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IBM Ships First 22" 200dpi Displays
wonko writes: "IBM has
begun shipping new monitors that are as much as 12 times sharper than current displays, and 4.5 times sharper than HDTV. These new 22-inch active matrix liquid crystal displays use aluminum-based technology and have over 9 million pixels. IBM will soon be licensing the technology to other display makers, so you could soon see these screens in laptops, PDAs, cellphones, etc. Pardon me while I wipe the drool off my keyboard ..." This is the same high-definition display you read about here earlier. They are not yet in CompUSA, to put it lightly -- first examples are going to Lawrence Livermore -- but the trickle-down effect in a couple of years is promising.
These new 22-inch active matrix liquid crystal displays use aluminum-based technology and have over 9 million pixels. IBM will soon be licensing the technology to other display makers, so you could soon see these screens in laptops, PDAs, cellphones, etc.
22-inch display on a cellphone? Damn!
Actually for photographs, it is newspaper/magazine quality. According to agfaphoto and kodak magazine quality is 150-175 lpi and for art quality books/magazine it its 175-250 lpi.
Unfortunately, they are going for $30K a peice and are only making a few (10!) per year.
I would be very, very suprised if these were as cheap as $30K each. I expect these things are expensive. They're shipping them to Lawrence Livermore, for christ's sake -- not some little $20 million dollar dot com where a VC might blanche at the bill.
Of course, since they're being used with ASIC White, I'd have to imagine that however many millions of dollars these 10 displays are going for, they make up only a small part of the total rental and service contract bill for any given month. Heck, IBM may have even just tossed 'em in as a promotional item, like the toy in a crackerjack box. "FREE! With every $100,000,000.00 purchase, a 22" super display! Offer available only for US government (and Batman)."
Slashdot is jumping the shark. I'm just driving the boat.
<i>True, but you should compare the new technology to the best that is available now, not to the average.</i>
<p>Why?
Well, I used to have a program that would send a "high-res" fax, at 300dpi. (or 300x100? 300x150? I'm confused...)
:)
But yeah, I mentioned about the anti-aliasing, I think that would make up for most of it. Not true color printing at 600dpi or greater, but on a lit screen I'm sure it would look amazing, much like HDTV's do.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
It's been nearly 15 years and it's time to move on. Copper should not be imposible now that we have been shown the way. Copper Windows should be heavier but flexible stable and lasting. Let's do it!
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Windows 9x hasn't used bitmapped widgets since day one. You can change the size of the font on the title bar and it will automatically change the size of the widgets on the titlebar.
The only thing that remains bitmapped about the Windows GUI is the icons, and I'm betting that 32x32 would make a droolingly good small icon on this display.
Must.. get.. a loan..
this is a sig.
I have both a DELL i500e notebook (1600x1200 15") and a Sony CPD-M151 TFT monitor (1024x768 15") and the colour on the sony is definately much richer. I'm no expert but I definitely think the colour quality of the sony is right up there with a CRT.
:-)
Once you switch to TFTs you can never go back
.
Or just use OS X.
That's strange, I thought you were a "be fan."
"Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence."
"And like that
To give you an idea. Right now, I'm holding a ruler and your post in netscape measures as a bit more than 1/4 inch for the caps. a little more than 0.7 a cm. This is acceptable to most people. When I zoom in to the lowest resolution, each capped character measures 0.7 inch.
X is much better for people with eye problems compared to Windows. XFree lets you change resolution with one keystroke. Windows? at least 0.5 minute to change resolution. This allows you navigate with slightly higher resolutions, and zoom in when you need to read something.
If you got eye problems, you simply cannot use any low end displays and you must change monitor every 3 years. Don't be a cheap bastard, make sacrifice on your hard drive, CPU, and buy the best monitor/video card you can afford.
And Geeez! If you got an eye problem, maybe you should stop playing computer games and go out some more. You need your eyes to do something more productive on the screen.
What you need is a good XF86Config file, fine tuned, and a very fast pointing device (mine is a Logitech trackmanFX) that moves super fast across the desktop. Or put in a second 21 inches monitor for a dual head. If the monitor becomes a little blured, THROW IT AWAY, or get the manufacturere to replace it like I do.
And don't whine about desktop publishing, either. I used to be a graphics designer. graphics designers do not demand as crisp the monitor as programmers, and CAD operators. They don't need to look hard.
Hummmm...... Aluminum, imagine what they will do when they switch to copper...
