What has striken me most the last few years, (...) is that they make you believe that Science will Have All The Answers.
What I believe Science will eventually have all answers to problems that can be answered, and it will be able to isolate all questions that can't be answered and prove that they can't be answered. Unless of course earlier somebody proves the set is infinite and simply the more questions you answer, the more arise (but I personally don't believe it) If human brain is the limit, we will build better brains. So far serious obstacles that can limit our abilities is the lifetime of the universe, speed of light (uh, we're hitting this one more and more frequently), sum of matter and energy in the universe, uncertainity theory and limit on concentration of mass in one place (creating black holes). They may mean barriers to answering some otherwise answerable questions.
NT4 was one of the least screwed up systems from Microsoft. Actually typing this away from a NT4 system running some custom software driving some custom hardware. (of course Mozilla+Gimp+Cygwin as my life support too:)
Eh, if Microsoft released NT4 as open source, now that would be something!
Imagine this scenario: - party A releases Free Software program implementing some technique. - party B patents the technique. - party B releases the patent for free use in Free Software. - party C challenges the patent claim, indicating A as author of prior art. - A would definitely better like B to hold the patent in current state than C to have it challenged (A's program gets protected under the patent rights that way)
The mass of Iapetus m=1.88E+21 kg The diameter of Iapetus 2r=1,436 kilometers (radius r=718E3 m) G=6.7E11 m3 kg-1 s-2 v0=sqrt(mG/r)
v0=419 m/s That's the orbital speed at the level of surface of Iapetus. Not all that impressive? In many cases it won't even get the rock to break. If it breaks, the dust lands somewhere further, but on the same vector, covering the strip of land, filling other craters. If it just slightly rubs the surface of the dust (note the descent may be very slow, as much as fractions of a milimeter in a single orbital period!) it starts rotating, losing its energy, then rolls on the surface till it stops. Now I don't know what effects are responsible for creating the orbit of a body but I don't know of any moon of polar orbit around its planet, most of them are more or less equatorial. But the chances are many orbiting bodies will get the equatorial orbit before landing/impact and the amount of dust falling on the route will cover the craters/groves created by falling bodies.
Now what makes me wonder is, can similar (maybe much smaller) structures be observed in other small atmosphere-less moons of Saturn?
Sports. (no, not me. I'm a nerd.) Shows. Demo of -other- technology than the AV running the display, also scientific presentations. Also educational. Security, monitoring;) News/Live.
Too true. A game released as adult-only: Tons of gore, rivers of blood, some glimpses of naked tits. Same game released as PG-13: Tons of gore, rivers of blood, pixelated tits.
But it's not only production...
Remember "Morrowind?" There was a character named Crassius Curio, a lord with taste for earthly deligts. He wasn't a very demanding master. His tasks were quite simple. "Take off all your clothes and show yourself to uncle Crassius." Menawhile other "lords" demanded assassination of competitors, mugging people, blackmail, requested bribes, wanted betrayal and all kind of such filth. Now visit Morrowind forums and look up for threads "most hated NPC". Of course harmless Crassius is far in front of the list and many people boast how they sneakily murdered him or what tortures would they want to apply to him.
It's scary how activity of destroying life is more accepted that creating it, and how strong hipocrisy makes otherwise harmless (unless of course taken over by the crime organizations, i.e. because of the reputation) porn industry "the devil". Probably if it wasn't treated as such "sneaky back door" stuff, all the wrongs (rape, slavery, violence) could be fought better too....and now we have Mafia bosses deciding what standard we will use.
We're still far from "the top" and IT must grow. "The bubble" had to burst, it was just too fast. It was a spike on a slowly growing curve, and the spike's drop seems to have ended. Now is era of growth and flourishing, at slow, ballanced pace. Of course it will end some day. In 30-50 years. Just like era of Steam got replaced by era of Electricity, which got replaced by era of Information. I predict the next era will be of biotechnology. But no worries - just as basic electric engines still get developed and steam still finds new uses, IT won't go away. It will just move out of focus.
Plate technonics tends to make subduction zones along arcs, not in straight lines. Volcanism outside of subduction zones tend to be in hot spots, not lines. So neither is likely to be the cause of this.
Don't you think plate tectonics is specific to planets of volcanic core? Rules that apply to a planet with hot liquid core don't apply to cold bodies of debris stuck together.
I'd guess that the cause is core colapse. Nice theory but what would be the reason for it to happen? And why is the line so straight?
