I love USB displays!
Andy "Krazy" Glew
large pixels for my aging eyes.
When encountering the various fanboyisms of my friends and coworkers -
gaming, netbooks - I have often felt somewhat embarassed, since I'm
really not that much into games, not that much into PCs of clamshell
formfactor. I am somewhat into tablet PCs and handhelds, but those are
expensive enough that I cannot really exercise my enthusiasm.
But LCD displays have come down in price. And USB display adapters have
made it feasible to attach many displays to my laptops - I still haven't
bought a desktop system in more than 10 years.
Best of all, I can almost, *almost*, act as if my love of large display
surfaces is work related. It sure does help to be able to look at
really, really, wide spreadsheets (although really, really, wide
spreadsheets are a bit of an abomination). It helps to be able to read
papers, or patents, in PDF a full page at a time.
Yesterday and today I went a bit overboard. It's been a while building.
Confronted with aforementioned really wide spreadsheets, I went and
bought a second 1680x1050 monitor for use at work, matched to the
company provided monitor. (After asking IT, who said that I could only
have two monitors if they were smaller, 1400x1050. Which rather misses
the point.)
Since I wanted to work at home in Hillsboro, as well as at work in
Bellevue, I bought a second LCD monitor at home. But this was 1900x1200.
Do you realize how much more you can see on a 1900x1200 monitor?
Almost didn't need to stretch the spreadsheet across both monitors.
Since I have no docking station, I used a Tritton SEE2 Xtreme USB
display adapter. Which works fine, and which allowed me to have not
just two, but three displays: the two 1900x1200 external monitors, and
my laptops' LCD.
It's a slippery slope. Last week I almost went out and bought 2 more
monitors for use at work. Instead, I decided to drive my two 1900x1200
monitors from Hillsboro to Bellevue, carefully wrapped in sleeping bags
and clothes. So now, on my big Biomorph desk at work (another piece of
personal equipment) I have 5 monitors: two 1900x1200 in landscape mode,
and the two 1050x1680, in portrait mode. Plus the laptop LCD display.
I originally set these up with 2 different USB display adapters: the old
Tritton SEE2 Xtreme, and a new Diamond USB Pro, bought last night on my
way to Bellevue. This gave me 4 monitors, in combination with the two
DVI ports on my Dell docking station. But there were issues: in
particular, Windows restricted me to 16 bit color on one of the
displays. Plus, I had forgotten an AC cable.
First trip back to Frye's: bought the power cable. And another Diamond
USB Pro. Now all works... Except that the Tritton monitor keeps
misbehaving, occasionally hanging. So I make another trip back to
Frye's. Now I have 3 Diamond USB Pros, 2x1900x1200 + 2x1050x1680 + the
laptop LCD. The laptop resolution is reduced, to 1200x800, but I can't
really complain.
Let's see, that's 8.88 megapixels, if I have done my math correctly.
Most of it driven by USB. Probably no good for video or games, but good
enough to throw a lot of data up where I can look at it.
More! I want more! More slow pixels! If I could plug in e-paper
displays all about my office, I would.
We're on the verge of LCDs and e-paper being cheap enough to replace the
whiteboards that are ubiquitous in offices. Nice thing, this is a
continuous acceptance curve: it's not so quantized as many other
application areas are.
Eventually, we must get rid of refresh.
---
comp.arch relevance: what sort of computers are good for processing such
large displays/ Not necessarily GPUs, since not necessarily real time
graphics.
Roger Ivie
> It's a slippery slope.
http://www.engadget.com/2009/11/10/matrox-pushes-eight-displays-with-a-single-slot-pcie-x16-gpu/
--
roger ivie
ri...@ridgenet.net
Noob
Robert Myers
wrote:
>
> More! I want more! More slow pixels! If I could plug in e-paper
> displays all about my office, I would.
>
You must have a lot of external bandwidth to your brain.
I have dual 22" displays to which I bring my entire menagerie of
desktops. Good investment so far, but I'm not sure how much more I
could profitably take in with conventional monitors.
Robert.
Roger Ivie
Argh! Better not show that page to my wife!
--
roger ivie
ri...@ridgenet.net
Terje Mathisen
> I love displays! I love looking at large numbers of pixels, relatively
> large pixels for my aging eyes.
