Google's this quick. I can think of a lot of tweaks, from using SSDs and servers with lots of RAM, to actually optimizing the OS image that goes on the various PCs in the hospital/clinic for speed. Make sure not to scrimp on the RAM for anything. To ameliorate network congestion, you'd need some kind of quality of service architecture.
Anyways, if you read the rest of the quote, they succeeded in building a working piece of software that met their expectations.
Here's a relevant quote from "Superfreakonomics" :
The diagnosis was clear: the WHC emergency department had a severe case of "datapenia," or low data counts. (Feied invented this word as well, stealing the suffix from "leucopenia," or low white-blood-cell counts.) Doctors were spending about 60 percent of their time on "information management," and only 15 percent on direct patient care. This was a sickening ratio. "Emergency medicine is a specialty defined not by an organ of the body or by an age group but by time," says Mark Smith. "It's about what you do in the first sixty minutes."
Smith and Feied discovered more than three hundred data sources in the hospital that didn't talk to one another, including a mainframe system, handwritten notes, scanned images, lab results, streaming video from cardiac angiograms, and an infection-control tracking system that lived on one person's computer on an Excel spreadsheet. "And if she went on vacation, God help you if you're trying to track a TB outbreak," says Feied.
To give the ER doctors and nurses what they really needed, a computer system had to be built from the ground up. It had to be encyclopedic (one missing piece of key data would defeat the purpose); it had to be muscular (a single MRI, for instance, ate up a massive amount of data capacity); and it had to be flexible (a system that couldn't incorporate any data from any department in any hospital in the past, present, or future was useless).
It also had to be really, really fast. Not only because slowness kills in an ER but because, as Feied had learned from the scientific literature, a person using a computer experiences "cognitive drift" if more than one second elapses between clicking the mouse and seeing new data on the screen. If ten seconds pass, the person's mind is somewhere else entirely. That's how medical errors are made.
END QUOTE I agree wholeheatedly with the last bit : I can't count how many times I've been to a doctors office or library or other institution and had to wait for a person to pull up my information on "the system". If you're gonna build a friggin computer system to handle local records, for the love of God don't scrimp on the hardware! Optimize the software! It should be INSTANTANEOUSLY fast!
Unless you're heating your dwelling with electrical resistance heating, which is the worst and most expensive form of heat there is, the excess heat from incandescents is not doing your energy bills any favors. Each unit of heat emitted is about three times as expensive as the equivalent BTUs from burning natural gas or using a heat pump. So in effect it's still costing you money to use incandescents, but you only save ~2/3 to ~3/4 as much money as you'd think if you replaced those incandescents with CFLs.
Read what I wrote : problems with current packaging. The reason they do that NOW is that LEDs are so expensive that it's not possible to put enough of them into a light bulb to match the total lumen output of a conventional bulb. So to make use of the limited light output, they leave the light focused in those narrow cones. Once LEDs get cheaper, they'll come packed with diverging lenses or diffusers to spread the light around.
I bought n-vision CFLs, which scored the highest in an objective, blind test done by popular mechanics a couple years ago. They were about $2 each with shipping, and have a 9 year warranty. So far, they've lived up to their promise : the light is almost EXACTLY like the light from an incandescent - low color temperature, lots of yellow, etc. They start up instantly, and of course use a fraction of the electricity.
Incandescent bulbs : + Cheap, we're used to the light - terrible efficiency, short lifespan, fragile, sensitive to vibration, emit heat
CFLs : + much more efficient, very long lifespan - not very dimmable, contain mercury, fragile, slow to start up in cold environs, reduced lifespan if toggled on and off
LEDs + extremely efficient, ridiculous lifespan (60,000 hours), almost bulletproof, can toggle on and off as much as you want, start up instantly in all environs, dimmable, no toxic materials. Basically almost perfect in every way. - $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$. Current generation light spectra is too high a color temperature to mimic incandescents. Current generation packaging creates a narrow, focused cone of light.
Summary : LED will pwn all once the problems are solved, and the problems appear solvable. Problems with other light technologies are inherent to the technology itself and not solvable. Once LED is perfected, the other two technologies will be useless.