Tidal lock doesn't necessarily mean that the revolution of Iapetus is in the plane of the ring or Saturn's rotation (or is it so? I can't locate its ephemeris). Actually Iapteus could orbit opposite to Saturn's location and perpendicular to the ring, it doesn't matter. What only matters is so its orbit axis was parell to its rotation axis when it had a normal daily cycle yet (no tilt), and paralell to its ring axis. (so tidal lock was changing speed, not direction of rotation). Nowadays when it's stopped it's impossible to tell.
Its gravitation field is not significant enough to trap a larger number of small bodies as Saturn does.
Sure it wouldn't if it was somewhere in open space. But in Saturn's ring it has enough debris nearby to catch them. Much lower strength but way more material to catch. And weak gravity isn't that much of a problem as most of the ring material travels at similar speed, very slowly, so obtaining a "high orbit" for a random piece of rock moving only slightly faster or slightly slower than the moon is really easy.
As they decend onto the surface, it'd make a crater, not mountains. So they do. Great most of them. Only some that get onto its orbit get to create the ridge. They can keep orbiting for millenia (and get stabilized on the equatorial orbit from any randomness where they got) before they finally slowed down by gravity fall to the surface, and as Iapteus has no atmosphere, they can orbit an inch over the surface and still won't fall unless they hit something (horizontally), and rapidly losing speed fall somewhere more or less on vector of their orbit. You get a crater from a really powerful hit from straight above, when a fast moving body (be it accelerated by gravity or just floating through space at high speed) hits the surface. Not from a satellite of atmosphere-less planet, hitting the surface horizontally.
(Posted Jan 10, 2005 11:26 UTC (Mon) by guest PaXTeam) (Post reply)
lots of speculation so let's see the actual timeline a bit. spender emailed Linus sometime early december about the few issues he had found. he also mentioned some of the fixes that were in PaX, the result of one of them was this commit: http://linux.bkbits.net:8080/linux-2.6/cset@41bc90 0azV2y9... . understand please that we (well, spender at least) already had had a working two-way email connection with Linus. during the holidays i had finally time to work on the forward port of PaX (last supported version was 2.6.7) and that's when i realized the change in status of the expand_down() bug as since 2.6.9 it became exploitable by unprivileged users as well. so i emailed Linus about it (of the importance, not the bug itself, he had already known about it from spender, although he had never replied back on that one). one week later, which is early this year i resent the mail to Linus and Andrew as well, and the next day spender forwarded the mail himself to them (as i said, he had a known working email route to Linus at least). nothing happened except spender was preparing the next grsecurity release and it became more and more urgent to get some feedback on these issues. we were considering emailing Alan Cox (the week of waiting allotted to Andrew as well wasn't over yet) when the uselib() exploit suddenly hit the net and everyone entered forced release mode, we couldn't delay it either.
now that you know some background, tell me again, 1. how much more we should have waited, 2. why we shouldn't have contacted Linus/Andrew in the first place, 3. why we should have contacted Alan first (who is explicitly not the security contact anymore), 4. why we should have contacted a VM hacker first (none of whom is a security contact either, not even for their respective employer, let alone linux/VM in general).
see, i've been in the security industry for some number of years now, and i know quite well what best practices are (everyone's got his own, but there're some common elements):
rule 1: you contact the explicit security contact first. for linux this used to be Alan himself, nowadays it's vendor-sec (yes, that means you're not supposed to deal with individual distros, that's why vendor-sec was established in the first place). except they proved to unreliable, not to mention that it's *impossible* to contact them in a secure way (they don't have a PGP key).
rule 2: short of such a security contact, you begin contacting the 'people in control', from top to down, not the other way around. for companies that's relevant because the chain of control also represents the chain of responsibility. you can argue that open source/free software projects are free of chain of control, but they're not free of responsibility. i believed and still believe that we did the right thing when we began contacting Linus, then Andrew and were about to contact Alan when external events intervened.
> THAT is why there is all this maintainers/lieutenants business.
except the VM has no explicitly listed maintainer. but yes, i can guess who the main contributors are, but that doesn't make them a security contact (remember, we only wanted to get feedback, be told what to do next, and *not* to force Linus or anyone to actually manage the issue). it makes them the right person to actually fix the bug, but that's only the second step after the initial contact.
