Yes, the I in (U)EFI stands for "interface", but this does *not* refer to a "user interface" but to a "software interface", like in API. The big deal about UEFI is *not* that MSI is going to replace the text-and-keyboard-based BIOS setup program with a GUI - proprietary vendors like Compaq have done this before as early as the 486 era (and then there was the AMI WinBios). The big deal is that the BIOS (note "BIOS" != "BIOS setup program") will be extended into something that has the potential to greatly facilitate the life of people who write kernels and drivers (i was going to say "kernel and driver hackers" but I'm not even sure that this crowd will understand hacker != cracker). From an (optimistic) user perspective, we might see less issues with buggy drivers and more cross-platform software in the future. Quoting from Wikipedia: --- UEFI firmware provides several technical advantages:
* Compatibility with operating systems that support only BIOS
* Ability to boot from large disks
* CPU-independent architecture
* CPU-independent drivers
* Flexible pre-OS environment
* Modular design --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UEFI also see: http://www.uefi.org/about/
Just like parent, I can 't believe that I have to explain all this on./ I officially proclaim this place dead. RIP.
Well, some people like to browse many sites at the same time. In the pre-firefox days, I used to have a gazillion windows open, which made it really annoying to switch to another task. When firefox came out with it's tabbed browsing, I felt it was the best thing since sliced bread.
Now, disabling tabbed browser would bring me back to the bad old days of multiple open windows. However, the exploit would still work as advertised, only with windows instead of tabs. In this respect, "tabnabbing" is a bit of a misnomer, one could argue it should be "window nabbing". I guess this shows how popular tabbed browsing is.
This was true... 20 or 30 years ago. Advances in cancer treatment made it possible to keep an ever larger percentage of cancer patients alive for ever longer. At the same time, cost of treatment became ever higher. At a certain point, it started to cost society more to treat them than to just give them a pension for the rest of their lifespan. That's when anti-smoking campaigns started popping up everywhere.
Right now, something similar is happening with heart disease and diabetes. Expect health insurance companies in the US and governments in the rest of the world to start campaigning against unhealthy food and lifestyle that promotes obesity some time in the next decade.
Pretty much the same thing here. We have 16 workstations and 7 servers in our lab, all of it running Linux. Oh, we do have 1 Windows PC and 1 Mac too. They are sitting idle most of the time, being used only if somehow wants to try out some mac-only program or access an IE-only website (which is getting increasingly rare). Making someone use Windows as their primary operating system for doing science would be like requiring them to ride a bicycle with one leg and both arms bound. Max OSX is better, but still barely adequate.
One might argue the Linux is a niche OS, but even it that were true, science *is* one of Linux's niches!
Yes indeed, Germany doesn't use common law. Why should they? Common law is only used in a few countries, and hasn't proven superior to civil law. Under common law, a few corrupt judges (not elected by the people) can make something silly into law. Under civil law, politicians (elected) have to vote it into law. (Granted, that might not make things better in a plutocracy such as the USA, but there are democracies in Europe that aren't that much hollowed out yet.(*)) The difference between common law and civil law is very important in this debate. I feel the OP is overreacting - the political fight against European software patents is far from over.
Modeling neurons inside the computer is how people have been doing it until now. And while it has made steady progress, it hasn't proven terribly successful; since the advent of the computer age, these AIs have evolved from being equivalent to a flatworm to being equivalent to a guppy (and I'm being optimistic here). Trying to model a massively parallel process inside a serial computer is not terribly advantageous - scientific computations such as CFD (computational fluid dynamics) and MD (molecular dynamics) are plagued by the same limit. What we really need for these kind of processes is a computer made out of very simple, small and fast elements that do exactly the task you want them to do and that are all connected. There have been steps in this direction (earth simulator, GPU computing,...) but I feel the current approach can easily trump them all - at least for the purpose of creating AI. Scientific calculations will be another ball game, because there, the desired properties of the system are very rigidly defined.
This is not to say there is no room for classical computers - some problems are inherently discreet and serial, and there, our serial processors rule. At least until quantum computing becomes more mature;)
The article ends with "Interestingly, though, only one company has the technology and IP needed to integrate a highly parallel GPU into a CPU... and that’s AMD." Although I like AMD and would surely like to see them getting a revolutionary "fusion" product out before anyone else, one has to ask whether the authors have looked under the hood of Intel's Clarkdale and Arrandale core i5... This shows Intel's rapidly catching up, and a neck-to-neck race may arise between their Sandy Bridge and AMD's Bulldozer. Not to mention the stubborn rumors that Nvidia's itself is developing x86 technology...
