"Am I willing to pay for commercial software in linux? No less than I am willing to pay for commercial software ontop of other OSes. Am i willing to pay for commercial software in general? No, not really. But my employer is...and there is no doubt in my mind that if MS office and adobe illistrator was available for linux all the pc's where I would would become some sort of linux solution."
You know, perhaps Linux would have as much support as Mac does if, well, you were willing to PAY for your software?
Mac users, bless their souls, are *known* for paying for more expensive hardware, paying for their software, and generally being a profitable market.
You're essentially claiming that a user's experience is related to the software available to the user.
Meaning your first choice may very well be Windows XP, followed by Windows 2000, followed by Windows 98, followed by Mac OS X, followed by Windows 95, followed by Mac Classic, followed by Linux, right?
You're *wishing* for these companies to support Linux, when reality is that these companies really support *themselves*. If Linux enables them to do so, then that's the platform they would push. But Linux, as great as it is for you, doesn't seem to be all that great for the Microsofts, Adobes, and Macromedias of the world.
The installed user base is one hurdle. The fixed, targeted, complete API is another Compare to Cocoa, Carbon, W32, DirectX, Quicktime, what does Linux have? SDL? X? The others have OpenGL. QT? QT is available on the other platforms as well. GTK? KDE? Those are hardly competitive, though each has their advocates. Usability of Linux is another hurdle; compared to Windows or Mac OS X, Linux is still very difficult (I run Debian on my server, and what takes me a few seconds in the other two OSes still takes me minutes or hours in Linux; looking up man pages, installing programs, checking versions, configuring stuff, etc)
So the question is... *can* you get application support parity in Linux? How much are you willing to pay for this *feature*? How much more than an Apple machine is worth the cost of Linux support?
Why not scatter, near the surface, a low amount of radioactive material, intentionally?
Not lethal levels, but enough to be measurably higher than the background, so that the casual adventurer with the right tools would realize this place is radioactive, with an obvious gradient from background to max near the center?
For that matter, why not have 'fossilized' bodies, 'skeletal' shapes, and such, litter the landscape, made of impossibly tough materials? Like, say, titanium? If they are advanced enough to process the titanium, they should be advanced enough to figure out the whole purpose of the site, and if they cannot cut/process the titanium, then, well, wouldn't it be awfully foreboding to see the utterly black surface pockmarked by skeletal remains?
Let's push this to the extreme and submit our own 'DMCA takedowns' to Google on everything possible (Slashdot effect?) so that the average search becomes littered with 'DMCA negative' links!
Nuclear power requires, of course, that the process be refined so that the energy to power the laser is less than the power generated by the reaction; this doesn't violate the second law of thermodynamic, but does require the right frequencies, the right catalysts, the right designs.
The other thought is solar power, since we get essentially unlimited power from the sun, coupled with the energy released by the nuclear reaction itself. Move the radioactive material into the middle of the desert, into a special solar powered nuclear reducer, and burn away the radioactive materials...
Take a laser of high enough energy to encourage radioactive material to fise until it reaches a suitably short half life and is safe to store? Say a half life of a couple months?
The neat part is that it may be possible to get more energy out of the reaction than we put in, at least for the first few cycles; uranium, plutonium, etc.
The advantages are twofold;no nuclear reactor would need critical masses, and nuclear waste would only be as dangerous as we choose not to degrade it, according to energy cost. If a half life of 100 years is acceptable, we can choose that. If a half life of 1000 years is acceptable, we can choose that.
This presupposes of course that research into laser induced fission proceeds on course.
Hmmm, lets see. 74 minutes of decent quality for $2 a disc $150 for a MD-player/recorder. 740 minutes = $20+$150 Weight of 20 discs + weight of MD player? Realtime upload; 2x if you're lucky. Is there a 4x?
iPod $399 for 5gb 3000+ minutes = 6.5oz $499 for 10gb 6000+ minutes = 6.5oz Near instantaneous upload; 74 minutes of music in 10 seconds of upload. 2 gb of music in 4 minutes
Just to be fair, I *do* own both a minidisc and an iPod, but the MD is now relegated for note-taking and recording purposes, rather than music:)
Re:I wish it would die
on
Unix Isn't Dead
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
The unix mindset has become too pervasive in the midrange computers. Nobody is implementing new ideas because everything has to be `posix compliant'.
What do you mean by midrange? Workstations? Small servers? Big appliances?