> PaxTeam isn't subscribed to LKML. Why? Because "there's too much"?
correct, i have a day job (unrelated to linux), family and friends, i can't handle that email load (and there's more in my world than lkml). i don't know where you got that i didn't like lkml, if i wasn't sympathetic to linux, i would have posted everything to bugtraq a month ago (contrast that to the recent DJB case).
> And that fact that it claims to report a security vulnerability is quite > likely to get it classified as "crying wolf"
i provided a proof of concept exploit (which you would know if you had actually read the announcement and posts here).
Note the moon is stopped in its rotation around saturn (1day=1year) and the ring is right around its equator. That would be a strong coincidence for the forces to appear right there. On the other hand, this symmetrical layout would be about the only possible where Saturn's influence wouldn't "puff" the ring and could actually stabilize it in this position.
Less possible: What I'd look for are two large craters of similar size and same age (can be estimated by amount of erosion from later meteorites), placed on opposite sides of the moon, shifted from the surface of the intersection by similar distance in opposite directions. Strong enough hit could have just split the moon it two...
More possible: The moon had its own ring, just like Saturn has. But the ring's rotation was slowed down by Saturn's gravity (the same way our Moon's rotation got stopped by Earth) and the ring was pulled by the moon's gravity down, on the surface, depositing all the material straight below its orbit.
Note "your average" laser can damage your sight. But you can run a laser as weak as you desire, shine it at the bottom of your eye and just see a harmless dot. With the extra profit of saving power.
Yes. All these bulky mechanical parts because there's only one expensive laser and it must sweep whole surface of the large disk...
Replace movement in one axis (rotary/radial) with an array of lasers, you have just removed one engine. With lasers cheap enough you can afford covering the whole CD surface and using micromovements i.e. by solid state piezzo activators to have the whole surface read.
Plus with the sensors and lasers cheap enough, by including a lot of them in a single drive you can multiply the readout times. No longer time consuming moving of the head and no longer 50x rotary speed for 50 tracks to be read instead of one.
Rather not. Remember the information needs to be converted from/to electricity on both ends to be useful. There's still no nearly-100% way of retrieving energy from light. So, you take something like iButton, a 1-wire device, on the end of a wire. It works solemnly on power provided through the data line, so the bus master must pump some electricity (not much, in fact within CMOS levels) with the data "ones" into the line to power up the slaves (and "zeros" have strict timing limits). Similar device based on light and optic fibres would be extremely difficult to make: sender device blinks a laser and the opposite end reads the data with a photovoltaic cell and using the power sent with the carrier of the signals powers up its own laser to send the signals back... The losses would be just too high...
Plus... modern technologies like these used in SRAM use very little power while in "stasis". A flip-flop containing a "1" almost doesn't use any current, just the same as one containing a "0". Only the moment of transition causes some power loss. They only differ with voltage levels at certain points. (a NVSRAM chip with built-in battery has data retention of 10 years. It's hardly bigger than any other chip)
With light-encoding signals there's still no way to hold a level without providing energy, 0 is no power, 1 is keeping the laser powered up, generating light that gets lost somewhere and using up power to keep it shining. There's still nothing near keeping the light in stasis, so you i.e. lock 500 photons in some cell and they run in circle endlessly and no external power source is needed to keep them like that, then you change something and the photons escape triggering a sensor.
Could they release that laser-on-chip device as a VHDL macro so I could implement it in my FPGA projects? I bet no, they would lose all the profit if people pirated the file and everyone could create one from readily availavle FPGA...
The problem is you still need electricity to power the laser:) But it's a great step in the embedded devices industry. (what took a PCB takes a part of a chip.)
Just like wheel. It rolls, it's round and does nothing. Completely useless invention.
Uses I can imagine already: -superminiaturized CD-ROM drives (laser+sensor+decoding circuitry all in one chip). Also lasers implemented everywhere where they were considered too bulky (nanobots anyone?) -single-chip fibre optic modems. -prices of all laser devices dropping rapidly (you can implement the laser on your chip as one of 1000 other parts for $0.003 each resulting in $3 chip, instead of a $3 chip, $2 laser diode and $1 circuitry to connect them) -laser based projectors where 1 pixel=1 laser (no sweeping beam=vastly increased brightnes plus solid state, no moving parts)
Currently one of major problems with lasers of any reasonable power is they require massive heat sinks. So, no. Still waiting till liquid nitrogen pipes and connectors get integrated into motherboards and chips...
