is insane.
Business users have no use for USB 2 or wireless g?
--
50% of the pesticides used in the USA are used on cotton. Hemp can grow with little to no pesticide use, produce stronger fibers (measured in feet compared to the inches of cotton), and has a higher yield. It also has a higher yield than trees when used for paper, doesn't require chemicals when making the paper, and it doesn't turn yellow with age.
--
Dude, I've seed Dazed and Confused. The only reason you want hemp is so you can 'schmoke shum weed'.
Analog TV has to follow stringent standards otherwise you get no picture at all. Sure, the picture can get fuzzy, but generally you are guaranteed a certain standard of quality.
Compression is the downside of digital, whether it be digital standard def or high def.
When you leave it to the broadcasters/cable-companies to decide how heavily to compress their signals, they will ratchet it up as far as they feel the market can bear.
That's why digital cable and satellite cable generally looks WORSE than analog cable.
Just because it's a higher frame resolution doesn't mean you get even detail across the entire frame. If you compress it enough, you can make a 1080i image look like a 56K webcam because the blocks internally create effectively a lower visible resolution. You'll have small pockets of native res and large pockets of lower blocky res.
Not only that, but with no fixed resolution for HDTV, what incentive is there to go for the highest HDTV resolution? The lowest HDTV resolution is basically the same as NTSC, only progressive (think DVD's representation of stuff shot on film). That is not really progress, to me.
And big screen TVs, why is it that you see them in the store showing 4:3 content on 16:9 screens? You know, I find messed up aspect ratios to be completely ugly. I don't think there is any advantage in either cropping a 4:3 NTSC picture or stretching it to 16:9 but if you buy a big screen TV then people tend to do just that as a matter of routine because the vast majority of programming is in standard def. Or if you have a plasma you are concerned about burn-in so you wind up watching stuff in the wrong aspect ratio.
What the FCC should have done is enforced a minimum res on HDTV and a maximum compression ratio. The consumer is generally too blind to tell the difference between marketspeak and the actual picture quality so they get suckered into the hype.
Just wait until HD-DVD comes out. If it uses standard DVD disks with MPEG4 compression on it, it's going to such in comparison to blue-ray with milder compression. MPEG4 is great for bootlegs but its limitations are not acceptable for a videophile format.
The next leap is a moonbase. If we can get enough raw tools to the moon to start mining and manufacturing then we can build the base there instead of having to send every part there from the earth. That's the reason we can't make a 2001-style space station. It takes too many space trips to ferry the materials into orbit.
Maybe we could even send robotic missions to the moon first and have them set up a hydrogen mining facility so that when humans get there they will be sitting on top of a huge ready-to-use energy store.
I think this is a fantastic idea.
It's basically a hybrid, hybrid hydrogen/gasoline.
The longer you leave the car sitting in the sun the more savings you are going to get over time because of the hydrogen build-up.
It sounds like one could retrofit existing cars to use this system.
The only thing I'm concerned about is the cost of the panels and the electrolysis units. Other than that I forsee a lot of people starting to go this direction when the inevitable oil shock hits us.
The problem with the internet is that there is TOO MUCH content and not a good enough way to find what you are looking for.
That's exactly why search engines like Google and Yahoo are the most popular fixtures of the internet.
The choice is overwhelming. Information overload.
The reason Kazaa became the most popular P2P engine out there had to have something to do with its categorization engine, something that is missing from most P2P applications. Filename alone tells you very little about content.
However, then people start categorizing content improperly/incompletely and you are still in trouble.
There is a convenience in consuming content from reliable commercial sources. You can trust that you are getting what you think you are. When I buy a song from iTunes or a DVD I know I'm not going to have any surprises. When I get something off of a P2P network I have less trust that the description matches the content. Even if real content is injected into the P2P network from people like the BBC that doesn't mean it can't be obscured by malicious individuals.
In fact the categorization can be used as a trojan to get attention. New album from Velvet Revolver coming out, right? Are you a struggling band looking for attention? Put your album on Kazaa using the names of the songs from the Velvet Revolver album and bingo, millions of people will wind up hearing your music!!! This kind of intentional mislabeling is a HUGE problem right now on P2P networks.
