The ones who feel like the thieves to me are the entertainment conglomocos who are trying to neuter our recording devices. What these guys really want to be are crack dealers -- we pay them regularly for delirous experiences that we can't get enough of, and that we can't recreate without their "product." Except in this case, the government's on the side of the crack dealers.  12:42:53 PM  (comments [])   

One that's become crystal clear, if it hadn't been already -- programmable GPUs are the wave of the future. And since these things are basically hopped up massively parallel processing machines, we'll probably see all kinds of crazy applications no one ever expected. You could probably download your damn SETI@HOME data onto the thing as a texture and process it there. Yow!

So the billion $ question is -- when will these things filter down into "most people's" machines? And what does "most" mean anyway? The hardcore guys -- people willing to pay $200, $300, or even $400 for a video card just because it makes (cough cough) the water look "cool" in their video game are a pretty small percentage of the (mostly stalled) PC market. How do we get these things into everyone's hands?

Part of the story is getting them down to $99 -- and if history is borne out, we'll see that by the spring of 2004. (I'm talking the fully programmable ones, not the GeForce 3/4 stuff we've got out now. The crazy shit that will come out this fall.) But there are still a lot of people out there who just aren't going to upgrade because "my machine runs Word plenty fast." And that's a darn shame, because these video cards are very exciting, and are going to open up a lot of new and unexpected vistas for interacting with our computers -- and I don't just mean games.  12:33:00 PM  (comments [])