Passage Two

In 1997, devotees of home electronics eagerly awaited the DVD player, a new device that could play movies without videotape, and with greater clarity. It caught on even faster than CD music players and within four years, DVD movies surpassed VHS tapes in sales. The DVD’s success is just on example of a historic shift from og to digital technologies. They began with computing and are now spreading to industries from banking to publishing. Products and services are shedding the limits of their physical form to become encoded information that never degrades, can be reproduced perfectly and distributed around the world in minutes, or less. Another example is photography: by the end of this year, tile number of images captured digitally each day is expected to surpass the number of images captured on film. With digital cameras and other devices linked to personal computers, we can collect vast amounts of data, which fortunately takes up little or no closet space. Today’s average personal computer has a hard drive that can store 300 times more information than a decade ago. Technologies, such as broadband e-commerce, are expected to be the primary means of delivering entertainment and media by the end of this decade. Even life itself is increasingly digitized. The human genome(基因组), the recipe for our genetic makeup, has been mapped and encoded and researchers are harnessing the power of computing to accelerate the development, of new, lifesaving drugs. The implications of this broad, digital revolution are enormous, although they tend to be over-shadowed by the struggles of high-tech industries to recover from the go-go years of the 1990s. Those struggles are real, yet there are reasons for optimism about a return to robust economic growth and job creation in the next several years. The digital innovations(创新) of the past two decades continue to bear fruit, so stay tuned for good news--digitally, of course.

The author implies that excitement over the digital revolution may be hindered by ______.