With the OLED super-displays of the future you could have an ambient light sensor that would increase the brightness of the image relative to ambient light. It would have to get pretty stupidly bright to be readable in direct sunlight, though.
For torrents, encrypting them to block this sort of thing would appear to be straightforward. Just include the encryption key in the *.torrent file itself. Make it a nice long randomly generated key using lots of bits with whatever freely available encryption algorithm is thought to be the most secure.
What sort of CPU overhead is needed for this kind of encryption processing, though? Would it add up to anything significant on modern 1 GHZ+ multicore CPUs at the current data rates?
I read that. I'm just saying that it's overall still not as bad as Louisiana or Texas by a long, long, long margin. Those states might pay lip service to your rights - but the mob will still convict you on the slimmest of evidence, and sent you to prison for about 10-20x times the sentence, under harsher conditions. Or they'll just murder you.
It's not all bad. At least according to wiki, Japan has one of the lowest incarceration rates of the civilized world. The conviction rate may be high, but the sentencing is extremely lenient and the total number of convictions is low.
Commit a murder in Japan? Out in 10-15 years. Rape? 2-5 years. Etc. That's ridiculously lower than typical sentences in the U.S. for the same crime. Also, "acquaintance rape" is almost never prosecuted because a prosecutor won't bring a case forward unless they are certain of a conviction. (versus in the U.S., where people are imprisoned for decades based solely on the uncorroborated word of the victim) In the U.S., prosecutors fail to get a conviction about 30-40% of the time in trials, and a vastly higher percentage of the population is prosecuted.
Whether you're a criminal or not, it sounds like you have a higher chance of keeping your freedom in Japan. On the other hand, their society is far less tolerant of any sort of behavior that isn't the norm.
With the monstrous hard drives, you could swap collections such as "every watchable TV drama aired between 2000 and 2005" or "top 1000 songs by month 1970-2009" or "best 100 PC games published in last 5 years by metacritic scores" and so forth. Takes a lot less time to transfer the data if it's plugged into your machine by SATA or eSATA cable than it does by a typical broadband connection.
Shouldn't the "reasonable person" definition be "device that appears to be a weapon of mass destruction".
I mean, first off, a WMD isn't an explosive device : it is a nuclear bomb or a biological or chemical weapon. A brown box does not look like any of those things.
Now, if it was a silvery cylinder with a bunch of wires coming out to various timers and batteries, and it was the proper size and shape to be an improved nuke (meaning about the size of a small car) or had biohazard warnings on it. THAT would qualify under the law.
But instead the prosecutors are punishing him for his disobedience by leaving him in jail while they "consider" if he broke the law. He obviously didn't.
Hint : there's several piracy methods that are going strong right now that have never been touched.
IRC is better than torrent sites ever were for obscure stuff usenet is faster and more reliable for just about anything, but it costs money for access megaupload/rapidshare link sites are the hottest new piracy method, and work very well for sharing recent and/or popular files. They work a lot better than torrents because you don't have to seed.
And this is just internet piracy. If the government were to REALLY crack down, then swapping 2 terrabyte hard drives between friends is a heck of a lot more time efficient than the old days of copying floppies and cassette tapes.
Yep. At the school I go to, a professor reported a possible theft of a bio hazardous material to the Feds a few years back. The Feds swooped in and examined his lab with a fine toothed comb. They never found out what happened to the biological samples, but they found plenty of minor violations of federal law in his handling and procuring of the materials. The FBI agents told the professor "look, we gotta account for the loss of these vials somehow. Why don't you sign this document admitting you accidentally destroyed the samples and lied to us, and we won't charge you with anything."
Well, after the Feds lied and pressured him into signing this false confession so that "we can all go home", guess what happened. They charged the professor who REPORTED the possible theft to the Feds with about 40 crimes, with a possible prison sentence of life. Jury of course found him guilty, he was given 9 years in prison, judge reduced it to 2 years.
Moral of the story? Don't call the Feds unless you absolutely have to. Someone's gotta go to prison, and if they can't find anyone else, that person will be you. If you're doing anything remotely interesting, you've probably violated at least one regulation just getting your work done.
