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Super LCD Screens: 200 PPI
crovira wrote to us with an article from the NYT (free reg. req'd.) Apparently, both Toshiba and IBM are dissatisified with the current state of monitor development. To that end, they've created some wondrous toys like 16.5" LCD screens that display 200 PPI. They've run into a most curious problem however: Legacy software/drivers. Click thru to read more - and if IBM should want to send a couple screens my way, I'd see what we can whip up around the office *grin*.
The solution to the scaling problem is not necessarily as hard as people are trying to make it. One just needs to get out of the idea of bitmaps mapping to pixels and instead thinking about texture maps mapping to polygons. Instead of "pixel coordinates", think in terms of standardized 2D coordinates.
Thus that 10x10 bitmap that you want to put at pixel location (200, 100) becomes a 10x10 texture map that you will map to a polygon at screen coordinate (200, 100). Here's the kicker to allow for super-resolution displays: allow the screen coordinates to be floating point (or at least fixed point fractions).
This is just my 3D-graphics background seeing a potential solution. Admittedly, there are lots of details to be worked out still.
The medical monitors they were comparing these to run around 25k for a fairly small one.
I've been working on a Vector based GUI (it's shite, unfortunately.. stealing a lot of code from Berlin :). Raise your resolution and it just adds more detail, ala Unreal/Q. Images don't get crunched up in the top left corner, they stay in the same physical location of the screen.
Object placement (windows for example) are done instead by a x:float,y:float rather than int.
Anyway, in vector i've written a text editor and done some icons (having some problems with window layering though). Mouse doesn't work yet but keyboard support is there, i'm just screwing arround though.
Actually, this whole post was a lie.
Doing it wouldn't be hard. Just assume a 800x600 grid, regardless of screen size, and specify coords based on it. You wouldn't break legacy applications, because they'd see a 800x600 screen. Imagine dragging a window across the screen and seeing it jerk and finally clip to each of those units because that's the only place it could be held :) I think a vert/horiz/depth float (add float detail as a GUI option) - with a wrapper for old systems would be the best. Crippling new tech for old tech ain't much fun. ps. depth float or maybe just an INT (can anyone see any problems with an INT for depth) as we're assuming you want to layer windows, right?
Imagine dragging a window across the screen and seeing it jerk and finally clip to each of those units because that's the only place it could be held :)
I think a vert/horiz/depth float (add float detail as a GUI option) - with a wrapper for old systems would be the best. Crippling new tech for old tech ain't much fun.
ps. depth float or maybe just an INT (can anyone see any problems with an INT for depth) as we're assuming you want to layer windows, right?
PS AGAIN... I checked that the drop down was HTML formatted.. I pressed submit and the formatting was completely lost. Questioning myself I backed up my browser and saw that I had done everything right and could only look to blame /. fpr whatever's going wrong. GRRRR!
:P You're right that there aren't that many of us mac users out there, but we do have one major advantage: Steve Jobs. Iff he decides that ultra high resolution monitors are a Good Thing (TM) then he'll make it standard on every mac that gets shipped. How does this affect everyone else? 30 million monitors isn't much, but it'll get the ball rolling, and cause prices to drop. At that point, even x86 nuts will be able to start looking at them.
You are right about the OS issue though. MacOS is getting a new graphics engine that is based on vectors, but unfortunately, this technology WON'T be applied uniformly across the board. Icons and such, although they will be able to resize up to some ridiculous size, will simply be bitmaps that are 128x128 and interpolated down via bicubic interpolation. If they decide to up the resolution much beyond 200 dpi, then Apple will need to upgrade their stuff like everyone OS.
well, it's about time. i was getting fed up with the blocky playboy photos.
I'm not huge into video, just an observation/question. The latest rage of tv is HDTV and plasma displays. If plasma displays are that good(and all the reviews I hear say they are), why still LCD for pc's?
1st post
Maybe tihs will drive the price down on some of the _inferior_ LCDs.
I think an NTSC TV has ~550 lines of vertical resolution, at 24fps (interlaced). It's an analog signal, so there's really no horizontal resolution.
It's probably much lighter than a regular TV (CRT) of a comparable size.
fuck off arsehole.
Yes, it'll do that, but it doesn't work very well. It's not consistent, for one thing. You see lots of places in apps where the enlarged text throws things out of whack.
It also doesn't help with icons. Who cares if you can set your fonts to display at 200 dpi, if all the toolbar icons are the size of a period?
I think a good strategy for web browsers at 200PPI is to rewrite them to allow Acrobat-like zooms. Bitmap images would be scaled up, and if the developer is feeling good about himself, he'd implement bilinear filtering. That would look great, if a little bit blurry. With a mixture of low and high resolution displays, there's no doubt that UI programming will have to shift focus to allow real-world sizing. Windows already has the API's for this by including various scaling modes for their GDI.
Uh, no. They are around $12,000 not $1200. If they were $1200, I'd have 4 of them around my apartment.
Good grief, the problem isn't drivers--it's these ridiculously obsolete raster-oriented GUIs we're shackled with. Why new Linux projects like GNOME and KDE continue to pursue this flawed paradigm is both bewildering and depressing. Irix got this one right a while back: vector icons. That, of course, is just the start. The whole UI needs to use vector graphics.
Whether or not you like the Mac, or even Mac OS X, you can't deny that its display mechanism, Quartz, based on PDF is pretty sweet when you realize that it would have NO problem with these 200 dpi screens, because everything is displayed using vector graphics, which means that all images can scale up very easily. I'm glad that Apple made such an intellignet choice -Damien Ivan
Current video cards can handle video memory transfers of 100-500 million pixels per second. GeForce DDR, for example, can do up to 480 million pixels per second to screen.
This implies that if chip makers were to apply the same technology to 2D (which they might be doing already), then a GeForce-level card could do one 21900x21900 blit per second, or 100 2190x2190 blits per second. This means a GeForce-level card could perform a 3200x2400 blit in 16 ms. That's plenty good enough for windowing.
Video memory is not a problem, either. A 32-bit 3200x2400 frame buffer takes about 30Mb. Today's video cards come with 32, and by the time 200dpi displays hit shelves, cards will have at least 64Mb. (Yes, I'm aware 64Mb cards are out now, but the memory is split and non-unified)
Perhaps 3dfx might take its SLI technology to these displays one day....
I don't know about Windows 98, but under Windows 2000, you get 3 options: small fonts, large fonts, and Other. The "Other" option gives you an on-screen ruler that you can scale to match real-world metrics and scales your font accordingly.
IRIX has vector icons... I love them they look super cool...
MS will be just fine when the world switches to 64-bit. I can't comment on anything confidential, but I can tell you that MS is working on their Win64 API for Itanium. Do a search for "Win64" at developer.intel.com.
I doubt they rewrote NT. They only rewrote the small portion of code that controls icon sizing. And this is probably in a DLL (gdi32.dll maybe?), so a full rebuild probably wasn't necessary. None of this seems drastic to me. It's not like they had to recompile a kernel or rebuild their entire window system.
Actually, if I remember correctly, NTSC's color gamut sucks - reds, for example, don't come out looking right at all. I don't now about PAL.
I'd rather run MacOS X
It's not so much a legacy driver problem, so much as a lack of foresight on the OS people's side! NeXT has had a solution for this problem for over a decade, and it looks like MacOS X will also be able to overcome this hurdle very easily; Display Postscript and Quartz, the PDF version of the above. I guess you could call this legacy software...
I've read this very often on this thread.
Unfortunately this is only half true. Of course, Nextstep, Openstep, and Mac OS X Server use Display Postscript and Mac OS X will use Aqua/Quartz. Fonts and all vector based images scale beautifully, but still all the icons and widgets are bitmap based and therefore do not easily scale.
To be precise, icons and widgets do not scale at all under Nextstep, Openstep, and Mac OS X Server. All we know so far about Aqua/Quartz is that icons will scale. From what I've seen so far, I seriously doubt that anything else (e.g. window close boxes, scroll bars, etc.) will scale in the initial version of Aqua.
I do agree that Apple has some serious advantage here, but please don't expect too much resolution independence in the first version of Aqua/Quartz, or else you'll be disappointed.
Sorry dude, you actually had to read your post and think about it to see how it tied in. Remember, most /.'ers (and therefore moderators) are young'uns who've been raised on MTV soundbites. Rational thought is not something they're good at. If you want to be left alone or moderated up, keep it simple and vacuous. Food for thought just makes moderators gag.
you are one stupid fuck. you realize this, don't you?
I definitely think Apple is doing the right thing with OS X and Aqua/Quartz. Having a resolution independent GUI is going to be a *must* for the future. It always makes me laugh reading some people write about "hating" the "huge" icons shown in the Aqua demos. I guess if they want to be stuck at 640x480 forever...
Something Microsoft doesn't want you to know is that companies like IBM, Compaq, etc are the ones who add the REALLY cool features to NT like clustering, failover, etc. Microsoft programmers work primarily on DOS-like systems (Windows 95, Windows ME, video games etc) and the real heavy duty programming for their "enterprise" stuff is done by more talented/experienced programmers at other companies. IBM has the source to NT because IBM is a primary *developer* of NT. IBM is, in fact, much like the "Gaea" character in John Varley's Titan series. It is a cohesive whole, but it has multiple non-necessarily compatable personalities within it. One of those personalities is the "Microsoft" personality (closest to Oceanus, I guess).
I happen to be metamoderating this stupid moderation. I marked it "unfair" needless to say. Moderation sucks lately.
And would you call those things you mention *portable*?
And you can bet that drivers will be forthcoming.
If there were a 1600x1200 LCD with 200 DPI for
$500 I'd buy it even without drivers.
Once more drivers are available they can raise the
price again.
Mark
Of course if you are running something such as XFree or Windows, there will probably be a driver. After all, if you have drivers for those two, you've got better than 90% of everything supported.
:-)
:-)
Of course if you are running something such as Windows, there will probably be a driver. After all, if you have drivers for that one, you've got better than 89% of everything supported
Sorry, sorry.