You know like the CPU manufacturers did. Coppermine liquid crystal displays will rock.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
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Some people are alive, only because it is against the law to Kill them!
"The good thing about Alzheimer's is that you can hide your own Easter eggs."
"People should be allowed to keep midgets as pets."
- Gov. Jesse Ventura
Speaking of the need for vector based interfaces... Berlin anyone? :-)
-----
"People who bite the hand that feeds them usually lick the boot that kicks them"
Higher Logics: where programming meets science.
You don't want to be pushing that through the system at 60 fps. So none of that "but can you play quake on it" stuff.
I used to do tech support. The customer told me that he bought a Flat Panel display. That was at the time when they were really expensive. I asked him why he needed one. And he asnwered that he had no more space on his desk.I told him that with the price of the monitor he could by a new desk or break down the wall of his and rebuild it a little further.
Think like a man of action, act like a man of thought.
And don't forget that about half of the dimensions in stock HTML are specified in pixels. Time to start weeding those out, too.
If they use the same standards as for the T86D you would have up to 68 bright pixels or 102 dark pixels... ouch! i hope they improved thier manufacturing yields by the time this thing hits consumers.
I thought that these monitors could be a long-term (5 yrs) investment. Unlike a processor that must be upgraded AT LEAST every 2-3 years.
At least my Palm will have a better screen someday...
Contrary to popular belief, I don't actually make my website for other people to look at.
>I've seen the monitor, it cries out 'Radiation
>EMITTED STRONGLY'.
I've never seen an LCD with an emissions sticker on it.
-LjM
I want one, now!
My UID is prime!
From the MSNBC article (which is really just a blurb):
Shipping, sure, but to various famous scientific laboratories only.
[
/etc/X11/fs/config
default-point-size
It wasn't enough that my CPU, memory size, and battery life were becoming obsolete in my laptop (purchased less than a year ago). Now my screen is becoming obsolete too....
there are no stupid questions, but there are a lot of inquisitive idiots
why can't they use this kind of display on my TV? i'd really like to get a nice TV that'd be that sharp. I just wasted 800 bucks on a tv that has a "3-line digital comb filter" and it's hardly sharp. Why waste that kind of resolution on a computer where any program that fully utilizes the monitor would fill the hard drive in a heartbeat. I'd rather use that kind of technology with a streaming display.
-"Hey, Baby. It's not a rash, it's textured love."
>rom the my-laptop-will-be-huge! dept.
Yes! 22 inch laptops that can finally cover the average lap of the sysadmin!
Tim, you spot the trend before everyone else....
Suppose there were already monitors with 10 mln pixels, then this news would not have been newsorthy at all.
This sounds great; we're up to fax-quality dpi, but in full color. Not quite up to the "virtual paper" level yet, but probably really close, especially with a little anti-aliasing.
:)
And even though these aren't available to the public yet... How much do they cost, and when can we expect to see these in the home? The answer had better not be "2010" still.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Actually I think remember reading (this was a long time ago now) that the Earth-Moon is more a binary planet than planet-satellite type system. Meaning that the Earth and Moon actually rotate around a point in space (closer to Earth due to its larger mass).
All I can think about is how great Half-Life would look at that kind of resolution.
+++++++++++++++++++++
The Digital Sorceress
The other slashdot article Taco linked to was posted on Monday December 13, @08:46AM, but it still appears active.
It still has the number of posts at each score level, ect.
I would have thought it would have expired by now.
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Colin Davis
9 million pixels X 4bpp= 36MB framebuffer! Does anyone know what kind of graphics cards they have on those super computer terminals?
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
If it doesn't make my X-11 Netscape Fonts look any better, then I don't need it.
And what kind of pull does he have to rate being first on the list for the first decent monitor?
Do you realize how few people know that 200dpi==40,000 pixels per square inch? You're talking about a country where 1/5th of people don't know whether the earth goes around the moon or vice versa. (Which, BTW compares favorably to the 1/4-1/3 in parts of Europe.)
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Or just use OS X. Quartz should be perfect for scalable GUIs (when, of course, we get HW acceleration for Postscript primitives.) I dream of a day when the user can specify a scaling size for their desktop, and program designers can work in a virtual coordinate space without having to worry about resolution.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Nope - as they are bitmaps - they will be smaller.
:)
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1% APY, No fees, Online Bank https://captl1.co/2uIErYq Don't let your $$$ sit in a no-interest acct.
