Had the same thing when I was a kid. 10' dish, receiver with analog meters. The whole setup was several grand if I remember right. I remember one week where I could switch between west and east coast feeds of a couple premium channels and watch Holy Grail and Delta Force back to back continuously. I think it was HBO and Cinemax. HBOw, CINw, HBOe, CINe, goto 10.

Crazy thing there was cable on the street behind us. The neighborhood all kicked in and paid to have the line extended. When my family found out, they asked if they could buy in and have cable run along the utility poles that ran thru our property to deliver electricity to their street. Offered to pay each house part of their cost then pay the full cost of running it on our poles. The assholes voted and said "no".

When encryption caught on, the dish was pretty much ignored. After I went to college, the cable company finally wired our street at no cost to us. (Other than the monthly subscription, of course.)

I've been watching the hardware since the 90s and I think it's finally got a chance this time. Back in the early days, neither displays nor computers could generate anything beyond proof of concept. The displays and headgear showed that you could strap a display to a person's head and track their movement but the pixel count was laughably low. Which did't really matter because the hardware could barely generate wire frame environments in real time. For the last 5 or 6 years, we've had the hardware to generate pretty decent environments but the display hardware was stagnant. Now we're finally getting decent quality headsets to plug into high performance hardware. We also have game engines that are pretty well tuned to serving up complete 3 dimensional environments with active "camera" tracking. The ingredients are all available. Of course, I'm looking at it from a gamer's POV.

I almost bought one of Sony's sets a while back but it was just a bit too pixelated. Now I've got the DK2 on order and I'm really hoping Facepage doesn't screw things up. I liked Oculus when they were a hungry company that had to listen to their customers to get money to continue to exist.

Wake me up when my vehicles can drive themselves.

And I couldn't play Wolfenstein 3D because it made me queasy. I was part of a small segment of the population who was incompatible with the game. That doesn't mean the game was defective. It means my optical sensing system is defective. I don't have that problem with current games running at 60Hz on LCD vs 70Hz on CRT. (Pretty sure 320x200x8bit was 70Hz in the VGA specs.) Hoping I won't have that problem with this new headset.

I just preordered a DK2. I've been waiting for a decent, affordable VR display since the early 90s when I played with some of the most cutting edge stuff available at the time. Holy crap, it was bad, bulky, and expensive. :) The goggles were massive and weighed several pounds. For head tracking you had to sit in just the right spot under a big frame holding sensors. The environment was barely beyond wire frame because that's all that portable equipment could render at the time.

That's just fucking stupid. That guy's a "lead engineer"?

I assume you're talking about 9.5mm drives because there have been 2tb 15mm drives for quite a while. And Samsung recently released a 9.5mm 2tb drive but they're only selling it in portable cases for some stupid reason.

I've got more storage now than I ever thought existed when I was a kid. I have a 32tb fault tolerant array in my RV. My little pocket camera has 32 gigs. So does my phone. I've got 4 2tb drives I cycled out of my array that are just sitting in boxes because I have no use for them.

That's the second biggest GPU I've ever seen.

It shouldn't cost that much. Many planes already have data service (run thru satellites) that they sell to passengers. Shouldn't be that hard to tap into the available instrument data and send out a blurp every 10-15 seconds. Doesn't even need fancy 2-way handshaking. Just send the encrypted packets and grab them as they arrive at the NOC. Not a big deal if the occasional blurp gets missed. But, if they never get another blurp from a plane, at least they got the data right up to the point of disaster.

That number's way too low.

So you'd ride a CitiBike home from the airport?

If only there was a more efficient way to publish information and make it available to a large group of people.

$995 will buy a lot of cab rides.

I worked for a lab that occasionally did work for them. I have no impression of them at all other than they were a client with a weird name. They sent samples, we analyzed said samples, sent them results, they paid, rinse, repeat. If they wanted interpretation, that'd be handled by the forensics division but I doubt they ever did.

Range. Range. Range. Ability to recharge quickly at many locations. Range. Make it look cool. Range.

There. Paypal me a bunch of money, Nissan. Did they really not know this?