I couldn't help but going there
Errr. Unless you've read something I haven't, I can't see how:
For picture quality, however, many computer screens are put to shame by the cheapest discount store portable TV.
could possibly make you think that "...they were referring to those discount flat panel Phillips HDTVs...". I'd hardly say that at "...around $1200..." they're the cheapest TVs, let alone portable.
Nick.
I turn my default font up from the flyspec 8 font
they have to a bold 12 (looks perfect at
1600x1200). All the gnome-aware apps respect it,
though some stupidly have hard-coded dialog box
sizes.
Who needs anti-aliased fonts with 200 dpi.
Mark
(n/t) == "no text"
So why aren't consumer computers using XGA video cards! It seems strange that we are still stuck at VGA or SVGA cards.
Many, if not most of these are _digital_, while the old monitor in front of you is analog--there is a D/A conversion in the graphics card or in the monitor box. Plus there are a whole lot more pixels. A maxed out graphics card for one of these babies might have 64 meg of VRAM. Egad. Without the D/A conversion, things like autoaliasing work differently too, so they will have some really low level impacts on the design of drivers. You probably won't be at all happy if you just plug one of these babies into your box.
This technology will significantly increase the potential feeling of reality derived from a virtual environment
;)
It'll also cause people to upgrade their vidcards to 128MB or more..
True, it's not a _driver_ problem. The problem is that nearly all windowing systems are built around the "grid of pixels" assumtion. Here is an area where I like Apple's chances with MacOS X. Since they are using PDF as their low-level graphics API the capability is already there to take advantage of these high DPI displays without squishing everything into oblivion.
This is true but the drivers aren't the problem (despite the fact that the article made them out to be). What is the problem is that windows does not scale its icons for higher resolutions. So, while the "my computer" icon may take 1/8 of the desktop in 640x480, it is very small in 1280x1024 and would be really damn tiny in... say... 3600x2880... That problem will not be solved in the drivers, thus, for those of us using windows (don't flame me.. :) we will have to wait 5 years for Microsoft to come out with the first extremely buggy fix for the problem.
There is some emerging #-D technology (haven't seen it--only read about it) where you use 2 chips on the graphics card and a ton of memory, in such a way that each generates one picture and then you interleaf pictures. Takes 65 or 70 frames per second from each processor, so it takes a fast monitor sync (!!!), but the result is supposed to be like the old two colored glasses, except you don't need glasses--you just have the two images blurred together into a 3-D effective image. It is supposed to be really cool for molecular modelling, etc., but it will be a year or so before you want to fork outthe cash for this--unless you hit the lottery or some such. (Apple is supposed to be working on this with ATI for a future graphics card, for instance).
You sir, are an idiot.
I can show you a HDTV signal running on a PC monitor at 720 lines progressive, and then show you the same signal degraded down to 525 lines interlaced (NTSC television), and you are going to tell me the the TV looks more "realistic"?
Have you even seen an HDTV signal yet?
Heck, even a 640x480x32bit picture on a PC monitor looks more "realistic" than a still TV picture.
You are the kind of person who probably thinks that letterboxing of movies is "cutting off" part of the picture.
*rolls eyes*
Ooog -- sounds like OS/2 2.x which had dialog boxes that would scale with the screen resolution. So, at 640x480, you got a 12 pt font, but running 1024x768, the dialog text WAS REALLY BIG. The moral of the story don't assume anything -- go with a vectors to begin with.
BTW, X isn't easier. Everything is pixel dependant, although you can trick the fonts by specifying a really huge point size. Someone (errm, the Open Group) needs to roll up their sleeves and fix X windows.
If I am not mistaken RISC-OS on the old Acorns running from OS2 on the arm3 to 3.7 on the StrongARM used to manage fine with screen resizing i used to run my old acorn at 640x480 in 1991 (mmm 32bit gui with the original start bar) upto 1024x768 on my strongarm machine and the icons were resized as was the icon bar as there were high res version in the OS ROMS. Unlike my mates PC with G400 and 22'' Iiyama at 1280x1024 or 1600x1200 where all the icons are to small to see .......
Sit two feet away from a TV screen for a while, then get back to us.
If you stand up, people will be able to hear you talking out of your ass more clearly. I've watched DVD movies on both a computer monitor and a TV and if you would rather watch it on a tv, you are plain dumb.
The point is, don't let software hold up the
project when there are 10 million Linux hackers
dying to make it work, and who are not held back
by a monolith like Microsoft.
Makr
when hemos or taco say *grin* or *drool* i am reminded of a catholic priest saying "sure, i can babysit little bobby.. i love kids *grin*"... i mean what the fuck is up with that ?
with windowing systems drawn vector based, resolution shouldn't be a problem..
You do realize that a 1600x1200 screen at 200 dpi would be about 10 inches diagonal, right?
I think that the Mac stuff uses 128x128 icons instead of 32x32 or 64x64. I don't know if the widgets are really vectors or now because I thought they were fancy. I wouldn't know for sure though. From what I understand KDE 2.0 has the vector widgets also. But the icons aren't vectors, so therefore we get the same problem.
Think about this, what would surfing the net be like with a monitor with 200 PPI or 300 PPI? While I would love the quality, there would be no way in hell you could actually read graphics. If you ask me, the problem isn't restricted to a 200 PPI LCD, its already become one on the web. Have you ever been to a site that was designed to be small or gone to a site that was designed to be big? It never works, the best way is to design one that scales, and the technology for scaling on the web is slowly coming (SVG, CSS1/2).
I've seen some of those displays they have in the newer A-10 jets
Newer A-10 Jets? Are they actually retro-fitting these 25+ year old 'hogs with stuff like this? COOL.
The reason most of these projects suffered either significant changes of function and purpose and/or were abandoned came down to one issue: the availability of a common interface with which to program our software for multiple interfaces and interface resolutions. We even experimented with database driven technology so that after an initial q & a with a user, the system would auto-configure for the best resolution it could find.
The bottom line was that with open standards (such as Open GL, etc.), we would have succeeded. So I wish IBM and Toshiba luck in bringing this to market, and offer them one simple word of advice: let the Open Source movement help you succeed, and don't try to bottle up the technology genie just for short term profit. IMHO companies that work with us in this new era of computing freedom-of-choice will be handsomely rewarded over the long haul.
...Open Source isn't the only answer -- but it's almost always a better value than the alternatives...
I read about this more than a month ago. I thought the link came from slashdot, too. What's up with this?
No, it can't modify bitmaps with vectors. Think about it for a second, that is a type of Optical Recognition.
Apple's present PR engine's mantra is that Icons are represented up to 128x128, but by a bilinearly mipmapped graphic.. I.e. there is also a 64x64, 32x32, 16x16 (And possibly lower powers of 2) version, and it chooses and scales an icon based on these numbers and the closest version of the icon size-wise. No vectors. You really need 64x64 icons in order for vector icons to work, in my experience. Scaling lower than that just gives a mess.
Well there is an option to use Large Icons. That might help. Display Settings, then Plus! tab. Of course the icons are just scaled up, so the quality isn't improved, but it is more readible.
What you don't get is the ability to say 'My display has a 14.5" visible diagonal, 4:3 apsect ratio, and 1280x1024 pixels' and expect things to be resized accordingly. This really should be here now, given PnP monitors.
John
John_Chalisque
It's EASY to make a CRT with an aribtrarily targetted beam -- think CRO. It's basically impossible to do a colour one. It's also rather difficult to make the image persist (you have to keep redrawing an arbitrary list of vectors. (IIRC, there use to be vector displays, until raster ones took over)
John
John_Chalisque
X11 is impossible to make resolution independant.
First, the font system is pixel based. Second, all the other drawing primatives are pixel based. There are no given res independant units to work in, and an extension won't help since not everybody will be using it. Get into the real world -- X is further behind than EVERYTHING else in the market today.
p.s. a target sized theme won't affect the appilcations, you just get a 'normal' sized window frame, and 'anything goes' inside it...
If you ask me, killing the dead horse is a small price to pay for 4000x3000.
John
John_Chalisque
When the target display architecture can't scale up the fonts properly even if asked to by the toolkit. Nor can it scale the line widths effectively. (If you take a look at Xlib, you'll notice that everything is done in terms of pixels, and that's what everything turns to in the end. And even with a theme, how do you synchronise the settings across distant hosts??)
John
John_Chalisque
What you need is a float based 'internal positioning metric' with a fast grid fitting algorithm to position the lines.
John
John_Chalisque
PDF 1.3 is a subset of Postscript 3!!!
Basically, all the programming stuff is pre-executed, and the contents of each page, in terms of Postscript primatives, is canned at each showpage command (well, its a little more, but not much)
John
John_Chalisque
Anywhere visible yet??
John
John_Chalisque
NeXT didn't do it, Sun didn't do it, Apple didn't do it -- Adobe formed to pioneer the display independant display architecture, its use in printing came later.
John
John_Chalisque
Blurry like a TV
John
John_Chalisque
It's interesting that one of the big problems is with software. Those tiny 16x16 pixel icons all but dissapear when you have a 200dpi monitor.
Perhaps those gigantic 128x128 pixel icons in MacOS X don't seem so huge now. And with their Display PDF system, a properly designed icon should be scalable to any size you want.
And with the Mac's popularity in the imaging business, I wouldn't be surprised if the first major customer of these 200 dpi displays is Apple. Just imagine an iMac with a 17" display and a 200 dpi resolution.
"Tomorrow's forecast: a few sprinkles of genius with a chance of doom!" - Stewie Griffin
I'd like to see monitors with high DPI, it'd make it more possible for me to avoid sending things to the printer down the hall. Resolution in the 200 dpi range might be enough to enable this though.
I see a weak spot though and thats the bandwidth required to keep screen response reasonably interactive. Comparing a high end 100 dpi monitor to a 200 dpi monitor means that 4 times the memory bandwidth would be required to maintain the status quo. This requirement is pushed all the way up from the underlying hardware into the software technologies such as the X servers or whatever it is that handles display primitives in Windows.
I don't follow the windowing developments under Linux very closely, with the V3.X servers running on a TNT with 16 megs of memory linux graphics are a lot slower performing than they were under Windows 98. Will V4.X achieve parity (or perhaps go beyond parity) and would it keep up with a 4X throughput increase?
