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16:9 Notebook Screens?
Transition Cat asks: "Is there any demand for longer notebook computers? With laptops as light and thin as they are, it seems that a laptop with the screen stretched out to 16:9 would still be portable. The longer dimensions would also permit room for a numeric keypad. Good as a portable DVD player (with better stereo effect since the speakers could be farther apart), good for spreadsheets, good for displaying a second browser window, etc. Good idea? Nightmare for Windows drivers? Does anyone want anything like this?"
i think there is some demand since sharp put one on the market a few years ago - but it was a pentium 75 class. sony's c1x is also 16:9 it is a pentium 2 - 266mhz.
the major drawback of these notebooks is that they adopted the wide form factor to make it more compact. they are 1024x480 screens. unfortunatly they are really just the sony n505 series screens cut in half.
in terms of usability, i found it hard to use it for long periods - but it could just be that i am used to the larger spreadsheets and writing documents. btw, i found surfing somewhat difficult since most pages are "optimized" for 800x600.
that all being said, i heard linus uses a c1x.
just my $0.02
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I have one of those nifty SGI 1600SW flatpanel monitors, that comes with a special version of the Number 9 Revolution IV that runs the monitor in 1600x1024, which is 16:10. I also have another monitor attached to an ATI Rage Pro in the same system. Win2k handles the weird ratio and dual monitors without any problems. I have yet to try it under linux or solaris (and don't really want to since I'm spoiled by dual heads, and rather use the unix's via command line, X, or vnc).
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I agree with your ranting against bad javascript, frames, shockwave et al. However, if you take a completely unformatted HTML document with default fonts, and display it on 1600x1200 full screen, you suffer a serious readability problem.
When your eyes reach the end of a line, you have to scan back to the left to find where the next line begins. At that point, if the line is too long, you are temporarily lost while you try to figure out what line to read next.
If you're young and sharp your brain doesn't get too mungled in the process. Otherwise, you get a headache quickly and find it hard to read anything longer than a few paragraphs.
Compare this to the experience of reading the printed word. These are the conventions that history has brought us. Books, with their white pages and highly-readable serifed fonts, have lines that average probably 5 inches across. Newspapers, with a less contrast and poor type quality, have columns so small that often each line is about 2 inches wide. (Modern newspapers with higher-quality type, such as USA Today, can have wider columns.)
So now the highly-qualified web designer steps up to try to do you a favor by preventing your eyes from traveling too far. And tries to offer good typography, layout that improves your understanding of the material, images that accompany the text at certain places, graphics that guide you to what you're looking for... and is rewarded by people such as yourself, and the weenie who moderated me down, saying they'll run at any resolution they like. The only answer then is to design fixed-width pages, and screw YOU man, it's for your own good and you don't even know why.
Ideally, in the long run, HTTP returns a screen size and other such information about the client, and web publishers offer wide-style pages so you can check your favorite team's standing on the same screen as you check the scores, stats and stories. And with Dynamic HTML, related stories are displayed at the same time the current /. story is shown, in a separate pane, according to your preferences.
In the meantime, do YOURSELF a favor and size your browser window for healthy readability.
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Looking directly ahead of me, my coherent visual field can encompass an area twice the width of my current monitor with no problem (and maybe 20% more height). Humans are designed for peripheral vision, a 100-degree field of view, but we insist on using squarish monitors which waste a lot of visual area. Multiple monitors are nice, but there's all that blank space between them: we need a visual system like MIT's Cave that utilises as much visual area as your eyes can handle. The productivity boost would be more than worth the expense.
Research needs to be done into the size and shape of the maximum monitor size a human being can use without straining their neck all the time, and then somebody can get rich manufacturing.