I've been using a 1920x1200 + 1600x1200 combination both at home and at
work for a few years now, these are both connected to a little docking
slice.
For our trading department I tested out a PC-Card graphics adapter some
years ago, using this allowed another pair of relatively fast 2D screens.
Since PC-Card slots have gone away, it makes sense to move the
power-hungry parts to the other end of a sufficiently fast USB2 connection.
I suppose you need external power for these, or do they run on 500 mA?
> comp.arch relevance: what sort of computers are good for processing such
> large displays/ Not necessarily GPUs, since not necessarily real time
> graphics.
External screens needs external power anyway, so why not embed the
needed USB/display hardware in the screen itself?
I'm pretty sure I've seen such beasts, at least in the form of
projectors supporting both VGA and USB connections. Having the driver
available is the crucial problem for a meeting room projector however.
Terje
--
- <Terje.Mathisen at tmsw.no>
"almost all programming can be viewed as an exercise in caching"
Andy "Krazy" Glew
> Andy "Krazy" Glew wrote:
>> I love displays! I love looking at large numbers of pixels, relatively
>> large pixels for my aging eyes.
> Since PC-Card slots have gone away, it makes sense to move the
> power-hungry parts to the other end of a sufficiently fast USB2 connection.
>
> I suppose you need external power for these, or do they run on 500 mA?
The USB display adapters have no external power.
They must be USB powered, unless they can snarf power from DVI or VGA.
2 of my displays have built in USB hubs. I.e. the display is powering
it's own USB display adapter.
ChrisQ
I replaced my old tube monitor for a large tft earlier this year, 1600 x
1200 vs 1280x1024 on the tube and a fraction of the power. Order of
magnitude clearer as well and less eye strain when using it all day.
I wouldn't have thought that usb would have enough bandwidth for video
rates, though perhaps if you're not doing anything else with the usb
controller. NIf no psu, so how bright is it ?. Most of the power for
tft's is in the backlight, often 10-20 watts on a larger display...
Regards,
Chris
Peter Grandi
> I love displays! I love looking at large numbers of pixels,
> relatively large pixels for my aging eyes.
Actually it should be relatively small pixels with scalable
fonts and icons -- they give much better contrast and are easier
for the eyes to focus on than coarse pixels masked by antialiasing.
[ ... ]
> Best of all, I can almost, *almost*, act as if my love of large
> display surfaces is work related. It sure does help to be able
> to look at really, really, wide spreadsheets (although really,
> really, wide spreadsheets are a bit of an abomination).
For programming it is much worse than abomination. I have
noticed that many people inexplicably (to me) like to have a
single maximized window on the screen, and that many programmers
tend to write lines as long as their window (and I guess many
know that kind of programmer who also likes really tiny fonts
with dark colors on black backgrounds). The result I see is that
lines in programs become longer and longer.
The extreme case I have seen so far is that coworker who used a
tiny font on a large monitor, with a maximized editor window 400
columns wide (and 200 high). I asked him what was the point, and
he said that with very long lines he would write many C functions
entirely on one line, and he could often write a whole module
that would fit in one screenful too.
Had to spend several days reformatting and indenting his code.
[ ... ]
> (After asking IT, who said that I could only have two monitors
> if they were smaller, 1400x1050. Which rather misses the point.)
I see that Mordac style characters are persecuting you. Where I
work currently some people have 3x 1920x1200 monitors on their
desks. That's pyshing it a bit too.
[ ... ]
> I decided to drive my two 1900x1200 monitors from Hillsboro to
> Bellevue, carefully wrapped in sleeping bags and clothes. So
> now, on my big Biomorph desk at work (another piece of personal
> equipment) I have 5 monitors:
Another case of edging closer to being a "free agent" supplying
your own tools/machinery for work.
> two 1900x1200 in landscape mode, and the two 1050x1680, in
> portrait mode. Plus the laptop LCD display.
The 1920x1200 would not be really necessary if native-portrait
monitors were available to. Ideally they would be grayscale too.
Unfortunately most monitors are targeted to consumers who can
only think of playing movies on them, and want them as wide and
colorful as possible; for office/programming work high DPI
portrait greyscale monitors would be far better (speaking from
experience).
