LCD's are still the most common FPD for many reasons including size, power consumption, contrast ration, brightness, and the fact that it's the most mature of the "new" display technologies (back in the 80's Japan became the world leader in LCD development).
The manufacturing process has progressed to a point where manufacturers consider only 3/4 pixels in a 32" display to be defective. The only major drawbacks to LCD's at this stage are response speed (fast moving images can get a little blurred), and their viewing angle.
There's a phenomenal amount of research going on into solving these problems, especially the viewing angle (something I was involved in myself indirectly). Even back in '98 companies like Mitsubishi had prototypes (.pdf) that outperform current commercial displays.
HDTV CRTs still outperform HDTV LCDs, but in for ordinary TVs LCDs have superior quality in terms of things like definition, image clarity, contrast ratio, so at this stage if you're after HDTV you really should stick with CRTs (unless you're prepared to wait another few years
The guy who published the 3 fantastic papers on Brownian Motion (which the most citations of the 3), Special Relativity, and the Photoelectric effect was not some crazy old dude with mad hair, but this guy. A 26 year old man working in the patent office. His most important work was done as a relatively (please excuse the pun) young man, up til his late 30's.
The old man didn't keep up with the new physics of the day (Quantum Mechanics, not including his arguments with Bohr over the philosophical meaning of it "God does not play dice" etc etc) and never made any true progress in his later years to a grand unified theory combining electrodynamics with gravity (the only two forces known at the time).
So to end this completely offtopic rant, it is sad to see the media, and most people's view of the most recognised scientist in the world (then again it was only in 50's/60's that the media formats allowed him to be recognisable) is shown as the mad, old scientist, and not the man who really did the work.
Sorry about that, I hadn't intended to give an "impending doom" slant, it was just sloppy of me (but if anyone followed the link they would get more accurate info on the three eruptions), and the activity I mentioned was just from memory -It can be found in the transcript I referenced (but if and only if my memory of reading it there is correct).
He did have one crucial point to make, if the goals of "limitless" energy sources like fusion (if the yanks & europe can agree on ITER) are realised then individuals would have megawatts to throw around with.
That's a long way off though; by the time such a situation was reached, the demands by consumers would have greatly increased. At current levels of power usage, of course the heat waste is negligable, that doesn't mean it won't be in the future.
Power demand is increasing phenomenonly throughout the world, as an example, in Ireland back in the 20's a hydroelectric dam was built.
It supplied more than 80% of the power for the entire country, now it supplies less than 2%.
They already use geothermal energy sources in Iceland, and in Italy. In Italy, I THINK the majority of it is used as power sources for research labs (but I could quite easily be wrong in this).
Oh and on the yellowstone bit, there is a huge amount of energy stored underneath yellowstone, but there are a lot of issues with that.
The caldera volcano in yellowstone erupts every 600,000 years or so, and the last one was 630,000 years ago. Scientists there have already seen signs of an increase in activity in deep in the crust over the last number of years, changes in surface temperatures (increasing), parts of the landscape bulging, they think the massive magma chamber is building up again.
The release of pressure by tapping into the geothermal sources could help release some of the immense pressure that is building up, or, if they fuck up, a sudden release of pressure, and a weak point in the bulge could be all it takes to allow the volcano to erupt.
74,000 years ago Mt. Toba erupted in Indonesia (I'm working on memory of something I studied a few years ago in uni so I could be wrong on the Indonesia bit, but I do know that 2,500 kilometers away in the Indian Ocean 35cm of ash from Mt.Toba was discovered). I think about 3,000 cubic kilometers of material was ejected in its massive eruption , there would have been a global temp drop of 5 degrees (according to Michael Rampino). And there is evidence to show that around this time, there was a bottlekneck in the global human population, it went down to a few thousand world-wide
(This bottleneck was identified because mutations in mitrochondrial DNA of humans, {whose rate of mutation is known, and is passed from mother to daughter} were used to work backwards in time to the bottleneck). Mt. Toba was a VEI8 volcano (VEI = Volcano Explosivity Index, rated by orders of magnitude), as has Yellowstone.
In Yellowstone National Park, a VEI8 has erupted there with a periodicity of approximately 600,000 years. These massive eruptions had ash zones that far outsized the ash zone of Mt. St. Helens (check out http://www.geolsoc.org.uk/template.cfm?name=Yellow stone2 (which had an ash zone that reached only 19 miles), which was a VEI5 and considered large by modern standards. The massive eruptions would have been 3 orders of magnitude larger than Mt. St. Helens, which caused a temperature drop of.10C, the affect on global temperatures of an eruption of such magnitude would have been massive. The ability of these massive volcanoes to spread ash & dust over massive distances is undoubtable.
An example of the correlation of eruptions and their ash zones would be, of an eruption that occurred in Bruneau Ridge around 10 million years ago. 1600 kilometres away, in Nebraska, in 1971 Mike Voorhies discovered fossilised remains of 200 rhinos, with those of camels, lizards, horses and turtles, which were dated to be 10 million years old. These animals all systematically showed signs of being killed by Marie's disease, a lung disease where the lungs where shredded by razor sharp ash particles and the animals affected choked on dust and ash, and drowned in their own blood. The fossilised remains were surrounded by two metres of thick ash. This ash, and ash from the site of the eruption were analysed, and found to match, exactly.
Also, for an interesting read, search for the transcript of "Supervolcanoes", it was aired on BBC2 a few years ago http://www.bbc.co.uk/
Sorry it's a little off topic!