Reading the New York Times column as reproduced on recombu.com, it seems that Mr. Tesla was more interested in the wireless transmission of power, and that he saw the wireless transmission of speech, pictures and other data as a trivial side-effect. His article implicitly seem to address the question: how to give a handheld device enough power so that it can transmit radio signals that have a practical range, and his answer is wirelessly transmitted power. This is somewhat ironic because his obsession with wireless power transmission is what caused friction with his financiers and made him be in debt for most of his later life. His wireless power transmission plans were never realized in a practical way; nowadays, people would find them laughable because they would incur enormous transmission losses and there would be concerns about the health effect of having ultra-high-intensity radio waves all over the place. And even without the technical hurdles, it would be hard to force people to pay for the power they use... Powering handheld communication devices was ultimately made possible possible by advances in battery technology, energy-efficient electronics, and sensitive receiving stations placed at a very high geographic density (aka. cellular networks), reducing the powered needed to transmit signals. That said, there are some contemporary applications of wireless transmission of power, but most of them are low-power short-range, or use different technologies than the ones proposed by Tesla. The most interesting ones are devices that dissipate stray radio waves to prolong their own battery life; I believe Nokia has been toying with this technology. Tesla did predict something in those lines, although he envisaged using natural sources of radio waves.
Of course, the incorrect parts of Tesla's prediction doesn't make the correct part any less impressive.
Looks like almost nobody here read the last 3 paragraphs. Too bad - they appear to be the most interesting.
Even so, I feel Dr. Miller is a bit too extreme in his view - one doesn't need to be a luddite to resist the self-indulgence pitfalls of modern society. Hard drugs such as cocaine an heroine (not to mention alcohol) short-circuit the brain's reward system in a much more brutal and direct way that video games and porn. These have been around for more that 100 years. Did they cause socio-economic problems when first introduced? Sure. Have they led to collapsing societies? Not quite. What we're seeing now is a plague of young people ruining their chance of a good jobs by playing MMORPGs all day. While this causes many personal tragedies, the good jobs still get filled in by those that are not addicted, and society still rumbles on. Same on a bigger scale: there are still people not working in the entertainment industry, there are still people pushing ahead science and technology...
I think in the (not-so-)long term, addictive video games will get a similar status as porn and alcohol: restricted to adults, and over-indulgence would be highly frowned upon. A certain percentage of the population will fall for them, a certain percentage will abstain from them, and the vast majority will suffer mild loss of productivity because of them (and have fun doing so).
Actually, you might be wrong about that. Quenching of a superconducting magnet starts when a small volume in the superconductor (let's say 1 cubic nanometer) becomes normally conducting (ie. has a resistance >0). Because of the enormous current in the magnet, the part with resistance > 0 will produce lots of heat, heating surrounding matter above superconducting temperature. Thus, the "resistant" domain will grow exponentially. In the end, the enormous amount of energy caught in the magnet is released as heat in less than a second. This makes all the coolant around the magnet boil off, resulting in a tremendous overpressure, which can do quite a lot of damage and could even cause nearby magnets to quench. This is how the LHC went down a year ago.
Now my point is, the amount of energy needed to heat 1 cubic nanometer of matter from 1.9K to 10K is very, very small. It's sufficiently large to not be triggered by common events such as alpha decay or the types of cosmic rays that might make it through the atmosphere, but it it may easily be smaller than the energy needed for what you're proposing.
Not that I want to defend this theory. Even if it would be true, there's nothing to worry about. If the Higgs boson really triggers events back in time that prevent it from forming, then these events will keep on occurring; it would be a very twisted universe to make one attempt to stop the LHC from coming online, then give up and watch itself get destroyed.
Umm, let's see. As everyone owning a swimming pool can attest (as well as oceanographers studying algae bloom), algae can proliferate in a matter of days. The only thing they need is seawater and a bit of light (filtered light through a layer of clouds would do nicely). Basically, what this says is that sunlight was blocked to an extent that it strongly influenced algae growth for about a century. Geologists may call this a swift abrupt blow, but I wonder how humanity would fare in a 100-year impact winter. There would be few plants left to eat, leave alone to feed livestock. And I'd be surprised if other aspects of the ecosystem recovered as rapidly as the algea's minimal requirements.