Same problem though. With computers, even the "my documents" folder could theoretically contain petabytes of data. Equivalent to searching an entire warehouse or even an entire country rather than just 1 dresser drawer.
It sounds like the current ruling is fine. The search warrant could be "any video or image files depicting person X engaged in criminal conduct". If the computer happens to contain files showing "person Y" committing a crime who is not named in the warrant, too bad for the cops. And to protect this restriction, the third party that examines the computer will only be able to forward records that fit within the warrant.
The problem with trying to apply old precedents to this matter is that digital databases can be so much vaster than any real place being searched. If the cops have a warrant to search the safe in someone's house for something illegal, they aren't allowed to go search the cupboards. Only if the evidence is in plain sight as they go about their business are they allowed to use it.
This is very relevant. What if the cops bust in to your house looking for marijuana in your safe, based on an anonymous tip, and don't find anything? Maybe they find you've stored chemicals in your kitchen cabinets in violation of federal law for storage, or maybe you've got some prescription med bottles for a person who is no longer living in the house. If the cops are allowed to rifle through everything a private citizen owns, and they get creative, they can almost certainly find SOMETHING to charge you with. Their perspective is "since you were accused, you must be guilty of SOMETHING...let's find what it is because I don't want to go back to the station empty handed"
Well, now, if suppose you were a credit bureau like Equifax. If the cops had the authority to search your database to get someone's credit record in order to prove illegal activity, they could search the records of every citizen in the united states because those records are in "plain sight" within the database! Bet they could find SOMETHING if they are allowed to basically open an investigation against every citizen of the country.
And for those arguing "if we're soft on crime, we're letting teh criminals win". The U.S. has already declared and imprisoned more of its citizens for being 'criminals' than any other nation on earth as a % of population. Now, I'm not saying that a large percentage of those people are innocent, just that this extreme level of imprisonment is not an appropriate way for society to deal with those who misbehave. (I think the percentage of innocent people is probably between 3 and 10 percent)
Well, what I mean is that for any given price point, a desktop is going to offer you a lot more power for your money. Laptops with a real graphics chip in them CAN play games...but those two games you mentioned are not particularly demanding, and run fine maxxed out on my old gfx card (8800GT) at 1920x1200.
Yes, there's portability : you need both. I have a low specced laptop (1.3 ghz DC, 2 gigs ram) that I have for situations where I need it, and I use my full desktop with it's dual 27" screens for everything else. You likely make more money than me, and can afford to have high specs in both, it seems.
DVI doesn't necessarily mean content protection, you know, and there actually are encoder cards that can compress a full digital stream from an HDMI port or DVI port back into compressed video again. (though such cards are several thousand dollars). Anyways, nearly everyone is using DVI for it all : you realize that most projectors are actually digital inside, even the old ones with only VGA inputs. DVI is far superior to VGA in every respect because there's no noise or sync issues. Every last pixel on the display is going to know what color it needs to be at a reliable 60 or 120fps. You just like VGA because you have good quality equipment you don't want to replace that needs it.
Truth be told, I suspect that those 30" LCD displays with the best available panel technology and the 32 bit color are probably superior to your CRTs in all respects. Those puppies are several grand each, however. And as you've said yourself, OLED will be the best of all worlds, with no drawbacks except for the problems they have having with the blue pixels dying. (OLED will have high contrast, high refresh rate, low power usage, cheap, thin, pretty much everything you'd want in a display)
Here's something I bet we can both agree on. Don't you hate the takeover of cellphones for everything, even calls made from locations where a landline would work? I hate the static, the poor frequency response, and the frequent malfunctions with cell phones with a passion. Whenever I possibly can, I make a call with a landline. On that note, I recall how a Nokia phone I had in 2002 on a CDMA network was vastly superior in any respect to my current 3G AT&T phone. I picked the very phone I'm using because online reviews concurred that it had good voice quality, and it was cheap.
My other pet peeve is how people love laptops to the point that most people my age don't even have a desktop! How can they not notice the slow CPUs and hard disks and flakey wireless internet compared to a desktop for the same price or less? My 3 year old desktop which had a mere $1300 in parts is still much faster than people's $2000 laptops!
