ac> I have to wonder though, after all a family's video tapes have
ac> been converted to DVD, what will happen to the video tapes? Can
ac> they be used for anything else?

JB> Haloween streamers?

JB> Recycled? prolly can, they're about 80% plastic, the rest is
JB> mgnetic oxides and a few bits of actual metal.

 I find it amusing that I have just 6 VHS tapes I use constantly to
record and play TV, but I have a hundred CDs I never use at all. I'm
not sure how that plays out by weight, but I'd guess that the "new"
technology generates about 10-times as much crap for landfill.

ac> Also, an announcement was made recently about HD DVD writers
ac> (with discs holding up to 30 Gb) to start appearing in the next
ac> year or so. Although, by then an entry level PC's hard disk
ac> drive will probably hold 200 Gb..

JB> Noone has proven Moore's law wrong yet.

 It's not a law. At most, it's an hypothesis.

 You have ot bear in mind that most of the exponential growrth is
cheating. For instance, hard drives increase incapacity, but they are
measured as 8-bit bytes while data is stored as 32-bits (most of those
bits redundant) and sectors have increased 16-times. Clock speeds are
into the gigahertz, but not really... they do clever tricks with the
architecture. The true measure is bus speed where things actually
happen, and the increase there is hardly exponential...

Regards,
Bob


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