No big deal. the design of the Hiroshima bomb (a uranium-based gun-type device) was so simple and foolproof that it wasn't even tested before dropping (the Trinity test was a plutonium based implosion-type device). One problem with gun-type devices is that they're too heavy to fit on a ballistic missile, except if you're talking about unusually large ballistic missiles, like the retired Titan II and Peacekeeper missiles, or some of Russia's larger ICBMs. Another problem with gun-type devices is that you can't use plutonium for them, and that you need such a big mass of uranium that a country like Iran would be restricted to producing only a 1 or 2 warheads per year.
Makes me think that they're talking about data for building implosion-type devices.
There's much more money at stake in the field of preserving organs for transplantation than in the field of freezing a few nut jobs with way too much money on their hands and an over-inflated ego. I were a scientists in the year 2300, I would think twice before spending the effort to revive someone foolish enough to have themselves frozen with early 21st-century technology, and to believe that the company that did so would be *that* far ahead of mainstream science.
Gotta love the US of A. Some countries have infrastructure damaged by their own citizens that are communist militants, or islamic militants, or ethnic separatists... Here, the Revolutionary Crackpot Army destroys nearly-obsolete means of communication. That's just surreal! And then people don't understand why I think that America has gone a tiny bit out of touch with reality.
Also, the claims that AM waves are harmful is, what, 80 years old? This has been debunked before these Revolutionary Crackpots were even born. Plus AM is at the lowest-energy end of the radio spectrum; if there's anything to worry about at all, it would be the microwave radiation that drives cell phone communications. I really wonder whether the people who toppled that tower own any cell phones, and what their opinion is on financially sponsoring corporations that dot the landscape with powerful microwave sources.
Lucky that I don't believe people cell phone towers expose people to harmful radiation levels because I'm living right next to onargggggglllll#@$%)^*&
You must be having some hardware compatibility issues. I dual boot Windows XP with an out-of-the-box Ubuntu Hardy installation (newer versions are said to have even better power management), and my battery life under Linux is on par with or better than under Windows XP. Measured battery life, that is, not the overly-optimistic estimate by windows' MIBL (Meaningless Indicator of Battery Life).
The only thing I changed in Linux is disabling the desktop effects but that's only fair; windows XP doesn't have them, and enabling them in Vista when running on battery is said to drain the battery in no time. Oh yeah, I've always been using the proprietary video drivers (in my case ATI); there are conflicting reports on whether this is good or bad for battery life.
Mod parent "citation needed"! A well-trained cursive writer easily beats someone well-trained at writing in print. It's almost like having a speed race with one of the contestants riding a bicycle while the other one has to run.
You guys are comparing apples and oranges. Even at the highest supported resolution, a logical pixel would consist of several RGB triads on a CRT monitor. Hell, the vast majority of CRT monitors would use a shadow mask, having their dots arranged in a honeycomb pattern and thereby making it impossible to use one RGB triplet per logical pixel! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cathode_ray_tube
In contrast, on LCD monitors, every pixel is exactly one RGB triad. That's why you have to set your video card at the "native resolution" of your LCD screen (or suffer digital resampling artefacts), while on a CRT screen, you could choose whichever resolution you'd like best. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thin_film_transistor_liquid_crystal_display
Slashdot Mirror
And of course, courtesy!
Too bad to see your noble efforts go to waste. They probably changed e-mail address by now.
Yeah! Down with the enviroment!
Mod parent up. Please!
Yes, the I in (U)EFI stands for "interface", but this does *not* refer to a "user interface" but to a "software interface", like in API. The big deal about UEFI is *not* that MSI is going to replace the text-and-keyboard-based BIOS setup program with a GUI - proprietary vendors like Compaq have done this before as early as the 486 era (and then there was the AMI WinBios). The big deal is that the BIOS (note "BIOS" != "BIOS setup program") will be extended into something that has the potential to greatly facilitate the life of people who write kernels and drivers (i was going to say "kernel and driver hackers" but I'm not even sure that this crowd will understand hacker != cracker). From an (optimistic) user perspective, we might see less issues with buggy drivers and more cross-platform software in the future. Quoting from Wikipedia:
---
UEFI firmware provides several technical advantages:
* Compatibility with operating systems that support only BIOS
* Ability to boot from large disks
* CPU-independent architecture
* CPU-independent drivers
* Flexible pre-OS environment
* Modular design
---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UEFI
also see: http://www.uefi.org/about/
Just like parent, I can 't believe that I have to explain all this on ./
I officially proclaim this place dead. RIP.