[ ... ]
> Let's see, that's 8.88 megapixels, if I have done my math
> correctly. Most of it driven by USB. Probably no good for
> video or games, but good enough to throw a lot of data up where
> I can look at it. More! I want more! More slow pixels! If I
> could plug in e-paper displays all about my office, I would.
My observation is that the most precious computer entities are
displays and memory (that is, visual and program memory) as
proven by the degree of multiplexing/caching they are subjected
to. Right now I have a 24" LCD, with the following levels of
multiplexing:
* KVM to switch between 2 computers.
* Window manager with multiple virtual desktops.
* Multiple overlapping windows within a desktop.
* Multiple tabs within a window.
* Multiple buffers (Emacs) within a tab.
It can get pretty confusing and distracting. Never mind the crazy
performance implications of many layer of memory caching each
with their own inappropriate replacement policy.
> We're on the verge of LCDs and e-paper being cheap enough to
> replace the whiteboards that are ubiquitous in offices.
I am very very much against replacing any tech that works well,
requires no power or batteries, no cabling, little maintenance,
and has excellent viewing properties, with something else, just
for the sake of bringing a "Blade Runner" style world forward.
[ ... ]
> Eventually, we must get rid of refresh.
LCDs don't refresh...
> comp.arch relevance: what sort of computers are good for
> processing such large displays/ Not necessarily GPUs, since not
> necessarily real time graphics.
Well, 'comp.arch' is about computer system architecture in
general, not just processors, and the technology of the surface
between the human an computer perceptual worlds is part of that.
There is an angle on processors: current monitors are in effect
display computers, as the signals received from the main unit are
processes (e.g. zooming, sharpening, ...) before being rendered
to the LCD. In effect what one sees on the monitor is a processed
movie of the contents of the frame buffer (that's why some LCD
monitors offer a sharpening setting even for DVI input), and that
is also what those USB adapters you use do too, as do the various
KVM-over-Ethernet-or-IP products. Not too different from current
disk drives, which are in effect complicated block device servers.
The overall architectural relevance here is that modern systems
are ever more asymmetrical distributed system with specialized
embedded processors (and not just printers and disks, monitors
too, never mind disk host adapters, network cards, ...).
The result is flexibility, but also increased confusion as the
definition of "working" becomes rather fuzzy for even simple
systems.
I wonder mhow many of the readers of this newsgroup realize that
sometimes current TVs crash and have to be rebooted, and so do
current LCD displays (and trains -- once I was stuck on a train
for a couple of hours as the locomotive engineers had difficulty
rebooting to a stable state the engine's controllers).
Bernd Paysan
> The 1920x1200 would not be really necessary if native-portrait
> monitors were available to. Ideally they would be grayscale too.
>
> Unfortunately most monitors are targeted to consumers who can
> only think of playing movies on them, and want them as wide and
> colorful as possible; for office/programming work high DPI
> portrait greyscale monitors would be far better (speaking from
> experience).
High resolution: yes, please. Grayscale: no. I use syntax
highlighting, and even when composing a Usenet posting like this, my
editor colors quoted text differently - that's very useful, I would miss
it on a grayscale monitor.
IMHO, a number of things go wrong which is why advance of resolution is
slow. My take at this is here:
http://www.jwdt.com/~paysan/hires.html
Executive summary: Use bayer pattern for the screen, double effective
resolution without decreasing feature size (i.e. with the same
technology and yield).
> I wonder mhow many of the readers of this newsgroup realize that
> sometimes current TVs crash and have to be rebooted, and so do
> current LCD displays
Fortunately, I'd neither to take my TV nor my LCD to an unexpected
forced reboot yet. The complexity still remains low enough to keep the
software robust. Suggestions like mine above would require some
slightly more complex software in the screen as long as the interface
stays RGB.
--
Bernd Paysan
"If you want it done right, you have to do it yourself"
http://www.jwdt.com/~paysan/
Anton Ertl
>IMHO, a number of things go wrong which is why advance of resolution is
>slow. My take at this is here:
>
>http://www.jwdt.com/~paysan/hires.html
>
>Executive summary: Use bayer pattern for the screen, double effective
>resolution without decreasing feature size (i.e. with the same
>technology and yield).