So, unless the GUI developer was moron and specified absolute dimensions for widgets, there is resolution indipendence. Just specify the size of your fonts in tenths of typographic points (the 8th field): the layout manager of the toolkit then will make your app equally usable at 640x400 and 1600x1200.
The real problem here is only with bitmaps: they have a hinerent size in pixels. Buttons containing only a bitmap won't scale (unless the developer arranges things specifically, i.e. scaling the bitmap to be n rows of text high).
It's called DLP (Digital Light Processing), and its from Texas Instruments. It's used in digital projectors, and I believe it's the technology used in the new theaters with a digital picture.
The classic photoshop rule of thumb was to have a image DPI 3x to 5x the LPI of the press.
Actually, that will just give your imagesetter a headache from the extraneous data you're downloading. 2xLPI is almost always an adequate resolution, and 2.2 is the absolute maximum you'll ever need. See http://www.adobe.com/support/tech doc s/c29e.htm or Ch. 3 of the Photoshop manual.
Danny
Hrm, is someone moderating their own submissions?
Methinks yes.
Stating on Slashdot that I like cheese since 1997.
PDF is PostScript
Stating on Slashdot that I like cheese since 1997.
Ever since then, when a friend wants a computer part I go to another store or get it from an online source.
- I don't care if they globalize against free speech. All my best free thoughts are done in my head.
1.64 miles is 2.64 kilometers.
What ever happened to metric?
Didn't we learn from that nasa flub last year? The future is not in miles or feet or inches.
The resolution is something like 3500x2500. Best commercially available displays have something like 2000x1500. 3 or 4 times sharper is more like it.
That was said in /. discussion about new small 'planet' found with mass less than Plutos.
I haven't done any Windows GUI programming so I can't really compare, but GTK+ still has many distances measured in pixels. Getting resolution dependance out of our applications will take quite a long time.
The other question I have is whether scalable graphics for the GUI is really feasible on existing 72 dpi displays with all the aliasing effects that implies. Does the new Mac interface really use vector graphics for *all* its icons and such? If we've all got 22" 200dpi displays, sure, but that's not going to happen for a long time yet.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
That 5 years to market might be also a safety measure. Why ? Because no video card on the market right now can handle that many pixels in 2D yet. At their rough 9 megapixels, that means 36mb per screenpage for full resolution. Any game will therefore require at least 72mb for double-buffering.. more for 3D. Lastly, can you imagine the abusive CPU load required to ferry that many pixels from system ram to video ram ? Next thing you'll know, Internet Explorer will be using offscreen video ram for its browser cache since it will surely require at least 128mb onboard. Just plain nuts!
-Billco, Fnarg.com
Think printing. Right now your monitor has a resolution of 75 dpi and bitmaps are made for that resolution. But you still can print them on you 600 dpi laserprinter. Although you don't take 100% advantage of the 600 dpi, it'll still look better then when it's printed on a 300 dpi printer.
I don't know how dpi settings work in X, but I can imagine that X could be made to use 3x3 pixels for a single pixel from a 75dpi bitmap (200 dpi is almost 3 times as high as 75 dpi).
So, all you have to do to be ready for such a display is alter X. At a later stage you could rebuild/enhance your wm to use high-res bitmaps. Or you could scale them, etc..
Thimo
--
Avoid the Gates of Hell. Use Linux!
"...going for $30K a peice and are only making a few (10!) per year."
- --------------------
Wouldn't 10! a year be 3,628,800 per year?
Yes folks, that was a joke.
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"And may your days be long upon the earth."
All bodies orbit around a commen point in space, the common center of mass. The sun and earth do it to. If you look at the sun over a long period of time, it will look like its wobbling because it is orbiting around a point thats not exactly at its own center (though, given the mass of the Sun, its pretty damn close.) The common point that the moon and Earth orbit around is about a thousand miles under the surface of the earth, so you can still say that the moon orbits around the earth. If it were outside the earth, then it might make more sense to call it a binary system.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Printing presses are fundementally different than computer displays. Look closely at a magazine, and you'll notice that the "dots" are 1) arranged diagonally, and 2) are of variable size.
The classic photoshop rule of thumb was to have a image DPI 3x to 5x the LPI of the press.
When I hear the word 'innovation', I reach for my pistol.
Not even 4 times sharper as a matter of fact!
People who write these articles need to take some remedial math classes.
