Count your blessings

I've been known to grumble about less than stellar service from Wide Open West and, given what I pay every month for service, I think that I'm justified in grumbling. Still, I have what passes for high-speed access on a more or less regular basis. I don't have to use a phone line to connect to my ISP and put up with a 24Kbps connect speed as do some people I know who live on top of a hill in Harrison County. Their one local ISP was sold to a corporation that seems intent on driving away all current customers and the telephone company's lines to the rural area aren't adequate for even 56K connections.

OK, so I'll count my blessings, and those go far beyond my Internet connection. If you've heard or read my blather for very long, you know that I'm a library fan. Central Ohio is blessed with an abundance of libraries. I live in Worthington, so I have a Worthington library card. That means that I can obtain any book, CD, or DVD in the Franklin County library system and that I can have whatever I want delivered to any library for pickup.

But I can easily drive past either the Upper Arlington main library or one of the branches when I drive from the office to home. And it's only a small distance out of the way to go past the Grandview Heights Public Library. I have library cards from all three systems. In December, I heard an interview on the Bob Edwards Show (XM Radio) with Will Kimbrough. His latest CD (Americanitis) sounded like something I would enjoy.

The Worthington Library didn't have it. Neither did the Upper Arlington Library. Grandview Heights didn't have it either, but it was on order at the Fairfield County Library and Grandview Heights has an agreement with Fairfield County. I placed a reserve on the CD. It hasn't arrived yet, but I'll get to hear it someday.

Big monitor or two monitors?

Personal computers used to have 12" monitors. The background was black. The text was white, amber, or green. But then Windows arrived and larger screens turned out to be better. Higher resolution turned out to be better, too. The best of all worlds might be two (or three) monitors, each with a different function. The primary application you're working with could be in the middle and the menus for that application could be on one of the side monitors. The other side monitor could be for e-mail or Web browsing. Or maybe you could do the same thing with a really huge monitor – particularly if it's a widescreen model.

Recently, I commented, "LCD screens are easier on the eyes. This is because they do not flicker. I've just replaced one LCD with a new one as the 5-year-old LCD began to age. The new monitor is a Viewsonic 1440x900, which is quite a bit shorter than my previous monitor, but also quite a bit wider. The extra width allows me to put Photoshop and InDesign panels outside the document. Wow! It's not quite the same as having two monitors, but it's nice."

That raised some questions:

Q: What would be better about having two monitors?

A: For some people, nothing. For others, a lot. If you deal with photo editing programs, graphics applications, or publishing programs, it's wonderful to be able to put all the clutter on one screen and what you're working on on the other screen. The extra-wide screen I'm using allows me to accomplish most of that.

Q: A salesman trying to sell me a widescreen cautioned me that some video cards will allow you to have dual monitors, but they will not allow you to have different resolution on the monitors. (I like one resolution for most work but need higher resolution for some tasks; I have been switching resolution on my current CRT.)

A: If you have an LCD, you will want to run it at the native resolution and at no other resolution unless you like fuzzy letters.

Q: The sales person also said that some video cards won't allow you to show the whole screen on both monitors; you'd have your Start menu on one monitor and any icons that you've placed on the right side of the screen would be on your second monitor.

A: This is probably true. The secret to buying computer equipment is to avoid stores where sales people say things like this and instead dealing with stores where the sales people are smart enough to ask what you want to accomplish and then make recommendations that will allow you to do it.

Q: My video card will allow me to have two monitors. It's an ATI Radeon 7000 and has the "Hydravision Wizard" for setting up multidisplays. Someone mentioned a problem with a dual monitor setup with that type of card, but that was on a laptop. Does the same problem apply with a desktop?

A: If an ATI Radeon 7000 has a specific problem it will have that specific problem no matter what kind of machine it is in.

Q: Could you have two monitors and one of them widescreen?

A: If you have the right video card, yes.

Q: I know about the native resolution thing; that's exactly why I was trying to figure out the equivalency between resolution sizes on CRTs vs. LCDs.

They're identical. If a CRT is 1600x1200 and an LCD is 1600x1200, they're the same. The physical size may be different, but the number of pixels is identical regardless of the technology. In other words, you can have a 12" 1600x1200 monitor or a 24" 1600x1200 monitor. Both have the same resolution, but the text on the 12" monitor would be tiny. (Truth in babble: You may NOT be able to find any 12" monitors. I think nobody makes that size anymore.)