Helium 3 is chemically indistinguishable from helium. For nearly any example you can think of, the answer is going to be "same as helium".
(except for nuclear properties)
Lol, pot calling kettle. You're telling us we're too blind to notice the orange pigments and poor black levels of our LCDs...we're telling you that we can't stand the strobe light flashing of your old school CRTs...
To each his own, I guess. Hard to imagine how you fit 3 CRTs on your desk though. And that square aspect ratio must be really annoying if you want to watch any videos.
I've used high end trinitrons. The flicker is awful, ESPECIALLY at 85 hertz. I can see it clear as day, especially if I had 3 space hogging power vampires on my desk like you do. Furthermore, the pixels are smudged on a CRT, especially at high resolutions.
I've got dual Dell 2707 WFPs. That's a high end LCD with an expanded color gamut. They are 27", with 1920x1080 resolution each, which means the individual pixels are pretty large, so text is readable at all font sizes. They are overwhelmingly superior to any CRT I've ever used. Absolutely no flicker. (yes, yes, the best of the best displays are 30" and 2560x1600 resolution, but mine cost half as much)
As for "orange pigment issues"...I used a color calibrator to fine tune my displays to eliminate any issues like that. The viewing angle is wide enough that I've never even noticed the limitations. (granted, at extreme angles its a little bit dimmer but still perfectly readable)
Yes, I agree, OLEDs are the next step up from this, and I'll be upgrading just as soon as they become reasonably priced. (probably 3-5 years from now)
My biggest criticism of your setup, besides the heat emanating off your displays has got to be the flicker. Especially if you've got 3 of them : your eye is much more sensitive to flicker out of the corner of your eye, because the rods in your retina are more sensitive to fast motion. I would often get headaches if I used a flickery display for too long.
Also, she didn't have the hard body I was expecting from a famous porn star. For as much money as she has, one would think she could hire trainers to keep her in better shape.
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Google's this quick. I can think of a lot of tweaks, from using SSDs and servers with lots of RAM, to actually optimizing the OS image that goes on the various PCs in the hospital/clinic for speed. Make sure not to scrimp on the RAM for anything. To ameliorate network congestion, you'd need some kind of quality of service architecture.
Anyways, if you read the rest of the quote, they succeeded in building a working piece of software that met their expectations.
Here's a relevant quote from "Superfreakonomics" :
The diagnosis was clear: the WHC emergency department had a severe case of "datapenia," or low data counts. (Feied invented this word as well, stealing the suffix from "leucopenia," or low white-blood-cell counts.) Doctors were spending about 60 percent of their time on "information management," and only 15 percent on direct patient care. This was a sickening ratio. "Emergency medicine is a specialty defined not by an organ of the body or by an age group but by time," says Mark Smith. "It's about what you do in the first sixty minutes."
Smith and Feied discovered more than three hundred data sources in the hospital that didn't talk to one another, including a mainframe system, handwritten notes, scanned images, lab results, streaming video from cardiac angiograms, and an infection-control tracking system that lived on one person's computer on an Excel spreadsheet. "And if she went on vacation, God help you if you're trying to track a TB outbreak," says Feied.
To give the ER doctors and nurses what they really needed, a computer system had to be built from the ground up. It had to be encyclopedic (one missing piece of key data would defeat the purpose); it had to be muscular (a single MRI, for instance, ate up a massive amount of data capacity); and it had to be flexible (a system that couldn't incorporate any data from any department in any hospital in the past, present, or future was useless).
It also had to be really, really fast. Not only because slowness kills in an ER but because, as Feied had learned from the scientific literature, a person using a computer experiences "cognitive drift" if more than one second elapses between clicking the mouse and seeing new data on the screen. If ten seconds pass, the person's mind is somewhere else entirely. That's how medical errors are made.
END QUOTE
I agree wholeheatedly with the last bit : I can't count how many times I've been to a doctors office or library or other institution and had to wait for a person to pull up my information on "the system". If you're gonna build a friggin computer system to handle local records, for the love of God don't scrimp on the hardware! Optimize the software! It should be INSTANTANEOUSLY fast!
Heat pumps are on average 3 times as efficient as straight resistive heating.
