There is a *lot* of demand for glossy monitors. Read the forums.
But... Go to Best Buy. Nothing but matte. Go to Office Depot.
Nothing but matte. Go to Office Max. Nothing but matte. Go to
Staples. One very low end TN glossy, everything else is matte.
The matte screens are all washed out with milky white fog.
Blacks are not black. Colors are not saturated. Text is very
hard to read. Glossy provides blacks that are black, colors that
aren't milky, text that is easy to read.

Aside from the very low end TN at Staples, the only other glossy
monitor I've found is the Apple 27". Absolutely beautiful,
but word is that the LG panels have quality control issues.
I don't want to pay $1000 for a monitor and get stuck with
yellow tint and backlight bleed issues.

Do *all* LG panels suffer from quality control problems?
The Dell ST2220T has a couple of excellent reviews, but
the units may have been cherry picked.

Oddly, I noticed that a lot of laptops had glossy screens.
So in an home or office setting where you can control the
lighting, nearly all monitors are matte. But portable
laptops, which will likely be used in a variety of settings
with a variety of lighting, come with glossy screens. Does
this seem backwards to anyone?

There are a lot of models of monitors, and a lot of models
of laptops. Lots of people prefer matte, lots of people
prefer glossy. Why can't they make a good selection of each?
Same deal with 1920x1200 vs 1920x1080.

And how much do they really save with 6-bits plus dithering vs
real 8 bits?

What other brick & mortar stores carry glossy monitors?
(A monitor is one item I want to actually look at before buying,
given what I plan to do with it.)

Darinbob writes:
> I've used one of these, and it was kind of nice. The drawback
> compared to X Windows was that it was not very standardized or common.

To be fair, X wasn't very standardized or common in the early days.
There were a lot of windowing systems in the 1980s. X became the
defacto standard. I always thought Display PostScript seemed interesting.

> It was quite usable over a normal serial link or even a modem, since
> it used a lot less bandwidth than X.

In the early 1980s at the Labs, most of us connected via 1200 baud modems.
The Ethernet switch didn't exist yet, so we used a phone switch. :-)
(What do you expect, we were part of the phone company.)

HomelessInLaJolla writes:
> Before 1982, one can only do one thing at a time on any computer.

Feh. I was doing multiple things at once on a pdp11 in the 1970s with
a dumb ascii terminal. Along with 50 other users. And it was fast.

russotto writes:
> So it's a contemporary of the Lisa (introduced January 1983, so finished
> development in 1982 also), which didn't require a Unix host.

The Lisa was a toy compared with Unix.

http://ozguru.mu.nu/Photos/2005-11-11--Dilbert_Unix.jpg

That Bacon, Lettuce and Interactive Tomato generated some serious terminal
envy, let me tell you.

> The main reason i see for it is in comparison to most other OSs,
> everything* can be accessed as a file. This includes most devices
> and sockets. That has made unix very agile and has allowed it to
> adapt with the times. The only OS i can think of that goes further
> than unix in this respect is plan 9, which was also designed by
> bell labs as the successor to unix. Plan 9 goes as far as allowing
> peripherals on the network to be accessed as files.

There is a reason NFS actually stands for Not really a File System.
NFS breaks "everything is a file".

DFS (Distributed File System) from Tektronix allows accessing devices
on remote nodes. And unlike NFS, DFS actually works.

WHY WHY WHY did NFS become the defacto standard? :-(

We need a FLOSS implementation of DFS.

PitaBred writes:
> Token? They've been working on open source drivers for the
> GPUs ever since AMD bought ATI. What more do you want?

I want enough resources provided so that *all* the features
are documented. In particular, UVD. Bridgman says that would
take about another 12 top people (6 for UVD, 6 for other).

According to yahoo, AMD has a market cap of $6.07 Billion,
a profit margin of 19.97%, and 10,400 full time employees.
AMD can easily afford another 12 people. There is no excuse
for a company of this size not properly documenting its products.
I've seen much better/complete documentation from projects done by
1-3 guys in their garage. So how do we convince AMD's management?

Evanisincontrol writes:
> I'd be surprised if VAAPI wasn't a high priority for this driver.

Be surprised. Video decode is at the bottom of Bridgman's
priority list. We need to either change his mind or get
him more people.

But don't trust my paraphrases, read Bridgman's own words here:
http://www.phoronix.com/forums/showthread.php?t=28075&page=6