Cover Story · Broadcast

THE NET WANTS YOUR TV

Broadband prophets say the living room is the next frontier — but the set-top box may be the dumbest computer you ever own.

For three decades the television sat at the center of the American living room like a glowing idol, fed a one-way diet of sitcoms and soap. This autumn, a strange new appliance promises to plug that idol into the telephone line — and the faithful are calling it the beginning of everything.

The set-top box, a beige slab the size of a paperback, is supposed to turn your cathode-ray tube into a window onto the World Wide Web. Vendors speak in hushed, reverent tones about "interactive broadcasting," as if the phrase alone were a product.

But scratch the surface and the vision blurs. The pipes are thin. A full-motion video clip takes ninety seconds to arrive, pixelating its way down a 28.8k modem like a fax of a dream.

"We are shipping 1990s hardware to deliver a 2005 promise." — a disillusioned engineer

Still, the romance is real. For the first time, the remote control might answer back. And in the labs of Stanford and MIT, prototypes already whisper of a day when the screen knows your name.

Fig. 1 — The $499 set-top unit, photographed in studio light.

SIDEBOX

Specs as advertised: 33 MHz processor, 4 MB RAM, bundled web browser, claims "thousands of channels." Reality: 12 working services at launch.

EDITOR'S NOTE

We tested seven units. Three arrived dead. One caught the eye of our fire marshal. The future, it seems, is still on back-order.

BY THE NUMBERS

· 14M households "online"
· 0.4% watching TV via modem
· $2.1B venture capital, spent
· 1 real hit show (none yet)

Field Report · Hardware

POCKET COMPUTERS ARRIVE

They weigh less than a paperback and cost more than a fridge. We spent a week living inside one.

There is a particular humility in tapping a stylus against a four-inch screen, willing your calendar to appear. The new class of "personal digital assistants" asks you to trust a fragile slab of glass with the architecture of your life.

We carried one for seven days. It remembered birthdays we had forgotten, and forgot the one meeting that mattered. It synced to the desktop only when the stars aligned — a serial cable, a soft reset, a small prayer.

And yet. The handwriting recognition, when it worked, felt like magic older than the telephone. A machine that reads your hand is a machine that knows you.

"It is less a computer than a very expensive, very loyal secretary who speaks only in beeps."

The desk is not dead. But the pocket has officially woken up — and it is hungry for our attention.

Fig. 2 — The palm-sized unit, shown with its chicory-stained leather sleeve.

VERDICT

B+ — Brilliant idea, brutal battery. Bring two. Bring a charger. Bring patience.

COMPARISON

· Weight: 340g
· Battery: 6 hrs (claimed)
· Battery: 2.5 hrs (real)
· Price: $699

OUR TESTER SAYS

"I missed my train because it rebooted. Would carry again tomorrow."

Long Read · Intelligence

CHIPS THAT THINK

A quiet laboratory in New Jersey says it has taught silicon to learn. The philosophers are not amused.

Neural networks were supposed to be a 1980s dead end — a beautiful theory strangled by the cost of computation. This spring, a team of researchers announced they had trained a network on a single workstation to recognize handwritten digits with near-human accuracy.

The trick was patience and a great deal of memory. The machine did not "understand" the number seven. It simply learned, through ten thousand examples, the shape a seven tends to take.

Critics argue this is pattern-matching dressed in the language of mind. The researchers shrug. "Call it what you like," said one. "It works, and it scales."

"We have not built a brain. We have built a remarkably convincing echo of one."

Whether echo or oracle, the dent in the wall is real. The age of machines that improve by practice has, quietly, begun.

Fig. 3 — A wafer of experimental neurons, 0.6 micron process.

TIMELINE

1943 idea · 1958 perceptron · 1986 backprop · 1996 this. The curve is bending upward.

GLOSSARY

Neuron: a node that sums inputs.
Weight: how much it listens.
Epoch: one pass through the data.

FEAR INDEX

Public: mild.
Philosophers: elevated.
Investors: ecstatic.

Market Watch · Infrastructure

THE BANDWIDTH WARS

Cable, phone, and satellite are racing to own the pipe to your home. The loser is you — paying twice.

Three empires are digging toward the same living room, each convinced it alone should carry the future. The cable operators own the coax. The phone companies own the copper. The satellite firms own the sky. None will share.

The result is a strange standoff: vast capacity, poorly connected. Your neighbor on the cable side downloads in minutes; you on the phone line wait in hours. Geography, not merit, decides your speed.

Regulators blink. Consumers pay. And somewhere a consultant is billing $400 an hour to explain why the obvious solution — open access — is politically impossible.

"The bottleneck is no longer the technology. It is the paperwork."

Whoever wins the pipe wins the decade. For now, the only certainty is the bill.

Fig. 4 — A street-level junction, where three empires meet and refuse to speak.

THE PLAYERS

Cable — fast, closed.
Phone — slow, everywhere.
Satellite — broad, laggy.

PRICE / MB

· 1994: $0.40
· 1996: $0.11
· 2000 (est): $0.02
· Patience: still free

EDITORIAL

Break the monopolies or break the bank. We know which we prefer.