As in no business use, no promoting of business use (such as surfing to a web page with an ad on it) or checking out the latest at Newegg, etc.
Those rules have been significantly relaxed in the past few years, mostly in response to repeater users ordering pizzas and whatnot. You would not be able to run your own wireless ISP under Part 97, but that's about the only way I can think of to get into trouble at this point.
really? i have been considering getting a ham license but i thought amateur radio only allowed analog voice transmissions.
Not at all; there are a lot people doing digital work in many different modes from Morse code to PSK to COFDM.
To use the Amateur bands from VHF through microwave, you don't need to jump though the Morse code testing hoop (unless you just want to.)
If you google "Microwave Update", you'll get a lot of hits on the ham radio sub-community involved in UHF/microwave communications, which overlaps heavily with the digital and weak-signal guys.
JURISDICTION IS EVERYTHING IN LAW. You don't seem to get that, so I think your legal legs are feeble at best.
You're right: jurisdiction is everything, and the Feds ownz0r it.
For all practical purposes, the Interstate Commerce Clause has been moot for significantly longer than 1934. The last nail in its coffin was driven in by the Supreme Court in Wickard v. Filburn, 1942. From http://www.fff.org/freedom/0895g.asp:
Enter Roscoe Filburn, an Ohio dairy and poultry farmer, who raised a small quantity of winter wheat -- some to sell, some to feed his livestock, and some to consume. In 1940, under authority of the Agricultural Adjustment Act, the central government told Mr. Filburn that for the next year he would be limited to planting 11 acres of wheat and harvesting 20 bushels per acre. He harvested 12 acres over his allotment for consumption on his own property. When the government fined him, Mr. Filburn refused to pay.
Wickard v. Filburn got to the Supreme Court, and in 1942, the justices unanimously ruled against the farmer. The government claimed that if Mr. Filburn grew wheat for his own use, he would not be buying it -- and that affected interstate commerce. It also argued that if the price of wheat rose, which is what the government wanted, Mr. Filburn might be tempted to sell his surplus wheat in the interstate market, thwarting the government's objective. The Supreme Court bought it.
So, yeah, pull up a chair underneath that JD degree hanging on your mantelpiece and tell us all about "jurisdiction."
That's the amazing thing... Maya works now over the free terminal-services client you can download from MS, the one that'll connect any Win98+ box to any WinXP+ box.
It works, but it's godawful.
With 1/10 the latency and 10x the bandwidth, it wouldn't be godawful anymore -- it would just suck.
With 1/10 the latency and 100x the bandwidth, it wouldn't even suck. You probably would never realize it wasn't running on your local machine.
That's pretty much how it works now. When you play a network game, you might as well be running on an OpenGL-tweaked X terminal.
Client-side prediction is helpful for a good experience in the general case, but it's far from necessary on most broadband connections today, and it won't be necessary at all in the future.
No matter how much bandwidth you've got, the game just won't run right with 1/3 second lag. Then, also assume that your "real computer" has to talk to another server. It'll be like playing in mud.
No, it won't be substantially different from the way it works now on a non-client-side-predicted client like the original Q1. You don't see the effect of moving your mouse or hitting a key until it goes to the server and back. All that will change is where the resulting graphical view is rendered. There is no inherent reason why the gameplay experience should feel any different, as long as you have enough downstream bandwidth to accomodate a video stream.
I'm not claiming any obvious gameplay advantages in a scheme like this, just pointing out that there's no reason why it wouldn't work. (Certainly it would eliminate cheating, since no geometry would ever exist on the client....) There are some interesting business aspects to the idea, such as the fact that instead of buying a $400 GeForce 68000 card or whatever, you're basically renting time on a real-time render farm somewhere.
VNC and X are fine locally, but laggy remotely; and the lag is pretty constant from 56k dialup to 100mbit lan...
Sure, in their current incarnations. This a pie-in-the-sky kind of prediction to begin with... we are multiple decades away from widespread, economical 100-megabit access. Almost nothing will look or work like it does now. My point was, the change is going to be a bigger one than just the usual "more games/movies/pr0n" commenters were suggesting.