Alternatively you could argue that adaptive resolution would be a useful approach at cutting bandwidth. Text is usually black and white and suffers greatly at todays resolutions while colour images are acceptable at todays resolutions. If the display could handle addressing multiple pixels for colour information to form a less fine resolution the overall bandwidth could be greatly reduced.
200x100 character terminals... oh, yes.
*imagining pine, vim, lynx, zicq in 200x100 rxvt's*
And think of the console modes with the 2.2 kernel framebuffer support... *doing math*
with an 8x16 console font, 2048x1536 comes out to... 256x96... even 1600x1200 is 200x75. Mmmmm.
Now THAT is where it's at.
--Ben
--Ben
What? Unless I'e been walking around in a trance, exactly the reverse is true.. Even a cheap monitor has a better quality picture then a fairly expensive TV.. Potention resolution, scan rate, dot pitch, all better on monitors then crappy NTSC TVs..<p>
Apple now has display PDF in their upcoming MacOS X.
Correct you are, sir. In fact, during the Rhapsody days, Apple engineers amazed themselves by putting together a Display PostScript interface for their latest effort (soon christened MacOS X Server) in five working days. Yes, the NeXT software development infrastructure was and is that good.
IIRC, the only reason why Apple got rid of Display PostScript was due to PDF's emerging dominance as a graphical layout standard. (Oh well. They had the spare week to code it anyway..)
Anecdotes like this make me hope that OS X Consumer will have some of the development tools available. Drool drool drool...
-----
".sig,
suddenly, the DPS support in GNUStep seems more important.
Somebody get our flag back!
That was the whole impetuous behind Display PostScript, pioneered by the NeXT computer / OS. It made for a very cool display / printer integration, because what you saw on screen was exactly what you'd get on paper. It took care of all the scaling issues for you. NeXT was very much ahead of it's time in the late eighties.
Unfortunately, it was perhaps too computationally-expensive for the machines available at the time. You gotta remember that back in 1989, a 16MHz 68020 was considered a high-end microprocessor.
Display PostScript would be a lot more viable today, except for 3-D games. Most graphic accelerators now have way more power than they need to keep up with 2-D display tasks. And the CPU power is there too, even with a low-end, non-OC Celery.
I just had a second though. Dont laugh, it happens...
:-) flat-screen 200dpi monitor would cost me!
:-)
The RAM requirements of a 200DPI display are enormous.
I have 13", 17" and 21" monitors hooked up to my G3. Obviously, what I want/need is screen real-estate. I shudder at what a card for a decent sized (30"
And the acceleration needed to handle all those pixels per square inch... I'd need a water cooled side-car.
But Tomb Raider would really be worth playing.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
Of course it does.
Gates always said: "Make it more Mac like"
Seriously, Display PostScript was a better solution since day none.
Microsoft suffers from IBM's old problem. "NIH"ilism. We'll see if it survives it when the world switches to 64-bit architectures.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
--
" It's a ligne Maginot-in-the-sky "
The toshiba one will help this. The article states that there method of increasing resolution results in refresh rates that are 100 faster.
It's a "2" because the poster of the comment has enough karma to get an automatic +1 bonus every time he posts. Oh, and I thought it was actually pretty funny.
"I'd like to live in theory, because everything works in theory, in theory." - Can't remember who said this.
Our SciVi group started using 640 x 480 24 bit
monitors in 1980 at $30K. The resolution jumped to
1280 x 1024 by 1983 and essentially remains stuck
there. The difference is the price has fallen
to $500 and the application software has grown
exponentially. (There have been a few specialty
monitors at 1600 or 2048 if you add another zero
to the price.) We were told for electron gun technology you just cant form clear pixels faster
than about 5 nanoseconds, hence the limit on those types of monitors. Multi-gun, mult-monitor
technology has been around- either kludgy or expensive. The IBM approach is looking at non-gun
monitors where there is still growth possibility.
irix seems to do this already, all of icos are in vector format and can be scaled, dynamicly, with a little roller bar on the side of all the windows.
b
Last I checked, EInk's writing speed is *slow*. Not really suitable for frame rates. Dense LCDs have been around for at least 6 years; Xerox PARC had a set of gorgeous 200dpi units, b/w and color, around 1993. They tried to figure out how to manufacture them at a profit and failed (even with governmnet subsidy). (I also recall that they were seriously power hungry!)
You forget one thing. More pixels = more electricity (most likely) - a big challeng in portables is not sucking too much power out of it. I don't want to have to replace/recharge the batteries on my Palm every 4 hours. Likewise, I don't need that kind of resolution on my notebook at the moment, and I'd rather have longer runtimes than more pixels.
I hope to die peacefully in my sleep like grandpa, not screaming like his passengers.
Sounds like IBM and friends need to either fund conversion of open-source apps to X11-DPS, or form a new consortium to develop a new Open Source resolution- independent (or at least less-dependent) protocol and libraries.
> All software is broken.
After all these years, the flying bathtub is still the best overall anti-tank weapon (well, anti ground based armored vehicle) there is. I mean, how many planes do you know of can still fly with half the wing blown off? They played a major part in desert storm several years ago, and whenever the next little/big war comes along, I'm sure they will then too.. stealths may be nice for buildings and all, but it really helps when you can visually identify your target and make sure your blowing up the enemy and not a friendly. (The first american/nato/allied/wtf casualty in desert storm was by one of our own apaches being off course and blowing away one of our own APCs! They did ask for confirmation of course, but HQ thought they were on course.. and they couldn't just fly over and see, like the warthog might risk..)
:)
My favorite aircraft is definately the A10
Hmm, I used to do this a few years ago when I ran 95... I had a 12" monitor running at 1024x786...
Unfortunately, several windows programs will notice the custom font setting and refuse to run (with a kind little dialog box which says, basically: "Hey weirdo, fix your font setting, you're being different, stop it.")...
So windows can handle some of this, in theory, but it's basically useless in real life. (gee, sounds like windows in general...)
Go read the article about Quartz on Ars Technica. One thing they mention is that the bitmap icons can in fact be modified by applying vectors to them. I'm not talking about opticl recognition or even tracing (ala Adobe Streamline). I mean vectors as in "a vector in space".
As you mouse over that task bar in Quarters the bitmap icons grow and shrink. They don't just pop up larger and then pop down smaller they execute a smooth grow/shrink based on a vector used to scale the bitmap. If you select an icon in the task bar it doesn't just open an associated window/app it flows the information out from the width of the icon to the width of the app using two bezier curves to define the sides of the flow.
It's quite slick, as long as it doesn't suck CPU power like a ShopVac.
The display surface for Windows might be resolution independent but the icons are most certainly not.
.dlls you can't just scale up a directory of images. You'd have to find all of the icons on the system (herculean task), extract them all, scale them all up by a factor of 3 and then reinsert them into the myriad .exe and .dll files they came from.
Most Windows icons are 32x32 pixels with the tacit measurement assumption of 72pixels/inch. That means that at most used resolutions your Windows icons/toolbar icons will nominally appear as 1/2" squares. If your monitor isn't based on 72pixels/inch but 200ppi then your 32pixel icon will only take up a square area of about 1/6" on a side on your display. I don't know about you, but many times I find the current icons too small to impart any useful iconographic information. If those icons become 1/3 of their current size then there is proably no sense in having them.
It will take a fundimental change in the way Windows handles icons in order to get them to display properly on such a dense resolution monitor.
Since Windows likes to keep the icons in the actual executables or
Display Postscript and it's successor, the new Quartz "display Acrobat", that can modify bitmaps with vectors is the proper way to go to achieve *true* device independance for a GUI.
What was NextStep about? Didn't the neXT-Station write to the b/w Monitor (actually four levels of grayscale) through PostScript? So Prsentations on screen where really WYSIWYG as the same language was used to write to screen as to the printer. And we know of laserprinters having 300, 600 or 1200 dpi!
The tecnology exixts! Don't reinvent the wheel.
ms
What was NextStep about? Didn't the neXT-Station write to the b/w Monitor (actually four levels of grayscale) through PostScript? So Presentations on screen where really WYSIWYG as the same language was used to write to the screen as to the printer. And we know of laserprinters having 300, 600 or 1200 dpi! (the more dpi, the better the resolution, without raster-graphics becoming infinitly small)
The tecnology exixts! Don't reinvent the wheel.
ms
In 1987 Sun Microsystems shipped a Networked Extensible Windowing System (NeWS) that was based on an object-oriented superset of PostScript.
Although that project is dead (sadly), part of it lived on in Java. One problem was that the Unix programming community did not embrace PostScript hcking. It's hard to debug, too. NeWS was also slow, although on a SPARCstation 20 (like a slow Pentium) it wasn't much slower than X for most things and faster for some others (e.g. it had better font support!).
There were some attempts to make publicly available versions of NeWS but I have not seen anything about these for several years. SinceI no longer keep the OpenWindows FAQ, maybe no-one told me, though :-)
The Berlin Consortium's project is the closest thing I'm aware of today, and at least some of the Berlin designers aer/were aware of NeWS.
The DPS/X extension is a shadow of NeWS, a toy by comparison. NeWX's Display PostScript is closer, better in some ways, although the NeWS language extensions seemed to me better done.
Live barefoot!
free engravings/woodcuts
And icons?
I haven't tried it on 2000, but on '95 osr1, it only resized the letters in a few of the possible places (no, i'm not talking about apps).
Microsoft (at least the research dept.) is aware of upcoming high-resolution devices. The latest issue of MSDN News has an article called "Five Centuries of UI Design" that talks about a new font smoothing technique specially designed for laptops called "ClearType". Instead of treating the three dots of red, blue and green as a single greyscale pixel, this new tech uses them each individually to increase the visual resolution for text by three times - smooth edges, but still sharp text.
In the article they mention that ClearType in combination with the upcoming 200dpi polysilicon devices will produce images "easier to read than most of the print we read today".
Anyway, some random notes:
- Betcha Microsoft will make it illegal to reverse engineer ClearType.
