SED, you said?
1:07 PM 09/02/2004
By the time you're done reading this, you'll either hate me for not "bringing this to your attention" before you dropped five bits on that monster plasma screen last week, or you'll love me for writing about this before you went ahead with you plasma screen purchase during the holiday season at the end of this year.
Flat and thin screens are real neat. They're thin, they're huge and they come without the bloated pixels of traditional CRT monster screens that use mirrors for their magic. In addition, hanging one on your wall gives you instant bragging rights on the block. Perhaps the only downsides are the potential "burn in" images that older plasma screens had, and the innate ability of most huge plasma screens on your wall to turn your couch into a potato-chip-disaster-zone after a football game.
Ditto for LCD screens, although they've lagged behind on the market owing to slower development in optimizing response times to gamer-and-movie-fan accepatable levels. They're great for computer screens, though. I presume they're cheaper than the average TFT laptop screen, since a lot of desktops today seem to be sporting LCD screens. I always got the 'explanation' that making the laptop-like TFT screens for desktops was a real expensive deal, and now I wonder why they aren't putting LCD screens in laptops instead. Apparently, the cost of the screen is the biggest chunk of a laptop's manufacturing cost, and if an LCD would make it cheaper and help the consumer relish the savings, everything would seem like a good fit. Anyway, I ain't no expert. The explanation I give myself is that the depth of an average desktop LCD screen is thicker than what they can squeeze into a laptop, and they're thus staying away from doing so. Seems right, doesn't it?
Enter the SEDs. Ready for a mouthful? They're Surface-Conductor Electron-Emitter Displays. Yeah, they dropped a C and an E from the acronym. Perhaps they wanted to get in on the successful TLA superstition. Anyway, reading the page that Canon's put out about it made me wonder if the SED technology had the potential to blitz the market and blow the plasma and LCD market into oblivion. (Too much caffeine in my system...)
Screens that are a few centimeters thick, with CRT-quality displays and wider than the current crop of flat screens. Screens that would need half the power of the current cRT and a third of the power required by plasma screens. Sounds like something straight off a wishlist, doesn't it? Toshiba & Canon own the patents on this technology, and my guess is that it'll be another two years before it hits the market at under $10,000 levels for 60-inch screens.
The interesting part to look for would be the means employed by vendors of screen peripherals, to adapt to the screen depth. Traditional plasma and LCD screens run a few inches deep at the very least, thereby allowing flat speakers and video ports and the sort to be easily accomodated in the back and around the sides. However, with screens that are just a few centimeters thick, speaker technology would either have to progress on an equal scale, or they'll have to conjure up some other way of creating a single point of audio-and-video in a room without spreading the speakers around the base or around the wall. Perhaps SED screens would be so expensive at the start that their only application would be home theater screens for the truly privileged among us. But, it'll be interesting to see how vendors cope with time and prices whittling down to "common consumer" levels. Perhaps they'll have better ways to BlueTooth and all the screens would have is a single BlueTooth port for getting the cable / video signal and the rest would be all wirelessly kept elsewhere. It'll be worth the wait to watch how everything falls into place.
The initial premise / promise of SED screens included something that addressed price. I wonder if they'll keep that up, judging by SED's potential to make really large screens that are usually in the homes of the rich and the famous. Essentially, those of us who don't really care for price tags. However, if I recollect right, plasma screens spent under a year in the "ridiculously overpriced" range before slipping below it. If that trend continues for SED screens, I'll give it five years before freshmen start taking a SED screen TV along with the rest of their leaving-home gear.
The most interesting part of SED technology, from my absolute-layman perspective, is its potential to bend. Think about it. Its surface-conducting, electron-emitting technology. The pixels are on the outer layer, and they don't have an electron gun inside. They also don't have some obnoxious gas inside. Essentially, if they make a flexible outer layer, then these screens could technically be bent. In another five years, I'm guessing these could be rolled. Has that got you thinking about having your TV and your French-window curtain be the same thing yet? None of this is on the official page or yet-published roadmap details, but...
Daydream about that a while...
Citrivia
1:07 PM 09/05/2004
Bouquets are usually the second-best indicators of popularity. The best indicator, in my opinion, is the brickbats. Call it "human nature" or any other popular cliché you like, but its true. When they see something "nice", four out of five would probably go "Interesting, but lets see if..." rather than "Cool!". And the fifth is proably thinking about hairloss and not concentrating.
But, there's still a huge market for self-help literature that encourages everyone to think positive. If everything above is true, it means that most of us are innately negative, but like to spend money on trying to be positive. Doesn't this mean that the only ones who're really having a positive life are the ones who're making money off the self-help literature and laughing all the way to the bank? Alright, maybe they're not really "laughing all the way to the bank", 'cause y'know, one looks stupid doing that...
But this isn't about bashing self-help literature; although that gives me an interesting to-do for this weekend. This is about everyone trying to pick on their favorite 300-pound scapegoat. Microsoft. I ain't exactly a Microsoft loyalist, but I do think that people tend to blame Windows for a lot more than they should. Of course, this still means that a lot of people can't live without it, and that's probably a good thing for Microsoft - but seriously, isn't the Windows-bashing getting a bit out of hand? Yes, I've seen Pirates of Silicon Valley, too - and I know that their beginnings weren't sparkling. Yes, I know that the new XP Service Pack is not making people smile. Yes, I know that the size of their average application increases significantly with every release and that the infamous "blue screen of death" isn't a very pretty sight when it happens in the middle of something important that you were doing.