Well, some people like to browse many sites at the same time. In the pre-firefox days, I used to have a gazillion windows open, which made it really annoying to switch to another task. When firefox came out with it's tabbed browsing, I felt it was the best thing since sliced bread.
Now, disabling tabbed browser would bring me back to the bad old days of multiple open windows. However, the exploit would still work as advertised, only with windows instead of tabs. In this respect, "tabnabbing" is a bit of a misnomer, one could argue it should be "window nabbing". I guess this shows how popular tabbed browsing is.
This was true... 20 or 30 years ago. Advances in cancer treatment made it possible to keep an ever larger percentage of cancer patients alive for ever longer. At the same time, cost of treatment became ever higher. At a certain point, it started to cost society more to treat them than to just give them a pension for the rest of their lifespan. That's when anti-smoking campaigns started popping up everywhere.
Right now, something similar is happening with heart disease and diabetes. Expect health insurance companies in the US and governments in the rest of the world to start campaigning against unhealthy food and lifestyle that promotes obesity some time in the next decade.
Pretty much the same thing here. We have 16 workstations and 7 servers in our lab, all of it running Linux. Oh, we do have 1 Windows PC and 1 Mac too. They are sitting idle most of the time, being used only if somehow wants to try out some mac-only program or access an IE-only website (which is getting increasingly rare). Making someone use Windows as their primary operating system for doing science would be like requiring them to ride a bicycle with one leg and both arms bound. Max OSX is better, but still barely adequate.
One might argue the Linux is a niche OS, but even it that were true, science *is* one of Linux's niches!
Yes indeed, Germany doesn't use common law. Why should they? Common law is only used in a few countries, and hasn't proven superior to civil law. Under common law, a few corrupt judges (not elected by the people) can make something silly into law. Under civil law, politicians (elected) have to vote it into law. (Granted, that might not make things better in a plutocracy such as the USA, but there are democracies in Europe that aren't that much hollowed out yet.(*)) The difference between common law and civil law is very important in this debate. I feel the OP is overreacting - the political fight against European software patents is far from over.
(*)Here's links to the infamous Citigroup plutonomy memos. While extremely cynical, they're mostly right: some countries are ruled by whoever has the money to finance political campaigns and influence the media, and these countries will do anything that is in favor of big companies, not necessarily in the interest of the people. Not all countries are like that.
http://www.scribd.com/doc/6674234/Citigroup-Oct-16-2005-Plutonomy-Report-Part-1
http://www.scribd.com/doc/6674229/Citigroup-Mar-5-2006-Plutonomy-Report-Part-2
Modeling neurons inside the computer is how people have been doing it until now. And while it has made steady progress, it hasn't proven terribly successful; since the advent of the computer age, these AIs have evolved from being equivalent to a flatworm to being equivalent to a guppy (and I'm being optimistic here). Trying to model a massively parallel process inside a serial computer is not terribly advantageous - scientific computations such as CFD (computational fluid dynamics) and MD (molecular dynamics) are plagued by the same limit. What we really need for these kind of processes is a computer made out of very simple, small and fast elements that do exactly the task you want them to do and that are all connected. There have been steps in this direction (earth simulator, GPU computing,...) but I feel the current approach can easily trump them all - at least for the purpose of creating AI. Scientific calculations will be another ball game, because there, the desired properties of the system are very rigidly defined.
This is not to say there is no room for classical computers - some problems are inherently discreet and serial, and there, our serial processors rule. At least until quantum computing becomes more mature ;)
The article ends with "Interestingly, though, only one company has the technology and IP needed to integrate a highly parallel GPU into a CPU... and that’s AMD." Although I like AMD and would surely like to see them getting a revolutionary "fusion" product out before anyone else, one has to ask whether the authors have looked under the hood of Intel's Clarkdale and Arrandale core i5... This shows Intel's rapidly catching up, and a neck-to-neck race may arise between their Sandy Bridge and AMD's Bulldozer. Not to mention the stubborn rumors that Nvidia's itself is developing x86 technology...
