Amen! I loved REXX, and ARexx as well. They were tramendously powerful, tremendously simple, and tremendously useful. To this day I wish that programs like OpenOffice or AbiWord (or Mozilla, for that matter) had REXX ports the way that most Amiga programs eventually did.
I've downloaded Regina and various other REXX utilities over the years, but it's just not quite the same...
And here I thought you were going to say that you had bought new flashlight batteries so that you could blind the poor guy trying to spy on you with nightvision goggles.
In fact, I've already seen two.torrrent files out there, and I wasn't even looking for them. And keep in mind that I don't have access to any deep pirate scene sites, or anything; I mainly stick to the larger, more prominent multi-purpose Bittorrent sites.
And if I can stumble across those.torrent files, you know that Warner Brothers, or the MPAA, can -- which is one reason why, if they ever subpoena the records of those sites, they won't find my IP address associated with the latest Hollywood blockbuster or hot new album release. I've never been interested in picking that particular fight with the RIAA or MPAA; if I want to listen to or watch their products, I'll go buy them (mind you, once I do that, they're mine, dammit; I'm not going to go smearing them all over the internet, but I'm also not going to let any DRM crap keep me from personally using them however I see fit). For me, the great advantage of those multi-purpose Bittorrent sites is the ability to find stuff that I don't have the option of buying otherwise, like obscure Bhangra pop music videos from India, or thirty year old concert recordings of Italian prog rock bands whose albums barely made it to America in the first place (and the latest Linux ISOs, and the like, too, of course).
But yeah, if you want to find copies of the new Harry Potter, it's already out there, just like Troy, The Day After Tomorrow, and every other big budget Hollywood movie.
I thought that the license fees for those shows went to Endemol, RDF Media, and Banyan Productions -- you know, the folks who produced the original shows for the BBC in the first place.
I mean, let's say that one of those companies produces a show where Cathy Rogers throws Alan Titchmarsh and Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen out of an airplane and they have to assemble a decorative parachute from scrap materials before they hit the ground. If TLC picks it up and has Jesse James toss Hildi Santo-Tomas and Mikey Teutul out of a plane, does the Beeb really get a cut of the action? Sweeeeeet deal, if so.
Ever since Bush came into office, the staff of The Onion have been racing desperately to keep their parody ahead of the rapidly-accelerating absurdity of American politics. The prime example of the difficulties they have to overcome is their now-legendary headline for Bush's Innagural address in January 2001: Bush: 'Our Long National Nightmare Of Peace And Prosperity Is Finally Over'. Reading the article today, the uncomfortable fact is that the jokes they made have basically all happened for real since then, as Dan Chak has documented. Their one concession to reality over these years was to run a completely straight article about how a muscular Austrian was running for governor of California.
Their 9/11 issue might well have won a Pulitzer if that year's judges could have figured out what to do with it (there was a marvelous article in Editor and Publisher magazine, I think, from one of those judges recounting how they passed it around the room in stunned silence).
Then there's their recent take on Condoleeza Rice's testimony before the 9/11 Commission
In all of America, only Jon Stewart's Daily Show and The Onion have managed to continue to parody politics faster than it can become a parody of itself. That's no mean feat.
So far, he's showing no signs of scuffling at all, and his numbers have been holding remarkably steady over the last several years (obviously, there were some injury issues last year, but those didn't seem to effect his ability at all, just his number of starts). Looking at Gray Ink, it's a given that he will pick up a minimum of 12 more points this year alone, and that's without worrying about IP, W, CG, SHO, or a couple of other categories in which he could easily pick up points. That alone would put him right in the range for an "average" Hall of Famer; if he even picks up another dozen or so points over the next couple years -- and he could almost pick up an extra dozen this year alone, if he pitches the whole year -- he would be up over 190 Gray Ink points; once again, there is only one eligible modern pitcher over 190 (Bobo Newsome at 198) who is not in the Hall.