What do you call new ideas? What do ideas have to do with posix compliance, or lack of compliance?
Linux is nice but has not advanced the state of the art.
Then you mention Linux, and state of the art. Does that mean OS X is fair game for me to mention?
OS X adds displayPDF and vectorized resolution independent displays. It adds FireWire, Bluetooth, 802.11b, and gigabit ethernet to the hardware mix; it's pushing LCD displays (and the accompanying trend of color managment and color profiling of digital display technologies), DVD-R as a video content creation tool, and high end video, film, and TV creation tools on 'low end' hardware.
That's not even mentioning future enhancements to the OS itself now that it has caught up to bar, in terms of memory protection, multitasking, multiprocessing, and stability.
But the difference is that a CRT fades to black when it's not being refreshed; that's where the flicker comes from.
An LCD doesn't fade to black when it's not being refreshed; it stays at the old value until it's been changed, and then it just changes to the new value.
So that means if you have a CRT refreshing at 75Hz, each pixel is touched 75 times a second; the minute you touch a pixel, it has 1/75 of a second to fade to black. If you're running at 80Hz, you have 1/80 of a second, so it fades less. If you're running at 90Hz, you get 1/90 of a second...
Whereas in an LCD, you may only refresh at 40Hz, but you never ever fade to black, so there's no flicker.
Oops my bad, I misunderstood the film speed, I had thought higher film speed was better, but you're right, low speed film is much more light sensitive.
Unless I'm much mistaken, an LCD screen is like a frame buffer; every pixel stores 3 bytes of information, and when you refresh the LCD you are literally displaying the contents of the frame buffer in 3 bytes of visual data (256 values of RGB)
By analogy, a CRT is a scanning beam of electrons, so you have to sweep across the row of pixels one pixel at a time, and then across the screen one row at a time, like a car driving across a parking lot trying to hit every parking space.
I don't know a better way to explain an LCD; the LCD *is* a frame buffer, or like ram, and yes, you do have to transfer data, but that's not any different than transferring data from SDRAM to L3 cache to L2 cache to VRAM or whatever; there's a bus, maybe 8 bits wide, running at 100MHz, meaning in one second you can send 100MB of data; a 1024*768 screen with 3 bytes per pixel refreshed 40 times a second == 120*1024*768 bytes, or 120*768KB, or 92160KB or roughly ~90MB of data per second. Or you can have a bus 32 bits wide running at 25MHz; the point being that the LCD screen's data bus is much, much, higher than any CRT signal's.
A few years back, my CEO's wife said, "We should replace all our monitors with LCD flatscreens to make the whole company look high tech to investors" Eventually that kind of free spending drove the company into the ground.
That has nothing to do with the viability of LCDs and everything to do with the stupidity of the CEO and the financial acumen of the spending department of your company.
LCD's are pretty to look at, that's about it. None of them can match the refresh rate of a CRT. (Yes I know LCD's don't really do vertical scan like CRT's do, but most LCD's sample the analog verticle refresh at 60hz then coverts it to digital unless it has a digital interface to begin with)
Well, you said it yourself. Get a digital LCD with a digital interface. That should slaughter the refresh of just about *any* CRT. There's no flicker at all, even though the refresh is only '35' Hz, it's refreshing the whole screen 35 times a second, instead of scanning a single row of pixels 75 times a second.
Of course personal preference rules, and if you prefer a CRT to an LCD, that's your choice.
If you really want to reduce eye strain, or just simply get work done, a bigger monitor with a high refresh rate (120HZ+)
Of course, to be fair, a monitor that can do 120Hz refresh is equivalent to an LCD screen that has 160 degree viewing angle and digital input, IE, not cheapo.
Size and refresh rate are the two most important things for me when I purchase a monitor. I don't care if I can hang it on a wall or off my ass. Unless you absolutely need it to be portable, you're better off using a CRT.
Barring the lone Sony 24" (viewable 22.5"), LCDs are bigger, with Apple selling a 22" and 23" (22" and 23" viewable), with IBM, Samsung, and Philips offering similar sizes.
Refresh rate is personal, but from my eye, an LCD with a 40Hz refresh beats everything I've seen short of a CRT set at 90Hz; but again, that's personal preference. If I were to choose between a Sony Trinitron vs a 17" cheapo LCD, the Trinitron wins. If I were comparing a 21" Goldstar with a 17" Apple LCD, the Apple LCD wins. Design quality means something too.