- Do the math on a 4000x3000 pixel screen - lets assume it's actually 4096 by 3072. That's 12,582,912 pixels. At 32 bpp, that's 48 MB of memory required for a single framebuffer. Double that for double-buffering, add a load of memory for textures, pixmaps, etc, and we will see graphics cards with 128 MB and up.
Yow!
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
"HTML needs a rant tag" - Alan Cox
I used to watch TV on an old Apple RGB monitor from the 80's, and it had significantly better image quality than any standard TV.
Also, the reason that Sony Trinitron televisions look better than other TVs is because their phosphors are more accurately and regularly lined up, not just splatted all over in huge fuzzy blobs like most TVs.
The main reason that TV looks more "realistic" is that the image is constantly changing whereas computer monitors for the most part display still images.
I didn't catch a price in the article. They make references to it being unreasonably high but no numbers. The standard progression in computers, and electronics in general, are that things debut at high prices to hit people that *have* to have something new and don't mind paying big bucks (think HDTV). From there, as newer technology hits the market, the people who have to have the newest thing are looking elsewhere and you have to lower prices to hit a more mainstream market.
In computers, your yields are going to rise as you learn to make your product more efficiently and with higher quality. Since you're throwing out fewer units, you don't have to pass as much of that cost on to the consumer. From what I understand, yields on LCD screens are terrible and don't get much better over time. Now triple the number of things that can go wrong and see what the yield looks like. It's a cool product and I'm sure we're all salivating, but I doubt that it will be a mainstream consumer item for *years*. By that time, we may not even be using LCD displays.
-B @ 800X600
--
"To do what ought to be done, but would not have been done unless I did it, I thought to be my duty"
Per Square inch?
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
Berlin is far more than just vector based; it's scalability considerations are currently on the "how to make the same app present a sensible UI in any server environment"; ie not just WIMP but audio-only, CAVE environments, etc..
Berlin is a very, very interesting project. You can take a peek at their website.
All modern LCDs are Active Matrix. The original color laptops were Passive Matrix, which was washed-out, and anything that moved was seriously blurry.
I disagree. If you sit as close to your TV as you do to your monitor you will definitely notice the pixelation. However this lower resolution comes with the benefit that for your dollar you can get a much larger TV.
I'm wondering why both my home and work computers are viewing the NYT links without registration...
Translation/metamorphosis processors are, I have heard, slower at equivalent clock speeds, yes...
:)
...but I guess the trick is that you can clock them much higher, because there are far fewer gates in the chip, thus less heat generated by it.
At the moment Transmeta are playing on the low-power sideeffect of this, but it will be interesting to see a high-performance version of a Crusoe...
Plus, I love the idea of running a debugger VM at processor level... and think what a Transmeta VMware-type app could do.
--
I'm sure there are other problems, but those two right there are enough for us to work on for years!
Opinions change daily as new information arrives. Stay tuned.
Flat panel has 4 times the pixels
By Reuters
Special to CNET News.com
September 10, 1998, 9:10 p.m. PT
I'm beginning to wonder about how timely the NY Times really is considering they dated they story as February 10, 2000
-- "In a time of drastic change it is the learners who survive; the 'learned' find themselves fully equipped to live in
Display Properties -> Appearance -> Icon Size (set it to 72)... not bad, huh?
Simon
Coming soon - pyrogyra
These are active matrix screens, most of the really horrible ghosting is on passive matrix LCD's. Plus it sounds like they are working on the latency issues -
"The liquid crystal in Toshiba's new screens is a material called polysilicon glass, which reacts 100 times as fast to electricity as amorphous silicon glass. That allowed Toshiba to shrink the transistors and wiring surrounding the pixels and speed up the overall screen operation by moving some of the integrated circuits that now ring the edge of L.C.D. screens directly onto the glass surface itself. "
Still maybe not as fast as slewing an electron beam with magnetic fields (CRT), but getting closer...
#include "disclaim.h"
"All the best people in life seem to like LINUX." - Steve Wozniak
#include "disclaim.h"
"All the best people in life seem to like LINUX." - Steve Wozniak
AFAIK the new MacOs X uses PDF for just this reason. Totally scalable images and stuff.
ultras arent that fast and alphas run hot. transmetas cpus are slower than pentiums at equivalent clock speeds. reality bites.
In Display properties, there's a combo box that normally says "Small Fonts (96 dpi)". Change it to "Large Fonts (120 dpi)", or Custom. The Custom option was introduced in Windows 95, but the others have been arount since 3.0.
Select custom, and go ahead and crank it up to 200 dpi. Your truetype will look fine and be exactly the right size.
Desktop icons, on the other hand...
Hands in my pocket
he dosn't mean 'driver' like device driver...
he means that running windows on a 4000x3000 display is really a pain, everything gets tiny. remember the actual screen size stays around 16" diagonal, you just double or triple the pixel density. since all(almost) icons are represented with bitmaps they don't scale up. sure, *we* can fix that with themes. aparantly the new mac os uses vectors for all that stuff, it wouldn't break a sweat. but windows users are the largest market. it's hard to justify the cost for 30 million(? mac + X)users when they could sell 300 million in all of the windows instalations...
200 PPI is all nice and stuff but this is still
years away. What we could use right now is better
yield of ordinary resolution LCD screens so that
they may get more affordable.
Not that I'm complaining.. last week I managed to score a
18" Fujitsu screen for half the normal price (it's
from a German store that went bust..).
With 1280x1024 pixels it's 'only' 90 PPI but this is in fact
already very sharp. The colors are incredibly
beautiful too, much more saturated then a CRT,
and photo's have the same brilliancy of a slide on
a lighttable. I can look all day at this monitor
without getting irritated eyes - with my previous
CRT at 100 Hz refresh I always ended up with
itching eyes. Finally, I don't seem to be getting
any screen acne anymore..
The executive summary being: LCD is way cool
and healthy too.
A few days ago I head this dream, it was about a map with A4 sized flexible plastic screens. You could browse throught all these screens like browsing a book, you could move windows with your finger, type on a virtual keyboard in the air and more like this. It was all very lucid. I did not have wet underpants when I woke up though.
Why would I want to go back to a 17 inch monitor? Like most programmers, most of my work is with text. I can fit 9 (legible) standard 80x24 xterms on my crt without overlapping. How will this new tecch improve my workstation? I'd much rather see larger displays than finer displays.
Ryan Salsbury
>For picture quality, however, many computer
>screens are put to shame by the
>cheapest discount store portable TV.
Is this guy crazy? Sure, my cheapie monitor can do 1024x768, that's obviously "put to shame" by some TV that can only do 400 lines, NTSC...
*shakes his head*
I'm wondering why both my home and work computers are viewing the NYT links without registration...
I usually can do that also, I just assume my browser has a cookie for whatever registration I last used.
George
First Person shooters have alot of movement in them. Its just more than one window/mouse pointer moving.
LCD screens have too much "ghosting" when things move around. So when you move a mouse you get very, very faint mouse trails behind the pointer. To me its makes the object moving blurred. For a FPS, this becomes more noticable since the whole screen is moving/changing.
Maybe these new generation monitors will fix this problem. I just wish they could make one that costs the same as a CRT mointor.
The surprise isn't how often we make bad choices; the surprise is how seldom they defeat us.
Perhaps the writer wasn't talking about static images, but moving video. IE, play that pirated Phantom Menace CD on your computer and it looks like crap compared to an infomercial on a cheap TV.
Of course we know this isn't a matter of the screen hardware - but I'll bet the writer doesn't.
Even the cheapest TV gets 30 frames per second, 1025x512 (is that right?) all the time. Your computer gets whatever the hardware / bandwidth / codec can supply at the moment.
Thank you, the clues are appreciated.
A 24-bit-per-pixel display card has a much wider color gamut than you're going to cram into an NTSC signal.
I guess I'm missing something here. A 24-bit graphics card can produce 2^24 different colors. An analog signal can express an infinite number of colors. What particular number can you represent in 24 bits that I can't represent in analog? IE, given the same tube, what color is your graphics card going to produce that my analog signal can't?
Yea, they are working on their Win64 stuff for IA-64 by doing the development on Alpha!
Too bad none of us will ever see it.
What's my Karma Mr. Burns? "Excellent"
The best resolution you can get is from a Vectrex. :) Think of the Star Wars arcade game.
There's a Xerox spin-off called "DPix", which has been selling prototypes of 200 DPI color and 300 DPI monochrome LCD's for at least two years.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
>TV has the advantage (!) of being analog - which gives you an infinite number of colors. Digital has a finite number of colors.
A 24-bit-per-pixel display card has a much wider color gamut than you're going to cram into an NTSC signal.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Having the source to NT isn't surprising at all. They're a microsoft partner. Companies do it all the time. However, I agree completely on the other points. Linux GUI developers (read: anyone working on GNOME, KDE, GTK, etc.) should be looking at a scalable vector-based graphics API now, because it will take a long time to roll over legacy apps. The longer the infrastructure is in place, the less painful this transition will be.
That's the same process used to etch wafers for ICs. How much did you pay for that AMD?
Solution: it is NOT about graphics drivers, never was, never will be. It is the display manager's job.
We only need to change the window manager to make 90% of the things look right. (the rest is really graphics libs and app developer's job) All we need is to write window managers that displays icons and text at a larger scale.
I suggest IBM to send Alfredo two of these monitors!! Don't sent them to Hemos, dummy, Hemos is just a gadget freak, Hemos doesn't code window managers!!! WindowMaker is by FAR the most popular window manager on UNIX. (Don't you think Alfredo deserves it anyway?)
And Apple's there first again (at least on commonly used Desktop OSs): MacOS X is probably the best OS to take advantage of such resolutions as Display PDF is not bound to pixel resolutions. It just scales up to anything (it's Postscript, so it uses vectors anyway and therefore is device independend)
Bernd
P.S.: I know that there were others, like NeXT and News...
The article claims that a cheap TV is better than a computer monitor in it's opening paragraph, that claim is absolute rubbish. The very opposite is true, even the highest quality TV is nowhere near the resolution of even a modest monitor. TV's are designed to resolve 480 lines or less and the ntsc signal is interlaced. Even the latest HDTV's are designed for 1020 lines interlaced, and it's not clear that many of them are actually up to the job of fully resolving those images.
