The new economy and congress revisited?
Zenith is going bankrupt. The premier TV manufacturing firm of the U.S.; got the HDTV specification approval but can not deliver the product. Why? The technology of digital TV can not overcome the ghost signals in the concrete jungle; ghost signals blank out frame after frame of digital pictures.
Congress and FCC got hearings from digital enthusiasts, but never had any fall back positions. Now, the industry here and abroad have prepared not to produce analog TVs; yet have no HDTVs or DTVs to build. No broadcast signals to use for the HDTV or DTV either. No silicon chip sets developed for HDTV or DTV yet. After 10 years, it is still a few years away.
Fortunately, beyond digital signals, waiting in the wing is mixed signal technology. FCC has to rethink the HDTV or DTV architecture. Broadcast signals has to be infinitely variable analog voltages but as digital compression codes. Subsequently, the analog signal will be deciphered and error corrected by digital processing. The compression codes will provide higher band width for the error correction time needed by high speed processors; there will be no blank frames of pictures on TV. Present schemes have no way to correct for digital signal errors, before the picture is viewed; hence a blank.
Many laws, that congress in a rush to write laws; have no understanding of technical feasibility or the side effects of social changes. In the case of TV industry, Congress and FCC killed it by writing a law without understanding the digital short comings. In the case of tobacco and liquor, social changes in denying the acceptable behavior have prevented smokers to join people in closed quarters, and drinkers to leave parties drunk. Liquor stores have been closing around towns. And tobacco sales have been mostly exports to China, since the Bush administration. |