I never bought into any of that "the network is the computer" bull-hockey myself until the first time I failed to notice I was typing on my machine at the office. At that point it was obvious that we're only a couple of orders of bandwidth-magnitude away from not caring where our apps live.
What are ordinary people going to do with 100Mpbs next year that they have such a difficulty doing now?
Actually, ubiquitous speeds on the order of 100 Mbps will change everything.
Right now, with a one-megabit DSL connection, it's possible for me to use a Terminal Services client at home to run basic apps like Outlook and Perforce on my machine at the office. It's slow, clunky, and not especially pleasant, but it works, and it beats the hell out of juggling multiple email clients (and.PST files). Even things like streaming video almost work.
At 10 megabits/second, this process will still be slow, but not all that clunky, and a lot less unpleasant. More apps will live on my machine at work, without having to be duplicated at home.
At 100 megabits/second and up, the distinction between remote computing and local computing will disappear entirely for most users. Software and services subscription models for commercial applications will actually make sense for PC users for the first time. The client operating system -- be it Windows, Linux, MacOS, what-have-you -- will shrink to almost zero-importance.
And Microsoft will either be bankrupt or they'll own the inner planets, depending on whether the entire company goes down with the sinking Windows/Office ship.
Since the entire Internet will be one huge client-server network at that point, worms, viruses, and malware won't be a concern for most users. Monopolization will be. Whose machine is going to run and maintain 99% of your applications? If you think you're married to your software vendor now, you haven't even met her daddy yet.
Hah! That would be like trying to pull a mind trick on Yoda. It would go more like:
Intel: [waves hand] You will switch to Intel.
Jobs: [waves both hands, accompanied by a faint hum and the smell of ozone] Your chips suck ass. You will pay me $50 for every Mac that ships with one.
Intel: [trembles] Er, how about if we pay you, say, $50 for every one you ship?
Either the parent has no clue what he is talking about (Texas Instruments)... so let's give credit when credit is due, and stop these random bashings that just make you look like a clueless fool.
I apologize; my information was indeed correct at one time, but it is currently twelve years out of date. (See page 7, as well as footnote n25 referencing Texas Instruments's $250 Million-A-Year Profit Making Center, The American Lawyer, March 1992.)
I do not have current knowledge of TI's relative earnings from its law department(s) versus sales of tangible products, nor do I have time at the moment to dig it up, so at the risk of looking like a "clueless fool" I'll admit my statement was (potentially) out of date.
Nowadays he'd be fired for using company resources to do side projects that management had already disapproved.
The most famous American tech companies used to be pretty good about this sort of thing. I bought a Tektronix employee handbook from the late Fifties on eBay awhile back, and it's a jaw-droppingly enlightened piece of work. Read it, and you'll wish you owned a time machine and a bus ticket to Portland, Oregon.
People speak in hushed tones about Google's "spend one day per week on your personal project" policy as if it's a radical innovation. They're like, who are those guys, a bunch of Communists?
Now... imagine how radical it sounded in the 1950s when Tektronix actually gave their engineers the key to the company storeroom on the weekends and a polite request, conveyed in the employee handbook, not to abuse the privilege.
The famous "HP Way", originating 30 or 40 years before Carly showed up, was another expression of the same idea: give your employees enough rope and they'll pull your company in directions you never would have imagined.
Nowadays, Hewlett-Packard sells ink for a living, Texas Instruments earns more from its legal department than from its engineering department, and policies like Google's sound like something from a Star Trek script. It seems that the best we can hope for is that the American technology industry as a whole relearns what it knew fifty years ago.
But my actual point stands... the Christian Church and the Moslems owe us just as great a debt for what they saved of the ancients' wisdom as they are responsible for what they destroyed.
Yeah, it's kind of interesting to see how the different political and philosophical standard-bearers blamed their own personal enemies for the destruction of the Library.
I was about to post something snippy to the effect of, "Fine, whatever, atheists don't burn libraries," but then remembered the Soviets, who didn't just burn their libraries but went door-to-door hunting down the librarians.