Not trying to pick an argument, but some thoughts on your opinion:
"The current generation of LCD displays are terrible for viewing photographs. The square pixels and variable contrast makes for a number of bad artifacts:"
I suspect the problems have as much to do with software being optimized for CRTs as much as real problems with LCDs.
"1. JPEG compression is terribly magnified on an LCD. look at a typical Yahoo News press photo on an LCD and then on a CRT, especially close ups of people."
I would argue that this actually says more about the visual clarity of the LCD, in being able to pick up the artifacts that CRTs blur away.
It's akin to claiming that certain brands of cameras with extra high speed film and extremely good lenses are bad for taking portraits because all of the makeup, flaws, and blemishes show up in the photographs, and that it's better to use a slower film and a less precise lens.
"2. Contrast is variable from top to bottom while looking dead center: On my recent model VAIO laptop, when looking at the screen from dead center, the top is too dark, the bottom is too bright. (in terms of black level)"
It is certainly true that CRTs have a wider viewing angle and more uniform color because each pixel is more like a point light source that radiates in a sphere, where an LCD pixel is a cone of light. Newer LCDs, like Apple 15" and 23" LCDs, have much better contrast ratio, 350:1, better viewing angle, 160 degrees in either dimension, and better brightness, at 200 nits, than their older 22" LCD;300:1 and 180 nits. I can't google anything about the VAIO laptops, but it's not uncommon for, say, a ViewSonic 17" LCD to hit 220 nits and a 300:1 contrast ratio; brighter and more evenly lit, but not nearly as black.
"3. Colors shift depending on left to right viewing angle, and typically subtle hues of red and blues and purples will not appear as pleasing and natural as they do on a CRT."
This does have something to do with the viewing angle; as per the 'pleasing or natural bit', that's about color optimization, I believe. LCDs have a different gamut and visual quality than a CRT, and if the software doesn't take that into account, that's like having overhead flourescent lights on a CRT without a hood!
"4. Overall gamma is poor, with the falloff happening in all the wrong places, which wrecks havok on portraits and figure photography. (which means yes, pr0n!)"
Can't speak for that, you may be right about the gamma.
"So it's interesting to note that on a recent visit to Vertis studios in San Francisco, the people who often do the Macy's catalogs, that each digital photography station consisted of a high end scanning back camera and a macintosh with a 22" LCD monitor! I mentioned this to one of the supervisors and he said "Yea...we're aware of the problems with LCD...we carefully calibrate them and make sure to stare at them dead center, or we get the color shift problem left to right." I figured that someone had sold them on those setups purely for the 'cool' value, and they fell for it hook line and sinker."
No, there are real reasons to use a LCD over a CRT, more than just 'cool' value.
Size, energy output, eyestrain-flicker, digital precision (digital input to digital output, consistent guaranteed visual quality across all LCDs if gamut and color space are taken into account, etc), and visual precision (no convergence, alignment, moire, or focus problems).
LCDs suffer from different problems entirely; instead of moire, convergence, focus, or alignment problems, they suffer from narrower visual focus, and lower contrast ratio and brightness. In fact, LCDs are *much* sharper than just about any CRT because there is no alignment, no convergence, no focus problems because there's no reliance on three electron guns aimed at a phosphor coated screen.
You also have the issue that CRTs aren't linear, where an LCD can be made so. CRT electron guns are nonlinear devices between the 0 and 1 signals, while an LCD's ramp between the totally off and totally on signal *is* linear; I'm talking about the value of Red0-Red255, or Blue0-Blue255, or Green0-Green255.
Then there's refresh. CRTs must refresh a line at a time, where LCDs refresh the whole screen at once; less headache, less flicker, less eyestrain.
"He then took me into the finishing room, where, to my pleasure, there were several workstations outfitted with high end CRT monitors with hoods around them. I knew there was no way they were doing catalog work without CRT's, given the pickiness of fashion retailers over the color accuracy in the catalogs."
This will change when designers and fashion retailers start using LCDs; then when you have digital images end to end, you can start seeing more focus on better compression algorithms (ne horrible JPEG artefacting), better gamma and gamut and color space taking advantage of the fact that LCDs have linear color response and deterministic color response.
"When I was working at Digital Domain in Hollywood, as well as every other VFX company I've ever worked for, there was nigh an LCD in sight, because you can't do critical adjustment on an LCD."
You couldn't do it, doesn't mean you can't. There are problems right now, but doesn't mean there also aren't advantages.