One problem for a 200 dpi monitor will be all the legacy jpegs on the web that will display at about 1/8 the size intended. By increasing to 216 dpi every old pixel can be displayed as a 3 X 3 pixel block at the same screen size as the original while vector graphics and text would still benefit from the extra pixels. The display engine could interpolate the pixels to improve image quality while conserving bandwidth. Peter Gillespie i like to know.
Indeed, you are perfectly correct. I have plugged in a 21 inch SGI monitor to my linux box and Jesus! thinks look small. Since my eyes are fine, I got used to it and I now enjoy it. But each time I go to see the lab workers (next door to my office) who can only "enjoy" a crappy 800x600 cheap monitor, I tend be shocked.
I'll do it for cheesy poofs.
They probably meant 'no definite timetable for introducing a solution _to_ Windows.'
:)
Fran
:):):)
1st 1st Poster of the new Millennium!
I am curious why people have to think that compatablity with older hardware is such a problem. I think that the less you have to spend the better off you are in general. Plus with more compatability comes lesser price and better transition.
Slashdot social engineering at it's finest
I propose
Ok with you there.
Multiple Alpha processors,(screw that SMP stuff. Three-way!) a G400 and two of these babies? Complete with MD, DVD-R and a *nix kernel with all of the 'legacy' support ripped sound good? We'll hand roll it all in assembler for
performance!
Uh huh. Ok now let's look at all that dye stained money that you seem to have. That's nice and Ski masks wow that must have been some bank robbery.
Seriously how does the processor actually influence that quality of the display except for generating the screen's content. You could just as easily hook one of those up to a 386 or 486 running dos or windows 3.1 or with Xfree 86 and still get a good looking display.
Slashdot social engineering at it's finest
Not necessarily. New technologies often (but not always -- maybe not even "usually") come with lower energy requirements. Also, each pixel will not require the same amount of power since each will be considerably smaller. My guess is that in the worst case, it will only require twice as much power. Best case? maybe half? (Not that I have any information to base that on.) With refinement, I wouldn't be surprised to see this technology lower power consumption.
Don't you think it's time to start communicating?
In the article, the project manager states that the technology will bring the resolution to the desktop. Screw that! You think people are going to leave this kind of resolution on their desktop? Heck no! This is going to cause a major shift in the handheld market. It's going to change the way we look at notebooks. It's going to change the way we look at PAPER! If this technology ever hits the streets, look for it to be used in ways you never imagined. (Sorry for the skeptasism, but so many promising technologies never make it out of the lab.) Sony's personal HUD system? full graphics pager on your watch?
If IBM and Toshiba will make the necessary information available, and make the licensing fees reasonable, they'll have a market for this product.
Don't you think it's time to start communicating?
Yes, most icons are fixed at 32x32 and are raster. This is not a problem. There is a format in Windows supposed low-level and all called a Windows Meta File and its a vector-based format that can scale perfectly. We've got to move on eventually. At some point people decided 8x8 was too small for icons and moved to 16x16 then went to 32x32 and now we have 64x64 (Large Icons option in Windows which is what everyone thinks I'm talking about). All of the display except raster images is ready for this kind of display. Everything else in Windows is measured in millimeters, twips, whatever, instead of pixels.
You know, someone ought to go back and do research on high-performance vector monitors...
Esperandi
Why would it be a CRT? I said ADVANCED vector display!
Esperandi
Raster didn't stay CRT, don't know why vector would....
Finally, some actual companies are getting into the mix on monitor development! If they stay in it, we might actually see sane monitor prices! If anyone out there works at a company that makes monitors, please cut your gentials out because I don't want the gene pool to be infected with your lazy, mediocre kind.
Seriously, monitor developers haven't done jack shit for decades until someone shits out megabucks LCD screens. Now the monitor industry is no doubt sitting back and settling in for another 20 year price freeze where nothing new comes out and no prices move.
Its a good thing that IBM and Toshiba are greedy, otherwise we'd be stuck with the situation, but thanks to them, we'll get price cuts and cooler screens!
Esperandi
Greed IS Good.
Microsoft Windows is already resolution-independent. Ask anyone who has had to deal with twips or the other few resolution-independent Microsoftian units... also, most fonts are truetype remember, vector-based, so they're already resolution independent.
Esperandi
/.s gotta love it when they find out they need to catch up to something Windows did years ago.
Sizes of things like button bars in Windows are set up as "dialog units" which are resolution-independent, so its not a problem... if a program is hard-coded down to the pixel level it would be a problem definitely, but I think theres a lot of flexibility in Windows. All the units are twips, points (1/72s of an inch), and etc. Even when you want to hard-code the pixel value, you have to convert the pixel value to screen coordinates first... you can have different ways of mapping the coordinates to the screen, all kinds of stuff. Windows looks real cakey and smiley and happy on the surface, but you start programming with the API directly and you see its true face... and but gawd its ugly.
Esperandi
CAD and medical imaging seem like similarly constrained markets, so I wonder if this'll take off or not.
Because regardless of the drivers, Windows (and most *nix's if I'm not mistaken) draw the widgets, icons and fonts at a certain pixel size. I know in Windows you can turn on large icons and increase the screen font size which would help. I've never done it, but I'm sure the same can be done in Linux. The place where real problems would arise would be things like button bars in programs that are hard coded to be a certain size. Also pictures would appear tiny in web browsers, etc.
-
"If a problem has a single neck, it has a simple solution."
This is only slightly offtopic, so I'll ask anyway...
Q: How to they get different intensities of colour in monitors?
My understanding of LCD is that they are either on or off. Crystals are aligned with a magnetic field, and the alignment causes them to be visible (or not) through a polarizing filter.
Is my understanding wrong? I'd appreciate someone who knows more about the technology elightening me.
However, I have experienced the very problem described in the article: I run 1600x1200 on my system at home, and certain foolish operating systems *cough*windows*cough* make teeny little icons. However, certain other systems *cough*xwindows*cough* allow me to tell the system the dots per inch, and most things work out well.
Hey.. maybe i missed something in XF86Setup.. Where do I specify DPI? I'm running 16x12 (@85Hz) on a 19".
Thanks
Using your sig line to advertise for friends is lame.
Why is this a "2"? It's nothing but a lame ass remark.
"Lend your ear while I call you a fool" Ian Anderson
Because I like my sound card and the 3D capabilities of my video card and would not enjoy having to wait for competition in this new market for this new hardware. Kind of like waiting for hardware companies to wake up and smell the coffee with respect to Linux.
I don't disagree with you, really, but a whole new system like you want will only be successful if it's got some capability to run old stuff. Hell, I still run old DOS games.
----------
Stupid sexy Flanders.
As I understand it, the problem with making LCD screens is that they can't be "Fixed". If a single pixel goes out the screen is "broken" and hard (or impossible) to sell. That's why you get really cheap small screens now, but the stand-alone 15" screens are still in the $800 range.
What I'm wondering is, when are they going to take a bunch of little (brick-sized maybe) extremely cheap panel screens and place them together? If you could produce those little ones for, say, less than $3/ea, then nothing is stopping you from wallpapering with them!
How long until whiteboards with LCD screens replace current whiteboards. A drawing program could easily replace chalk.
Why have static pictures on your wall when a live view from a mountain screen is just $50.00?
This stuff all has to be right around the corner, I'd like to know why I haven't heard of it? Am I wrong in guessing that producing very small screens could be extremely cheap? Are there technical issues about putting them side-by side (not quite seamless I would guess, but I'd take a seam or two!)
They could have a setting where the monitor emulates a certain resolution. So, pixel based measurements in web pages would display *as if* they were on a 640x480 screen or whatever (you pick the resolution)
The "display driver resolution" problem can easily be worked around with a bit of hardware enhancement. Compaq's TFT monitors have native pixel resolutions of up to 1280x1024, depending on the model. They also have internal circuitry which can accept signals at a variety of standard resolutions and map them to the native pixel resolution of the monitor.
Although this solution does not exploit the full capabilities of 200ppi screens, it does allow them to be useful until the new drivers and 32Mb video cards arrive.
Yes! Do away with the bitmap oriented os!
:-/
Give us a 2D-vector-GUI!
That way there would be no large chunks of bitmap graphics in the os and you could choose the scale at which to view things by yourself.
Would take one hell of a gfx-card to be able to draw all those vectors fast enough at 200+ dpi, though...
/.Mattsson - My native language is not English, so please don't whine over linguistic errors. (That's lame anyway...)
There are three bigger standards for digital connection of lcd-displays.
P&D, DFP and DVI.
P&D and DFP can only handle up to 1280x1024 resolutions while DVI can handle up to 1920x1080 (which, to my eyes, seem like a mighty strange resolution...)
All three are restricted to either 12 or 24 bit colour-depth.
(These specifications are for revision 1.0 of all three, so they might have changed since I read them...)
As for the refresh-rates, they are emulated as 60Hz/31KHz, if I'm not remembering it wrong.
All pixels on a TFT-screen a lit all the time, so the refresh-rate doesn't need to be high.
Of course, since you only update the screen 60 times a second, a higher framerate than that in a game would be useless... =)
But that goes for analog monitors too. A 200fps in , say, quake is useless if you only change the picture on your monitor 100 times per second...
And since todays TFT's are actually quite slow on changeing pixel-state, a higer refreshrate would only result in a blurry picture...
TFT's aren't yet a very good alternative for applications where you move stuff very fast on the screen... Like games and movies...
IMHO, of course...
/.Mattsson - My native language is not English, so please don't whine over linguistic errors. (That's lame anyway...)
As screen resolution and area grows greater, we see more organic GUIs develop; many GTK/QT themes, MacOS X, the Winamp/xmms skins and so on.
ever try running your monitor at 1920x1440? it's beautiful for photoshop work, but text disappears and icons are nearly impossible to hit. but what IBM is talking about is more than twice that detailed. Imagine cranking your monitor up to 3200x2400...
