On 23/04/2014 08:58 AM, scott wrote:

> Sure plastics have been around for ages, but
> today we take for granted there are plastics that you can leave in
> direct sunlight for decades without fading or going brittle.

Really? Where are they?

> Another large part of the change is making things more efficient to
> manufacture, and thus affordable for more people. Food processing and
> transportation has become hugely more efficient over the last few
> decades, just look at the sort of things the average person could afford
> to eat in 1900 or even 1960 compared with today.

Yeah, well, that's a bit before my time, so I don't really have a handle 
on that.

>> I don't know, man. I think Internet speeds have now reached the point
>> where page loading is near-instant, and any further boost is of no real
>> benefit.
>
> Who would ever need more than 640KB?

Nobody. 640KB is enough to store a *vast* amount of text.

...and then they invented ways to store stuff that isn't text. And 
suddenly that 640KB looked really puny.

That's kinda my point. When the Internet first started, the limiting 
factor with surfing the web was how damned long it took to load the HTML 
and all the images. That has long since stopped being a problem. So 
until the next bandwidth-heavy thing comes along, there's no real reason 
to increase.

BTW, I just saw on the news that Peterborough is getting gigabit-speed 
Internet access. (Quite how that's physically plausible I'm not sure, 
but presumably they know what they're on about.) My employer's *LAN* 
isn't that fast! The politician was standing there enthusing about how 
this is going to "super-charge local businesses", but I can't think of 
too many businesses where this extra speed will be of any use... (Unless 
you're a web-hosting company or something - in which case, you *already* 
have gigabit speed - or more...)

>> From what I've seen, the limitation is that all projectors work at
>> 800x600, or if you buy an expensive one, 1024x768. Christ only knows why
>> they don't make them in any higher resolutions...
>
> Have you felt the *heat* from a modern portable projector? If they made
> the pixels even smaller, they'd need an even bigger light and a fridge
> to stop the thing melting. There's still a way to go until you have
> something small that can project clearly and sharply on to a big wall
> without filling your room with heat and fan noise.

I guess the problem is that you're generating a lot of light, and then 
trying to selectively absorb the colours you don't want. If you could 
somehow do it the other way around - only generate the optic power you 
actually want in the first place - it could be a lot more efficient.

But I'm not sure how you would do that...

Post a reply to this message