Black Ink is a bit more problematic, in that it's easy to not lead the league in anything, especially when you're on the same team as Pedro Martinez; again, though, everyone with his current score or better is in the Hall.
Looking more closely at the HoF Standards numbers -- his weakest measurement of the four -- he should easily pick up a bare minimum of five or six points by the end of next year, which would put him right below Kaat and John.
Looking at the HoF Monitor numbers, he's in line to pick up 20 points by the the end of next year (or at the very start of the next one, at worst); if you toss in a point or two for things like playoff wins or All-Star or world series appearances, he'd be at 150, right between Sutton and Marichal -- again, in the range where everyone with comparable or higher scores is in the Hall.
If his career ends at just the wrong time in relation to the careers of Randy Johnson, Pedro Martinez, Tom Glavine, Greg Maddux, Roger Clemens, Mike Mussina, Kevin Brown, and John Smoltz; and if the pitchers behind him on the various lists, such as Mussina and Brown, pick up their pace a bit; and if the current crop of young pitchers just starting out ushers in a new era of pitching and defense; then it is possible that he could find himself sort of lost in the shuffle, like Blyleven or Kaat. Aside from that, though, I think he's going to wind up in the Hall.
I guess we'll just have to wait and see. I'm also guessing that we'll have a much better idea after this season is over, though.
Good point. Of course, I could have used Eddie Cicotte as a comparable, given that his score is a 42. Mind you, the fact that his stellar career as a pitcher for the Chicago White Sox came to an abrupt end in 1920 may well be a subtle hint as to why he isn't in the Hall of Fame.
Well, The Mule won a Retro-Hugo in 1996 despite the fact that the entire Foundation Trilogy had already won a special "Best All-Time Series" Hugo in 1966...
Trivia Time: Speaking of 1966, in 1966 Jack Vance's The Last Castle was nominated for the Nebula Award as both a novella (it won) and a novel (it just missed the shortlist, in which Flowers for Algernon and Babel-17 tied, beating out The Moon is a Harsh Mistress).
I certainly agree that football involves a lot more thinking and planning than people usually credit.
If you're up at, like, 3:00 AM or so during football season, ESPN has a show called Edge NFL Matchup, hosted by Suzy Kolber, Ron Jaworski, and, er, some other guy whose name has just flown out of my head. A lot of the show is stock football stuff, but every so often they will break down not just the execution of plays, but their design -- and it can be quite fascinating.
I remember watching them explain one play where they went over every last bit of it for like five minutes or so, explaining what every player on offense was doing, and what the expected defensive reactions would be; and the upshot of it was a play where, basically, every last player was involved in some specific set of actions designed solely for the purpose of getting the right cornerback to turn his hips slightly towards the inside of the field at just the wrong moment, so that the receiver could break off his move. It was so intricate, so meticulously planned, and so well explained, that I can't imagine any True Geek not getting a rush out of it. Their explanation, with the film, and the diagrams and arrows they superimposed, was like single-stepping through an elegant piece of code in a good debugging environment, watching all the variables change just so as everything falls into place.
Baseball Reference's Hall of Fame Monitor has him at 127 points already; no eligible pitcher of the modern era with more than 130 points is not in the Hall of Fame (well, Lee Smith, with 136 points, isn't in yet, but it's a fair bet that he'll get in before his eligibility is up, and he's a reliever anyway).
His score of 33 on the Black Ink Test puts him in the company of Juan Marichal (34), Three Finger Brown (35) and Old Hoss Radbourn (35); once again, every eligible pitcher of the modern era with a Black Ink score of 33 or higher is in the Hall (heck, if it weren't for Sudden Sam McDowell at 32, and Ron Guidry at 29, we could run that number all the way down to Hippo Vaughn and Dolph Luque at 27).