Is feature size really a problem for monitors? There used to be 24"
monitors with 200dpi (IIRC 3840x2400) >5 years ago. I have not heard
much about them lately, apparently the inability of Windows to cope
with them has resulted in a retreat into specialty markets. Apart
from Windows, a problem of such monitors is how to drive them. You
need two dual-link DVI ports, and I found it already pretty
challenging to get hardware and software to work for my 2560x1600
display.
>Fortunately, I'd neither to take my TV nor my LCD to an unexpected
>forced reboot yet. The complexity still remains low enough to keep the
>software robust.
My >10 years old TV set occasionally needs a soft or hard power cycle,
especially in connection with using teletext.
- anton
--
M. Anton Ertl Some things have to be seen to be believed
an...@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at Most things have to be believed to be seen
http://www.complang.tuwien.ac.at/anton/home.html
Bernd Paysan
> Is feature size really a problem for monitors? There used to be 24"
> monitors with 200dpi (IIRC 3840x2400) >5 years ago.
Yes. Small feature size drives the price up the roof. 50-60dpi (TV
screens) can be made significantly cheaper per m² than 100dpi (computer
screens), and 200dpi is just way too expensive - it's left to very small
displays. There are also troubles with aligning the liquid crystal if
the alignment domain (i.e. the subpixel) is too small.
> I have not heard
> much about them lately, apparently the inability of Windows to cope
> with them has resulted in a retreat into specialty markets. Apart
> from Windows, a problem of such monitors is how to drive them. You
> need two dual-link DVI ports, and I found it already pretty
> challenging to get hardware and software to work for my 2560x1600
> display.
Fortunately, there's now DisplayPort 1.2; with four lanes, it can drive
4k by 2560. DisplayPort can also use YCrCb, and thus could utilize the
fact that there are more green pixels on my proposed display (4:2:2
color subsampling plus possible extended color space).
The 30" screens are particularly challenging to drive, because they
usually have no scaler inside, so you have to get everything right to
drive them.
nm...@cam.ac.uk
Anton Ertl <an...@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at> wrote:
>
>>Fortunately, I'd neither to take my TV nor my LCD to an unexpected
>>forced reboot yet. The complexity still remains low enough to keep the
>>software robust.
>
>My >10 years old TV set occasionally needs a soft or hard power cycle,
>especially in connection with using teletext.
My cheap Microsoft optical mouse crashed and rebooted a few weeks
back. It then crashed and wouldn't come back, so I power cycled
it by pulling the USB plug out, and it has worked since :-)
All right, that WAS a good enough story to tell at work - even our
hardware service people had not seen that one!
I suspect memory corruption, making the assumption that mice don't
use ECC ....
Regards,
Nick Maclaren.
Niels Jørgen Kruse
> My cheap Microsoft optical mouse crashed and rebooted a few weeks
> back. It then crashed and wouldn't come back, so I power cycled
> it by pulling the USB plug out, and it has worked since :-)
What made you decide that it was the mouse?
Couldn't it have been corruption on the host side?
--
Mvh./Regards, Niels J�rgen Kruse, Vanl�se, Denmark
nm...@cam.ac.uk
=?ISO-8859-1?Q?Niels_J=F8rgen_Kruse?= <nos...@ab-katrinedal.dk> wrote:
>
>> My cheap Microsoft optical mouse crashed and rebooted a few weeks
>> back. It then crashed and wouldn't come back, so I power cycled
>> it by pulling the USB plug out, and it has worked since :-)
>
>What made you decide that it was the mouse?
>
>Couldn't it have been corruption on the host side?
Possible, but unlikely. When it crashed, the light went out, it
flickered as it rebooted, and then came back steady. When it
failed to reboot, it continued to flicker.
My computer has ECC, as I have better things to do than track
down memory errors.
Regards,
Nick Maclaren.
Bernd Felsche
Could be a virus. Keyboards have been known to be hackable.
They contain microcontrollers with flash memory. Only a matter of
time before somebody installs their own code.
Everything is a computer now; pretending to be an appliance.