People who suck will do so regardless of religion or lack thereof.
The Library of Alexandria was burned down by the Romans.
The Library of Alexandria was torched by Moslems under the command of Caliph Omar. His reasoning was, "To the extent knowledge is necessary, it is in the holy Quran. To the extent it is not necessary, it is blasphemy."
Romans?!?? Sheesh. You must be taking faith-based history, or something.
Fair enough, with the Iraq war there was a bit of the if you disagree with me you are a traitor and should be jailed mentality.
That is a perfect example of the point being made. You can say just about anything here, no matter how loony or (in this case) unpatriotic. You might be called a traitor for speaking out against the war, but you will not be prosecuted as one.
This is not an example of suppression of distasteful speech; it's an example of its exercise.
That said, the objections to BPL would carry more weight if they weren't traceable to amateur radio sources. I have seen next to nothing objecting to it on the basis of interference from other sources.
Well, who else uses the HF spectrum these days? Everybody but the hams have moved to satellite.
Now if we could get Family Radio and a few of the other Christian shortwave broadcasters to petition the White House, I'd expect that would do the trick. BPL would be gone tomorrow, based on the Bush Administration's record of asking the Jesus freaks, "How high?"
But those broadcasters aren't targeting the US, so they, along with other users of the HF spectrum, don't care much about BPL one way or the other.
The only valuable asset that power companies own with respect to broadband Internet service are rights-of-way, not transmission lines. If they had spent half the money running fiber between their existing towers and poles that they've spent pushing the technical idiocy that is BPL, they'd have... well, OK, they'd still need to spend a lot more money.
It is expensive to provide high-quality, robust Internet service. The physical transmission medium is about the least important/interesting part of it. Wiping out big chunks of HF spectrum with limited-speed BPL infrastructure is just plain dumb by any rational measure, with or without bellyaching and interference from ham operators. (What? Ten years have gone by, and now the power companies need to offer more than a megabit or so of bandwidth to compete with the telcos and cable operators? Gee, I guess you should have run fiber when you had the chance, huh?)
BPL is one of the dumber ideas from the Powell regime, and I frankly wouldn't expect it to survive much additional scrutiny.
How does sexual-orientational diversity help a software company to produce better software?
Gee, I don't know. Do you think maybe we'd have seen some more interesting work from Alan Turing if he hadn't been driven to suicide by a homophobic government?
A healthy society cannot afford to waste its intellectual resources in this manner. Turing's case is a good example of how discrimination harms everybody, even those of us who aren't members of the targeted community or subculture.
Actually, now that you mention it, I think the ALMA guys at NRAO are working in the 1 THz neighborhood with SIS (superconductor-insulator-superconductor) mixers.
Google returns all kinds of interesting-sounding papers for "SIS mixer". I can hardly wait for these puppies to hit eBay.
Spectrum analyzers could "see" up to 325 GHz directly in the early Eighties. So I'd guess that newer and better waveguide mixers are available now. A Tek 2782 or 2784 analyzer could theoretically display a harmonically-downmixed signal 1.2 THz, although I have no idea how you were supposed to acquire the signal in the first place.
You may not be able to see a single one-picosecond pulse in the time domain, but if you fire off a bunch of them in succession, you can build a picture of the waveform with repetitive sampling techniques. Technology was available in the 1960s to perform repetitive sampling in the 20-picosecond regime, so someone like Tek or Agilent or Picosecond Pulse Labs may have a sampling gate that can do the job.
I would recommend surfing around at PPL's site if you're seriously interested in this stuff. There may also be some photonic tech involved in the measurement; I haven't RTFA yet.
Looking at the stats, the Samsung 213T looks like a very nice LCD monitor. Still only a 500:1 contrast ratio (versus several thousand for a good CRT, and I have no idea how much the lighting argument can really play into this).
I'd suggest going by Fry's or CompUSA and taking a look at one to see what you think, but unfortunately, retail stores usually use analog connections through distribution boxes that look just plain awful, and their lighting conditions are nothing like what anyone would have in their home or office. If you have a chance, look at a 213T with a DVI connection sometime.