Here's some background for those of us that have been living in a cave:
http://www.brightsideofnews.com/news/2009/4/15/amds-next-gen-bulldozer-is-a-128-bit-crunching-monster.aspx
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/future-3d-graphics,2560-9.html
Reading the New York Times column as reproduced on recombu.com, it seems that Mr. Tesla was more interested in the wireless transmission of power, and that he saw the wireless transmission of speech, pictures and other data as a trivial side-effect. His article implicitly seem to address the question: how to give a handheld device enough power so that it can transmit radio signals that have a practical range, and his answer is wirelessly transmitted power. This is somewhat ironic because his obsession with wireless power transmission is what caused friction with his financiers and made him be in debt for most of his later life. His wireless power transmission plans were never realized in a practical way; nowadays, people would find them laughable because they would incur enormous transmission losses and there would be concerns about the health effect of having ultra-high-intensity radio waves all over the place. And even without the technical hurdles, it would be hard to force people to pay for the power they use... Powering handheld communication devices was ultimately made possible possible by advances in battery technology, energy-efficient electronics, and sensitive receiving stations placed at a very high geographic density (aka. cellular networks), reducing the powered needed to transmit signals. That said, there are some contemporary applications of wireless transmission of power, but most of them are low-power short-range, or use different technologies than the ones proposed by Tesla. The most interesting ones are devices that dissipate stray radio waves to prolong their own battery life; I believe Nokia has been toying with this technology. Tesla did predict something in those lines, although he envisaged using natural sources of radio waves.
Of course, the incorrect parts of Tesla's prediction doesn't make the correct part any less impressive.
There, fixed that for you.
They've started working on it more than 12 years ago
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_ignition_facility
and it has made frequent appearances in all kinds of media ever since (see references in wikipedia article).
Looks like almost nobody here read the last 3 paragraphs. Too bad - they appear to be the most interesting.
Even so, I feel Dr. Miller is a bit too extreme in his view - one doesn't need to be a luddite to resist the self-indulgence pitfalls of modern society. Hard drugs such as cocaine an heroine (not to mention alcohol) short-circuit the brain's reward system in a much more brutal and direct way that video games and porn. These have been around for more that 100 years. Did they cause socio-economic problems when first introduced? Sure. Have they led to collapsing societies? Not quite. What we're seeing now is a plague of young people ruining their chance of a good jobs by playing MMORPGs all day. While this causes many personal tragedies, the good jobs still get filled in by those that are not addicted, and society still rumbles on. Same on a bigger scale: there are still people not working in the entertainment industry, there are still people pushing ahead science and technology...
I think in the (not-so-)long term, addictive video games will get a similar status as porn and alcohol: restricted to adults, and over-indulgence would be highly frowned upon. A certain percentage of the population will fall for them, a certain percentage will abstain from them, and the vast majority will suffer mild loss of productivity because of them (and have fun doing so).
Actually, you might be wrong about that. Quenching of a superconducting magnet starts when a small volume in the superconductor (let's say 1 cubic nanometer) becomes normally conducting (ie. has a resistance >0). Because of the enormous current in the magnet, the part with resistance > 0 will produce lots of heat, heating surrounding matter above superconducting temperature. Thus, the "resistant" domain will grow exponentially. In the end, the enormous amount of energy caught in the magnet is released as heat in less than a second. This makes all the coolant around the magnet boil off, resulting in a tremendous overpressure, which can do quite a lot of damage and could even cause nearby magnets to quench. This is how the LHC went down a year ago.
Now my point is, the amount of energy needed to heat 1 cubic nanometer of matter from 1.9K to 10K is very, very small. It's sufficiently large to not be triggered by common events such as alpha decay or the types of cosmic rays that might make it through the atmosphere, but it it may easily be smaller than the energy needed for what you're proposing.
Not that I want to defend this theory. Even if it would be true, there's nothing to worry about. If the Higgs boson really triggers events back in time that prevent it from forming, then these events will keep on occurring; it would be a very twisted universe to make one attempt to stop the LHC from coming online, then give up and watch itself get destroyed.
Nice one, cryfreedomlove.
