LCD and LED displays to be give way to LPD

Forget LCD and LED Displays - here comes LPD


CA-based Prysm came out of stealth mode to talk about its plans for manufacturing Laser Phosphor Displays, or LPDs. The new devices, which the company will show off at the Integrated Systems Europe trade show in Amsterdam next month, reportedly use 25 percent as much electricity as equivalently-sized LCD screens. And they should be easier to manufacture too, since they don't have a backplane of transistors like LCD screens: the image is generated by a laser beam that sweeps across phosphor stripes under the control of a scanning mirror. The venture-funded startup, which plans to build and sell LPD screens under its own brand, is promoting them as a low-cost, low-maintenance way to display information in lobbies, airports, broadcast studios, command centers, and the like.

Full story at http://bit.ly/4Cu8ud

OpenGL vs DirectX

A very apt article/blog and must read for all those working on graphics (Simulators? Domain awareness? Game Development?)

http://blog.wolfire.com/2010/01/Why-you-should-use-OpenGL-and-not-DirectX

OpenGL Graphics Libraries are Open Standards, first developed by 'Silicon Graphics' and currently supported on all platforms has for long has been living in the shadows of Microsoft's DirectX. Time to get to know the truth other than DirectX marketing over dose!!

One of the comments in the article drives home the point, which I am reproducing just to hightlight lest you may miss it.

To an observation that DirectX is easier for development view ease of use with Microsoft's Development tools and integration, Frozencow replies:

Yes, I first also thought that was really cool.I started with C#+ ManagedDirectX (MDX). MDX is a sort of wrapper for DirectX that exposes the functionality to .NET. But after using it some time, it felt like it was always coming second. A small subset of features were available in MDX and newer features took Microsoft WAY too long to be implemented into MDX.

NA does more 'abstraction' over the graphics API. It makes it much easier to start with your game and it a very clean and polished library (compared to MDX). But, like MDX, it made a small subset of the features of DirectX available to the programmer. Next to that, it requires people to install another framework next to your game. My little application/game was smaller in size than the framework itself! Especially that last part is in my opinion not cool.

I can see why. DirectX is quite complex. This makes it hard for people (Microsoft) to create a wrapper for it. That's where OpenGL has an advantage. It's much more simple than DirectX. Wrappers like Tao Framework and OpenTK expose most functions of OpenGL to .NET. Also, IF functions are missing, you can easily extend the wrapper with the needed functions, since the wrappers are opensource and OpenGL has a simple structure.

Next to that, your .NET game/application will work on more platforms, since you can run it on Linux through Mono. This is why I'm nowadays using OpenGL instead of DirectX. It's just a bit more freedom (nice catchphrase eh?) for me.

'GodMode' trojan feature in Windows 7

Wonder how many many more such undiscovered features are there in Win7 - a real security nightmare. Check out this blog on CNet http://news.cnet.com/8301-13860_3-10423985-56.html

Extract from the blog:

Understanding Windows 7's 'GodMode'by Ina Fried, January 4, 2010 12:41 PM PST

Although its name suggests perhaps even grander capabilities, Windows enthusiasts are excited over the discovery of a hidden "GodMode" feature that lets users access all of the operating system's control panels from within a single folder.

By creating a new folder in Windows 7 and renaming it with a certain text string at the end, users are able to have a single place to do everything from changing the look of the mouse pointer to making a new hard-drive partition.The trick is also said to work in Windows Vista, although some are warning that although it works fine in 32-bit versions of Vista, it can cause 64-bit versions of that operating system to crash.

To enter "GodMode," one need only create a new folder and then rename the folder to the following:

GodMode.{ED7BA470-8E54-465E-825C-99712043E01C}

Once that is done, the folder's icon will change to resemble a control panel and will contain dozens of control options. I'm not sure it's my idea of playing God, but it is a handy way to get to all kinds of controls.

I've asked Microsoft for more details on the feature and how it came to be. But so far, Redmond is silent on the topic.

Moving to Ubuntu - a first hand account

There was discussion earlier that for office use, Windows rules and transition to Linux for office use would be difficult. One of the logical reasons and rather correctly is that Windows OS is heavily entrenched in our training curriculums with the reasoning that 'we all use it for Office use' - and Linux is not used in Offices with the excuse that 'no one knows it or is comfy with it' (if you don't train people, how can they be comfy - logic isn't is :-). So we have the classic Chicken-and-egg story here, ironically!! (it is rather amusing how many miss this simple logic!!)

Anyway, with my views that every educated IT user (that means nearly all of us!!) should be comfy in at least two OS, and maybe two different word processing software (yess, later very important :-), its time many of us usher in 20Ten getting multi-IT-skilled!!!

Can we do it? Well, came across an interesting blog (http://bit.ly/8nXtYc) of Mrs. Amber Graner, (an ex-US Army veteran) who moved from Mac to Ubuntu and doing an yeoman service to the Open Source Community.

Why I am sharing this is that for all those who feel that changeover to Ubuntu for Office use would be difficult, this blog just shows that it is not at all difficult. Of course here we are talking individuals instead of Organisation, but than every individual can make a difference!! And maybe change the system.

=====Extract from the blog http://bit.ly/8nXtYc===============

I decided that I finally wanted to make the transition from Mac to Linux. What fueled the change - and intrepid CD and an Ubuntu T-shirt that read, "Linux for Human Beings". I sorta laughed when my husband came home from a Sprint in the UK and said. "I have something for you." I looked at the CD and the Shirt and said, "yeah right". However, I had wanted to use Linux for years, but *always* without fail had to turn to my husband to fix things and help me, so I tended to always fall back to the Operating System I was the most familiar with. While my husband was busy working on various Linux distributions , I was moving slowly from DOS to Windows to Mac, then in Feb 2009 landed pretty smoothly into a Linux distro I could feel comfortable with - Ubuntu. I haven't looked back, every once in a while I brush off the Mac, and use it for something. I don't dislike Mac, I just like using Ubuntu better.