I have no intention of converting my tapes to digital format (too lazy), so the VCR stays around for a while. And if it breaks in 2007, I'll have to work something out.

Plus, I'll miss the clock.

I'm sure that a VCR collectors' market will break out immediately. People still have and keep working betamax machines, after all.

Plus, how do you think all those midwestern housewives, who can't afford or aren't even offered Tivo service, will tape their soaps? Soap opera fans always find a way.

That's all I need -- to be at the mercy of "collectors."

I bet there still will be smaller companies and companies in China making VCRs for a while after 2006. When the big electronics companies stopped making 8-track players, other companies continued to make them for years afterwards.

Yeah, and Tivo has no conceivable conflict of interest in pronouncing the death of the VCR.

Production companies will continue to use VHS screeners long after the rest of us have implanted Tivo chips into our brains, guaranteed.

(Which doesn't mean that VCRs will continue to be produced, merely that dubbing facilities will be unable to get rid of our existing ones, as is currently the case with 3/4" decks.)

Tivo has no conceivable conflict of interest in pronouncing the death of the VCR.

It's not like it's unpredictable, though.

Samsung to Pay $300M Fine for Price Fixing.

Hmm. So, I just sold my desktop, but kept my display, keyboard, and mouse so that I could run my laptop into them and occasionally pretend to have a desktop (mostly for two purposes: watching TV on the much bigger physical display, and for typing papers on the much more comfortable keyboard).

Unfortunately, I have a bit of a problem. The laptop is an old iBook, that only outputs up to 1024x768. The display is a 17" LCD with 1280x1024 native resolution. Now, it can upscale the 1024x768 to 1280x1024, of course, which is what it's doing now, but it's an old display and doesn't do that very well.

Long story short: it's giving me a headache. Kinda ruins the paper-writing thing (though it still works fine for movies).

I'm wondering if there's anyway I could get it to show the 1024x768 without scaling - that is, centered in the display with a black border around it. Then I would still get all the ergonomic value of the display, and not have a headache from the blurriness.

I'm wondering if there's anyway I could get it to show the 1024x768 without scaling - that is, centered in the display with a black border around it.

I kind of doubt it. Of course, the iBook is never gonna output more than 1024x768, so you'd have to tell the monitor to use the higher resolution while still accepting 1024x768 input. So my guess is it depends on the design of the monitor - if that mode is available, or if you can somehow override the default (which is to go to whatever the input resolution is) and use the higher resolution.

eta: If this is possible, I'd expect you'd have to adjust the monitor itself to go into this mode.

Yeah, I'm thinking it'd have to be in the display controls. Which it isn't. Sigh, guess i'll just use the monitor for watching movies on, then (no pain then, it's only text that I can't deal with.)