from DVD players to central home computers (part I)

I bought a new DVD player today. I didn't want to buy one, but I did. I prefer to move forward whenever possible and if I can't move forward I at least try not to move backward. This is true with life and especially true with technology.

"Technology!" you say, "We don't need no stinking technology!" Well don't fool yourselves. The world's population is rapidly closing on 7 billion. We need technology. We are on a path we chose long before we developed writing and we can either stay on it or get off. If we stay on it, we need technology. If we want to get off it alive, we need technology... anyway, that's a topic for another post. Back to DVD players...

When dealing with technology, you want to keep moving forward, it just makes sense. So if I needed a new DVD player, why did I buy another DVD player instead of a Blu-Ray player? Blu-Ray represents a lot of new things but none of them are a step forward unfortunately.

Higher resolution? We already have that on our computers. Higher capacity? Ditto. Greater freedom? Well, no. Blu-Ray has even more severe copy protection than DVD did. It is so severe that some of the earlier Blu-Ray players can't even play the latest DVDs because they changed the spec after their first attempt at copy protection was broken. This is something that will likely continue so if you have aBlu-Ray player now, get ready to replace it before too long. There's more but suffice it to say I'm not too fond of Blu-Ray.

So the title of this posts mentions central home computers. How do we get from DVD players to central home computers? Hopefully I'll get to that in part II.