<p>However, 2000x1500 isn't exactly a common resolution, today. Many more people have 1024x768.
<p>3840 x 2480 = 9,216,000
<p>1024 x 768 = 786,432
<p>9,216,000 / 786,432 = 11.7
Finally, my eyes may get a rest. I have considered display technology to be one of the major hangups to further progress towards the mythical, so-called paperless society. Just like the flicker of Saturday morning cartoons (accompanied by the requisite overdose of simple carbohydrates), my old CRT makes me EVIL!!! #-( They may say five years, but I bet the process will accelerate. Hope to be not-tanning in front of one of these in a couple of years.
Then, I went to a LAN party, and saw all the 20/20 people doing Windows at 1600x1200, on 15-inch monitors, and complaining that "It starts to get a little blurry on my monitor when I try that..." Then I tried installing Linux and X-Windows on my own machine, and found that X-Windows was meant to never ever NEVER run in 640x480, because all the applications I found seemed to be designed for 1024x768 -- even though they had 7-pixel-high fonts.
This new era of high-resolution displays struck fear into my heart, that in ten years all computer applications will run at 3000x2000 resolution, with 10-pixel-high fonts. And do you seriously believe that people won't design web pages to be "best viewed at 5000x4000"? Or that they aren't already?
But, in the short term, while a 640x480 or 800x600 large-fonts display is still a realistic option, a display like that might actually be a good thing. See, most LCD screens only work at a certain resolution -- 800x600, 1024x768, etc. If you try to decrease the resolution, you get either a big black border of wasted space, or you get random patterns of thick and thin pixel rows and columns. Either way, it's ugly. But if you start at 3000x2000, it becomes less ugly, because you're not alternating single rows and double rows of pixels anymore; you're alternating quadruple and quintuple rows of pixels. This would be good, not just for me, but for gamers who might want to play different games at different resolutions. Starcraft, for example, still plays only at 640x480 if I'm not mistaken.
Of course, the best option would be if people designed everything to be actually scalable for a change. MS Windows has some support for scalability; you can set 800x600 for "Small Fonts" or "Large Fonts" and it works fine with most, but not all, apps. Other objects change size too, such as icons. Bitmaps, however, will always be bitmaps, and that affects web pages. Have you ever played Sissyfight? A 200-pixel-high window, but 6-pixel-high fonts abound. Or Pixeltime -- only usable because the pics can be zoomed and the text is largely inconsequential. Hopefully, when people think in inches instead of pixels, we'll see fewer sites like those. I just hope the backlash doesn't create pages that say "Optimized for a 22-inch display," though such a thing would better expose the inherent arrogance of such a design choice.
Now, I imagine some of you are drooling over this display for the reason my friends always give for their insanely-high resolution: "Just think of how many more windows I can have open at once!" Of course, after a certain point, it would be easier on the eyes and wallet to just use two displays. Break that down into cost-per-pixel, cost-per-square-inch, etc. Perhaps dual displays might even have organizational advantages: "The 17-inch display is for code, the 15-inch display is for man pages and instant messages."
Of course, none of this applies to desktop publishing, where the situation demands something as close to paper as humanly possible. Or video production, in which having a pixel-perfect HDTV display window would be very useful. But for mortals, well, we'll just see whether we use this power for good or evil.
A friend of mine who works at IBM sent me a screenshot. Looks great:
<IMG src="22inch.png">
<DISPLAY WARNING> If you can read this message your monitor is not high enough resolution to view this picture.
</DISPLAY WARNING>
</IMG>
In CompUSA, when it says ".28", it doesn't mean DPI, it means dot pitch. .28 means that each dot is .28mm, measured diagonally.
>14 DPI -- Think Apple II in lowres mode. Breakout ...
:D
Nah, the Apple II lowres mode was more like 5 or 6 dpi. You're thinking of double-lowres.
Unfortunately, they are going for $30K a peice and are only making a few (10!) per year. The seller seemed confident that the price/availability would be going down/up very soon.
pr0n jokes aside, I know more than a few graphic artists who would rip out the liver of their best friends for one of these.
As for scalable graphics, this will be really interesting to see. One of Windows greater failings (IMHO) has always been its lack of geometry management. Most Windows apps basically nail things to specific X,Y positions in a dialog, rather than having a fluid layout which specifies relative attachments. (This is one area where Motif does something better than Windows). Geometry management scales with resolution or font size, where absoulte positioning doesn't.