Did I just convince myself that they were the source of all evil? 'Fraid not! Microsoft's applications may be a veritable woodpeckers colony of security holes and application flaws, but there's a huge positive side that a lot of us missed. The "bloatware" that they're selling has driven down prices of hard disks and has driven people out of megabyte-misery and towards terabyte-terrain. Their "hold on the market" has spawned interesting creations of collective intellect, like Linux and its various flavors. Think it'll be fair to have an antitrust lawsuit on Linux after a while? "Free enterprise" does mean that the strongest competitor survives. If the impression is that Microsoft is steamrolling the competition, then the likes of Linux and Apple wouldn't exist. And they do. If so, then why is some of Silicon Valley filing ANOTHER antitrust lawsuit against them, even before the first one has died out?
Yes, they are. Information Week just ran a story about the new lawsuit, and I checked the "old lawsuit website" to check if that had been put to bed. Turns out that its still alive and kicking, and that Microsoft had extended the deadline to November 16.
Sounds like someone's being kicked in the shins repeatedly, and the thought ain't pretty. The way I see it, everyone's got the option to go the Linux way, and they don't quite seem to be making the plunge. A lot of corporations, both government and private, are leveraging Linux a lot, and that does mean that Linux is very much "out there for everyone to see". So, its in the proverbial spotlight, but the consumer still rejects it in favour of "big, bad Windows". Doesn't that mean that "the people have spoken"? And then there's Apple as well. That's another option available to consumers. Apple ran a string of ads about how people were making the switch, and all that hype was interesting for a while. And they've got the iPod to further fortify the Apple brand into the consumer market. Doesn't all this clearly show that there are a lot of options available to the consumer? And that all the options aren't hidden in the geek underground? They're out there on billboards along the freeway and on corporate design documents. If a bunch of cities are still choosing to file an "antitrust" lawsuit against Microsoft, it doesn't seem to quite ring right. It rung right just fine earlier when it did seem like Windows was steamrolling the market, but the Internet's grown since then and everyone knows that "Apple" isn't just a fruit or Gwyneth's child, but an operating system that comes packaged in a cute little computer, and one that can do everything Windows can, if not more and better.
The reason for people cursing Windows but still using it could very well be closely tied to the infamous "human nature" cliché. We love something we can crib about. If its "too perfect", we'll eye it suspiciously. Same reason gossip shows and gossip media rakes in the big bucks. Same reason why paparazzi exist. Controversies sell. There would be more people watching Paris Hilton than Amy Smart. Oh, who's Amy Smart? Look her up - she's done a LOT of films - yes, recent ones, too. She's young, she's fit and she's blonde. Paris would still gets the consumer vote. Why? Methinks 'cause everyone has the ability to look at her and think of all the "bad stuff she's known for" and sorta identify with her 'cause they've got flaws as well. On the other hand, "we" don't know much about Amy Smart and what "we" don't know, scares us.
Apple's got security flaws, and with all the increased attention they're getting thanks to the iPod, I'm sure "Mac-Hack" forums are gonna start growing real soon. Ditto for people poking fun at functionality and interface flaws. They're there, and they've always been there. That's the reason why Apple developers have a job. They're not working on 'a paradigm shift' all the time even if they like to make us think that. They're weeding out bugs. They're fixing stuff and they're hoping that one of the rips in their fabrics isn't going to let a nosy finger wriggle through. Ditto for Linux. And I'm not even going to talk about what happened when I had an aunt sit in front of a Linux desktop.
I hate the constant security updates from Windows Update as much as the second guy. I hate the fact that the OS takes up as much space on the disk as it does as much as anyone else. I can see that their Office applications are getting bigger so quick that its "upgrade or die" for the average consumer who doesn't have the time or money to spend on getting a bigger disk and a faster computer just to create a document or edit a spreadsheet. And then I think about the cars that most of us drive; and their periodic maintenance checks, their need for fuel that ain't getting cheaper, and our "need" for new cars that we never quite grow out of, because of the pretty ads on TV. They make for traffic and delayed commutes, they make for pollution and expensive smog checks, and they've got really, really expensive accessories in 'em that often come close to the purchase value of the car. We still use 'em. There are those of us who bike around town and to work, and there are those of us who look at bikers on the road and curse the fact that bike lanes are a problem around intersections. Bikes are cool, clean and efficient. Sorta like Linux. You'll never see a grandma use one - unless she's a fitness geek.
In other news, there are plans to make the whole of Philly go wireless. I didn't quite understand the thought behind this statement from the city's chief information officer, though:
"If you're out on your front porch with a laptop, you could dial in, register at no charge, and be able to access a high speed connection," Neff said. "It's a technology whose time is here."
If we're talking about a wireless network and are out on the front porch with a laptop, what am I dialing in into - and why?