...simply nobody cared. If you sit sideways from a flatscreen (no matter what kind, CRT, LCD or Plasma) you still get perspective distortion, trapezoid image. The only difference with old CRTs is that it's made a bit worse by the curvature so their real viewing angle is like 170 degrees or so, because then parts of the screen get obscured by the middle.
Far, far away from, say, my friend's Toshiba Satellite laptop with P4 3GHZ (so not SO old!) where you had to adjust the lid precisely to see all colors, and still blue on the bottom of the screen was different from blue on top unless you moved your head far enough, just because of very limited viewing angle. 30 degrees and you see just contours, 45 degrees and you don't see a thing! Match that against your 22yo CRT where you could still recognize the actor's face at 60 degrees angle.
The "viewing angle" problem does not refer to distortion of the image resulting from screen shape, but reduced brightness caused by the angle at which you view the screen, resulting from polarization, which happens only with LCDs.
ps. With the laptop - if I placed my head in the right place, kterm darkening the walpaper was generating such colors with the "knoppix" logo in the background, that one eye was seeing them differently than the other. Which gave a cool 3D effect (feeling that the logo was some 5cm under the terminal window) But it really sucked when it happened in a game.
Slashdot Mirror
Anyone who has taken high school chemistry ought to know better.
:)
like, say, Alfred Nobel?
(why do you think there's no Nobel Prize in maths? Look up this story
What has striken me most the last few years, (...) is that they make you believe that Science will Have All The Answers.
What I believe Science will eventually have all answers to problems that can be answered, and it will be able to isolate all questions that can't be answered and prove that they can't be answered. Unless of course earlier somebody proves the set is infinite and simply the more questions you answer, the more arise (but I personally don't believe it)
If human brain is the limit, we will build better brains. So far serious obstacles that can limit our abilities is the lifetime of the universe, speed of light (uh, we're hitting this one more and more frequently), sum of matter and energy in the universe, uncertainity theory and limit on concentration of mass in one place (creating black holes). They may mean barriers to answering some otherwise answerable questions.
NT4 was one of the least screwed up systems from Microsoft. :)
Actually typing this away from a NT4 system running some custom software driving some custom hardware. (of course Mozilla+Gimp+Cygwin as my life support too
Eh, if Microsoft released NT4 as open source, now that would be something!
Imagine this scenario:
- party A releases Free Software program implementing some technique.
- party B patents the technique.
- party B releases the patent for free use in Free Software.
- party C challenges the patent claim, indicating A as author of prior art.
- A would definitely better like B to hold the patent in current state than C to have it challenged (A's program gets protected under the patent rights that way)
Can C succeed in challenging the patent claim?
...on bodies of what size?
The mass of Iapetus m=1.88E+21 kg
The diameter of Iapetus 2r=1,436 kilometers (radius r=718E3 m)
G=6.7E11 m3 kg-1 s-2
v0=sqrt(mG/r)
v0=419 m/s
That's the orbital speed at the level of surface of Iapetus. Not all that impressive?
In many cases it won't even get the rock to break. If it breaks, the dust lands somewhere further, but on the same vector, covering the strip of land, filling other craters. If it just slightly rubs the surface of the dust (note the descent may be very slow, as much as fractions of a milimeter in a single orbital period!) it starts rotating, losing its energy, then rolls on the surface till it stops. Now I don't know what effects are responsible for creating the orbit of a body but I don't know of any moon of polar orbit around its planet, most of them are more or less equatorial. But the chances are many orbiting bodies will get the equatorial orbit before landing/impact and the amount of dust falling on the route will cover the craters/groves created by falling bodies.
Now what makes me wonder is, can similar (maybe much smaller) structures be observed in other small atmosphere-less moons of Saturn?
Sports. (no, not me. I'm a nerd.) ;)
Shows.
Demo of -other- technology than the AV running the display, also scientific presentations. Also educational.
Security, monitoring
News/Live.
Too true. A game released as adult-only: Tons of gore, rivers of blood, some glimpses of naked tits. Same game released as PG-13: Tons of gore, rivers of blood, pixelated tits.
...and now we have Mafia bosses deciding what standard we will use.
But it's not only production...
Remember "Morrowind?" There was a character named Crassius Curio, a lord with taste for earthly deligts. He wasn't a very demanding master. His tasks were quite simple. "Take off all your clothes and show yourself to uncle Crassius." Menawhile other "lords" demanded assassination of competitors, mugging people, blackmail, requested bribes, wanted betrayal and all kind of such filth. Now visit Morrowind forums and look up for threads "most hated NPC". Of course harmless Crassius is far in front of the list and many people boast how they sneakily murdered him or what tortures would they want to apply to him.