"Despite all this doom and gloom, it IS getting better all the time, and eventually, unless it's replaced by DLP or other "every pixel is a tube" flatscreen technology, then I'll be calibrating my photographs for viewing on LCD, because that's what everyone will have. Until then, I prefer my high end Sony FD trinitron above all else."
Yeah, new technologies and software (such as Apple going all LCD) should help a lot.
What, you mean develop on the fastest Mac, test on the slowest Mac?
This is Linux here! You can code on a fast *or* slow Mac, thanks to NFS, X, and vi or emacs, and compile on the fastest platform available.
Essentially the point being you can own 'the fastest' Mac to do your compiling and such, but you don't actually 'need' to test it on the highest end hardware because you really want to target the lowest end hardware, meaning you should be running, writing code, and using lowest 'mean' available hardware, even if you use the highest end for compilation purposes.
I read the article, he didn't say he *had* brain damage, only that he feared it (I thought)
I mean, as I said before, if you experience nausea, confusion, mental and physical impairment, dizzyness, etc, why shouldn't you worry about damage?
Melodrama or not, he claims to require the equipment and has the medical release for it. How can you counter that claim without like experience?
Again, I don't know if it was *simply* a HUD, or more, but I can't question his claims based on my experience, anymore than I can question your claims; it's just outside my ken.
Slashdot Mirror
"Am I willing to pay for commercial software in linux? No less than I am willing to pay for commercial software ontop of other OSes. Am i willing to pay for commercial software in general? No, not really. But my employer is...and there is no doubt in my mind that if MS office and adobe illistrator was available for linux all the pc's where I would would become some sort of linux solution."
You know, perhaps Linux would have as much support as Mac does if, well, you were willing to PAY for your software?
Mac users, bless their souls, are *known* for paying for more expensive hardware, paying for their software, and generally being a profitable market.
Them's the breaks
I only meant that all the platforms had OpenGL at this point; Linux, Mac, and Windows.
Linux has... KDE, GNOME, SDL, X... but what about font APIs (QuickDraw, ATSUI (Unicode text), etc), among other things?
Get over it.
You're essentially claiming that a user's experience is related to the software available to the user.
Meaning your first choice may very well be Windows XP, followed by Windows 2000, followed by Windows 98, followed by Mac OS X, followed by Windows 95, followed by Mac Classic, followed by Linux, right?
You're *wishing* for these companies to support Linux, when reality is that these companies really support *themselves*. If Linux enables them to do so, then that's the platform they would push. But Linux, as great as it is for you, doesn't seem to be all that great for the Microsofts, Adobes, and Macromedias of the world.
The installed user base is one hurdle.
The fixed, targeted, complete API is another Compare to Cocoa, Carbon, W32, DirectX, Quicktime, what does Linux have? SDL? X? The others have OpenGL. QT? QT is available on the other platforms as well. GTK? KDE? Those are hardly competitive, though each has their advocates.
Usability of Linux is another hurdle; compared to Windows or Mac OS X, Linux is still very difficult (I run Debian on my server, and what takes me a few seconds in the other two OSes still takes me minutes or hours in Linux; looking up man pages, installing programs, checking versions, configuring stuff, etc)
So the question is... *can* you get application support parity in Linux? How much are you willing to pay for this *feature*? How much more than an Apple machine is worth the cost of Linux support?
Not even that; W XP ON X
What does that mean?
If they had used Entourage instead of Excel, would it have said: WEPON X? Too bad Access isn't available on OS X.
WEAPON X would have been hilarious
I like the black hole concept.
Why not scatter, near the surface, a low amount of radioactive material, intentionally?
Not lethal levels, but enough to be measurably higher than the background, so that the casual adventurer with the right tools would realize this place is radioactive, with an obvious gradient from background to max near the center?
For that matter, why not have 'fossilized' bodies, 'skeletal' shapes, and such, litter the landscape, made of impossibly tough materials? Like, say, titanium? If they are advanced enough to process the titanium, they should be advanced enough to figure out the whole purpose of the site, and if they cannot cut/process the titanium, then, well, wouldn't it be awfully foreboding to see the utterly black surface pockmarked by skeletal remains?
Who says that it wouldn't be accurate?
All I'm suggesting is following the letter of the law, and not the spirit, since the spirit sucks anyway.
Let's push this to the extreme and submit our own 'DMCA takedowns' to Google on everything possible (Slashdot effect?) so that the average search becomes littered with 'DMCA negative' links!