I'd learn to code if it would convince IBM to throw a few of the things my way. Actually, what I'm really interested in (an' I dunno if this has been posted before (prolly) but I'll submit it anyway) is an article I saw in Popular Science I think it was on a company that has apparently perfected true 3D displays that projects the image just two inches above or in front of the screen (depending on the image type desired and placemnt of the monitor). The company mostly does medical equipment, and is based out of New York. They were projecting that the screens would be on user's desktop (not just in the medical field) and at a fairly affordable rate within two years.
"Inveniemus Viam Aut Faciemus" 'We will find a way... Or we will make one!' --Hannibal of Carthage
How come it wasn't Letter Size or Legal Size?
In any case, I can't believe the NYT article thought that "many computer screens are put to shame by the cheapest discount store portable TV". What kind of monitor are they using? This may have been true back in the Apple ][ days.
Most important, though, If they can get this to a size suitable for a webpad or an eBook of some sort, with a certain low-power consuming CPU, then you have your ideal portable electronic reading (as in words, and not viewing, as in pictures, although it'd be good for that too)device. From the article, though, it seems that size is not the issue, rather it's the cost. But hopefully, that will come down soon enough.
I think that like the Crusoe chip, its immediate application would best be in small mobile devices. This way, they could keep the cost down. Much like the way the original LCD screens were first used as displays for smaller portable computers way back, it will be the same path for the hi-res LCD screen.
Now, if they could just make the LCD made out of some flexible fiber/polymer material (I know they are already working on it), we would have web pads that can be rolled up...that'd be awesome.
Computer games is about learning and entertainment. Well, more specifically, it's about learning, training, and role-playing, which can all be loosely categorized under learning.
Computer games are the interactive lesson books, made fun by positive reinforcement of winning (the endorphin rush after fragging someone, the adrenaline pumping as you turn the corner and faces someone with a much bigger gun than you). There are, of course, philosophical and moral lessons that we are constantly bombarded with in computer games.
Computer games is an art, and art, imitates life.
And computer games, after all, are a higher level of interface between us and the rest of the world than the input/output devices. (A little extrapolation: since computer games ARE computer art, and since the Internet has become, for many of us, the main channel of communication, and since Internet computer games only seem to grow in numbers, it would seem that in the future, we would all communicate with each other, collaborate with each other by being plugged in and playing computer games all the time. So in that sense, you are right, computer art will ascend to great heights).
I'd really like to see that discount store....
The illegal we do immediately. The unconstitutional takes a little longer.
--Henry Kissinger
I'm glad I'm not the only one who picked up on this. In an otherwise good article, they blew it with the argument that monitors are _lower_ quality than TVs. Ah, silliness.
If there's any doubt about which is better, get a good 21" TV, a good 21" monitor, a DVD player (yes, you can use DeCCS under Linux if you want), and THEN tell me which looks better.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
Unfortunately, changing the GUI would not be sufficient. You would also need to reengineer all the websites (and other documents) that depend upon bitmapped graphics. This appears to pose some problems.
The vast majority of GUI features are simple enough that they may be able to be rendered in real time. But a number webpages (and other documents) use complex images that were rendered with photoshop or other high-powered graphics tools. For these to become resolution independent, wouldn't client apps be required to rerender them theirselves? Do we really want people to be rendering complex images every time they download/view these documents?
I was intrigued to note that these high resolutions screens are causing problems because of the way that much of the screen tools are designed in terms of pixel size. This failure to deal with having a GUI which is resolution independent, or at least resolution-abstracted presents many problems for GUI design. I wonder just how much of a legacy this will prove to be as display devices improve further down the line.
It strikes me that there are several ways to get around this from a GUI point of view. One work around is to move from a pixel-based paradigm to a vector-based paradigm. With the introduction of the Quartz technology in Mac OS X, Apple has made a first step towards this, but it doesn't extend to the toolbars or window decorations. I seem to remember from my distant past a SGI windowing system which was fully vectorized, but whether it was a toy or a real environment I do not recall.
On the other hand I think it is extremely unlikely that we are likely to see a wholesale switch from pixel based windowing GUIs to vector ones for the foreseeable future. If this is what we are working with, pixel size is not going to work as a base measurement and we need to abstract the size of windows and toolbars from the resolution at some level. One operating system I have used which went some way towards this is Acorn's Risc OS, which had a scaling function allowing you to rescale graphics at powers of two for the entire windowing system, including pointers and icons, while doing 'the-right-thing' with regard to text (properly anti-aliased alpha blended hinted Type 1 style fonts). Apple's Mac OS X allows scaling of its icons between tiny and 128x128, but this doesn't solve the problem of ending up with the other window real estate becoming unuseably tiny. Some scaling factor to represent the scaling between pixel and window-size is essential to preserving the window tool bars from shrinking into insignificance.
To sum up, these new high resolution screens hold up a challenge to GUI designers to give us some reasonable level of resolution-independence in the way the windows are displayed. Once screen resolutions start pushing up beyond 2560x2048 on 17" monitors, current windowing systems will become unuseable to those with less-than-perfect eyesight. Coming up with a method for changing the scaling between pixel and screen size for the desktop will give the advantages of superb image quality while maintain useablity for users and will open the doors for disabled users to tweak the size of the desktop tools to their needs.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Anything I post is strictly my own thoughts and doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the opinions of IBM.
Could be old news to most, but EInk is developing a high resolution display that promises to be closer to the look of paper, use less power, and be cheaper to manufacture than LCDs. It seems a bit pie-in-the-sky compared to evolutionary improvements to LCD technology, but I hope they can get it to work. It would be interesting to see the two (actually three) technologies side by side some day. I want both: LCD for movies and games, EInk for reading, writing, browsing, etc. Then again I can't imagine what it would look like to watch a movie on a display that looks like printed paper. It might look really cool.
I'm interested in 200-300 ppi screens for portable photo display and perhaps motion video at the HDTV resolution of 1920x1080 (note this resolution is now an option under Windows). At this resolution, 200 ppi gives a screen diagonal of 11" (28cm) diagonal which is fairly portable. This form factor allows for a CD-ROM drive to be stackable or integrated which is a plus, though I might prefer a form factor closer to that of a common (HDTV ratio) print in the US (4"x7.1") when 270 ppi becomes cheap enough. I wonder what is the common print size in Europe - A6?.
.5mm pencil!
It would be great to have a very sensitive touch screen integrated with this technology if it didn't hurt the image quality significantly. This could be like writing on paper with
I'm not concerned about fonts or icon problems at all, it can't be that difficult for the various Linux desktop projects to create some new icons twice as big, and in fact a lot of icons are way too big now and would look great at 200 ppi. Then create some 200 dpi fonts for the X server. As far as Windows goes, Microsoft will fix the problem when enough consumers are asking for a fix - again it can't be that hard for them either to just offer a new Display Properties option: Windows Standard (extra extra large). Non-Microsoft apps will quickly follow suit.
Compact hardware is almost getting to the point that I'd actually be interested in a palmtop. Take this display, integrate a low power CPU, a small 5-10 Gig drive, GPS, camera, mic, speaker, lots of ports, wireless keyboard, a touch screen, a few dedicated buttons (so the pen interface is not needed for simple things) and voila - a big market. If anyone knows of an open hardware project with similar goals, I'd love to find out about it. - dara
His point (hopefully) must be: your 1024 15" monitor presents about 85ppi, while his 4" TV screen presents about 200.
...is what you'd prolly need to RUN the bloody thing....
The streets shall flow with the blood of the Guberminky.
Sounds like a project to me! Any takers?
When I write, I always keep my gun handy. You never know when God will try to interfere.
For the sake of Peace, the Sword.
I don't actually know much about PDF (but I do know enough about PS to write simple programs), but I was under the impression that PDF is a subset of PostScript. From what I've heard, PDF is basically the part of PS that actually draws stuff--none of the programmability of PS.
This doesn't strike me as an either/or proposition. Sure, go ahead and write the whole OS so that scaleable vector functions are available. Give us bitmap functions also for those of us who still want and need them. Remember how MS had to scramble to release the WinG patch so that Win3.x programmers could access bitmaps directly? Let's not go through that again.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
In fact, they took away the power to manipulate bitmaps in Win3.x. They had to release a patch, called WinG. So by all means re-write BSD, Linux, etc... to have vector functions, but don't take away the bitmap access. Some of us need it.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Make them for an entirely new system, designed from the ground up with the newest technologies. I think that it is about time that entirely new systems not based on the old x86 systems succeeded in the mainstream. I realize that it would be quite a feat, but just think about the raw power you could get from new chips and equipment that didn't have to be compatible with old chips/code/peripherals.
Just a thought.
Eh...
Over the last few years, 2D performance has hit a plateau where it's very hard for a graphics card manufacturer to justify increasing the perfomance any further. (how much faster than 1 refresh cycle to redraw the entire screen do we need?) If newer, much higher resoution display devices become more prevalant, there is going to be suddenly a need for rather high performance 2D cards, if only because of the sheer ammount of data that would now be required to be moved, in for example a bitblt operation. I don't know about others, but I typically run 24bpp at 1600x1200 now on a 24" monitor, and sometimes I can see the screen updated. (only sometimes...)
}#q NO CARRIER
A well-crafted lie appears unquestionable - Dama Mahaleo
First of all with my limited experience doing low level graphics I seem to remember only being able to write to the screen during the horizontal or vertical refresh of the monitor.
Most people don't poke video data into memory buffers anymore either. You will write with calls to an OS's screen display routines.
The screen flashing from not waiting for the refresh interval was really only a problem on CGA adaptors in IBM PCs. I don't believe EGAs had the problem and certainly VGAs din't have the problem. So, we're taking about display hardware that went out of style more than 10 years ago.
Anomalous: inconsistent with or deviating from what is usual, normal, or expected
Anomalous: deviating from what is usual, normal, or expected
Canard: a false or unfounded repor
It's not a standard, but the new 22" Apple LCD monitors (not all that new) work with a special digital video card, providing a digital signal to the monitor (this is what I remember, I can't find any mention of it on the site). You can only get the monitor with a G4 desktop and card. Quite likely the accompanying MacOS has special drivers for it.
