Why don't they invest more?

[Endus]

The file size is already huge now.

Storage is vastly cheaper than it used to be, though. Like, thousands of times cheaper. When DVD launched, it wasn't really economically feasible to rip/burn them, because the storage needed was massive and expensive. Today, it's a question of how many dozen blu-rays you could rip to your hard drive, which likely cost less than a single hard drive back in '95.

File size as measured proportional to available storage space is decreasing, not increasing. Storage is incredibly cheap.

[shimerra]

The OP sounds less like a call for increased scientific endeavors and more like a whine about why other smarter people aren't doing more things for him.

[skrump]

The file size is already huge now. And it's not much of a difference - a 1080p movie is considerably bigger than 720p for rather marginal quality gain, on average screen sizes. It'll be a while until such big screens are commonplace enough to warrant a substantial shift.

Dunno I work at walmart and the majority of tv's we sell are 46" or bigger.
I would also be willing to wager that the majority of people who visit this site have a minimum of a 22" monitor set at a res of 1600 or higher.


That being said the higher quality picture is required to reduce the pixalation effect on larger screens (your iphone screen is tiny so use lower resolutions)
1080p generally doesn't offer a significant quality improvement on any screen below 40" which is why 99% of televisions under 40" don't offer it.

To be honest though I am amazed smartphones don't automatically convert video's into more manageable formats as the videos are uploaded to the device.

[Romeo83x]

There have been news about new and exciting and ground-breaking battery technology developments for the last 30 years.

The truth is almost none of them make it out of the lab and into the real world. All modern batteries are still based on the 200 year old technology developed in the 1800s.

To sound slightly less pessimistic, there have been considerable improvements on the battery charging speed technology though.

[haxartus]

The power consumption is constantly dropping due to improvements in microprocessor technology, but instead of increasing the battery life, they just put more features and keep the power consumption high.

To be honest though I am amazed smartphones don't automatically convert video's into more manageable formats as the videos are uploaded to the device.

Too much processing power required.

[Dezerte]

Companies balance ethics & profit, doing what is right vs. making money. Some companies have very skewed ratios, some of these companies will downright be anti-science/future if it means higher profits.

That's the general rule, as for this particular topic, I don't know.

[Reeve]

It seems companies don't want to invest to solve some of the basic tech problems.

For example, with the rise of higher and higher video formats out there, the next being the 4K, the file size is huge. I am talking about 40+ GB for one standalone movie.

Another example are smartphone batteries, where they seem to last less and less. Now I know they tried to hotfix it by having shorter recharge time, but still use a smartphone for 3-4h and it's almost out.

I've gotten my iPhone 5 to last about 60 hours without a charge once, and that was while using it for calls and games and texts and internet.

[Duncanîdaho]

It's a flaw of capitalism in my eyes. Although it encourages competition that leads to growth and new tech, it can also prevent said technology from being as efficient or good as it could be due to $. Why make something no one will have to buy again when instead you can make something that people will have to buy multiple times in there lifetime? Why come up with a battery that lasts forever, or a car that is super efficient when by doing those things you would essentially be killing the long term viability of your business and any business under it that supplies yours? At some point everyone will have one and will never buy one again if whatever object it is never breaks or improves. Inventing,discovering or creating something new has become more about how much money you can make off it rather then the potential benefits it can have for the human race.

I'm not saying this applies to everything either, but many things suffer from it. Some things do actually run into technical issues as well.

[Doktor Faustus]

It seems companies don't want to invest to solve some of the basic tech problems.

For example, with the rise of higher and higher video formats out there, the next being the 4K, the file size is huge. I am talking about 40+ GB for one standalone movie.

Another example are smartphone batteries, where they seem to last less and less. Now I know they tried to hotfix it by having shorter recharge time, but still use a smartphone for 3-4h and it's almost out.

At what point does the next medium become pointless?

DVD? Blueray? Super-duper HD Vision A1+?

One cannot polish a turd (ie the programming the masses consume).

[Auloria]

Honestly, R&D is expensive and risky. I'm a scientist, and about 95% of my time is all about learning how NOT to do things.

[Ravenblade]

It seems companies don't want to invest to solve some of the basic tech problems.

For example, with the rise of higher and higher video formats out there, the next being the 4K, the file size is huge. I am talking about 40+ GB for one standalone movie.

Another example are smartphone batteries, where they seem to last less and less. Now I know they tried to hotfix it by having shorter recharge time, but still use a smartphone for 3-4h and it's almost out.

Some companies like Intel or TMSC are willing to up their annual R&D spending in order to maintain an edge over the competition by solving the tech problems which their competitors can't. Intel alone spends more than $16bn per year on R&D. Other companies like Samsung rather work on expansion instead and let 3rd parties do the R&D. Some issues however take some time to resolve. Since you mentioned file sizes. I remember when hard disk storage sizes exploded in late 90s after they made use of the discovery of GMR by a French and a German physicist, another example is the development of compression algorithms and development of standards like MP3 which required a lot of mathematical groundwork, or when they finally got around resolving the issue around higher clock rates for CPUs and finally reached 1 GHz in 2000 while only much as two years before it was assumed that it wouldn't be possible. In short investments alone won't solve problems, it requires discoveries (which happen more or less are random) and then a lot of experimenting and iterative testing before things work out. More often than not they will meet a dead end or meet successive failures. Sure the basic motivation is still to make people consume without you being left to sit on your own goods but good tech and even having a monopole is good for business too. Nothing to do with ethics really.

[haxartus]

We are soon going to reach the limit of the CMOS technology, and unless we do some drastic changes, we will be stuck and the exponential growth of the computer industry will be over.
Abandoning silicon and CMOS as a whole will mean a huge R&D cost (tens of billions) and an increased production cost in the beginning.

[Romeo83x]

Intel spent $18.2 BILLION in research & development in 2012. They are starting manufacturing process of 14nm chips in 2014 and are making preparations for the 10nm chip in 2016.

Should be interesting, considering the physical limitations of current technology are expected to cap at 5nm.

[Tierbook]

well as far as batteries go we have new all-solid sulfur-based batteries now

[This name sucks]

That's because, if you double the dimensions of the screen, the actual image is four times larger, meaning it will generate a file size four times as large. This isn't a "problem", particularly as storage is getting larger and cheaper faster than file sizes are increasing.



Batteries have multiple concerns going into their makeup, charge time is only one of them. Size/weight is another big one. If people keep wanting smaller/slimmer/lighter phones, they're going to keep skimping on battery to accomplish that.

And the fundamental problem of having a shit load of energy in a tiny storage device ends up becoming extremely dangerous.

[Romeo83x]

well as far as batteries go we have new all-solid sulfur-based batteries now

News like these about "new breakthroughs" are dime a dozen. As always, they're merely in the laboratory stage.

[Tierbook]

News like these about "new breakthroughs" are dime a dozen. As always, they're merely in the laboratory stage.

ahh but it depends on who could profit off of such technologies in this case Tesla motors would like it because it could easily double their cars ranges and possibly quadruple it depending on conditions

[This name sucks]

Also silicon reaching its physical limit is a pretty big deal. Unless we finally get that graphene shit figured out by 2020 we're going to be in big trouble.

[Romeo83x]

Also silicon reaching its physical limit is a pretty big deal. Unless we finally get that graphene shit figured out by 2020 we're going to be in big trouble.

If you can't expand vertically, then you expand horizontally. 8-core, 16-core, 32-core processors in the future.

[haxartus]

If you can't expand vertically, then you expand horizontally. 8-core, 16-core, 32-core processors in the future.

Not possible due to power consumption.