Just on the YouTube example, it was more an that its time had come, and YouTube just happened to be the one who got popular.
The factors included: multimedia-capable PCs, broadband and cell-phone cameras. All driven by Moore's Law.
A great deal of compsci seems to be like this (even including new ways of multiplying numbers) - not surprising, since Moore's Law dwarfs all other forces. No other industry has anything anywhere near comparable.
This can be used predictively: what obviously great but ridiculously infeasible idea will Moore's Law soon make feasible?
Examples: spherical TV (you sit inside); golf-swing analysis by brute-force matching with 3D recordings of every possible swing (to arbitrary resolution); literal recording and playback of 3D cerebral cortex activity (to arbitrary precision).
Displays are tricky. A 1280x960 is four times the 640x480 that was typical some years ago. We need more memory, more buses bandwidth, bigger and faster everything in different levels (without talking about colour depth), so I'd say that the power needed would be 20x or 30x. My gut feeling is that displays only have consumed Moore's gift for the last ten years.
The factors included: multimedia-capable PCs, broadband and cell-phone cameras. All driven by Moore's Law.
A great deal of compsci seems to be like this (even including new ways of multiplying numbers) - not surprising, since Moore's Law dwarfs all other forces. No other industry has anything anywhere near comparable.
This can be used predictively: what obviously great but ridiculously infeasible idea will Moore's Law soon make feasible?
Examples: spherical TV (you sit inside); golf-swing analysis by brute-force matching with 3D recordings of every possible swing (to arbitrary resolution); literal recording and playback of 3D cerebral cortex activity (to arbitrary precision).