Well, two thoughts come to mind;
Nuclear power or solar power.
Nuclear power requires, of course, that the process be refined so that the energy to power the laser is less than the power generated by the reaction; this doesn't violate the second law of thermodynamic, but does require the right frequencies, the right catalysts, the right designs.
The other thought is solar power, since we get essentially unlimited power from the sun, coupled with the energy released by the nuclear reaction itself. Move the radioactive material into the middle of the desert, into a special solar powered nuclear reducer, and burn away the radioactive materials...
Very impressive, but still not available.
MSRP of $350, when you consider that an iPod was available 6 months ago, at $400.
Have you heard of laser induced fission?
Take a laser of high enough energy to encourage radioactive material to fise until it reaches a suitably short half life and is safe to store? Say a half life of a couple months?
The neat part is that it may be possible to get more energy out of the reaction than we put in, at least for the first few cycles; uranium, plutonium, etc.
The advantages are twofold;no nuclear reactor would need critical masses, and nuclear waste would only be as dangerous as we choose not to degrade it, according to energy cost. If a half life of 100 years is acceptable, we can choose that. If a half life of 1000 years is acceptable, we can choose that.
This presupposes of course that research into laser induced fission proceeds on course.
Google search.
Hmmm, lets see.
:)
74 minutes of decent quality for $2 a disc
$150 for a MD-player/recorder.
740 minutes = $20+$150
Weight of 20 discs + weight of MD player?
Realtime upload; 2x if you're lucky. Is there a 4x?
iPod
$399 for 5gb
3000+ minutes = 6.5oz
$499 for 10gb
6000+ minutes = 6.5oz
Near instantaneous upload; 74 minutes of music in 10 seconds of upload. 2 gb of music in 4 minutes
Just to be fair, I *do* own both a minidisc and an iPod, but the MD is now relegated for note-taking and recording purposes, rather than music
The unix mindset has become too pervasive in the midrange computers. Nobody is implementing new ideas because everything has to be `posix compliant'.
What do you mean by midrange? Workstations? Small servers? Big appliances?
What do you call new ideas? What do ideas have to do with posix compliance, or lack of compliance?
Linux is nice but has not advanced the state of the art.
Then you mention Linux, and state of the art. Does that mean OS X is fair game for me to mention?
OS X adds displayPDF and vectorized resolution independent displays. It adds FireWire, Bluetooth, 802.11b, and gigabit ethernet to the hardware mix; it's pushing LCD displays (and the accompanying trend of color managment and color profiling of digital display technologies), DVD-R as a video content creation tool, and high end video, film, and TV creation tools on 'low end' hardware.
That's not even mentioning future enhancements to the OS itself now that it has caught up to bar, in terms of memory protection, multitasking, multiprocessing, and stability.
Can you tell I like Macs and OS X?
Gah. I'm getting everything backwards. And here I was working for yearbook in college for 3 years.
:(
I feel stupid
Okay, fair enough.
Why isn't making videos of your kids for your grandparents worth a $800 used refurbed iMac running iMovie?
But the difference is that a CRT fades to black when it's not being refreshed; that's where the flicker comes from.
An LCD doesn't fade to black when it's not being refreshed; it stays at the old value until it's been changed, and then it just changes to the new value.
So that means if you have a CRT refreshing at 75Hz, each pixel is touched 75 times a second; the minute you touch a pixel, it has 1/75 of a second to fade to black. If you're running at 80Hz, you have 1/80 of a second, so it fades less. If you're running at 90Hz, you get 1/90 of a second...
Whereas in an LCD, you may only refresh at 40Hz, but you never ever fade to black, so there's no flicker.
Oops my bad, I misunderstood the film speed, I had thought higher film speed was better, but you're right, low speed film is much more light sensitive.
Different needs and requirements have different solutions.
:)
CRTs have moire, convergence, focus, and alignment 'issues'.
LCDs have viewing angle-color shifting and refresh speed 'issues'.
CRTs can cause headaches for some people.
LCDs ghost too much for some people.
LCDs are too expensive, and CRTs are to heavy/bulky.
You can't weld a CRT to a laptop, as an example
Unless I'm much mistaken, an LCD screen is like a frame buffer; every pixel stores 3 bytes of information, and when you refresh the LCD you are literally displaying the contents of the frame buffer in 3 bytes of visual data (256 values of RGB)
By analogy, a CRT is a scanning beam of electrons, so you have to sweep across the row of pixels one pixel at a time, and then across the screen one row at a time, like a car driving across a parking lot trying to hit every parking space.