The Gray Ink Test isn't quite as kind to him, mainly because it is kinder to a lot of other pitchers (interestingly, it's the only one of the tests that puts Maddux ahead of Clemens, so I automatically like it). The Gray Ink Test has him at 168, down amongst a lot of weaker Hall of Famers such as Dazzy Vance (171) and Red Faber (161), and a lot of good non-HoFers like Claude Passeau (170) and Allie Reynolds (161). On the other hand, it's a lot easier to pick up additional points on the Gray Ink Test, so it's virtually certain that he'll move up on that list.
Finally, the Hall of Fame Standards Test, calibrated to give an "average" Hall of Famer 50 points, has him way down on the list, at 37 (along with Mickey Lolich and Dennis Martinez). That's still higher than Hall of Famers such as Herb Pennock (36), Eppa Rixey (35), and Hal Newhouser (34); but it's lower than Luis Tiant (41), Carl Mays (41), and Babe Adams (39). Still, looking at that list, most of the players ahead of him are either (a) not eligible, (b) pre-lively ball, (c) in the Hall, or (d) ought to be in the Hall (i.e., Bert Blyleven at 50, Jim Kaat and Tommy John at 44).
Of these indicators, the Hall of Fame Monitor numbers are probably the best known and most trusted, and those numbers say that he's already pretty much a lock. Give him a couple of pretty godd years with a pretty good team, and he'll be a sure thing.
By the same token, after Wes Helms of the Milwaukee Brewers hit a long home run the other day, ESPN's Tim Kurkjian made a comment about "Helms Deep" on Baseball Tonight, which I figure makes up for Jayson Stark not knowing about Everquest the other year.
I'm not sure about the Retro nominees, but the regular Hugo niminees are almost always made available for free download at some time prior to the convention.
At the moment, I know that Best Novelette nominee "The Empire of Ice Cream" is available on-line; also, Kage Baker's novella The Empress of Marsappears to be available for free from Fictionwise. Don't know about the others, although, like I said, I'm sure they'll turn up eventually.
1953 was a pretty damned good year for short stories, as well. Those are five damned good stories. I'm pretty sure that "The Nine Billion Names of God" will win, because, well, it's the freakin' "Nine Billion Names of God," isn't it? And it has one of the most famous end lines in all of science fiction. But all of those stories are classics, just like all five novels.
The novella category looks like a walkover for James Blish; and the novelette might go to Dick simply because "Second Variety" got made into a movie. Hard to say for sure, though.
Of course, only the episodes broadcast in 2003 were eligible; "Conversations with Dead People," from early in Buffy's final season, won the Short Form Hugo last year.
Well, Elron was a fairly prominent author back in the pulp SF era; many of his stories from back then -- Ole Doc Methuselah or Fear, for instance -- stand up pretty well. At the very least, they're generally considered to be superior to the stories he wrote after his death.
I'm currently streaming HD video from my entertainment center to/from my 450MHz G4 Cube using 100Mb Ethernet and el-cheapo $30 switches.
Broadcast HD video is an approximately 20Mbps MPEG2 stream. So, it is not a burden on even modest hardware. Other HD formats, like cable, satellite, and HD-DVD might be a bit faster in the future - like maybe 40Mbps. But, it won't go much beyond that.
I agree that a good 100Mbps network should be able to handle it -- that's what we have now, with our current cheap-switch setup (actually, they're not all completely cheap -- I had to go up in price a little bit to get a switch which wouldn't object to the temperature in a Georgia attic in the summer); but the process isn't what I would call invisible yet. And it's certainly easy to imagine scenarios involving pulling video from one source while streaming a different video to a different source over the same set of wires that could even now cause a non-trivial amount of strain on a 100Mbps network.
So, yeah, I agree that 100Mbps is sufficient for our current needs and uses; but I doubt that our needs and uses will have increased tenfold by the time Gigabit, or perhaps even 10Gbps, becomes affordable enough. And I think you'd agree that if our bandwidth requirements increase, say, fivefold, while our available network bandwidth increases by a factor of a hundred, that the network itself would then completely disappear as a factor in considering usage patterns.
