Mark Mischke's Weblog

Glossy notebook displays

There are two kinds of modern notebook displays, anti-glare and anti-reflective.  Anti-glare screens have the traditional matte finish while anti-reflective screens have the newer glossy (reflective??) finish.  There's much debate over the merits of one type vs. the other, especially in the Macintosh camp.  Apple's new MacBook is their first product to employ an anti-reflection display.

My Alienware Sentia has an anti-reflective display and I love it.  To some degree it's a matter of personal preference.  Both types of display have their pros and cons.

Ali and I were out on the deck the other day, me with my Alienware and she with her ThinkPad, which has an anti-glare display.  She was forced to go indoors because she couldn't see anything on her screen.  I could see mine well enough to work, which is really all that can be expected of current LCD technology.

Anti-glare screens attempt to reduce reflection through the use of a rough surface which diffuses incoming light.  This unfortunately has the effect of reducing overall contrast because the images coming from the display also get diffused.  Colors tend to have less saturation and blacks are more like dark greys.

Anti-reflective screens address the problem of diffusion and color saturation.  Colors are vivid and blacks are really black.  Despite the fact that you can effectively use the screen as a mirror, much less light is reflected than that in an anti-glare display.

Anti-glare screens are best for those who use business applications and work indoors.  Anti-reflective screens are better for visual designers and multimedia applications.  They also seem to work better outdoors, although by a slim margin.  In addition, higher-resolution displays will benefit from anti-reflective technology due to the lower level of image diffusion.

Linux finally works!

I've been waiting for a Linux distro that 'just works' for about ten years.  I first started looking at Linux back in 1996 and my initial experience with it involved a 386-SX box with 8 MB RAM and a stack of 3.5" Slackware floppy images.  It took me the better part of a day to get it running, and X was a real bitch to configure.  Once I got it set up I wasn't sure what to do with it.  But I _was_ proud of myself.  :-)

Linux has come a long way in the past couple of years.  Ubuntu 5.10 was very nearly a viable mass-market OS, but it had poor wireless network support.  By poor support I don't mean lack of drivers.  I'm referring to WPA encryption and the ability to easily roam between WLANs - things Windows and Mac users take for granted.  5.10 worked like a charm on a spare desktop box I had laying around but the wireless issues prevented me from using it on my notebook.  I'd written some scripts which allowed me to use WPA and jump between WLANs but a mature platform shouldn't require that.  After all, Granny don't script.

Ubuntu 6.06 LTS was just released and I promptly cut a 10 GB partition on the notebook for it.  I have to say that I'm very impressed.  Everything works.  WPA didn't work right out of the box, but after installing Network Monitor, it found my access point, prompted me for the password and connected right up.  I do believe that the good folks at Ubuntu have gotten it right.

What's left?  We need an Internet Explorer-compatible Web browser, complete with plug-ins.  Like it or not, we live in a Windows-dominated world.  Many Web sites are designed and tested with IE.  I'm all for standards-based browsing but if we want things to 'just work', we need to accomodate de-facto standards, too.  CNN looks like crap in Firefox (on Ubuntu), and the video clips don't work.  Users don't care about standards purity.  They just want things to function as expected.  This isn't a Linux gripe, so I'll get off the soapbox.  I also won't go into OpenOffice <-> MS Office compatibility issues.  This post is meant to be a big thumbs-up to Ubuntu for achieving what I consider to be a huge milestone.  Plus, I expect that I'll discover workarounds for my browser woes.