Second, natural gas furnaces are 3 or 4 times cheaper per BTU to operate than electric, on average.
I'm not sure what the ratio is for fuel oil, it may be less favorable.
Unless you're heating your dwelling with electrical resistance heating, which is the worst and most expensive form of heat there is, the excess heat from incandescents is not doing your energy bills any favors. Each unit of heat emitted is about three times as expensive as the equivalent BTUs from burning natural gas or using a heat pump. So in effect it's still costing you money to use incandescents, but you only save ~2/3 to ~3/4 as much money as you'd think if you replaced those incandescents with CFLs.
Read what I wrote : problems with current packaging. The reason they do that NOW is that LEDs are so expensive that it's not possible to put enough of them into a light bulb to match the total lumen output of a conventional bulb. So to make use of the limited light output, they leave the light focused in those narrow cones. Once LEDs get cheaper, they'll come packed with diverging lenses or diffusers to spread the light around.
I bought n-vision CFLs, which scored the highest in an objective, blind test done by popular mechanics a couple years ago. They were about $2 each with shipping, and have a 9 year warranty. So far, they've lived up to their promise : the light is almost EXACTLY like the light from an incandescent - low color temperature, lots of yellow, etc. They start up instantly, and of course use a fraction of the electricity.
Incandescent bulbs :
+ Cheap, we're used to the light
- terrible efficiency, short lifespan, fragile, sensitive to vibration, emit heat
CFLs :
+ much more efficient, very long lifespan
- not very dimmable, contain mercury, fragile, slow to start up in cold environs, reduced lifespan if toggled on and off
LEDs
+ extremely efficient, ridiculous lifespan (60,000 hours), almost bulletproof, can toggle on and off as much as you want, start up instantly in all environs, dimmable, no toxic materials. Basically almost perfect in every way.
- $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$. Current generation light spectra is too high a color temperature to mimic incandescents. Current generation packaging creates a narrow, focused cone of light.
Summary : LED will pwn all once the problems are solved, and the problems appear solvable. Problems with other light technologies are inherent to the technology itself and not solvable. Once LED is perfected, the other two technologies will be useless.
Well, actually...
With the OLED super-displays of the future you could have an ambient light sensor that would increase the brightness of the image relative to ambient light. It would have to get pretty stupidly bright to be readable in direct sunlight, though.
For torrents, encrypting them to block this sort of thing would appear to be straightforward. Just include the encryption key in the *.torrent file itself. Make it a nice long randomly generated key using lots of bits with whatever freely available encryption algorithm is thought to be the most secure.
What sort of CPU overhead is needed for this kind of encryption processing, though? Would it add up to anything significant on modern 1 GHZ+ multicore CPUs at the current data rates?
I read that. I'm just saying that it's overall still not as bad as Louisiana or Texas by a long, long, long margin. Those states might pay lip service to your rights - but the mob will still convict you on the slimmest of evidence, and sent you to prison for about 10-20x times the sentence, under harsher conditions. Or they'll just murder you.
It's not all bad. At least according to wiki, Japan has one of the lowest incarceration rates of the civilized world. The conviction rate may be high, but the sentencing is extremely lenient and the total number of convictions is low.
Commit a murder in Japan? Out in 10-15 years. Rape? 2-5 years. Etc. That's ridiculously lower than typical sentences in the U.S. for the same crime. Also, "acquaintance rape" is almost never prosecuted because a prosecutor won't bring a case forward unless they are certain of a conviction. (versus in the U.S., where people are imprisoned for decades based solely on the uncorroborated word of the victim) In the U.S., prosecutors fail to get a conviction about 30-40% of the time in trials, and a vastly higher percentage of the population is prosecuted.
Whether you're a criminal or not, it sounds like you have a higher chance of keeping your freedom in Japan. On the other hand, their society is far less tolerant of any sort of behavior that isn't the norm.
With the monstrous hard drives, you could swap collections such as "every watchable TV drama aired between 2000 and 2005" or "top 1000 songs by month 1970-2009" or "best 100 PC games published in last 5 years by metacritic scores" and so forth. Takes a lot less time to transfer the data if it's plugged into your machine by SATA or eSATA cable than it does by a typical broadband connection.