I can explanate how to administrate your network. You must configurate and segmentate it, so it can computate.
Yeah, that was actually a typo - I meant x2. Apologies for being so incorrectly "informative".
There were some cases when we had to go up to x4+ in the old days to fix certain output issues. Too many years and too many jobs ago to remember why exactly.
When I hear the word 'innovation', I reach for my pistol.
a) Well, that's because the article was written by marketing people whose job it is to make things sound good to the drones.
b) but there aren't, so it is.
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
I don't have a Windows machine anymore but as I recall this just expanded the bitmaps it did use for the widgets, so you get blocky widgets.
Things may have changed in the three years since I stopped using it.
TWW
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
I do not agree; I think this just looks crap. I assume you mean that you would make each pixel a 2x2 square. Uggh!
At a later stage you could rebuild/enhance your wm to use high-res bitmaps.
This is just a kludge, the real issue is trying to come up with a solution which is portable to less well-endowed displays. Scaling is the only way to go.
TWW
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
Actually, even the 204 figure itself is incorrect. 3840x2400 pixels on a 16"x10" display comes out to exactly 240dpi -- not 204dpi.
240dpi! Holy moly! Now I know what I want for Christmas (2001?).
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begin 644
Oops, looks like I misread the article. I mistakenly took "aspect ratio of 16 to 10" to mean that the actual dimensions are 16" x 10". Since the diagonal is 22" rather than 18.87", this is obviously incorrect.
Assuming that the diagonal is exactly 22", the actual dimensions of the display are 18.66" x 11.66". This works out to 205.8dpi, which is more or less consistent with the article.
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begin 644
You're comparing the linear dimensions. They're comparing the total number of pixels.
Mod down posts with a "Free Mac Mini/iPod" sig, they're spam!
OS X's display engine is PDF based, but their widgets are still bitmaps. PDF can display bitmaps too.
:)
:)
I think the only resolution independent WM out there would be 3dwm
Not that we exactly have the 3d horsepower to drive this kind of display. Maybe if it were driven as four separate displays with four separate GeforceGTSs
--
There are no trails. There are no trees out here.
--from the article
"When IBM showed a prototype of this technology in 1998, many in the industry predicted this display wouldn't be ready for mass production until at least 2010," said Ross Young, president of Display Search, a display market research firm in Austin. "The technology can change the way computers are used in a wide range of areas where extremely high-resolution images are required, and I am impressed that IBM is able to produce them today."
If the resolution is 2000x1500, then you have 3x10^6 pixels.
9x10^6 / 3x10^6 = 3
convincing?
stupid me.. didn't read it properly
Oh I don't know, but it got past me! When I 'read' (scanned) it, the sentence may have been "pixels per sq inch" but my brain said "ooh thats twice the dpi than my current monitor!".
Apple has been selling something similar for quite a while.A ppleStore.woa/71/wo/fFb1d0iklLNV9eJOh6/2 .5.0.3.28.1
Might not be 200ppi, but it is 22 inch and it is available now:
http://store.apple.com/1-800-MY-APPLE/WebObjects/
poor man's moderation points
As an example they were showing X rays. If you got your face right up next to the screen, you still couldn't identify individual pixels. In fact, it looked just like a piece of paper. The difference between this setup and a normal hi-res monitor is simply indescribable.
We don't have a resolution independent operating systems/applications
Under Windows 9x, right-click on the desktop (unless you are using a web page with Active Desktop and a JavaScript [right-click trap]) and choose Properties. In the Settings tab, click Advanced. In the General tab, choose Font Size: Other... and crank the res up to 192 dpi.
Will I retire or break 10K?
What ... you expected this at CompUSA?
porn 4.5x sharper than it is on hd, shweet.
From other IBM materials, and an earlier Slashdot posting:
200 ppi, 16.3 inch Active Matrix Liquid Crystal Display diagonal viewing area
2560x2048 pixels (5,242,880 full color pixels)
Subpixels are 42 x 126 microns
15,728,640 high-performance amorphous silicon transistors
1.64 miles of thin film wiring (low-resistance aluminum alloys)
Aperture ratio of 27.3 percent
Backlight power of 44 Watts for a brightness of 230 cd/m2
The prototype is 21 inches high and 16.5 inches wide; the total depth (including base) is 9.5 inches; the thickness of the display is 2.5 inches
The display weighs less than 20 pounds, which is less than a third of today's CRT displays
The power dissipated is less than half the power used by an 18-inch CRT display
The display is Quad-SXGA (4 times the resolution of an SXGA)
[
Now throw ClearType onto it and that would be a nice, readable screen! With 600 dpi effective resolution that would start being around the same resolution as commercially printed text.
