Are Smart Display's Worth The High Price?

Anonymous Howard writes "I've never understood the need for smart display's. It appears I'm not the only one. Here's an article that agrees with me, but even goes as far as calling smart displays a dumb idea. The only use I see for smart displays is in a business setting. But I still see better options, like laptops that connect to projectors, etc. What are the markets for smart displays and what are the targeted uses?"

Comments

first p0st

[Anonymous Coward]

this story seem s to have miraculously appeared a day after it was apparently posted!

Re:first p0st

[antiprime]

seems to be a dollar short as well.

Is school worth the high price

[Anonymous Coward]

I've never understood the need for an apostrophe s used to denote a plural. It appears I'm not the only one. I won't even bother going into the number of articles that agree with me, but even go as far as calling apostrophe s plurals a dumb idea. The only use I see for apostrophe s is in a possessive setting. But I still see better options, like possessive pronouns that connect to nouns, etc. What are the markets for smart teachers and what are their targeted uses? They're obviously not teaching kids all the should be. *sigh* /sarcasm no hard feelings, hm? :-]

no

[Anonymous Coward]

i dont think so

fp

[Anonymous Coward]

fp no?

Dumb Laptop

[Anonymous Coward]

Huh? When I worked on Apple's Displays team, "Smart Displays" were those that allowed software control of monitor settings.

This thing is more of a "dumb laptop"

what the

[Anonymous Coward]

nobody home??

No audience now but...

[ggwood]

The (brief) article makes a couple really good points why not many people are going to adopt this now: first, you can use this *or* the computer it is connected to but not both. Second, it is really darn expensive. One could just buy a laptop.

However, when something like this costs way, way less, it might be nice to bring to the kitchen with a recipe from the internet...or when take it to the store to buy the ingredients...or use it as a remote control for the TV or to program the VCR or into the garden to see if those worms look like the ones which eat tomatoes or just help the soil.

All of this is predicated on a few things (which I would focus on if I were designing something like this): one it is light weight (and thus portable), cheap or, if not cheap at least very, very sturdy.

Obviously it has to allow you to use your darn desktop as well - and it should have a long battery life and it should probably have really nice handwriting recognition and a very nice display (otherwise why not use something like a palm pilot form factor with 802.11b?).

Sounds like it has a ways to go, but I could definately see using something very similar to this in the future.

(Oh, of course it would have to be able to display equations properly which my palm never did. Ideally it would recognize all the greek alphabet as handwriting but I'm not holding my breath.)

If you build it, they will come.

[sketerpot]

Sometimes it is better to do something and fail than never to have tried at all. One such area is science, in which any blind alley is one less that someone will have to go down. I think this is similar. Smart displays may or may not pay off, but there's a good chance that they will yield something worthwhile. Who knows?

Anyway, there may be some applications....

Submitted for your approval...

[Anonymous Coward]

Bob's Quick Guide to the Apostrophe, You Idiots

You're not the only one.

Wireless w/X server?

[TheGrandePoobah]

The article mentions that you'll likely need a winXP desktop. Wouldn't a *nix desktop along with a laptop with wireless network running any OS with an X server work better for many?

Re:Wireless w/X server?

[\kludge]

I'm going to go off on a limb and mention that Microsoft's RDP performs way better over low bandwidth / high latency connections than X does. This seems to be in large part because applications under RDP are not stalled by round trip messages as they are with X. X applications exhibit extremely long load times and are for the most part totally unusable except on a fast low-latency local network. VNC doesn't even come close to the same level of responsiveness under the same network conditions. It tries very hard, but there's only so much that can be done with (compressed) bitmap image transfers alone. In the long term, it would be neat if some RDP-type solution were implemented using similar techniques as VoIP. Allowing for some packet dropping and prioritization could significantly improve responsiveness over its current levels. RDP still appears to be much better than VNC at flow control. With VNC, one must wait for the entire screen dump to be transferred, even if most of it has become irrelevant due to user interactions. Now, I've been arguing based on slow / unresponsive network effects. Why do I worry about this when 802.11 wireless implementations are usually pretty fast?

1. We want to avoid significant degredation when sharing a wireless network, or when physically near its fringes.
2. We want to run high-bandwidth multimedia applications, and it is important that their performance degrade gradually. This requires adaptive algorithms for prioritizing and queueing audio/video streams.
3. I see no impediment to attaching multiple smart displays to a central computer (mainframe terminal style) or to multiple computers. So sharing of resources is a problem.
4. Local area wireless networks are great, but I envision non-local uses for these things too.

VNC?

[SharpFang]

Doh, if the smart displays had VNC support, they could be pretty cool tools. Cross-platform, with unices - non-blocking for the desktops, a neat thing to have in a company plus if the prices were lower - Welcome back old times of one big server plus multiple terminals :) A good way to miniaturise your box is to put everything you don't need to carry around on some shelf and connect the rest wirelessly :)

Smart Display's and Illiterate Editor's

[Elrac]

I'm very tolerant of furriners who don't write the language so well. But when someone who calls himself "Editor" puts an apostrophe into a plural in a topic title, I despair at being surrounded by illiterates.