Want a 2048 x 1536 monitor? They sell the medical monitors at eizo.com

Try to drive it with a laptop though. If you have a laptop, it likely has an analog VGA cable. The 17″ Mac has 256 MB vram and a mini DVI. I asked sales at Eizo if they pair up seeing as they drive their monitor with a DVI-2. Dell has the video card, but not the dvi plug. There’s a PCI card and dongle to drive a couple more monitors, but they top out at 1920×1200 per monitor. I saw mention that Lenovo has a DVI on it’s Thinkpad, but I couldn’t confirm it in the specs or in the picture or on their sales support.

I don’t want to go all the way to the 30″ apple monitor. I am thinking there is room for a 16:9 monitor at 3 megapixels. What should the resolution be? We know we can drive 2048×1536 (at analog VGA speeds) on a regular laptop, even the Toshiba Portege. So what 16:9 can we fit in that? 2360×1328 is 3134080 pixels which is less than 3145728 pixels in the 2048×1536. That gives us a near perfect 16:9 to four nines at 1.777 ratio.

Can we do better? Yes. 2368 is divisible by 32 which is true of the long dimensions of our favorite resolutions {640, 800, 1024, 1280, 1440, 1600, 1920, and 2048}. But what about the memory management? They chose 2048*1536 because it is a multiple of 1024*1024. They were trying to get inside 3*2²⁰ or 3 MB which is 3 * 1048576. And if we divide that by 2368, we get 1328 with .43 of a column of pixels to spare. A little wider than 16×9, but what’s so magical about 16:9? The Golden Square is 1.618 anyway if we want to be classical. Let’s optimize instead!

If you want a Golden Square and long dimension divisible by 32 and stay in 3 MB, you have to choose between 2272×1384 (1.641) and 2240×1404 (1.595). They bracket the Golden Square ratio almost in half (divisible by 16 anyone? 2256 x 1394 just like fire wire), but 2240×1404 only leaves over 1/3 of a column of pixels so I prefer that vs. 4/7.

So build me a cinematic display at one of these resolutions, build me a laptop with a 256 MB card to drive it at 75 Hz, a port to get to the monitor and a video driver to drive it.

In 1992, I got so disgusted with my monitor’s native flicker that I installed Linux and wrote my own video driver for it, ultimately settling for 1152×720 (1.6 aspect ratio anticipating by a few years a VESA standard resolution) which was just the right number of pixels so my 386SX20 could refresh at a 72-75 Hz speed so I wouldn’t see the flicker. Without that sensitivity to flicker, I might be much more shy about optimizing and programming projects. I might be more trusting in big corporate technology machinations. 15 years later we are ready for the (almost-)quad version of VESA 361. Lay it on me. $4000 is a smaller share of my income now than the hundreds of dollars to get a 15″ CRT was then. Hit me with it. I will bet you $100 it will be mainstream in 5 years. 1920×1200 is so yesterday’s news–1200 scan lines is part of the 1994 VESA standards to be precise.

Ever get a spam like this?

I have a patent pending from 2003 for visual spam that would parse this via OCR, then filter the text as usual. Call me 1-512-853-9123 if you want to license it. You’d be the first licensee so you’d get generous terms. Check it out at USPTO, it’s 20050050150. It’s just one step in the spam arms race. Next will be audio and video spam. Money paid to readers by mailers is the only way to halt spam, but it will take decades for that to get deployed. This patent is the only one that comes up if you search for “aural recognition” and “spam”.

Check out the graphic on this solar film. My guess is that it would work on the Moon. We might even use film as power transmission cable.

When I was at IBM, I helped them decide to sue Informix which resulted in a merger. I also questioned intellectual property (IP) policy with respect to the personal computer (PC) business. Now that IBM no longer has a PC business, it can more aggressively enforce its IP. With a large portfolio, IP benefits from looking tough on some of its patents. The assumptions in game theory that lead to the chain store paradox of never fighting do not apply here. It is doing that with its portfolio of non-PC patents too. IBM earned $1.4 billion from IP royalties in 2000.

I think their R&D spend is optional to support a much higher rate of patenting. That is, I think the 1.8 million they spent on R&D to get a patent was optional. Only the filing fees, incentive awards, employee hours and legal are necessary to get a valuable patent portfolio. Case in point: a patent I got for IBM on all externally adjustable medical implants. If IBM spun off its IP portfolio, that could generate billions in royalties without any risk of a countersuit. Decisive win for IBM.