When we were building our house, we had the foresight to have the contractors put in a conduit run from our attic all the way down to our basement, on the west wall of our house. Unfortunately, we didn't have the foresight to have them run a similar conduit on the east wall, which is the end of the house with my computer room, my wife's computer room, and, on the ground floor, our living room. As a result, to run network cable from my computer room (where most of the computers are) to our entertainment center, the cables would have to go up into the attic, across the full length of the house to the far wall, down all the way into the basement, all the way back across the full length of the house to the far wall of the basement, and then up to the entertainment center.
Now, that may well be less than 100m, even though we have a fair-sized house; and the main switch is already up in the attic (albeit down on this end), which cuts a couple of meters off the journey, but it's still closer to 100m than I'd like -- especially when you consider the eternal tendency of cables and protocols to not necessarily perform up to spec. It may say 100m, but I'd rather not push my luck on it.
Still, if I'm going to put in a Gigabit switch in the attic, I might as well wait until I can get one with at least eight ports, so we can drop new lines down to the guest bedroom and the like. Right now, four and five-port switches are just under $100, so it's not something I need to think too much about for a while yet.
(Oh, and while we may have had money to burn when we were building the house, we sure as heck don't have any to spare these days -- mainly because of the house payments, of course)
Obviously, this ain't coming to the home for a few more years (heck, Gigabit switches are only just now getting home-use priced), but it'll sure be nice to not have to re-pull all that Cat5e cabling we ran all over our house, especially since we'll probably be in our fifties by then.
At that type of transfer speed, the network should effectively vanish completely, even if we're streaming HD video to or from the downstairs entertainment center (I'm assuming that the internal bus bandwidths in the computers will have improved proportionally as well by then).
Slashdot Mirror
I never really thought about it before now, but damn, l337-speak can look like exceptionally grotty perl code when it wants to...
Amen! I loved REXX, and ARexx as well. They were tramendously powerful, tremendously simple, and tremendously useful. To this day I wish that programs like OpenOffice or AbiWord (or Mozilla, for that matter) had REXX ports the way that most Amiga programs eventually did.
I've downloaded Regina and various other REXX utilities over the years, but it's just not quite the same...
And here I thought you were going to say that you had bought new flashlight batteries so that you could blind the poor guy trying to spy on you with nightvision goggles.
Of course there is already a bittorrent.
.torrrent files out there, and I wasn't even looking for them. And keep in mind that I don't have access to any deep pirate scene sites, or anything; I mainly stick to the larger, more prominent multi-purpose Bittorrent sites.
.torrent files, you know that Warner Brothers, or the MPAA, can -- which is one reason why, if they ever subpoena the records of those sites, they won't find my IP address associated with the latest Hollywood blockbuster or hot new album release. I've never been interested in picking that particular fight with the RIAA or MPAA; if I want to listen to or watch their products, I'll go buy them (mind you, once I do that, they're mine, dammit; I'm not going to go smearing them all over the internet, but I'm also not going to let any DRM crap keep me from personally using them however I see fit). For me, the great advantage of those multi-purpose Bittorrent sites is the ability to find stuff that I don't have the option of buying otherwise, like obscure Bhangra pop music videos from India, or thirty year old concert recordings of Italian prog rock bands whose albums barely made it to America in the first place (and the latest Linux ISOs, and the like, too, of course).
In fact, I've already seen two
And if I can stumble across those
But yeah, if you want to find copies of the new Harry Potter, it's already out there, just like Troy, The Day After Tomorrow, and every other big budget Hollywood movie.
That's it, then -- I'm getting rid of all my nano-fabric Dockers.
No way I'm letting anything that might have side effects get that close to my genitals.
I thought that the license fees for those shows went to Endemol, RDF Media, and Banyan Productions -- you know, the folks who produced the original shows for the BBC in the first place.
I mean, let's say that one of those companies produces a show where Cathy Rogers throws Alan Titchmarsh and Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen out of an airplane and they have to assemble a decorative parachute from scrap materials before they hit the ground. If TLC picks it up and has Jesse James toss Hildi Santo-Tomas and Mikey Teutul out of a plane, does the Beeb really get a cut of the action? Sweeeeeet deal, if so.