Slashdot Mirror
LCD's are still the most common FPD for many reasons including size, power consumption, contrast ration, brightness, and the fact that it's the most mature of the "new" display technologies (back in the 80's Japan became the world leader in LCD development).
The manufacturing process has progressed to a point where manufacturers consider only 3/4 pixels in a 32" display to be defective. The only major drawbacks to LCD's at this stage are response speed (fast moving images can get a little blurred), and their viewing angle.
There's a phenomenal amount of research going on into solving these problems, especially the viewing angle (something I was involved in myself indirectly). Even back in '98 companies like Mitsubishi had prototypes (.pdf) that outperform current commercial displays.
HDTV CRTs still outperform HDTV LCDs, but in for ordinary TVs LCDs have superior quality in terms of things like definition, image clarity, contrast ratio, so at this stage if you're after HDTV you really should stick with CRTs (unless you're prepared to wait another few years
Damn, too sleepy to finish this....... :P
if you know what you're doing you can pet a hedgehog, its rather cute really, until you sneeze and get a face full of needles :(
The old man didn't keep up with the new physics of the day (Quantum Mechanics, not including his arguments with Bohr over the philosophical meaning of it "God does not play dice" etc etc) and never made any true progress in his later years to a grand unified theory combining electrodynamics with gravity (the only two forces known at the time).
So to end this completely offtopic rant, it is sad to see the media, and most people's view of the most recognised scientist in the world (then again it was only in 50's/60's that the media formats allowed him to be recognisable) is shown as the mad, old scientist, and not the man who really did the work.
it wasn't the US DoD, it was developed by the scientists in CERN to transfer the huge amounts of data from their particle colliders, DARPA came after.
Sorry about that, I hadn't intended to give an "impending doom" slant, it was just sloppy of me (but if anyone followed the link they would get more accurate info on the three eruptions), and the activity I mentioned was just from memory -It can be found in the transcript I referenced (but if and only if my memory of reading it there is correct).
He did have one crucial point to make, if the goals of "limitless" energy sources like fusion (if the yanks & europe can agree on ITER) are realised then individuals would have megawatts to throw around with. That's a long way off though; by the time such a situation was reached, the demands by consumers would have greatly increased. At current levels of power usage, of course the heat waste is negligable, that doesn't mean it won't be in the future. Power demand is increasing phenomenonly throughout the world, as an example, in Ireland back in the 20's a hydroelectric dam was built. It supplied more than 80% of the power for the entire country, now it supplies less than 2%.
They already use geothermal energy sources in Iceland, and in Italy. In Italy, I THINK the majority of it is used as power sources for research labs (but I could quite easily be wrong in this).
Oh and on the yellowstone bit, there is a huge amount of energy stored underneath yellowstone, but there are a lot of issues with that.
The caldera volcano in yellowstone erupts every 600,000 years or so, and the last one was 630,000 years ago. Scientists there have already seen signs of an increase in activity in deep in the crust over the last number of years, changes in surface temperatures (increasing), parts of the landscape bulging, they think the massive magma chamber is building up again.The release of pressure by tapping into the geothermal sources could help release some of the immense pressure that is building up, or, if they fuck up, a sudden release of pressure, and a weak point in the bulge could be all it takes to allow the volcano to erupt.
74,000 years ago Mt. Toba erupted in Indonesia (I'm working on memory of something I studied a few years ago in uni so I could be wrong on the Indonesia bit, but I do know that 2,500 kilometers away in the Indian Ocean 35cm of ash from Mt.Toba was discovered). I think about 3,000 cubic kilometers of material was ejected in its massive eruption , there would have been a global temp drop of 5 degrees (according to Michael Rampino). And there is evidence to show that around this time, there was a bottlekneck in the global human population, it went down to a few thousand world-wide (This bottleneck was identified because mutations in mitrochondrial DNA of humans, {whose rate of mutation is known, and is passed from mother to daughter} were used to work backwards in time to the bottleneck). Mt. Toba was a VEI8 volcano (VEI = Volcano Explosivity Index, rated by orders of magnitude), as has Yellowstone.
In Yellowstone National Park, a VEI8 has erupted there with a periodicity of approximately 600,000 years. These massive eruptions had ash zones that far outsized the ash zone of Mt. St. Helens (check out http://www.geolsoc.org.uk/template.cfm?name=Yellow stone2 (which had an ash zone that reached only 19 miles), which was a VEI5 and considered large by modern standards. The massive eruptions would have been 3 orders of magnitude larger than Mt. St. Helens, which caused a temperature drop of .10C, the affect on global temperatures of an eruption of such magnitude would have been massive. The ability of these massive volcanoes to spread ash & dust over massive distances is undoubtable.
An example of the correlation of eruptions and their ash zones would be, of an eruption that occurred in Bruneau Ridge around 10 million years ago. 1600 kilometres away, in Nebraska, in 1971 Mike Voorhies discovered fossilised remains of 200 rhinos, with those of camels, lizards, horses and turtles, which were dated to be 10 million years old. These animals all systematically showed signs of being killed by Marie's disease, a lung disease where the lungs where shredded by razor sharp ash particles and the animals affected choked on dust and ash, and drowned in their own blood. The fossilised remains were surrounded by two metres of thick ash. This ash, and ash from the site of the eruption were analysed, and found to match, exactly.
Also, for an interesting read, search for the transcript of "Supervolcanoes", it was aired on BBC2 a few years ago http://www.bbc.co.uk/ Sorry it's a little off topic!