Your analogy makes no sense. The video card doesn't have to care about what particular technology the display uses, only the range of vertical and horizontal frequencies it supports. The video signal is the same, whether you use a CRT, a LCD, o whatever.

With a modern machine, a good setting is:

core=dynamic
cycles=auto

That way you don't have to manually adjust the cycles, and VGA games run quite smooth and fast.

In my experience, anti-depressants make you feel nothing, neither positive nor negative emotions.

I don't have a final solution quite yet (though I am working on it as a thought project), but the problem we need to solve is getting a new instruction set which is inherently capable of parallel operation, not on adding more cores and pushing the responsibility onto the programmers for multi-threading their programs.

Like the old Cray machines, or the new NEC SX series? After having studied them, I wonder why manufacturers don't add long vector instructions to current CPUs, they are much more flexible than short vectors (SIMD).

I recently bought a Precision M4400 with a Core 2 Duo T9400, 4 GB of RAM, Quadro 770M with 512 MB of dedicated RAM, 15" matte 1440x900 display, with white LED backlighting, a 200 GB, 7200 RPM hard-drive, and Vista Bussiness (I use Windows for games, I don't care what version it is). It cost me 1800 euros. At the time, a MacBook Pro with a similar configuration had a cost of 2500 euros. Now, this was in Spain, I have heard that in USA macs are cheaper.

PS: about having a big screen and HDD... I have it plugged to an external 22" display and a 500 GB eSATA drive. Plenty of space.

While they give a very natural style of compression on still images (JPEG-2000, etc), they do not translate well to moving sequences because, unlike all other current codecs, the image is not broken up into blocks that can then be tracked and diff'd in time.

You seem to be confusing motion estimation/compensation with residual coding. Dirac does break the image into blocks, using overlapped block motion compensation. However, the residual image is coded as a whole, thanks to wavelets. This should greatly reduce blocking artifacts.