The problem with integrity ratings is that they are bound to the file, but what does someone do when they realize they downloaded a bogus file? Do they drop the integrity rating and leave it up for sharing? No, they immediately delete it. So the fact that the file is bogus doesn't propagate. Meanwhile the file still circulates like a virus because people still think it's genuine.
This is a critical piece that needs to get solved within the P2P domain.
The solution seems to be moving towards using hashes and special links (magnet, etc...) on database-driven websites as a way to separate things. But then you are at least in part moving BACK to a central server rather than a P2P model. You still need an authoritative website as a search engine and authenticator. And these sites are getting shut down by the RIAA/MPAA faster than they can go up so this is not a long-term solution.
Not only that, but as for news and political viewpoints, the problem is again too much diversity of opinion. There are billions of people on this planet and I simply have no desire to hear all of their opinions all at once like some kind of Godlike psychic. Journalism as we know it dies, to be replaced by individual opinions masquerading as journalism. Opinions are nice, but everyone's got one and not everyone's worth listing to. So you don't trust Fox News? I'm not sure an unabashedly liberal outlet is any more unbiased. On the net you NEVER know who to take seriously because there are no fact checkers, no regulations, nothing. Anyone can say whatever they want. It's the perfect environment for some kind of Orson Welles War of the Worlds type hoax.
You know, I've actually seen some UFO clips on Kazaa. How the heck do we know if they are real or not? Where is the context? Where did they come from? These things are disassociated from context.
I simply can not see this as a purely positive development in mass media. For these reasons, there are serious drawbacks!
Beheadings are better?
The same slashdotters who were rooting for SS1 invariably turn out to be the ones to immediately whine about it when SS1 lands and the high wears off and they are pissed that they can't beam up to the Enterprise and go off to Vulcan or something.
Come on, people! What kind of ungrateful ADD losers are you?
You know it takes some amount of engineering to build even a 747 and keep it in the air. Something as exotic as this is not a "toy" as you call it. If they make it look easy, that is to their credit. Just because it doesn't fit in with your maturbatory SF fantasy idea of advanced space travel doesn't mean it isn't an engineering marvel.
Yeah, the shuttle is very good at blowing up and SS1 isn't.
X-15 benefitted from research from all previous X planes also. All technology is evolutionary to some degree.
I heard that the hardware can do some kind of scrolling thing to simulate a full 800x600 display so nothing gets cut off.
This is starting to get to be an old argument. Haven't hardware designers been working on low-power small-size for a while now?
Don't laptops use off-the-shelf components from 3rd parties such as the processor and the graphics subsystem? Aren't these produced at a high enough scale to be as affordable as desktop equivalents? How much custom work is really necessary anymore besides the wiring on the board and the casing?
I think the main thing with price is PERCEIVED value. The public is used to thinking of notebooks as these ultra-rare ultra-high-tech things when they are now becoming mainstream consumer items.
It's like not that long ago people were used to paying $1,500-$2,000 for a new PC. Then finally we entered into the sub-$1,000 PC era with companies like eMachines and the other PC vendors were forced to follow them to the bottom.
Now we're finally starting to see sub-$1000 notebooks but some companies still want to charge an ultra-premium for their hardware because they feel the market will bear it.
It's not a given that the price they want is truly reasonable.
Why is it that Dell can sell PDAs at 624MHZ (which is probably fast enough to run Windows 2000 if it were x86 based) for less than $500 but when you throw a hard drive and a few other ports and switch to x86 suddenly the price skyrockets?
The next Dell PDA is going to be VGA resolution also.
The price gap between PDA and subnotebook is a constant but the performance gap is shrinking.
I thought it was Mercedes Benz that built the gas nozzles in the concentration camps, not BMW.
The theory has been tested on an actual sample of surviving Hindenburg skin. It went up like a fricken torch. Case closed.
That's not true. Scriptwriters generally know how long a movie is going to be when they are writing it. It's roughly 1 minute per page average.
While most movies have at least one or two cut scenes, they are usually only a few minutes long total.
This extended edition stuff is probably only going to be the domain of adaptations that require a lot of cutting down for screentime, and only in the case of productions which intentionally shoot large chunks of story they know they can't get into the theatrical edition.
Perhaps PJ will influence this kind of moviemaking, but not everyone follows that path.
Compare the cut scene percentage of LOTR vs. the Harry Potter DVDs for instance.