It will also only do 1600x1200, and only 16.7M colors? That seems odd to me. Is that 24bit color?
Yeah, you don't want to run an LCD at any resolution other than its native pixel-array size. Otherwise it has to resample the video signal, which looks terrible at best. Naturally, manufacturers don't tell people this. As far as I know, LCDs are indeed limited to 8 bits per RGB component per pixel.
A 22" diagonal 4x3 monitor with 0.24mm dot pitch probably works out to a shadow-mask resolution of 1600x1200. It may accept higher-resolution signals, but the shadow mask or aperture grille is the real limiting factor. Then there's the inevitable image degradation you get from running such a high-bandwidth analog signal through a multiconductor cable.
That Viewsonic does look like a great solution for a low-light work environment. I'm surprised they're that cheap. It doesn't make sense for large CRTs to have come down that far in price, unless I'm missing something. (scratches head)
Yeah, I'd buy that, at the low end of the market. Medium-sized CRT monitors in the competent-but-not-stellar range are pretty cheap these days, while you won't find an LCD of acceptable (IMHO) quality for less than $600-$700 retail.
If I had $400 to spend, it's entirely possible I'd go the CRT route. At $800? No way on Earth.
Huh? What? For most people its the best choice? Paying two, three, four times as much as a CRT is the best choice for "most people" ? I know you can't specifically be speaking about the quality of the monitor either.
I don't think those price ratios are realistic in today's market. The best CRT I've used was the 21" Hitachi SuperScan Supreme, which cost me about $2300 circa 1995. I flew to Comdex that year specifically to find the best monitor on the market, price no object, and the Hitachi ended up on top.
The best LCD I've used is the $800 Samsung 213T on my desk now. You can spend more for a bigger display, but it won't offer higher visual quality, just more pixels.
I haven't priced high-end 21" CRT monitors for several years, but I would be utterly amazed if an $800 21" CRT is anything but junk. They don't have the economies of scale they once enjoyed, and CRT foundries have been going the way of buggy-whip factories for several years now.
You do realize that CRT monitors have anti-glare coatings (or something) nowadays, correct?
Yep. They do a good job on specular reflections (as do the outer layers of an LCD), but they do nothing for diffuse light. Gray still looks gray.
Slashdot Mirror
As in no business use, no promoting of business use (such as surfing to a web page with an ad on it) or checking out the latest at Newegg, etc.
Those rules have been significantly relaxed in the past few years, mostly in response to repeater users ordering pizzas and whatnot. You would not be able to run your own wireless ISP under Part 97, but that's about the only way I can think of to get into trouble at this point.
really? i have been considering getting a ham license but i thought amateur radio only allowed analog voice transmissions.
Not at all; there are a lot people doing digital work in many different modes from Morse code to PSK to COFDM.
To use the Amateur bands from VHF through microwave, you don't need to jump though the Morse code testing hoop (unless you just want to.)
If you google "Microwave Update", you'll get a lot of hits on the ham radio sub-community involved in UHF/microwave communications, which overlaps heavily with the digital and weak-signal guys.
You're right: jurisdiction is everything, and the Feds ownz0r it.
For all practical purposes, the Interstate Commerce Clause has been moot for significantly longer than 1934. The last nail in its coffin was driven in by the Supreme Court in Wickard v. Filburn, 1942. From http://www.fff.org/freedom/0895g.asp:So, yeah, pull up a chair underneath that JD degree hanging on your mantelpiece and tell us all about "jurisdiction."
How is your pringles can use COMMERCE? How is it INTERTSTATE?
1865 called. They want their legal argument back.
That's the amazing thing... Maya works now over the free terminal-services client you can download from MS, the one that'll connect any Win98+ box to any WinXP+ box.
It works, but it's godawful.
With 1/10 the latency and 10x the bandwidth, it wouldn't be godawful anymore -- it would just suck.
With 1/10 the latency and 100x the bandwidth, it wouldn't even suck. You probably would never realize it wasn't running on your local machine.
Imagine trying to play Quake on a remote system.
