Moral calculus

[mmcirvin]

I got Sam a hulking, turbocharged HP laptop for Christmas, and she decided not to keep her Dell tower or the big old monitor that went with it. So she gave the computer to her mom. But her monitor was bigger than mine, and I called dibs on it, so her mother got mine instead.

I was wondering if the calling of dibs made me a bad person, but Sam, who had just gone through the process of setting up a hand-me-down computer for someone else, told me, with what may have been slight hyperbole, that she'd have died if she had to haul another CRT this size somewhere.

So I comfort myself knowing that I saved my lovely wife's life by snagging this big, big monitor.

Comments

[iayork.livejournal.com]

Current music: Riccardo Chailly; Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra - Jazz Suite No.2. II Lyric Waltz

Another vicious strike from the anti-classical tyranny, I see. Dmitri gets it from all sides.

If you're posting with XJournal, I can give you a script that parses iTunes and enters classical music into the "current music" slot correctly.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Oh, I could write one easily. It's a question of bothering to use it... first Stalin, now apathy, I guess.

Maybe I ought to pester the XJournal guy to put in the obvious option.

[tomscud.livejournal.com]

Also, if Sam's mom is basically going to use the dell for "doing email" and looking at baby pictures, what difference does a big monitor really make?

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Some of those baby pictures can get big. Of course the major problem there is that she's on dialup.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Okay, I just rebooted, and discovered that now that the computer has the right monitor profile loaded, you can run this baby at 1600x1200 without noticeable flicker.

Of course then you have to deal with all the font-size problems that crop up when you are running at higher resolution than every coder in the world assumes you are. I think that fonts hard-coded to certain pixel sizes, more than any engineering limitation, are actually the main thing holding back high-quality displays. This monitor is a few years old and it's capable of far higher resolution than most people actually use; they've all been taught by hard experience to believe that high resolution = tiny fonts, and that this is somehow the way it will always be.

[partiallyclips.livejournal.com]

"Is there anything so precious and delicate and yet so heavy and dangerous as a computer monitor? It's like owning a high voltage glass anvil."

Richard Sergei Chapman

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Actually, having worked with scientific equipment, I can say that the answer is "yes".