Umm, let's see. As everyone owning a swimming pool can attest (as well as oceanographers studying algae bloom), algae can proliferate in a matter of days. The only thing they need is seawater and a bit of light (filtered light through a layer of clouds would do nicely). Basically, what this says is that sunlight was blocked to an extent that it strongly influenced algae growth for about a century. Geologists may call this a swift abrupt blow, but I wonder how humanity would fare in a 100-year impact winter. There would be few plants left to eat, leave alone to feed livestock. And I'd be surprised if other aspects of the ecosystem recovered as rapidly as the algea's minimal requirements.
No big deal. the design of the Hiroshima bomb (a uranium-based gun-type device) was so simple and foolproof that it wasn't even tested before dropping (the Trinity test was a plutonium based implosion-type device). One problem with gun-type devices is that they're too heavy to fit on a ballistic missile, except if you're talking about unusually large ballistic missiles, like the retired Titan II and Peacekeeper missiles, or some of Russia's larger ICBMs. Another problem with gun-type devices is that you can't use plutonium for them, and that you need such a big mass of uranium that a country like Iran would be restricted to producing only a 1 or 2 warheads per year.
Makes me think that they're talking about data for building implosion-type devices.
Can't wait till they also try to implement "street view" indoors oo===|:-)
Funny and insightful at the same time
Yes, it's extremely unlikely that there will be no frost damage. Modern science only now starts to venture timidly into the realm of freezing small organs that are much simpler than the brain, thawing and transplanting them.
http://www.landesbioscience.com/curie/chapter/4347/
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-1038859/How-deep-frozen-organs-spell-end-transplant-waiting-lists.html
There's much more money at stake in the field of preserving organs for transplantation than in the field of freezing a few nut jobs with way too much money on their hands and an over-inflated ego. I were a scientists in the year 2300, I would think twice before spending the effort to revive someone foolish enough to have themselves frozen with early 21st-century technology, and to believe that the company that did so would be *that* far ahead of mainstream science.
Let me fix that for you: "An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind."
Gotta love the US of A. Some countries have infrastructure damaged by their own citizens that are communist militants, or islamic militants, or ethnic separatists...
Here, the Revolutionary Crackpot Army destroys nearly-obsolete means of communication. That's just surreal! And then people don't understand why I think that America has gone a tiny bit out of touch with reality.
Also, the claims that AM waves are harmful is, what, 80 years old? This has been debunked before these Revolutionary Crackpots were even born. Plus AM is at the lowest-energy end of the radio spectrum; if there's anything to worry about at all, it would be the microwave radiation that drives cell phone communications. I really wonder whether the people who toppled that tower own any cell phones, and what their opinion is on financially sponsoring corporations that dot the landscape with powerful microwave sources.
Lucky that I don't believe people cell phone towers expose people to harmful radiation levels because I'm living right next to onargggggglllll#@$%)^*&
You must be having some hardware compatibility issues. I dual boot Windows XP with an out-of-the-box Ubuntu Hardy installation (newer versions are said to have even better power management), and my battery life under Linux is on par with or better than under Windows XP. Measured battery life, that is, not the overly-optimistic estimate by windows' MIBL (Meaningless Indicator of Battery Life).
The only thing I changed in Linux is disabling the desktop effects but that's only fair; windows XP doesn't have them, and enabling them in Vista when running on battery is said to drain the battery in no time. Oh yeah, I've always been using the proprietary video drivers (in my case ATI); there are conflicting reports on whether this is good or bad for battery life.
Mod parent "citation needed"! A well-trained cursive writer easily beats someone well-trained at writing in print. It's almost like having a speed race with one of the contestants riding a bicycle while the other one has to run.
You guys are comparing apples and oranges. Even at the highest supported resolution, a logical pixel would consist of several RGB triads on a CRT monitor. Hell, the vast majority of CRT monitors would use a shadow mask, having their dots arranged in a honeycomb pattern and thereby making it impossible to use one RGB triplet per logical pixel!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cathode_ray_tube
In contrast, on LCD monitors, every pixel is exactly one RGB triad. That's why you have to set your video card at the "native resolution" of your LCD screen (or suffer digital resampling artefacts), while on a CRT screen, you could choose whichever resolution you'd like best.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thin_film_transistor_liquid_crystal_display
The battle between the Core and the Arm is about to begin! Finally I can put my stock of tins of baked beans to use!