That's pretty much how it works now. When you play a network game, you might as well be running on an OpenGL-tweaked X terminal.
Client-side prediction is helpful for a good experience in the general case, but it's far from necessary on most broadband connections today, and it won't be necessary at all in the future.
No matter how much bandwidth you've got, the game just won't run right with 1/3 second lag. Then, also assume that your "real computer" has to talk to another server. It'll be like playing in mud.
No, it won't be substantially different from the way it works now on a non-client-side-predicted client like the original Q1. You don't see the effect of moving your mouse or hitting a key until it goes to the server and back. All that will change is where the resulting graphical view is rendered. There is no inherent reason why the gameplay experience should feel any different, as long as you have enough downstream bandwidth to accomodate a video stream.
I'm not claiming any obvious gameplay advantages in a scheme like this, just pointing out that there's no reason why it wouldn't work. (Certainly it would eliminate cheating, since no geometry would ever exist on the client....) There are some interesting business aspects to the idea, such as the fact that instead of buying a $400 GeForce 68000 card or whatever, you're basically renting time on a real-time render farm somewhere.
VNC and X are fine locally, but laggy remotely; and the lag is pretty constant from 56k dialup to 100mbit lan...
Sure, in their current incarnations. This a pie-in-the-sky kind of prediction to begin with... we are multiple decades away from widespread, economical 100-megabit access. Almost nothing will look or work like it does now. My point was, the change is going to be a bigger one than just the usual "more games/movies/pr0n" commenters were suggesting.
I never bought into any of that "the network is the computer" bull-hockey myself until the first time I failed to notice I was typing on my machine at the office. At that point it was obvious that we're only a couple of orders of bandwidth-magnitude away from not caring where our apps live.
What are ordinary people going to do with 100Mpbs next year that they have such a difficulty doing now?
.PST files). Even things like streaming video almost work.
Actually, ubiquitous speeds on the order of 100 Mbps will change everything.
Right now, with a one-megabit DSL connection, it's possible for me to use a Terminal Services client at home to run basic apps like Outlook and Perforce on my machine at the office. It's slow, clunky, and not especially pleasant, but it works, and it beats the hell out of juggling multiple email clients (and
At 10 megabits/second, this process will still be slow, but not all that clunky, and a lot less unpleasant. More apps will live on my machine at work, without having to be duplicated at home.
At 100 megabits/second and up, the distinction between remote computing and local computing will disappear entirely for most users. Software and services subscription models for commercial applications will actually make sense for PC users for the first time. The client operating system -- be it Windows, Linux, MacOS, what-have-you -- will shrink to almost zero-importance.
And Microsoft will either be bankrupt or they'll own the inner planets, depending on whether the entire company goes down with the sinking Windows/Office ship.
Since the entire Internet will be one huge client-server network at that point, worms, viruses, and malware won't be a concern for most users. Monopolization will be. Whose machine is going to run and maintain 99% of your applications? If you think you're married to your software vendor now, you haven't even met her daddy yet.
Hah! That would be like trying to pull a mind trick on Yoda. It would go more like:
Intel: [waves hand] You will switch to Intel.
Jobs: [waves both hands, accompanied by a faint hum and the smell of ozone] Your chips suck ass. You will pay me $50 for every Mac that ships with one.
Intel: [trembles] Er, how about if we pay you, say, $50 for every one you ship?
Jobs: [nods benignly] That is acceptable.
Either the parent has no clue what he is talking about (Texas Instruments) ... so let's give credit when credit is due, and stop these random bashings that just make you look like a clueless fool.
I apologize; my information was indeed correct at one time, but it is currently twelve years out of date. (See page 7, as well as footnote n25 referencing Texas Instruments's $250 Million-A-Year Profit Making Center, The American Lawyer, March 1992.)
I do not have current knowledge of TI's relative earnings from its law department(s) versus sales of tangible products, nor do I have time at the moment to dig it up, so at the risk of looking like a "clueless fool" I'll admit my statement was (potentially) out of date.
Nowadays he'd be fired for using company resources to do side projects that management had already disapproved.
