Re: New 3D business opportunity -- let's get rick quick!!

[P3D John W Roberts <roberts@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

>Date: Thu, 11 Sep 1997 15:54:02 -0500
>From: "P3D Gregory J. Wageman" <gjw@xxxxxxxxxx>
>Subject: Re:  New 3D business opportunity -- let's get rick quick!!

>You CANNOT read a CD without at least a laser and a fairly sophisticated
>playback system.  Even if the KNOWLEDGE of how to build such a system
>doesn't become lost (and I'm not betting it won't), what's the likelyhood
>of any CD players still working in 100 years, when the current medium
>of storage is holographic data cubes with a million times the storage
>density of CD-ROM, or some such?

100 years from now, somebody will take your CD-ROM of stereo images,
place it in their home neutral particle beam scanner, create an atomic-
level model in the memory of their home computer, use an AI interpretation
program to decode the disc's contents in about six seconds, and view the
stereo images, at which point the response will be "I knew they wouldn't
have ThoughtSurround, but I never expected they wouldn't have TrueFocus -
didn't these people realize that viewing without TrueFocus would degrade
their vision?"

>As technology progresses, people's ability to hack will be restricted
>to more and more primitive technologies (relatively speaking).  People
>used to be able to construct relatively state-of-the-art projects at
>home, when state-of-the-art was transistor technology (remember Heathkit?).

You can still construct many of those same things, but they're not nearly as
good as what you can buy. We owe much of our current level of prosperity to
the economics of mass production. It is theoretically possible to make
high-tech reconfigurable modular components that consumers could work
with - do you think it would be worthwhile for someone to try to come up
with a way to do this that makes economic sense?

>If peoples' knowlege was keeping up
>with technology (or even maintaining the same distance), we'd have
>kids today with wafer fabs in their garages.  Instead, many of them
>can't even read.

On the other hand, I think that overall kids today have more practical
technical knowledge than at any time in the past. (Maybe not quite as
much about dragster engines. :-)

John R


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