On 24/04/2014 08:37 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?
>
> If you buy a 10 year old BMW you don't expect the dashboard to crack if
> you lean on it or for it to have gone yellow. Or most bumpers on cars
> now are plastic that can withstand 2 tons forcing them into another car
> at a few mph without damage (IIRC that's an EU requirement now).

I thought that was fibreglass...

What I did see, that was quite interesting, was a guy who "studies 
nature" to try to look for clever ideas that we can copy. One of his 
suggestions was to create colour by diffraction rather than using 
chemical dyes. Chemicals degrade in the Sun, but a grating doesn't 
suddenly change size just because you hit it with a ton of UV...

(Naturally, a suggestion is one thing, making a viable product is 
something else entirely.)

> I remember when an mp3 took hours to download, today it's an mp4 and
> software that takes hours. Until everyone has 500ppi screens with all
> content at that resolution downloadable within seconds then I see no
> reason for the continual increase in speeds to stop.

My understanding was that displays aren't increasing their ppi rating 
because 100% of all Windows software assumes a fixed 72ppi, and if you 
increased the dot pitch everything would become too tiny to see.

>> 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.)
>
> Is that not just fibre to the house? The obvious next step after fibre
> to the cabinet. My village is looking forward to FTTC in a few months
> and Peterborough is just up the road!

Fibre to the house is a simple concept. Why didn't they do this before? 
Oh, yes, that's right - because fibre is so astronomically expensive 
that nobody can afford it...

>> 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...
>
> I would imagine this would benefit medium-size companies (around 50-200
> people) that currently cannot justify the cost of a really fast
> connection but due to the number of employees would make good use of
> more bandwidth.

I guess I haven't worked in many industries, but most of them don't seem 
like they would have much need for such a thing. The only thing I can 
think of is that at my last place, they were determined to host 
absolutely *everything* using Terminal Services, so that the desktop has 
absolutely no software on it and everybody has to hammer the Internet to 
get anything done. (It also has the nice side-effect of preventing 
anybody being able to print stuff...)

>> 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.
>
> That's exactly the problem, and also that the light source itself is
> very efficient at converting electricity to heat :-) People have looked
> at using lasers but it doesn't look like that technology has worked out
> yet.

Tangential, but... one of the 3D technologies I saw on Tomorrow's World 
involved scanning a laser across a corrugated screen. It also involved 
using "a supercomputer" to control the motors scanning the laser; I'm 
guessing today it would be less of a problem. But who really wants to 
look at spinning monochrome wireframes?

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