I don't know a better way to explain an LCD; the LCD *is* a frame buffer, or like ram, and yes, you do have to transfer data, but that's not any different than transferring data from SDRAM to L3 cache to L2 cache to VRAM or whatever; there's a bus, maybe 8 bits wide, running at 100MHz, meaning in one second you can send 100MB of data; a 1024*768 screen with 3 bytes per pixel refreshed 40 times a second == 120*1024*768 bytes, or 120*768KB, or 92160KB or roughly ~90MB of data per second. Or you can have a bus 32 bits wide running at 25MHz; the point being that the LCD screen's data bus is much, much, higher than any CRT signal's.
A few years back, my CEO's wife said, "We should replace all our monitors with LCD flatscreens to make the whole company look high tech to investors" Eventually that kind of free spending drove the company into the ground.
That has nothing to do with the viability of LCDs and everything to do with the stupidity of the CEO and the financial acumen of the spending department of your company.
LCD's are pretty to look at, that's about it. None of them can match the refresh rate of a CRT. (Yes I know LCD's don't really do vertical scan like CRT's do, but most LCD's sample the analog verticle refresh at 60hz then coverts it to digital unless it has a digital interface to begin with)
Well, you said it yourself. Get a digital LCD with a digital interface. That should slaughter the refresh of just about *any* CRT. There's no flicker at all, even though the refresh is only '35' Hz, it's refreshing the whole screen 35 times a second, instead of scanning a single row of pixels 75 times a second.
Of course personal preference rules, and if you prefer a CRT to an LCD, that's your choice.
If you really want to reduce eye strain, or just simply get work done, a bigger monitor with a high refresh rate (120HZ+)
Of course, to be fair, a monitor that can do 120Hz refresh is equivalent to an LCD screen that has 160 degree viewing angle and digital input, IE, not cheapo.
Size and refresh rate are the two most important things for me when I purchase a monitor. I don't care if I can hang it on a wall or off my ass. Unless you absolutely need it to be portable, you're better off using a CRT.
Barring the lone Sony 24" (viewable 22.5"), LCDs are bigger, with Apple selling a 22" and 23" (22" and 23" viewable), with IBM, Samsung, and Philips offering similar sizes.
Refresh rate is personal, but from my eye, an LCD with a 40Hz refresh beats everything I've seen short of a CRT set at 90Hz; but again, that's personal preference. If I were to choose between a Sony Trinitron vs a 17" cheapo LCD, the Trinitron wins. If I were comparing a 21" Goldstar with a 17" Apple LCD, the Apple LCD wins. Design quality means something too.
Not trying to pick an argument, but some thoughts on your opinion:
"The current generation of LCD displays are terrible for viewing photographs. The square pixels and variable contrast makes for a number of bad artifacts:"
I suspect the problems have as much to do with software being optimized for CRTs as much as real problems with LCDs.
"1. JPEG compression is terribly magnified on an LCD. look at a typical Yahoo News press photo on an LCD and then on a CRT, especially close ups of people."
I would argue that this actually says more about the visual clarity of the LCD, in being able to pick up the artifacts that CRTs blur away.
It's akin to claiming that certain brands of cameras with extra high speed film and extremely good lenses are bad for taking portraits because all of the makeup, flaws, and blemishes show up in the photographs, and that it's better to use a slower film and a less precise lens.
"2. Contrast is variable from top to bottom while looking dead center: On my recent model VAIO laptop, when looking at the screen from dead center, the top is too dark, the bottom is too bright. (in terms of black level)"
It is certainly true that CRTs have a wider viewing angle and more uniform color because each pixel is more like a point light source that radiates in a sphere, where an LCD pixel is a cone of light. Newer LCDs, like Apple 15" and 23" LCDs, have much better contrast ratio, 350:1, better viewing angle, 160 degrees in either dimension, and better brightness, at 200 nits, than their older 22" LCD;300:1 and 180 nits. I can't google anything about the VAIO laptops, but it's not uncommon for, say, a ViewSonic 17" LCD to hit 220 nits and a 300:1 contrast ratio; brighter and more evenly lit, but not nearly as black.
"3. Colors shift depending on left to right viewing angle, and typically subtle hues of red and blues and purples will not appear as pleasing and natural as they do on a CRT."