I just acquired an 18" LCD at work, a Philips. It's impressive at 1280x1024 so the IBM must be awesome. However, with all the emphasis on high resolution, what do we know about the IBM's ability to display colours? I ask because my LCD seems not to do greens very well, they look a little washed-out.
The Register has a little article about this also. They say that it will be used along side ASCI White.. so the worlds fastest compnuter gets the worlds best display... droool... Dear Mr. Bank Manager...
So agreed! I have similar-but-different problems (I'm dyslexic, and my *particular* [this is not the same for all dyslexics] issues are helped by flipping around font sizes, background and foreground colours and page layout -- generally, given the choice, I'll take white-on-black text based anything with reasonable layout...unfortunetly, slashdot's text-only options are not reasonable, so....)
:) -- but from what I've seen, most people who need non-visual input prefer screen readers to braille terminals) so the only things I can really say for sure is that *everyone* needs to be able to choose what works for them, and the only 100% intuitive interface is the nipple :)
:P )
I think the solution to the problem is to keep things customiseable -- originally, the point of html was to mark up text in such a way that the browser (and by extension, the user) could decide how to display it -- but this model has been largely discarded by web 'designers' (not all of them, but apparently the majority of those designing commercial sites, at least) who want as much control over how the web sites look to the end user as those same companies have over their TV ads (for example -- other advertising is similar) -- sure, they can't control whether or not you have a color or black and white TV, but they'll do their damndest to over ride your font settings (you can do some magic with X windows to help this in netscape, at least -- email me privately if you want those details, I'll have to go look them up again) color settings, etc etc. Some sites (extreme hardware comes to mind!) have their pages written such that if I bring the font to something I can read, all the letters overlap. This sucks. Of course, all this woudln't be a problem if designers designed with lynx in mind (not necessarily because it still wouldn't do that in netscape, but if I could navigate their sites with lynx I wouldn't be trying to make it readable with netscape instead).
That is, of course, just *one* area in which customization is definetly the way to go. I'm not sure how applicable this is to games (or desktop publishing, or a number of other things) it's merely the thing I've thought about the most, since it's the one area that I have to deal with more-or-less every day (I'm a unix sysadmin) that I cannot just default to the easier (for me) text interfaces. I do recognize that for a lot of people graphic interfaces are easier, but there is no one size fits all solution -- both because of individual preferences and actual physical and/or perceptual limitations. I just cannot really authoritatively comment on all of them (i.e. I can read text [formatted correctly] but graphics are generally useless to me, I have auditory processing problems that make using a screen reader completely useless -- if I ever go blind, it'll be a braille terminal for me
Really, I think that customization (either of the underlying environment..i.e. X windows, or at the applications level) is the way to go. This is one of the reasons I like unix (all the really important stuff is text based, but you can write graphical widgets to interface with it if you like -- it's very modular) and open source (because in theory I can tinker with it until it works for me..in practice this is limited by my programming ability [which is really low right now, but something I want to get back into] but this is a limit I can overcome, unlike, say, getting closed source source to tinker with
So is there a project out there dealing with user interface issues for people who don't have 'normal' perception (not just severely visually impaired people -- I'm aware of the blinux project, and think it's great and needed, but it's more specialized than what I'm thinking about, but also less-severely visually impaired folks, dyslexic folks and anyone else who thinks regular user interfaces don't work for them) within the open source community -- it strikes me that open source software would be the easiest to work with, both because the source is available and because the folks who write it are generally more available than the programmers and management at j. random software house.
You couldn't be more wrong.
Yeah, you're right, my bad.
Must pay more attention!
Mod down posts with a "Free Mac Mini/iPod" sig, they're spam!
Limited number of programs?
OSX runs all classic MacOS software, runs Carbon/Cocoa-based apps, and can also compile most unix apps, including X-windows packages (I have XFree running in OSX, for instance, and run Apache/PHP/PostGreSQL/sshd on the same box.
That's hardly a limited number of programs.
Even less know that neither goes around the other one. It totally depends on what you define as your reference coordinate system. If you'll excuse me now, I'll do some weightlifting with mother earth... Offtopic: Right now, on a tv show in Europe, someone is betting that the showmaster can't find three U.S. citizens who count the seats in the audience and report the same number.