Shouldn't the "reasonable person" definition be "device that appears to be a weapon of mass destruction".
I mean, first off, a WMD isn't an explosive device : it is a nuclear bomb or a biological or chemical weapon. A brown box does not look like any of those things.
Now, if it was a silvery cylinder with a bunch of wires coming out to various timers and batteries, and it was the proper size and shape to be an improved nuke (meaning about the size of a small car) or had biohazard warnings on it. THAT would qualify under the law.
But instead the prosecutors are punishing him for his disobedience by leaving him in jail while they "consider" if he broke the law. He obviously didn't.
Hint : there's several piracy methods that are going strong right now that have never been touched.
IRC is better than torrent sites ever were for obscure stuff
usenet is faster and more reliable for just about anything, but it costs money for access
megaupload/rapidshare link sites are the hottest new piracy method, and work very well for sharing recent and/or popular files. They work a lot better than torrents because you don't have to seed.
And this is just internet piracy. If the government were to REALLY crack down, then swapping 2 terrabyte hard drives between friends is a heck of a lot more time efficient than the old days of copying floppies and cassette tapes.
Yep. At the school I go to, a professor reported a possible theft of a bio hazardous material to the Feds a few years back. The Feds swooped in and examined his lab with a fine toothed comb. They never found out what happened to the biological samples, but they found plenty of minor violations of federal law in his handling and procuring of the materials. The FBI agents told the professor "look, we gotta account for the loss of these vials somehow. Why don't you sign this document admitting you accidentally destroyed the samples and lied to us, and we won't charge you with anything."
Well, after the Feds lied and pressured him into signing this false confession so that "we can all go home", guess what happened. They charged the professor who REPORTED the possible theft to the Feds with about 40 crimes, with a possible prison sentence of life. Jury of course found him guilty, he was given 9 years in prison, judge reduced it to 2 years.
Moral of the story? Don't call the Feds unless you absolutely have to. Someone's gotta go to prison, and if they can't find anyone else, that person will be you. If you're doing anything remotely interesting, you've probably violated at least one regulation just getting your work done.
Same problem though. With computers, even the "my documents" folder could theoretically contain petabytes of data. Equivalent to searching an entire warehouse or even an entire country rather than just 1 dresser drawer.
It sounds like the current ruling is fine. The search warrant could be "any video or image files depicting person X engaged in criminal conduct". If the computer happens to contain files showing "person Y" committing a crime who is not named in the warrant, too bad for the cops. And to protect this restriction, the third party that examines the computer will only be able to forward records that fit within the warrant.
The problem with trying to apply old precedents to this matter is that digital databases can be so much vaster than any real place being searched. If the cops have a warrant to search the safe in someone's house for something illegal, they aren't allowed to go search the cupboards. Only if the evidence is in plain sight as they go about their business are they allowed to use it.
This is very relevant. What if the cops bust in to your house looking for marijuana in your safe, based on an anonymous tip, and don't find anything? Maybe they find you've stored chemicals in your kitchen cabinets in violation of federal law for storage, or maybe you've got some prescription med bottles for a person who is no longer living in the house. If the cops are allowed to rifle through everything a private citizen owns, and they get creative, they can almost certainly find SOMETHING to charge you with. Their perspective is "since you were accused, you must be guilty of SOMETHING...let's find what it is because I don't want to go back to the station empty handed"
Well, now, if suppose you were a credit bureau like Equifax. If the cops had the authority to search your database to get someone's credit record in order to prove illegal activity, they could search the records of every citizen in the united states because those records are in "plain sight" within the database! Bet they could find SOMETHING if they are allowed to basically open an investigation against every citizen of the country.
And for those arguing "if we're soft on crime, we're letting teh criminals win". The U.S. has already declared and imprisoned more of its citizens for being 'criminals' than any other nation on earth as a % of population. Now, I'm not saying that a large percentage of those people are innocent, just that this extreme level of imprisonment is not an appropriate way for society to deal with those who misbehave. (I think the percentage of innocent people is probably between 3 and 10 percent)
Get a better monitor. Borderlands looked great, even indoors, on my Dell 2707 WFP.