The difference between Type I and TT lays in the quality of the designer. Actually the TT has the hinting built in while the Type I has "some". So no solution is better than the other. BOTH are open standards? That would be the solution. But the important fact here is that if you define all the vector graphics in logical units you could do so for raster images. The scaling may not be the most beautyful, but is a solution. Or in places with dynamic layout you could define a range of DPI where the picture is shown at 1:1, then at 2:1 then at 3:1, etc. A third solution would be to use fractal compression of images. It saves space and is resolution independent (Problem: there's no free fractal compression standard). Though the images lose sharpness. OK, my 2 cents. Baldusi
Photolith isn't expensive-- perfect wafers of silicon are. With this hi-res of a screen, they're not going to care about a few dozen flawed pixels, so it shouldn't be much more expensive than working with moly or tungsten.
1984 was supposed to be a warning, not an instruction manual.
The vector icon idea is probably the way to go. This is how the icons are in IRIX, as most SGI workstations run at a pretty high resolution. I used an indy years ago that was 1280x1024 on a 17" monitor (that's high resolution to me.) Each of the windows had a nifty little "wheel" that you could use to grow and shrink the icons. Pretty novel.
Ian "zsazsa" Scott
I think there selling OpenHDTV
thank you
There are three types of people in the world; those who can count, and those who can't. http://opop.nols.com/index
OK - so these screens are going to be very expensive at first, but I would imagine they'd come down in price as current flat screens have come down in price.
Of course, for anyone in design, CAD, or publishing, or people who do a lot of word processing, screens like this would be ideal - the higher the resolution of the text, the easier it is on the eye.
And Quake at that resolution would be pretty nifty too!
"Information wants to be paid"
True Type tends to have better hinting for low resolution devices like a CRT screen, while Type1 gives better output on high resolution devices such as printers. With these high resolution LCD screens, Type1 may be a better choice.
Also, remember that while scrollbars, entry boxes and the like can already be any size you want them, on a high-res display, the 3D effects will get lost as they'll be too small to see, for example. Converting these to vectors will help. But bear in mind that not everything is suitable for conversion to vectors. Many enlightenment and gtk themes, for example, would be all but impossible to make into vectors.
I suspect what we'll end up with is a halfway house where theme designers will have to make multiple versions for various resolutions, much like we have 75 and 100dpi bitmaps fonts now.
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
I remember they did something similar with an earlier version of OS/2. It really pissed me off. I reconfigured a OS/2 box such that instead of the default 640x480 it was working in 1024x764, only to find that IBM in its infinite wisdom was now showing all the text at the same size as before, only with higher resolution.
Very clever, they no doubt thought, the 9 point text is still 9 point text - only smoother. Of course, what I actually wanted was more bloody text on the screen - and bugger the point size.
I'm pretty sure they played the same game with the icons too. Damn their eyes.
When I get my hands on one of these 200dpi LCDs I do not want one of IBM's inflating pixel drivers with it.
Regards, Ralph.
Two questions
First of all with my limited experience doing low level graphics I seem to remember only being able to write to the screen during the horizontal or vertical refresh of the monitor. Do these new LCDs emulate this to allow legacy software and etc...
Second is their a new all digital standard for connecting these to video cards. With no analog components this would seem to get better quality and allow me to have a longer monitor cord.
Marriage is the "pseudo-ethics" that cloaks the messy truth of sexuality in the raiment of propriety -- it's "Don't Ask,
The display hardware is bitmapped anyway (I think it's harder to make a CRT that can steer the beam arbitrarily, as the old vector scopes did, than to make a raster CRT) - and intrinsically so if it's an LCD. There's going to be bitmapped graphics code somewhere at the bottom.
However, you can implement a resolution-independent layer above that, e.g. Display Postscript/NeWS or Display PDF.
If you are having problems with 10pt fonts looking small then your system is broken. A point, by definition, is 1/72 inch high. This is regardless of resolution, so the system should be scaling the font's pixel representation based on the actual screen resolution.
X, at least, gets this right. I am running my 21" screen at 2000x1500 and all the fonts are fine. Everything in Netscape, application menus, and the window manager are perfectly readable and about the physical size I would expect from the point sizes I have chosen.
-jwb
Maybe if you're only using gtk/qt based apps, someone could throw together a theme to size up their widgets. Anyone know if the theme support is flexible enough to allow an easy scaling up of all apps that use these toolkits?
Ah, an opportunity to plug the Berlin windowing system! How sweet!
In Berlin, rendering the vector-based description of the GUI to actual pixels is done at a very late stage, thus allowing almost anything (CRT, LCD, sport arena jumbotrons(!)) to act as visual device - just rewrite the rendering and output modules & off you go.
With the varying resolutions on screens (PDA->CRT->this new LCD), this is the natural next step in GUI development.
hese folks have upped the resolution to 3200x2400. That's nearly impossible to read even on a 24 inch SGI monitor
I can read xterm's "tiny" font with no problem on my SGI 1600 Flat Panel at 1600x1024 resolution. The same font is unreadable on a 21" CRT monitor at 1280x1024. Comparing resolutions between CRTs and plasmas is apples to oranges - the clarity of a plasma panel is akin to getting glasses after your eyesight has gradually deteriorated: you simply can't believe how much better you can see, and how much more seldom those headaches kick in.
You are correct in noting that the resolution increase is such that all but the largest point (pixel) fonts we're used to today would become unreadable, even on a flat panel. But you (or others, anyway) would be surprised at just how clear and readable tiny print is on a flat panel, as opposed to a continuously scanning (and distorting) CRT.
The solution is, as others have said, a level of abstraction between the physical world "length" and "area" screen measurements and the digital world "size" in pixels, preferably with user definable mappings between the two for "arbitrary" virtual resolution ranging from "unreadable" to "large enough for all but the completely blind."
Maybe IBM could ship off a display in the direction of the XFree86 group...
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
There comes a time in every man's life when he must say, "No mother! I do not want any more Jell-O!"
What was NextStep about?
NextStep = OS X
OS X is Apple's GUI on top of NextStep. Remember when Apple bought NEXT a few years back. They didn't reinvent the wheel. They own it.
There comes a time in every man's life when he must say, "No mother! I do not want any more Jell-O!"
Ok corporate, listen up..
OPEN THE HARDWARE SPECS, and sit back to watch the magic happen.
-- What you do today will cost you a day of your life.
Maybe I'm constrained by my understanding of technology...
If you had a flourescent gas encased between two plastic sheets, and activated it via a combination of RGB lasers and priming lasers, you could conceiveable get infinite resolution displays, assuming the motors and laser pulses could accomodate the speed, and that the data bus could feed the device high enough.
And there is no reason for the lasers not to fire paralle to the surface of display; just use two intersecting lasers to 'activate' the gas.
Just a random thought
-AS
-AS
*Pikachu*
Can you answer another question, hypothetically?
Can windows support WMF images instead of BMPs and ICOs in the dlls that generate all the desktop/widget icons?
-AS
-AS
*Pikachu*
I see what you're talking about, but it would require that Windows itself support .WMF images as an alternative format to the .BMP and and .ICO for desktop icons and widgets; I've never seen any mention that Windows has that kind of functionality, though I've never looked for it either. If there is support, at the OS level, for WMF icon files and data, then Windows would be, as you suggest, capable of going straight to vector-ish scalable displays.
Though it obviously doesn't help that every windows program today has bmps and icos embedded within DLLs, and aren't in any sort of realistically scaleable format.
-AS
-AS
*Pikachu*
It's not so much a legacy driver problem, so much as a lack of foresight on the OS people's side! NeXT has had a solution for this problem for over a decade, and it looks like MacOS X will also be able to overcome this hurdle very easily; Display Postscript and Quartz, the PDF version of the above. I guess you could call this legacy software...
I'd imagine an Apple handheld using a 3x4 inch 200dpi display(that's 800x600! wow) would be awesome. Or a 19" LCD for their pro series desktop, when they can scale to that size... 3000x2200 here! Or imagine nextgen gameboys with monocle displays; a 1x1" display would easily match today's gameboy resolution of 144x144 pixels. Or a PDA with a monocle display!
I wonder how Apple is going to try to capitalize on their ability to display 128x128 pixel icons and their Quartz Display PDF capabilities? Right off the bat the icons would be larger than 5/8, which is about right, if on the small size. I'm not sure it was explicitly mentioned, but Toshiba are only shipping 4" and 6" screens; were IBM's not limited to that size, by omission of detail?
Wow. Cool.
-AS
-AS
*Pikachu*
Yes it would be cool.
NeXT had display postscript over 10 years ago.
Apple now has display PDF in their upcoming MacOS X.
So your prayers are answered, and they have been done so by the man called Jobs. Fear.
Anyway, it may be that Apple can support this right off the bat, with their vector based display system, Quartz, and 128pix icons, etc. All of a sudden, it seems everything is going Apple's way. Hmmm.
-AS
-AS
*Pikachu*
Isn't the large Icon's setting in Plus! allow for support of 64x64 icons?
Of course, that's actually still too small, and it doesn't scale very intelligently, but it's a step in the direction. I'm betting Apple will be able to leverage this new display technology and wow everyone =)
-AS
-AS
*Pikachu*
Just a question - if the problem is icons sized in pixels, would systems that use something like Display PDF help, since (presumably) they would know about point sizes, and thus render big enough to see? If so, Apple might be interested...
By making icons and text vector graphics (or something along the same lines), you could make it entirely scaleable. That is, "rendered" real-time, although I'm sure that term isn't quite applicable.
Hmm.. better example: If you go into Adobe Photoshop and use the text tool to write "Hi Mom" and then resize the image (without flattening the layers) to be four times the pixel depth, which makes the image larger, you don't lose any image quality. It's not just zooming in, it's using the algorithms that define the curvature and lines of the letters (or vector graphics) to re-calculate the shape down to more specific pixels. It isn't "zooming in" in the traditional sense.
That's exactly why picture quality on a television is better than a computer screen. Because tv-screens are so crude, they 'blend' together pixels, creating a smoother picture. Ordinary television has a resolution of about 600x400, in computer terms, yet it looks more realistic.
This is because your brains do something similar: images are picked up in pixels (a limited number of light sensitive cells) and combined into an image. The individual pixels aren't important, but the overall image is. So your brain doesn't process the individual cells. It rather combines the signals from clusters of cells, with some cells physically located together, participating in different signals. Several of these signal channels (nerves) interact together.
