We just read that LCD monitors are about to get a whole lot better. Manufacturers such as Benq, Viewsonic and Samsung have rolled out LCD displays with a response time of 8 millisec, which places them squarely in the visual quality range of good ol’ CRT displays. What is this millisecond stuff about, you might ask? Good question.
Welcome to Chez Gearhead, your table is ready. Please, walk this way. . . . Ah, sir and madam, you say you could not walk that way without the talcum powder? Most droll, if we might venture an opinion. Anyway, today we have a wonderful menu for you. . . .
First, an amuse-bouche to titillate the palate: After our discussion the week before last , wherein reader Don Janeway raised the question of how to boot a Live CD on a machine that doesn’t support CD booting, reader Chris Lucht might have a solution: “I found an even easier way on the Debian 3.0r3 CD #1. It’s a floppy image for the Smart Boot Manager boot disk, which boots up to a menu that asks where you want to boot from, such as a hard disk, floppy or CD-ROM (details ). This is easier than making Linux boot floppies since you only need one disk, and it will work for all of your CDs.”
We haven’t had a chance to try this out yet but it looks good. It also looks like one of those things you really need to have in your tool kit.
Which leads us to the question of, what is in your tool kit? And what do you have tool kits for? What we’d like to see from each of you – yes, each and every one of you – is a list of your tools, where they come from, what they are good for and what they cost. Drop us a note outlining your equipment.
Next on the menu is another question: What is the world-record over-clocking speed? The previous record we knew about was the “5 GHz Project: CPU Cooling With Liquid Nitrogen ” dated December 2003. This project uses a liquid nitrogen cooling system (natch) to chill an Intel P4 to minus 196 F to achieve a clock speed of 5.25 GHz.
But then we found a forum thread at XtremeSystems dated Feb. 12, 2005, that told us someone named “Fugger” using a custom-made, three-phase, vapor-phase CPU cooler over-clocked an Intel P4 running in BIOS at an insane 7.2 GHz and followed that up with a new world-record benchmark performance of 6.3 GHz.
For a discussion of the engineering involved there are a number of posts to the XtremeSystems forums that discuss the system’s performance issues and problems. Let us know if you find out more details or know of anything more impressive.
And now for the main course: We just read that LCD monitors are about to get a whole lot better. Manufacturers such as Benq, Viewsonic and Samsung have rolled out LCD displays with a response time of 8 millisec, which places them squarely in the visual quality range of good ol’ CRT displays.
What is this millisecond stuff about, you might ask? Good question. It refers to the refresh rate that a display can handle, and if you push a display beyond its maximum refresh rate you’ll get blurring and jaggies, which will significantly degrade the image.
Thus, a 16.6 millisec (that is, 60 Hz) refresh rate allows for a maximum frame rate of 60 frames per second. A good-quality CRT can run at better than 10 millisec (100 Hz).
Given that the last generation of LCDs had a maximum 12 millisec (83 Hz) refresh you can see why CRTs have traditionally won out in professional settings such as high-end graphics and medical applications.
But with an 8-millisec refresh rate, LCD displays spell the demise of CRTs: Not only is their display quality as good, but when you compare CRTs with LCDs of the same screen size, LCDs are physically smaller, weigh less and consume less power. Soon you’ll be saying to your kids “Yep, we used to use displays based on cathode ray tubes,” and they’ll be wondering how an antique like you can still cut it. You won’t care, you’ll be rich from having invested in LCD manufacturers. …
Oh, our regrets, sir and madam, we’re afraid we only have time for a small dessert: Almost a year ago in our Network World Web Applications newsletter, we wrote about Onfolio, a tool for capturing, reading and saving newsfeeds as well as publishing newsfeed items to e-mail, blogs and Web sites. A new version has just been released, and it is excellent.
So that’s the end of today’s dining pleasure. Send you compliments to the chefs at gearhead@gibbs.com, and the antacid tablets are in that big bowl in the foyer. We hope to see you again next week.