--
/"\ Bernd Felsche - Innovative Reckoning, Perth, Western Australia
\ / ASCII ribbon campaign | Politics is the art of looking for trouble,
X against HTML mail | finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly
/ \ and postings | and applying the wrong remedies - Groucho Marx
Anton Ertl
>Anton Ertl wrote:
[3840x2400]
>> Apart
>> from Windows, a problem of such monitors is how to drive them. You
>> need two dual-link DVI ports, and I found it already pretty
>> challenging to get hardware and software to work for my 2560x1600
>> display.
>
>Fortunately, there's now DisplayPort 1.2; with four lanes, it can drive
>4k by 2560.
But which graphics card has that and can do that? Sounds to me like
reliving the dual-link DVI experience: First having to find a card
that supports dual-link DVI, and then one that also supports the whole
resolution; I have a Radeon X850XT at home that has two dual-link DVI
connectors, but supports only up to 2048x1536. Also, of the two
graphics cards I bought after my 30" monitor (which has DisplayPort
among other connectors), none has DisplayPort.
>The 30" screens are particularly challenging to drive, because they
>usually have no scaler inside, so you have to get everything right to
>drive them.
Do you mean "scaler" as in blowing the picture up to full screen? My
Dell 3008WFP can scale, and some of the things it does are quite
impressive: I have a picture of picture-by-picture mode (two computers
displaying on the same monitor, each getting a 1280x1600 half-screen),
with one half being driven in 1920x1440 scaled down to 1280x960. The
result was still surprisingly readable.
I also have the impression that some graphics cards (in particular, an
Nvidia 8600 based card I tried) scale the picture in the graphics
card: Even when I asked the monitor for 1:1 display (which worked as
intended with other graphics cards), I got a scaled-up image from
lower-resolution modes.
Niels Jørgen Kruse
> In article <1j9yr3x.1qkn41jucv84uN%nos...@ab-katrinedal.dk>,
> =?ISO-8859-1?Q?Niels_J=F8rgen_Kruse?= <nos...@ab-katrinedal.dk> wrote:
> >
> >> My cheap Microsoft optical mouse crashed and rebooted a few weeks
> >> back. It then crashed and wouldn't come back, so I power cycled
> >> it by pulling the USB plug out, and it has worked since :-)
> >
> >What made you decide that it was the mouse?
> >
> >Couldn't it have been corruption on the host side?
>
> Possible, but unlikely. When it crashed, the light went out, it
> flickered as it rebooted, and then came back steady. When it
> failed to reboot, it continued to flicker.
A reboot should take no longer than when the mouse is first plugged in.
I have never come across a wired mouse with any perceptible delay from
being plugged in to being usable.
Noob
> The extreme case I have seen so far is that coworker who used a
> tiny font on a large monitor, with a maximized editor window 400
> columns wide (and 200 high). I asked him what was the point, and
> he said that with very long lines he would write many C functions
> entirely on one line, and he could often write a whole module
> that would fit in one screenful too.
>
> Had to spend several days reformatting and indenting his code.
Seriously?
Bernd Paysan
>>Fortunately, there's now DisplayPort 1.2; with four lanes, it can
>>drive 4k by 2560.
>
> But which graphics card has that and can do that?
AFAIK none at the moment. From the spec, it looks like even the newest
ATI 5x cards (which fully embrace DisplayPort) currently only has
DisplayPort 1.1 on chip - 6 in total, each of them carries 4 TMDS
transmitters, and they spec it up to 2560x1600, i.e. "only" DisplayPort
1.1, limited to 1.62GHz symbol rate. At least their "Eyefinity"
technology would make it possible to just use several DisplayPorts
together.
> Sounds to me like
> reliving the dual-link DVI experience: First having to find a card
> that supports dual-link DVI, and then one that also supports the whole
> resolution; I have a Radeon X850XT at home that has two dual-link DVI
> connectors, but supports only up to 2048x1536. Also, of the two
> graphics cards I bought after my 30" monitor (which has DisplayPort
> among other connectors), none has DisplayPort.
I've two unused PCIe-DisplayPort lying around...
BTW: Your Dell apparently is currently the only 30" monitor which *has*
DisplayPort... all the others are DL-DVI only...