Hey timothy- Ya sure that's drool?
True, it does depend on the reference system. However, in astronomy the reference point is the common center of mass. Since that center of mass is about a thousand miles under the surface of the earth, you can in all truth say the moon orbits about the earth.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
We don't have a resolution independent operating systems/applications. Thus, all that will happen on these displays is everything on your windows or linux desktop will just look smaller, not crisper and sharper.
I might be wrong though, I think OS X with it's display PDF engine could actually make very good use of these displays.
-josh
Just imagine pr0n on one of these! The boobs would be more real then in real life!
Ok, maybe not MORE real.. most of them have implants.
Not that I know, or anything!
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CitizenC
can you imagine ....
http://Lenny.com
Making them into bigger bitmaps will just make them non-portable to older/cheaper machines.
Time to get scalable icons working, whether you're Windows or X. There should be just enought time before these start hitting the market in bulk, although print and design houses will want these displays sooner than most and will pay for them.
TWW
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
Might as well be given the availability. Maybe we need a new term. Droolware.
I've seen the monitor, it cries out 'Radiation EMITTED STRONGLY'.
Astronomers really need to boost their self esteem. Personally, I always choose myself as the reference point. Don't let this mislead you to the assumption that the common center of mass is always within my body...
I recently setup a MAC for a gentleman who can only read text that is about 1.5inches high. I setup his 19" monitor to run at 1024x768. I then jacked up the font size. He and I tested various modes and it was found that the higher resolution was best. The reason was that the useless windowing crap was small enough that it did not take up huge ammounts of screen space, but the important text information was still readable.
Not all was perfect though. While MacOS was very good at scalling the fonts and icons some of the applications were not. Word in particular is very bad at scaleing fonts. The zoom feature seems to be pixel based. If the document is zoomed to 400% the fonts looked awfull as the fonts were very blocky. Instead of taking a 12pt font and scaleing it to 400%, the pixels of the 12pt font are expanded 400%. The hack was simple two macro keys were programmed to switch the font between 12pt and 60pt (or 48pt can't remember).
The problem is not the high resolution monitors, but rather the software that does not scale its fonts. I am very disapointed with how most software treats fonts. The user should be able to control the size of all fonts. If software was designed properly it would not care what font size was used.
Web pages are a whole other matter. There is no need for a web page to dictate what font and font size is used. Web designers that need to do that generally make ugly, hard to read pages that don't have anything content.
True, but you should compare the new technology to the best that is available now, not to the average.
I am sure these labs that are purchasing the monitors are not using 1024x728 either.
I imagine some of you are drooling over this display for the reason my friends always give for their insanely-high resolution: "Just think of how many more windows I can have open at once!"
I'm afraid I'm thinking of this in almost exactly the opposite way you are. My vision is reasonably good -- slightly better than 20/20 without glasses, even better with glasses. But text is difficult to read from a standard computer display for me, too. Guess what -- it's difficult for anyone to read. Why? In part, because standard displays have awful, awful, awful resolution. And with the standard, antiquated software that comes on nearly every computer made, the size of the text on the display is dependent on the resolution. The better I make the resolution, the smaller the text gets -- it unbelievable to me that I'm still using software shitty enough to demand that. But hey, what can you do? Its not like its a new millenium yet (wait another month and a half for that).
I guarantee that as high resolution displays become available, the idea that the size of the text on the monitor is somehow tied to the resolution of the monitor will go away. Think, for example, of printers -- imagine if someone said to you today, "I only buy the lowest resolution printers I can find. In fact, I prefer the old 120 dpi bubble jets. That way, the text looks bigger when I print, and its easier to read." You'd look at them as if they had a huge screw loose inside their head. "Why," you'd think, "would anyone on earth believe the resolution of the printer would affect the size of the text? The text is always scaled to be the same size -- the lower the resolution, the blockier the letters get. Lower resolution makes it harder to read -- not easier."
With any luck at all, in 10 years resolution independent display drivers will exist, and the idea that higher resolution is somehow "harder" to read will go away. Unless, of course, you're still using X windows. Bleh.
Slashdot is jumping the shark. I'm just driving the boat.
If it really were "204 pixels per square inch" that would be one of the worst resolutions ever made since it would only be around 14 dpi.
They obviously mean 204dpi, not 200 pixels per square inch. Christ knows how this got past the proof readers.
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