Q: In checking into the documentation for the video card, I cannot find any convincing evidence that it can handle either a widescreen monitor or a dual-monitor setup.

A: Don't depend on that. Contact the manufacturer. The video card I have did not list the widescreen mode -- even on the website -- but the card recognizes the screen size and offers the proper settings when the monitor is attached to the computer.

Q: I was trying to come up with an indicator number that would tell me in advance what combination of screen size and resolution I would like, based on what I like on my CRT. I like 800x600 on my 17-inch CRT. On my 17-inch CRT at 1024x768, text looks too small.

Keep in mind that screen measure (as with television) is diagonal and that the "standard" screen has a width:height ratio of about 4:3. It may be important to note that CRT measure is bogus -- from edge to edge, even though you lose about an inch. On LCDs, the stated measurement is the actual measurement.

You might be better off trying to come up with the approximate number of pixels per inch or maybe dividing the number of pixels by the diameter in inches.

• Your 800x600 16" screen would be (800x600)/16 = 30,000
• Your 1024x786 17" screen would be (1024x786)/17 = 46,260

If you want the text to be about the same size on a higher-resolution screen (1024x786) then you need to approximate 30,000.

Solve for x: (1024x786)/x = 30000
1024x768 = 30000x
30000x = 786432
x = 26.2144

With all else being equal (which it won't be) you would need a monitor that's approximately 26" (diagonal) to get the same text size.

Here's why all else wouldn't be equal: Windows offers "large fonts" and "small fonts", which make gross changes in the way things are displayed. You can also use Display Properties to set specific sizes for the system display (menus and the like) and you can use the zoom feature in Word, InDesign, Corel Draw, and many other applications to control the size of text in a document.

In the final analysis, the only way to be certain that you'll get what you want is to see the monitor in operation at the resolution you plan to use.

Nerdly News

Who owns Iphone?

Cisco Systems claims to own the Iphone trademark via its Linksys (Infogear) division, but now it appears that Cisco/Infogear/Linksys used open source software improperly. This would be a major "oops" and a significant impediment to Cisco's attempt to hold up the release of Apple's Iphone.

Cisco hasn't published the source code for the WIP300 Iphone. This would seem to be a violation of the company's open-source licensing agreement under the GPL (GNU General Public License). GPL controls precisely how commercial enterprises can use open-source software. The WIP300 is based on Linux and in using that technology, Cisco agreed to comply with the terms of the open-source GPL license. That's required by any company that wants to use the software.

Armijn Hemel, a consultant with Loohuis Consulting, says the firmware for the phone is legal, but Cisco didn't share the code for some of the programs in the phone. Big oops.

As you know from last week's program, Cisco filed a lawsuit charging Apple with trademark infringement because Apple introduced a cell phone called the Iphone. For-profit corporations often fail to comprehend or comply with open-source software rules, but using code under GPL requires that users release modifications to the general community. Cisco hasn't done that.

Stay tuned!

When will they ever learn?

Copy protection on DVDs makes it difficult for people who buy the DVDs to make copies and give them to their friends. Copy protection on DVDs makes it difficult for people why buy the DVDs to make copies they can take with them on business trips, meaning they risk losing or damaging the original. Copy protection on DVDs does absolutely nothing to discourage the pirates who make illegal duplicates by the thousands.

So to recap: Copy protection provides the maximum amount of annoyance for the people who buy your product and does nothing at all to keep professional thieves at bay. One would think that DVD publishers would catch on to this simple fact and do something else to encourage people who might otherwise copy a friend's DVD to buy their own. What might that "something else" be?

What if the DVD came with the equivalent of liner notes? Some CD publishers (notably small independents) include booklets with their CDs. The booklets are illustrated and add value to the CDs. They're also impractical to copy. People who might otherwise copy the CD buy their own because they want the extras.

Hollywood is reputed to be home to some clever marketers. Maybe someday they'll figure out that annoying the people who buy your product isn't a good long-term business model.

The first high definition (HD) DVDs are out. They come with copy protection. Already the copy protection has been cracked and the movies are being distributed on the Internet using BitTorrent.

Data consists of 1s and 0s. It is intended to be copied and efforts to make it uncopyable are ultimately futile and doomed to fail. That seems to be what the big businesses in the movie and music business don't seem to comprehend even now.

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