It's scary how activity of destroying life is more accepted that creating it, and how strong hipocrisy makes otherwise harmless (unless of course taken over by the crime organizations, i.e. because of the reputation) porn industry "the devil".
Probably if it wasn't treated as such "sneaky back door" stuff, all the wrongs (rape, slavery, violence) could be fought better too.
We're still far from "the top" and IT must grow. "The bubble" had to burst, it was just too fast. It was a spike on a slowly growing curve, and the spike's drop seems to have ended. Now is era of growth and flourishing, at slow, ballanced pace.
Of course it will end some day. In 30-50 years. Just like era of Steam got replaced by era of Electricity, which got replaced by era of Information. I predict the next era will be of biotechnology. But no worries - just as basic electric engines still get developed and steam still finds new uses, IT won't go away. It will just move out of focus.
Unless we nuke ourselves first that is.
Thank you. I wish I had mod points. (and the author of the summary should be shot.)
Plate technonics tends to make subduction zones along arcs, not in straight lines. Volcanism outside of subduction zones tend to be in hot spots, not lines. So neither is likely to be the cause of this.
Don't you think plate tectonics is specific to planets of volcanic core?
Rules that apply to a planet with hot liquid core don't apply to cold bodies of debris stuck together.
I'd guess that the cause is core colapse.
Nice theory but what would be the reason for it to happen? And why is the line so straight?
Tidal lock doesn't necessarily mean that the revolution of Iapetus is in the plane of the ring or Saturn's rotation (or is it so? I can't locate its ephemeris).
Actually Iapteus could orbit opposite to Saturn's location and perpendicular to the ring, it doesn't matter. What only matters is so its orbit axis was parell to its rotation axis when it had a normal daily cycle yet (no tilt), and paralell to its ring axis. (so tidal lock was changing speed, not direction of rotation). Nowadays when it's stopped it's impossible to tell.
Its gravitation field is not significant enough to trap a larger number of small bodies as Saturn does.
Sure it wouldn't if it was somewhere in open space. But in Saturn's ring it has enough debris nearby to catch them. Much lower strength but way more material to catch. And weak gravity isn't that much of a problem as most of the ring material travels at similar speed, very slowly, so obtaining a "high orbit" for a random piece of rock moving only slightly faster or slightly slower than the moon is really easy.
As they decend onto the surface, it'd make a crater, not mountains.
So they do. Great most of them. Only some that get onto its orbit get to create the ridge. They can keep orbiting for millenia (and get stabilized on the equatorial orbit from any randomness where they got) before they finally slowed down by gravity fall to the surface, and as Iapteus has no atmosphere, they can orbit an inch over the surface and still won't fall unless they hit something (horizontally), and rapidly losing speed fall somewhere more or less on vector of their orbit. You get a crater from a really powerful hit from straight above, when a fast moving body (be it accelerated by gravity or just floating through space at high speed) hits the surface. Not from a satellite of atmosphere-less planet, hitting the surface horizontally.
Note the moon is stopped in its rotation around saturn (1day=1year) and the ring is right around its equator. That would be a strong coincidence for the forces to appear right there. On the other hand, this symmetrical layout would be about the only possible where Saturn's influence wouldn't "puff" the ring and could actually stabilize it in this position.
Proportionally, though, it's about 2.5 times the size
the height.
Olympus is a single top. This is a ridge, very long.
Comparing a lake 1km wide and a river 1km wide...
I have two theories...
Less possible:
What I'd look for are two large craters of similar size and same age (can be estimated by amount of erosion from later meteorites), placed on opposite sides of the moon, shifted from the surface of the intersection by similar distance in opposite directions. Strong enough hit could have just split the moon it two...
More possible:
The moon had its own ring, just like Saturn has. But the ring's rotation was slowed down by Saturn's gravity (the same way our Moon's rotation got stopped by Earth) and the ring was pulled by the moon's gravity down, on the surface, depositing all the material straight below its orbit.
http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/multimedia/images/image -details.cfm?imageID=1270t /swtc/Pix/books/weg/dstc3.g if
:)
http://www.theforce.ne
Striking similarity, isn't it?