Well, what I mean is that for any given price point, a desktop is going to offer you a lot more power for your money. Laptops with a real graphics chip in them CAN play games...but those two games you mentioned are not particularly demanding, and run fine maxxed out on my old gfx card (8800GT) at 1920x1200.
Yes, there's portability : you need both. I have a low specced laptop (1.3 ghz DC, 2 gigs ram) that I have for situations where I need it, and I use my full desktop with it's dual 27" screens for everything else. You likely make more money than me, and can afford to have high specs in both, it seems.
DVI doesn't necessarily mean content protection, you know, and there actually are encoder cards that can compress a full digital stream from an HDMI port or DVI port back into compressed video again. (though such cards are several thousand dollars). Anyways, nearly everyone is using DVI for it all : you realize that most projectors are actually digital inside, even the old ones with only VGA inputs. DVI is far superior to VGA in every respect because there's no noise or sync issues. Every last pixel on the display is going to know what color it needs to be at a reliable 60 or 120fps. You just like VGA because you have good quality equipment you don't want to replace that needs it.
Truth be told, I suspect that those 30" LCD displays with the best available panel technology and the 32 bit color are probably superior to your CRTs in all respects. Those puppies are several grand each, however. And as you've said yourself, OLED will be the best of all worlds, with no drawbacks except for the problems they have having with the blue pixels dying. (OLED will have high contrast, high refresh rate, low power usage, cheap, thin, pretty much everything you'd want in a display)
Here's something I bet we can both agree on. Don't you hate the takeover of cellphones for everything, even calls made from locations where a landline would work? I hate the static, the poor frequency response, and the frequent malfunctions with cell phones with a passion. Whenever I possibly can, I make a call with a landline. On that note, I recall how a Nokia phone I had in 2002 on a CDMA network was vastly superior in any respect to my current 3G AT&T phone. I picked the very phone I'm using because online reviews concurred that it had good voice quality, and it was cheap.
My other pet peeve is how people love laptops to the point that most people my age don't even have a desktop! How can they not notice the slow CPUs and hard disks and flakey wireless internet compared to a desktop for the same price or less? My 3 year old desktop which had a mere $1300 in parts is still much faster than people's $2000 laptops!
Helium 3 is chemically indistinguishable from helium. For nearly any example you can think of, the answer is going to be "same as helium". (except for nuclear properties)
Lol, pot calling kettle. You're telling us we're too blind to notice the orange pigments and poor black levels of our LCDs...we're telling you that we can't stand the strobe light flashing of your old school CRTs...
To each his own, I guess. Hard to imagine how you fit 3 CRTs on your desk though. And that square aspect ratio must be really annoying if you want to watch any videos.
I've used high end trinitrons. The flicker is awful, ESPECIALLY at 85 hertz. I can see it clear as day, especially if I had 3 space hogging power vampires on my desk like you do. Furthermore, the pixels are smudged on a CRT, especially at high resolutions.
I've got dual Dell 2707 WFPs. That's a high end LCD with an expanded color gamut. They are 27", with 1920x1080 resolution each, which means the individual pixels are pretty large, so text is readable at all font sizes. They are overwhelmingly superior to any CRT I've ever used. Absolutely no flicker. (yes, yes, the best of the best displays are 30" and 2560x1600 resolution, but mine cost half as much)
As for "orange pigment issues"...I used a color calibrator to fine tune my displays to eliminate any issues like that. The viewing angle is wide enough that I've never even noticed the limitations. (granted, at extreme angles its a little bit dimmer but still perfectly readable)
Yes, I agree, OLEDs are the next step up from this, and I'll be upgrading just as soon as they become reasonably priced. (probably 3-5 years from now)
My biggest criticism of your setup, besides the heat emanating off your displays has got to be the flicker. Especially if you've got 3 of them : your eye is much more sensitive to flicker out of the corner of your eye, because the rods in your retina are more sensitive to fast motion. I would often get headaches if I used a flickery display for too long.
Also, she didn't have the hard body I was expecting from a famous porn star. For as much money as she has, one would think she could hire trainers to keep her in better shape.