This does have something to do with the viewing angle; as per the 'pleasing or natural bit', that's about color optimization, I believe. LCDs have a different gamut and visual quality than a CRT, and if the software doesn't take that into account, that's like having overhead flourescent lights on a CRT without a hood!
"4. Overall gamma is poor, with the falloff happening in all the wrong places, which wrecks havok on portraits and figure photography. (which means yes, pr0n!)"
Can't speak for that, you may be right about the gamma.
"So it's interesting to note that on a recent visit to Vertis studios in San Francisco, the people who often do the Macy's catalogs, that each digital photography station consisted of a high end scanning back camera and a macintosh with a 22" LCD monitor! I mentioned this to one of the supervisors and he said "Yea...we're aware of the problems with LCD...we carefully calibrate them and make sure to stare at them dead center, or we get the color shift problem left to right." I figured that someone had sold them on those setups purely for the 'cool' value, and they fell for it hook line and sinker."
No, there are real reasons to use a LCD over a CRT, more than just 'cool' value.
Size, energy output, eyestrain-flicker, digital precision (digital input to digital output, consistent guaranteed visual quality across all LCDs if gamut and color space are taken into account, etc), and visual precision (no convergence, alignment, moire, or focus problems).
LCDs suffer from different problems entirely; instead of moire, convergence, focus, or alignment problems, they suffer from narrower visual focus, and lower contrast ratio and brightness. In fact, LCDs are *much* sharper than just about any CRT because there is no alignment, no convergence, no focus problems because there's no reliance on three electron guns aimed at a phosphor coated screen.
You also have the issue that CRTs aren't linear, where an LCD can be made so. CRT electron guns are nonlinear devices between the 0 and 1 signals, while an LCD's ramp between the totally off and totally on signal *is* linear; I'm talking about the value of Red0-Red255, or Blue0-Blue255, or Green0-Green255.
Then there's refresh. CRTs must refresh a line at a time, where LCDs refresh the whole screen at once; less headache, less flicker, less eyestrain.
"He then took me into the finishing room, where, to my pleasure, there were several workstations outfitted with high end CRT monitors with hoods around them. I knew there was no way they were doing catalog work without CRT's, given the pickiness of fashion retailers over the color accuracy in the catalogs."
This will change when designers and fashion retailers start using LCDs; then when you have digital images end to end, you can start seeing more focus on better compression algorithms (ne horrible JPEG artefacting), better gamma and gamut and color space taking advantage of the fact that LCDs have linear color response and deterministic color response.
"When I was working at Digital Domain in Hollywood, as well as every other VFX company I've ever worked for, there was nigh an LCD in sight, because you can't do critical adjustment on an LCD."
You couldn't do it, doesn't mean you can't. There are problems right now, but doesn't mean there also aren't advantages.
"Despite all this doom and gloom, it IS getting better all the time, and eventually, unless it's replaced by DLP or other "every pixel is a tube" flatscreen technology, then I'll be calibrating my photographs for viewing on LCD, because that's what everyone will have. Until then, I prefer my high end Sony FD trinitron above all else."
Yeah, new technologies and software (such as Apple going all LCD) should help a lot.
What, you mean develop on the fastest Mac, test on the slowest Mac?
This is Linux here! You can code on a fast *or* slow Mac, thanks to NFS, X, and vi or emacs, and compile on the fastest platform available.
Essentially the point being you can own 'the fastest' Mac to do your compiling and such, but you don't actually 'need' to test it on the highest end hardware because you really want to target the lowest end hardware, meaning you should be running, writing code, and using lowest 'mean' available hardware, even if you use the highest end for compilation purposes.
Not to be mean, but how about Macs without OS X support?
To be fair, it seems weird for the developers to be playing with *modern* Macs, instead of 6 year old Macs, but hey, the new iBook is cool.
I read the article, he didn't say he *had* brain damage, only that he feared it (I thought)
I mean, as I said before, if you experience nausea, confusion, mental and physical impairment, dizzyness, etc, why shouldn't you worry about damage?
Melodrama or not, he claims to require the equipment and has the medical release for it. How can you counter that claim without like experience?
Again, I don't know if it was *simply* a HUD, or more, but I can't question his claims based on my experience, anymore than I can question your claims; it's just outside my ken.
When did I say he couldn't recover, or cured?
I'm just saying it's not excessive to suspect possible brain damage and concurrent loss of mobility, visual acuity, and mental capability.