Note "your average" laser can damage your sight. But you can run a laser as weak as you desire, shine it at the bottom of your eye and just see a harmless dot. With the extra profit of saving power.
Yes. All these bulky mechanical parts because there's only one expensive laser and it must sweep whole surface of the large disk...
Replace movement in one axis (rotary/radial) with an array of lasers, you have just removed one engine. With lasers cheap enough you can afford covering the whole CD surface and using micromovements i.e. by solid state piezzo activators to have the whole surface read.
Plus with the sensors and lasers cheap enough, by including a lot of them in a single drive you can multiply the readout times. No longer time consuming moving of the head and no longer 50x rotary speed for 50 tracks to be read instead of one.
Rather not. Remember the information needs to be converted from/to electricity on both ends to be useful. There's still no nearly-100% way of retrieving energy from light. So, you take something like iButton, a 1-wire device, on the end of a wire. It works solemnly on power provided through the data line, so the bus master must pump some electricity (not much, in fact within CMOS levels) with the data "ones" into the line to power up the slaves (and "zeros" have strict timing limits). Similar device based on light and optic fibres would be extremely difficult to make: sender device blinks a laser and the opposite end reads the data with a photovoltaic cell and using the power sent with the carrier of the signals powers up its own laser to send the signals back...
The losses would be just too high...
Plus... modern technologies like these used in SRAM use very little power while in "stasis". A flip-flop containing a "1" almost doesn't use any current, just the same as one containing a "0". Only the moment of transition causes some power loss. They only differ with voltage levels at certain points. (a NVSRAM chip with built-in battery has data retention of 10 years. It's hardly bigger than any other chip)
With light-encoding signals there's still no way to hold a level without providing energy, 0 is no power, 1 is keeping the laser powered up, generating light that gets lost somewhere and using up power to keep it shining. There's still nothing near keeping the light in stasis, so you i.e. lock 500 photons in some cell and they run in circle endlessly and no external power source is needed to keep them like that, then you change something and the photons escape triggering a sensor.
Could they release that laser-on-chip device as a VHDL macro so I could implement it in my FPGA projects? I bet no, they would lose all the profit if people pirated the file and everyone could create one from readily availavle FPGA...
The problem is you still need electricity to power the laser :)
But it's a great step in the embedded devices industry. (what took a PCB takes a part of a chip.)
Just like wheel. It rolls, it's round and does nothing. Completely useless invention.
Uses I can imagine already:
-superminiaturized CD-ROM drives (laser+sensor+decoding circuitry all in one chip). Also lasers implemented everywhere where they were considered too bulky (nanobots anyone?)
-single-chip fibre optic modems.
-prices of all laser devices dropping rapidly (you can implement the laser on your chip as one of 1000 other parts for $0.003 each resulting in $3 chip, instead of a $3 chip, $2 laser diode and $1 circuitry to connect them)
-laser based projectors where 1 pixel=1 laser (no sweeping beam=vastly increased brightnes plus solid state, no moving parts)
Currently one of major problems with lasers of any reasonable power is they require massive heat sinks. So, no.
Still waiting till liquid nitrogen pipes and connectors get integrated into motherboards and chips...
...simply nobody cared.
If you sit sideways from a flatscreen (no matter what kind, CRT, LCD or Plasma) you still get perspective distortion, trapezoid image. The only difference with old CRTs is that it's made a bit worse by the curvature so their real viewing angle is like 170 degrees or so, because then parts of the screen get obscured by the middle.
Far, far away from, say, my friend's Toshiba Satellite laptop with P4 3GHZ (so not SO old!) where you had to adjust the lid precisely to see all colors, and still blue on the bottom of the screen was different from blue on top unless you moved your head far enough, just because of very limited viewing angle. 30 degrees and you see just contours, 45 degrees and you don't see a thing! Match that against your 22yo CRT where you could still recognize the actor's face at 60 degrees angle.
The "viewing angle" problem does not refer to distortion of the image resulting from screen shape, but reduced brightness caused by the angle at which you view the screen, resulting from polarization, which happens only with LCDs.
ps. With the laptop - if I placed my head in the right place, kterm darkening the walpaper was generating such colors with the "knoppix" logo in the background, that one eye was seeing them differently than the other. Which gave a cool 3D effect (feeling that the logo was some 5cm under the terminal window)
But it really sucked when it happened in a game.
Moderator is currently metamoderated unfair. :)
Satisfied?