[rescue] Rescued: SGI Visual Workstation 320

[Nathan Raymond]

On Fri, 6 Aug 2004, Kevin wrote:

> The 1600SW is a nice little LCD monitor (very bright) but i
> personally believe it gets more hype than it deserves.  It's much
> smaller than a"normal" 17" LCD, as the top and bottom are chopped
> off to get the 16:9 (or whatever it is) aspect ratio.  All of
> that may have been great when it was new, but as you pointed out,
> there are much better deals to be had these days.  The 17"
> LCDs that came with some Dells here in the office beat it out
> IMHO.  They are larger, just as bright and have both VGA and DVI
> inputs.

In my opinion the nice thing about the 1600SW is that it is 1600x1000, not 
1280x1024 like every other 17" LCD.  You have to move up to 20" (and spend 
at least $800) to get 1600x1200 in an LCD these days.  If you take a look 
at notebook computers (where you can get a 15" screen that does 1600x1200) 
or at the ultra high end of desktop screens (IBM's 22" Quad UXGA Wide 
3840x2400 LCD, also rebranded under the Viewsonic label), we could have 
much higher DPI screens than the stupid conventions of 1024x768 15", 
1280x1024 17", 1600x1200 20/21".  But of course to really make the best 
use of a high DPI screen, we need an operating system that dynamically 
scales the whole UI based on the physical screen size and pixel resolution 
so that you don't loose your cursor and get WYSIWYG etc.  Yet, NOBODY has 
created a GUI like that.  It's not hard, and it pisses me off that no one 
has done it (especially Apple, who by using DisplayPDF and introducing a 
new OS had the best opportunity to impliment it).  Sigh.

- Nate