iSCSI? Move on!
Chris Evan's lives in a world where technologists and early adopters drive mass market adoption of technology.
It's a world where the Macintosh, BetaMax, LaserDisc, and IMAX all became the standard in their field. A world where the technology which early adopters & geeks were enamored with won. It's commonly known as dreamland to you and I.
Technologists and early adopters between them don't have enough spending power to drive standards on their own, indeed in large organizations if you show me a technologist I'll show you the business person responsible for turning down their funding requests. Technologists and early adopters also support the losing technology on a frequent basis, it wasn't the mass market buying Betmax or MiniDisc.
To hammer the point home, technologists and early adopters were using digital audio players long before the iPod, DEC created the first commercially sold hard drive based MP3 player, but it was Apple's marketing machine which pushed the idea into the mainstream, and they did so by fixing all the issues technologists were happy to live with. Terrible user interfaces, poor software design, and USB 1.1 as a transport.
Chris would have us believe that it's technologists who are driving the adoption of 1080p televisions because "they say it's the best". No Chris, 2160p or Quad HDTV is currently "the best" as you get four times as many pixels per square inch than you do with 1080p. Even then it's not "the best" as I've already seen some prototypes which go beyond that.
So what's driving 1080p television sales? It's not technologists, it's show room picture quality. It just looks better in the window when you've a PlayStation 3/XBox 360 game, Blu-Ray or HD-DVD movie playing, but what most people don't realize is that everything looks better on those sets. HD or no HD. In reality very few sets are marketed as supporting 1080p, in Europe it's the HD Ready sticker which people look for. Why? Because you're not getting real 1080p/60 when you're watching a 1080p TV, there are no fast refresh 30Hz or 60Hz transmission broadcast standard in use.
Sets ether output a 1080i signal while dropping half the vertical resolution, or they'll use DLP to rapidly refresh two lines of 960 horizontal pixels to simulate 1920x1080 resolution. Why are they pulling all these tricks off and calling it 1080p? Because it costs a fortune to provide the bandwidth required for a native 1080p/60 resolution, a lot of the large displays aren't large enough to display the required pixel perfect image, and most HDTV content is captured at 1080i anyway.
So in reality you're buying marketing, not technology. So much for the technologist's immunity to marketing.
Getting away from the technology, the upcoming HD edition of the Spider-Man movies on Blu-Ray Discs will sell more HD TV sets and Blu-Ray players than any technologist or early adopter we can care to list.
Now as for the great iSCSI debate of 07 which has been going on, from the outside it looks like a bunch of people arguing 220V Vs 110V. Sorry boys, it's all just electricity to me.
What? Q1 a bit slow for you all?