"...the web site's music selection is expected to consist entirely of songs written by Bob Geldof."
Because these are the glory days of The Onion.
Ever since Bush came into office, the staff of The Onion have been racing desperately to keep their parody ahead of the rapidly-accelerating absurdity of American politics. The prime example of the difficulties they have to overcome is their now-legendary headline for Bush's Innagural address in January 2001: Bush: 'Our Long National Nightmare Of Peace And Prosperity Is Finally Over'. Reading the article today, the uncomfortable fact is that the jokes they made have basically all happened for real since then, as Dan Chak has documented. Their one concession to reality over these years was to run a completely straight article about how a muscular Austrian was running for governor of California.
Their 9/11 issue might well have won a Pulitzer if that year's judges could have figured out what to do with it (there was a marvelous article in Editor and Publisher magazine, I think, from one of those judges recounting how they passed it around the room in stunned silence). Then there's their recent take on Condoleeza Rice's testimony before the 9/11 Commission In all of America, only Jon Stewart's Daily Show and The Onion have managed to continue to parody politics faster than it can become a parody of itself. That's no mean feat.
Well, Suicide Girls got nominated in the "Best Community" category...
So far, he's showing no signs of scuffling at all, and his numbers have been holding remarkably steady over the last several years (obviously, there were some injury issues last year, but those didn't seem to effect his ability at all, just his number of starts). Looking at Gray Ink, it's a given that he will pick up a minimum of 12 more points this year alone, and that's without worrying about IP, W, CG, SHO, or a couple of other categories in which he could easily pick up points. That alone would put him right in the range for an "average" Hall of Famer; if he even picks up another dozen or so points over the next couple years -- and he could almost pick up an extra dozen this year alone, if he pitches the whole year -- he would be up over 190 Gray Ink points; once again, there is only one eligible modern pitcher over 190 (Bobo Newsome at 198) who is not in the Hall.
Black Ink is a bit more problematic, in that it's easy to not lead the league in anything, especially when you're on the same team as Pedro Martinez; again, though, everyone with his current score or better is in the Hall.
Looking more closely at the HoF Standards numbers -- his weakest measurement of the four -- he should easily pick up a bare minimum of five or six points by the end of next year, which would put him right below Kaat and John.
Looking at the HoF Monitor numbers, he's in line to pick up 20 points by the the end of next year (or at the very start of the next one, at worst); if you toss in a point or two for things like playoff wins or All-Star or world series appearances, he'd be at 150, right between Sutton and Marichal -- again, in the range where everyone with comparable or higher scores is in the Hall.
If his career ends at just the wrong time in relation to the careers of Randy Johnson, Pedro Martinez, Tom Glavine, Greg Maddux, Roger Clemens, Mike Mussina, Kevin Brown, and John Smoltz; and if the pitchers behind him on the various lists, such as Mussina and Brown, pick up their pace a bit; and if the current crop of young pitchers just starting out ushers in a new era of pitching and defense; then it is possible that he could find himself sort of lost in the shuffle, like Blyleven or Kaat. Aside from that, though, I think he's going to wind up in the Hall.
I guess we'll just have to wait and see. I'm also guessing that we'll have a much better idea after this season is over, though.
Good point. Of course, I could have used Eddie Cicotte as a comparable, given that his score is a 42. Mind you, the fact that his stellar career as a pitcher for the Chicago White Sox came to an abrupt end in 1920 may well be a subtle hint as to why he isn't in the Hall of Fame.
Well, The Mule won a Retro-Hugo in 1996 despite the fact that the entire Foundation Trilogy had already won a special "Best All-Time Series" Hugo in 1966...
Trivia Time: Speaking of 1966, in 1966 Jack Vance's The Last Castle was nominated for the Nebula Award as both a novella (it won) and a novel (it just missed the shortlist, in which Flowers for Algernon and Babel-17 tied, beating out The Moon is a Harsh Mistress).