So, the quality of screens depends on your definition of quality. Do you think it's better if it's more realistic, or better if you can put smaller elements on it, whether you can discern them or not? I think it's not a set criterium, but rather dictated by purpose and circumstances.
----------------------------------------------
the pun is mightier than the sword
Scaling the graphics shouldn't be that difficult. But them sites that use pixel-specified tables may be in trouble.
2,200x1100 pixels in antialiasing.
Smoooth like silk.
Not largely relevant to the rest of the article, but...
For picture quality, however, many computer screens are put to shame by the cheapest discount store portable TV.
Uuuuh.... what? Someone needs to lay off the crack rock. The average computer monitor is like
Anthony
"I think any time you expose vulnerabilities it's a good thing." -Attorney General Janet Reno
Seems like this is the ideal position for the OOS communtiy to jump in.
:-)
<i>At I.B.M., Dr. Wisnieff's laboratory rewrote the underlying code of Windows NT to inflate its display pixel counts. Lotus, a unit of I.B.M., also created a high-resolution-compatible version of its word processor.</i>
With the open availability of specs, OSS programers should be able to step in and provide a solution without something as drastic as a rewrite of NT. (The fact that an IBM lab has access to the NT source strikes me as odd for a whole other reason. Woder is they can fix the rest oif it while they are at it
It also should serve as a heads-up for all app developers, as something that will become an issue in the future. These monitors are going to be designed for the medium end desktop, and Linux has the ability to be ready for when these things arrive, without having to re-write everything.
--sugarman--
Given this, why should this cause a holdup?
They (IBM) also have an interesting bio up on Robert L. Wisnieff Manager, Advanced Display Technology Laboratory. Interesting if you can ignore the market spin at least :).
Noel
RootPrompt.org -- Nothing but Unix
kayaking
Probably why Apple has gone to display PDF in its next operating system then?
They have obviously seen this thing coming along - in a couple of years most laptops will have min 1600x1200 screens, probably 2048x1536 even, and do you want to hunt for those icons on that screen (shhh, don't even think of 200x100 character terminals).
This calls for a scalable desktop - one where things are specified in DPI and not pixels. Apple has done it. Windows hasn't, and won't until people start moaning (my taskbar is 1/8" high, I can't read the text...) but what about X?
~~
Windows tried, at least.. I remember discussion of using an alternate representative unit in Windows95.. They ended up using a modified, braindamaged 'TWIPS' system again..
Doing it wouldn't be hard. Just assume a 800x600 grid, regardless of screen size, and specify coords based on it. You wouldn't break legacy applications, because they'd see a 800x600 screen.
X is even easier! Toss a 'target sized theme' on BlackBox or Enlightenment. Or, better yet, write a userland application that dynamically resets the WM fonts, terminal fonts, and icons based on resolution. You'd have to restart the WM every resolution change to reread the altered settings, but that is a small price to pay for 4000x3000!!
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I had Windows in mind whan I said that.. I run my display at work at 1600x1200, and have you tried reading the titlebars, at standard '8' font size? Not kind the eyes more than a few feet away. Same with Word. Unless you're print previewing, the font size is never adjusted to screen resolution.. Courier 6 point, is acceptable as printed but illegible on screen!!
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The newer LCD/plasma displays are stunning! I've owned an IBM for a few years now with what was the best display offered on any 'light' laptop, and the displays on some of the new top of the line Dell and Compaq offerings are so crisp and so deep I said 'Wow' outloud at the display on the Inspiron 700.. I would take that display over my IBM, Sony and NEC 21's...
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Many, if not most of these are _digital_, while the old monitor in front of you is analog--there is a D/A conversion in the graphics card or in the monitor box. Plus there are a whole lot more pixels. A maxed out graphics card for one
of these babies might have 64 meg of VRAM. Egad. Without the D/A conversion, things like autoaliasing work differently too, so they will have some really low level impacts on the design of drivers. You probably won't be at all
happy if you just plug one of these babies into your box.
Well if they make one that fits into an ISA slot I will be a happy person.
Slashdot social engineering at it's finest
I'm sure there can be some compatability mode for older applications while everyone starts putting vector image resources into their win32 modules.
PostScript has a lot of features in that respect. And since this display would require a video card with an ungodly amount of RAM and it'd have to push an ungodly number of pixels, why not build a fast PostScript interpreter right into the Display? That could be cool...
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
That's not true. Your computer has no idea what the size of your monitor is. 1600x1200 looks entierely different on a 17" monitor compared with a 21" monitor. There is no way for it to raise the size of 10pt text and have it look good on both monitors.
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Funny, I think the resolution of broadcast quality NTSC video on a 30 inch television sucks ass compared to a finely tuned, 1600x1200 21" computer monitor. Modern monitors are far superior to consumer televisions for the simple reason that you sit a lot closer to them. That, and the fact that broadcast standards (ie NTSC, PAL, etc) are a bitch to make high quality.
I mean really, most displays will at least display standard VGA... That way if you don't have a proper driver, you can go to the lowest common denominator.
Of course if you are running something such as XFree or Windows, there will probably be a driver. After all, if you have drivers for those two, you've got better than 90% of everything supported.
This technology will significantly increase the potential feeling of reality derived from a virtual environment. The computer screen will seem like a window into another world, and computer art will be able to ascend to grand new heights. However, computer games addiction rates might also increase. As all computing technology improves, people will lose all capacity to handle the world outside of a computer. They will be reduced to formless, drooling blobs, their eyes never budging an inch from the images on their screens. Or did I just describe you?
"What is freedom of expression? Without the freedom to offend, it ceases to exist." Salman Rushdie
This is going to keep the costs way up there for at least several years. If they are targeting the 30M+ Win customers they are going to need to get the price to come way down. Pretty cool though, I've seen some of those displays they have in the newer A-10 jets, they are very sharp and surprizingly tough, the overall resoulution was sorta like looking at a magazine photo.
More race stuff in one place,
than any one place on the net.
Maybe it's that the fleet of developers are busy working on SP2??
More race stuff in one place,
than any one place on the net.
"The problem isn't in the display driver!"
Nope, it's the assumptions that programmers make about screen resoultion. The solution might lie in using 'third generation 2d engines' as discussed in a story on slashdot one or two weeks ago. Apple's MacOS X will use such an engine. Basically it's vectorbased graphics they are using. This means that the GUI is resolution independent and that anything you display on it will scale nicely from a ancient 14 inch monitor to a modern laser printer.
It wouldn't surprise me if these screens will be available for mac os X first.
Jilles
The issue at hand is not that "corporate" is not willing to open up the specs. The real problem is the fundamental way most OSes realize their GUI on the display. They were designed with the "traditional" monitors in mind. With new monitors from IBM/Toshiba that supports double the resolution in the same amount of space, everything - icons, menu bars, EVERYTHING looks half as small on the monitor. What we realy need is let go of everything bitmap, and implement the GUI in vector and True Type Fonts.
The problem isn't in the display driver! A good 16 LCD at 80ppi will pull 1280x1024. These folks have upped the resolution to 3200x2400. That's nearly impossible to read even on a 24 inch SGI monitor; everything is miniscule! Imaging trying to read that image, complete with tiny 10pt fonts and 80x80 icons, condensed into 16.5 inches! Thats the problem!
Quake ought to look good on that sucker..
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OK. Here's another take. Many newer games using 3D API's have to be written with resolution independence. For instance, on an old 3DFX Voodoo, you're not going to be able to push 30fps in the newest games unless you run at 640x480 or maybe 800x600. But on your brand spanking new GeForce 256 DDR you can do 1280x1024 at like 60 fps.
I don't really understand how everything under the hood works, but it appears to me that when a game needs to display 2D graphics, sprites, or entire 2D UI's, it makes calls to the 3D libraries, loading these graphics as textures that the accelerator can then scale, rotate, and all that other fun stuff. Load up Quake 3 and look at the main menu. The text is the same size no matter what resolution you're at and unless you're in some absurdedly high resolution, it doesn't pixelate, and the graphics card automatically anti-aliases the pixels.
Display Postscript, Display PDF, and other forthcoming display technologies rely a lot on software and still treat the computer display as a raster medium. These will be interim solutions, but if the proper hooks aren't put into these software components for hardware acceleration, things like Display PDF will overrun the processor at very very high resolutions.
How about this? Let's treat the video memory area in the graphics card as a canvas and draw vector graphics in it. These will naturally include bitmaps with physical size information, and even a legacy "raster canvas" mode to accomidate legacy applications. Then all that has to happen is the graphics card does the rasterizing to whatever absurd resolution you need and pipes it to the display.
A few things this implementation has the ability to do:
1) Support everything NOW. In legacy modes, you'd get anti-aliased scaling, much like when I change my resolution on this LCD monitor in front of me to 640x480. Sure, you wouldn't get the benifit of 200 ppi, but at least you would have a crisper screen to look at (one of the things that annoys me most about my flat panel is that you can see the individual Pixels and the grid in between them)
2) Take a lot of the graphics burden off of the CPU -- the performance increase from the modifications made to DirectX 7.0 to accomidate the GeForce and a "GPU" in general really beg for the same kind of GPU idea to migrate back to 2D, where it will be needed to support massive resolutions needed in the future. Gradients, scrolling, and moving entire solid windows and widgets around are some of the most CPU intensive operations that can be done (check your meter while running E with all the bells and whistles on!) This are things that should be done by the video card anyway. Let's see some people start putting hooks in there software and OS's to allow this! Stop thinking in pixels already!
3) Support legacy apps on new software/hardware in the future. Load a rater-drawn app into a texture buffer and a virtual "screen" that has pixel dimensions, then scale those pixels on the canvas appropriately.
So anyway, I guess we'll see now how this idea will hold up.
~GoRK
For example, SGI has long provided scalable icons for its IRIX desktop file manager. Apple's new Quartz graphics API and Aqua GUI look like they may have the start of this flexibility. OpenGL may be a good base to work from as well.
As someone who spends way too much time reading text on computer monitors, I look forward to any improvements in their readability!
Tim