The most famous American tech companies used to be pretty good about this sort of thing. I bought a Tektronix employee handbook from the late Fifties on eBay awhile back, and it's a jaw-droppingly enlightened piece of work. Read it, and you'll wish you owned a time machine and a bus ticket to Portland, Oregon.
People speak in hushed tones about Google's "spend one day per week on your personal project" policy as if it's a radical innovation. They're like, who are those guys, a bunch of Communists?
Now... imagine how radical it sounded in the 1950s when Tektronix actually gave their engineers the key to the company storeroom on the weekends and a polite request, conveyed in the employee handbook, not to abuse the privilege.
The famous "HP Way", originating 30 or 40 years before Carly showed up, was another expression of the same idea: give your employees enough rope and they'll pull your company in directions you never would have imagined.
Nowadays, Hewlett-Packard sells ink for a living, Texas Instruments earns more from its legal department than from its engineering department, and policies like Google's sound like something from a Star Trek script. It seems that the best we can hope for is that the American technology industry as a whole relearns what it knew fifty years ago.
But my actual point stands... the Christian Church and the Moslems owe us just as great a debt for what they saved of the ancients' wisdom as they are responsible for what they destroyed.
Yeah, it's kind of interesting to see how the different political and philosophical standard-bearers blamed their own personal enemies for the destruction of the Library.
I was about to post something snippy to the effect of, "Fine, whatever, atheists don't burn libraries," but then remembered the Soviets, who didn't just burn their libraries but went door-to-door hunting down the librarians.
People who suck will do so regardless of religion or lack thereof.
The Library of Alexandria was burned down by the Romans.
The Library of Alexandria was torched by Moslems under the command of Caliph Omar. His reasoning was, "To the extent knowledge is necessary, it is in the holy Quran. To the extent it is not necessary, it is blasphemy."
Romans?!?? Sheesh. You must be taking faith-based history, or something.
Fair enough, with the Iraq war there was a bit of the if you disagree with me you are a traitor and should be jailed mentality.
That is a perfect example of the point being made. You can say just about anything here, no matter how loony or (in this case) unpatriotic. You might be called a traitor for speaking out against the war, but you will not be prosecuted as one.
This is not an example of suppression of distasteful speech; it's an example of its exercise.
That said, the objections to BPL would carry more weight if they weren't traceable to amateur radio sources. I have seen next to nothing objecting to it on the basis of interference from other sources.
Well, who else uses the HF spectrum these days? Everybody but the hams have moved to satellite.
Now if we could get Family Radio and a few of the other Christian shortwave broadcasters to petition the White House, I'd expect that would do the trick. BPL would be gone tomorrow, based on the Bush Administration's record of asking the Jesus freaks, "How high?"
But those broadcasters aren't targeting the US, so they, along with other users of the HF spectrum, don't care much about BPL one way or the other.
The only valuable asset that power companies own with respect to broadband Internet service are rights-of-way, not transmission lines. If they had spent half the money running fiber between their existing towers and poles that they've spent pushing the technical idiocy that is BPL, they'd have... well, OK, they'd still need to spend a lot more money.
It is expensive to provide high-quality, robust Internet service. The physical transmission medium is about the least important/interesting part of it. Wiping out big chunks of HF spectrum with limited-speed BPL infrastructure is just plain dumb by any rational measure, with or without bellyaching and interference from ham operators. (What? Ten years have gone by, and now the power companies need to offer more than a megabit or so of bandwidth to compete with the telcos and cable operators? Gee, I guess you should have run fiber when you had the chance, huh?)
BPL is one of the dumber ideas from the Powell regime, and I frankly wouldn't expect it to survive much additional scrutiny.
Cool, the PS3 supports 1080p... the obvious irony being that only Bill Gates can afford an HDTV display device that can handle 1080p.
How does sexual-orientational diversity help a software company to produce better software?
Gee, I don't know. Do you think maybe we'd have seen some more interesting work from Alan Turing if he hadn't been driven to suicide by a homophobic government?