Most filmmakers are too disciplined to shoot so much footage they know can only potentially be shown on DVD. It won't happen unless there is a mandate from the studios to spend the time and effort on it.
Lensing the pages of LOTR was seen as a civic duty by PJ which is why he pushed to do it that way. Most other literature adapted to screen is seen more as a product and not so much a sacred cultural artifact.
I have to disagree with you. The average running time of movies is going up, driven largely by Titanic and other movies that claim to be epics.
It's just that once you pass the 3 hour mark you really limit how many times you can show a movie. However, up to that point you can compensate pretty easily by dedicating multiple screens to the same movie.
Kill Bill was never epic enough to justify Tarantino's requested running time, which is why it was split into two.
I also think the two Civil War movies that Ted Turner did went over the line on running time.
But in general I think the studios are okay with releasing movies up to 3 hours long if they are genuine spectacles.
PJ said that he wanted Frodo to be the focus of the theatrical editions, the character and the changes he goes through.
The EE is more all-encompassing, giving more importance to the various places, people, and things to help flesh out the world.
The irony here is that the pacing of the theatrical editions also wound up removing some of the slower, more character-driven scenes that would have benefitted a more character-centric edit.
So in addition to these expository "diversions" like the Bilbo scene you have many other details like the extended fencing thing with Boromir that really help make the characters more three-dimensional rather than just running from one chase to another.
I don't see this happening.
There isn't much more footage that can be intercut.
Remember that in most cases, the additional footage also required new effects and new scoring, and editing decisions on which take to use, etc..
PJ was busy enough with King Kong that it seemed to me like he was somehow rushing the ROTK EE out the door so he could get on with the new project.
I don't think he wants to revisit the material anymore. And Howard Shore and everyone else are on other projects too.
I think an HD edition is inevitable (hopefully blu-ray instead of hyper-compressed MPEG4 HDDVD) but I don't see much in the way of special material. The only "fix" I'd like to see is reducing Frodo's size when he looks out the balcony in Rivendell. I think they goofed the proportions up on that one.
There is a dream sequence where Frodo turns into a Gollum-like creature. It's not really necessary.
I'd love to see some way to insert Radagast into the picture, but that would be pretty expensive to pull off, I think.
I would like them to insert a cut-in of Denethor's palantir. Suppodely that was deliberately not shot and I think that's a big creative mistake on PJ's part, one they repeatedly make excuses about.
I'd rather have footage with Denethor's palantir vs. Aragorn's.
I'd also like them to re-insert the scene where
Eowyn kills an orc in the glittering caves. That was taken out in order to hold back on showing Eowyn as a warrior, but I also think that was a creative mistake.
But most of the unused footage left over would not fit in with the chosen continuity of the adaptation. You have Arwen at Helm's Deep, Aragorn fighting Sauron, perhaps alternate death scenes for Saruman. Stuff like that.
50 minutes of additional footage is not a marketing gimmick. That's an enormous amount of new footage to add to a film and I'm sure it's all worth it as all the theatrical versions, as long as they are, have rushed pacing (up to the epilogue of ROTK).
The fact of the matter is that PJ filmed the equivalent of more like 6 movies vs. 3, and that's why they are so long. There is an established maximum running time even for epics and PJ just decided to go over the limit, knowing that this was the only chance we were likely ever going to have to film this stuff.
What may have seen like a risky luxury at the time on the part of the studios will return huge dividends in the end. PJ got his actors together and rolled film endlessly (not to mention multiple pickup sessions) which is what I or any other Tolkien fan probably would have done in that case. The allure of Lord of the Rings is the immersion into the world and you only get that feeling when you're in there for a while and feel like a part of the journey. You don't get that book-like feeling with even 3 90-minute movies. Regardless of the limitations of theatrical movies (no pause button), DVD is the ultimate venue for this sort of extended immersion.
You really are not supposed to try to digest the entire story in one large feast.
You really have to watch the films episodically over a longer span of time, which is how most people read the trilogy in book-form.
It's just that so many people have such poor memories and their lives are so hard to schedule that they'd have a hard time committing to follow a storyline that took 12+ hours to watch over the course of a week or two of viewings.
Someone throw this guy into Mount Doom for me.
If they sold a DVD commercially maybe they'd make back some of their R&D.