I agree. I think lost sales are more due to the inconvenience and unfairness imposed by regular technology updates of physical media. When I buy a DVD, I know that it will outlive the technology needed to play it. That's a really bad deal, as shown by LaserDisc, videotape, and 8mm film. Compare that to having a digital copy that isn't locked to one form of physical media, that can be moved to other media without loss of quality. It's no wonder Big Media wants to kill that notion. They can't compete against it, they can't physically control it, and they can't easily rape it for profit. It's amazing how much government and legal support Big Media has been able to gather around itself. I guess greed and money can corrupt anything.

I think that the whole parallel processing notion is being stood on its head by logic developers working on embedded FPGA apps. The languages of choice are mostly based on VHDL and verilog. The processors involved can be DSP hardware blocks, embedded processors (implemented hardcore or softcore logic), and an arbitrary number of custom state machines, all operating independently or in various locked-step arrangements. Communications between processors are defined as required. Latest FPGAs offer a couple of thousand DSP blocks implemented in hard logic, all with localized memory stores. They can be arbitrarily grouped and/or can run independently, and can be clocked at different rates according to requirements. The resulting parallel processing power and versatility is astounding.