A healthy society cannot afford to waste its intellectual resources in this manner. Turing's case is a good example of how discrimination harms everybody, even those of us who aren't members of the targeted community or subculture.
How does one get a job at the USTPO?
It's tricky, from what I've heard. You need to demonstrate basic competence at oxidative phosphorylation.
Actually, now that you mention it, I think the ALMA guys at NRAO are working in the 1 THz neighborhood with SIS (superconductor-insulator-superconductor) mixers.
Google returns all kinds of interesting-sounding papers for "SIS mixer". I can hardly wait for these puppies to hit eBay.
Spectrum analyzers could "see" up to 325 GHz directly in the early Eighties. So I'd guess that newer and better waveguide mixers are available now. A Tek 2782 or 2784 analyzer could theoretically display a harmonically-downmixed signal 1.2 THz, although I have no idea how you were supposed to acquire the signal in the first place.
You may not be able to see a single one-picosecond pulse in the time domain, but if you fire off a bunch of them in succession, you can build a picture of the waveform with repetitive sampling techniques. Technology was available in the 1960s to perform repetitive sampling in the 20-picosecond regime, so someone like Tek or Agilent or Picosecond Pulse Labs may have a sampling gate that can do the job.
I would recommend surfing around at PPL's site if you're seriously interested in this stuff. There may also be some photonic tech involved in the measurement; I haven't RTFA yet.
Looking at the stats, the Samsung 213T looks like a very nice LCD monitor. Still only a 500:1 contrast ratio (versus several thousand for a good CRT, and I have no idea how much the lighting argument can really play into this).
I'd suggest going by Fry's or CompUSA and taking a look at one to see what you think, but unfortunately, retail stores usually use analog connections through distribution boxes that look just plain awful, and their lighting conditions are nothing like what anyone would have in their home or office. If you have a chance, look at a 213T with a DVI connection sometime.
It will also only do 1600x1200, and only 16.7M colors? That seems odd to me. Is that 24bit color?
Yeah, you don't want to run an LCD at any resolution other than its native pixel-array size. Otherwise it has to resample the video signal, which looks terrible at best. Naturally, manufacturers don't tell people this. As far as I know, LCDs are indeed limited to 8 bits per RGB component per pixel.
A 22" diagonal 4x3 monitor with 0.24mm dot pitch probably works out to a shadow-mask resolution of 1600x1200. It may accept higher-resolution signals, but the shadow mask or aperture grille is the real limiting factor. Then there's the inevitable image degradation you get from running such a high-bandwidth analog signal through a multiconductor cable.
That Viewsonic does look like a great solution for a low-light work environment. I'm surprised they're that cheap. It doesn't make sense for large CRTs to have come down that far in price, unless I'm missing something. (scratches head)
Yeah, I'd buy that, at the low end of the market. Medium-sized CRT monitors in the competent-but-not-stellar range are pretty cheap these days, while you won't find an LCD of acceptable (IMHO) quality for less than $600-$700 retail.
If I had $400 to spend, it's entirely possible I'd go the CRT route. At $800? No way on Earth.
Huh? What? For most people its the best choice? Paying two, three, four times as much as a CRT is the best choice for "most people" ? I know you can't specifically be speaking about the quality of the monitor either.
I don't think those price ratios are realistic in today's market. The best CRT I've used was the 21" Hitachi SuperScan Supreme, which cost me about $2300 circa 1995. I flew to Comdex that year specifically to find the best monitor on the market, price no object, and the Hitachi ended up on top.
The best LCD I've used is the $800 Samsung 213T on my desk now. You can spend more for a bigger display, but it won't offer higher visual quality, just more pixels.
I haven't priced high-end 21" CRT monitors for several years, but I would be utterly amazed if an $800 21" CRT is anything but junk. They don't have the economies of scale they once enjoyed, and CRT foundries have been going the way of buggy-whip factories for several years now.
You do realize that CRT monitors have anti-glare coatings (or something) nowadays, correct?
Yep. They do a good job on specular reflections (as do the outer layers of an LCD), but they do nothing for diffuse light. Gray still looks gray.