I certainly agree that football involves a lot more thinking and planning than people usually credit.
If you're up at, like, 3:00 AM or so during football season, ESPN has a show called Edge NFL Matchup, hosted by Suzy Kolber, Ron Jaworski, and, er, some other guy whose name has just flown out of my head. A lot of the show is stock football stuff, but every so often they will break down not just the execution of plays, but their design -- and it can be quite fascinating.
I remember watching them explain one play where they went over every last bit of it for like five minutes or so, explaining what every player on offense was doing, and what the expected defensive reactions would be; and the upshot of it was a play where, basically, every last player was involved in some specific set of actions designed solely for the purpose of getting the right cornerback to turn his hips slightly towards the inside of the field at just the wrong moment, so that the receiver could break off his move. It was so intricate, so meticulously planned, and so well explained, that I can't imagine any True Geek not getting a rush out of it. Their explanation, with the film, and the diagrams and arrows they superimposed, was like single-stepping through an elegant piece of code in a good debugging environment, watching all the variables change just so as everything falls into place.
Baseball Reference's Hall of Fame Monitor has him at 127 points already; no eligible pitcher of the modern era with more than 130 points is not in the Hall of Fame (well, Lee Smith, with 136 points, isn't in yet, but it's a fair bet that he'll get in before his eligibility is up, and he's a reliever anyway).
His score of 33 on the Black Ink Test puts him in the company of Juan Marichal (34), Three Finger Brown (35) and Old Hoss Radbourn (35); once again, every eligible pitcher of the modern era with a Black Ink score of 33 or higher is in the Hall (heck, if it weren't for Sudden Sam McDowell at 32, and Ron Guidry at 29, we could run that number all the way down to Hippo Vaughn and Dolph Luque at 27).
The Gray Ink Test isn't quite as kind to him, mainly because it is kinder to a lot of other pitchers (interestingly, it's the only one of the tests that puts Maddux ahead of Clemens, so I automatically like it). The Gray Ink Test has him at 168, down amongst a lot of weaker Hall of Famers such as Dazzy Vance (171) and Red Faber (161), and a lot of good non-HoFers like Claude Passeau (170) and Allie Reynolds (161). On the other hand, it's a lot easier to pick up additional points on the Gray Ink Test, so it's virtually certain that he'll move up on that list.
Finally, the Hall of Fame Standards Test, calibrated to give an "average" Hall of Famer 50 points, has him way down on the list, at 37 (along with Mickey Lolich and Dennis Martinez). That's still higher than Hall of Famers such as Herb Pennock (36), Eppa Rixey (35), and Hal Newhouser (34); but it's lower than Luis Tiant (41), Carl Mays (41), and Babe Adams (39). Still, looking at that list, most of the players ahead of him are either (a) not eligible, (b) pre-lively ball, (c) in the Hall, or (d) ought to be in the Hall (i.e., Bert Blyleven at 50, Jim Kaat and Tommy John at 44).
Of these indicators, the Hall of Fame Monitor numbers are probably the best known and most trusted, and those numbers say that he's already pretty much a lock. Give him a couple of pretty godd years with a pretty good team, and he'll be a sure thing.
By the same token, after Wes Helms of the Milwaukee Brewers hit a long home run the other day, ESPN's Tim Kurkjian made a comment about "Helms Deep" on Baseball Tonight, which I figure makes up for Jayson Stark not knowing about Everquest the other year.
Well, I included a link to SABR, which I figured was pretty much the same thing. :-)
I'm not sure about the Retro nominees, but the regular Hugo niminees are almost always made available for free download at some time prior to the convention.
At the moment, I know that Best Novelette nominee "The Empire of Ice Cream" is available on-line; also, Kage Baker's novella The Empress of Mars appears to be available for free from Fictionwise. Don't know about the others, although, like I said, I'm sure they'll turn up eventually.
Harry Stubbs. Clement was his midle name.
He died just last year, dammit.
1953 was a pretty damned good year for short stories, as well. Those are five damned good stories. I'm pretty sure that "The Nine Billion Names of God" will win, because, well, it's the freakin' "Nine Billion Names of God," isn't it? And it has one of the most famous end lines in all of science fiction. But all of those stories are classics, just like all five novels.
The novella category looks like a walkover for James Blish; and the novelette might go to Dick simply because "Second Variety" got made into a movie. Hard to say for sure, though.
Of course, only the episodes broadcast in 2003 were eligible; "Conversations with Dead People," from early in Buffy's final season, won the Short Form Hugo last year.
Well, Elron was a fairly prominent author back in the pulp SF era; many of his stories from back then -- Ole Doc Methuselah or Fear, for instance -- stand up pretty well. At the very least, they're generally considered to be superior to the stories he wrote after his death.
For what it's worth, Ray Bradbury has the story credit for It Came from Outer Space.
The same is true, of course, for The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, another of the Best Dramatic Presentation nominees.
I'm currently streaming HD video from my entertainment center to/from my 450MHz G4 Cube using 100Mb Ethernet and el-cheapo $30 switches.
Broadcast HD video is an approximately 20Mbps MPEG2 stream. So, it is not a burden on even modest hardware. Other HD formats, like cable, satellite, and HD-DVD might be a bit faster in the future - like maybe 40Mbps. But, it won't go much beyond that.
I agree that a good 100Mbps network should be able to handle it -- that's what we have now, with our current cheap-switch setup (actually, they're not all completely cheap -- I had to go up in price a little bit to get a switch which wouldn't object to the temperature in a Georgia attic in the summer); but the process isn't what I would call invisible yet. And it's certainly easy to imagine scenarios involving pulling video from one source while streaming a different video to a different source over the same set of wires that could even now cause a non-trivial amount of strain on a 100Mbps network.
So, yeah, I agree that 100Mbps is sufficient for our current needs and uses; but I doubt that our needs and uses will have increased tenfold by the time Gigabit, or perhaps even 10Gbps, becomes affordable enough. And I think you'd agree that if our bandwidth requirements increase, say, fivefold, while our available network bandwidth increases by a factor of a hundred, that the network itself would then completely disappear as a factor in considering usage patterns.
When we were building our house, we had the foresight to have the contractors put in a conduit run from our attic all the way down to our basement, on the west wall of our house. Unfortunately, we didn't have the foresight to have them run a similar conduit on the east wall, which is the end of the house with my computer room, my wife's computer room, and, on the ground floor, our living room. As a result, to run network cable from my computer room (where most of the computers are) to our entertainment center, the cables would have to go up into the attic, across the full length of the house to the far wall, down all the way into the basement, all the way back across the full length of the house to the far wall of the basement, and then up to the entertainment center.
Now, that may well be less than 100m, even though we have a fair-sized house; and the main switch is already up in the attic (albeit down on this end), which cuts a couple of meters off the journey, but it's still closer to 100m than I'd like -- especially when you consider the eternal tendency of cables and protocols to not necessarily perform up to spec. It may say 100m, but I'd rather not push my luck on it.
Still, if I'm going to put in a Gigabit switch in the attic, I might as well wait until I can get one with at least eight ports, so we can drop new lines down to the guest bedroom and the like. Right now, four and five-port switches are just under $100, so it's not something I need to think too much about for a while yet.
(Oh, and while we may have had money to burn when we were building the house, we sure as heck don't have any to spare these days -- mainly because of the house payments, of course)
Obviously, this ain't coming to the home for a few more years (heck, Gigabit switches are only just now getting home-use priced), but it'll sure be nice to not have to re-pull all that Cat5e cabling we ran all over our house, especially since we'll probably be in our fifties by then.
At that type of transfer speed, the network should effectively vanish completely, even if we're streaming HD video to or from the downstairs entertainment center (I'm assuming that the internal bus bandwidths in the computers will have improved proportionally as well by then).