LevelsOfDetail

It's been about 2 weeks since I switched to Vista full time now at home, and I'm liking it quite a bit so far. Performance seems fine, and the machine seems to operate much smoother than when I ran XP. Suspend and resume is great too, both take just a few seconds, again, much better than XP.

What surprises me more though is how much Outlook 2007 and Desktop search perform better on Vista. I know there are several kernel enhancements that make things like Desktop search run better, but my intuitive feel is that Outlook itself actually runs better.

Which leads me to have the sneaking suspicion that Outlook 2007 (and most of Office 2007) were actually built for Vista. With Vista doing so badly as it did out of the gate, many more people than intended ended up running Office 2k7 on XP. My guess is that because the primary focus was Vista, and that Vista could better "handle" a badly performing application, that the Outlook guys didn't really see the performance problems until it was too late. In short, the better Vista kernel masked the poor performance of the new Outlook version. But even with the Outlook 2k7 SP1 patches, it still runs significantly better on Vista than XP.

Of course this is all complete and utter speculation. Even on Vista, Outlook still seems overly slow for what it does. There are tons of mail apps that can process way more mail than Outlook can and also be orders of magnitude more responsive (Thunderbird for one). But Outlook 2k7 (with searching) is definitely tolerable on Vista, and we know MS is most often about providing the "good enough" instead of the "good", so no real surprises.

I suppose we'll have to wait around to see if Mail.app can do it any better, though I have my doubts there as well. Windows 7 at least seems to be trying to push into the "good" category. Let's hope the Outlook folks take up the cause as well.

Found here.

Interestingly, there's a fairly long "Known Issues" section. It's disappointing how many issues there are, but at the same time, the listing here is very helpful. It's good to know that certain hardware is known not to work so that I don't spend all my time trying to debug it.

It's kinda sad that all these different distros need to develop their own testing methodologies. It seems like one area where the open source model could really work. Everyone co-develops a comprehensive test suite, which would then lower costs for OEMs and actually let them concentrate on delivering better hardware.

Too bad you can't get the distros to agree on anything.

Just about 2 years after Vista's initial availability, I finally installed it on my primary desktop at home.

Actually, the machine has been in a pretty sad state of running 32-bit XP on a machine with 6 Gb of RAM for several months now. Vista x64 is the only useful 64-bit version of Windows, so here we are.

So far, things seem to be OK. I managed to use the opportunity to change my boot drive to a newly acquired WD Velociraptor, which seems to be doing quite alright. 5.9 on the vista disk performance index, whatever that means.

I'm kinda tired of the Vista hating. Yes, it sucks on old machines, but on a decently new machine, it's just fine (and most of my current desktop is 2 years old). It's the only Windows OS that lets you use >3GB of RAM, and there are tons of kernel improvements that can really benefit power users. Try using Windows Search on an XP machine with a giant cached outlook mailbox. It totally sucks. Only the vista scheduler and low-priority I/O support make it bearable.

I got this thing up and running in an hour. I still can't say the same about Linux. Mac OSX sure, but I don't want to pay 3k for a MacPro, so that comparison is irrelevant for me.

It seems like I've been struggling with how to complete this phrase for way too long.

But I think it just occured to me how it should go:

... when I can _use_ all the hardware I paid for.

That's really what it comes down to. I buy hardware. I expect the software to work with it, to let me take advantage of the hardware's features. If I didn't want the hardware feature, I wouldn't have bought the hardware. Simple as that.

For the hardware that I buy, Windows (and it's software ecosystem) is still the best solution. Whether it's the thinkpad and it's power saving, or whether it's my digital camera and it's RAW files, or whether it's my new monitor with it's hardware calibration settings, or whether it's my cheapo dvd-rom and it's ability to play DVD's.

Linux hackers and Linux distributors haven't figured out how to create incentives for others to enable the best of the hardware out there.

Of course, the corollary to that is if I limit my hardware choices, then Linux should be just fine. This used to be really hard to do, even for desktops. It all depended on the motherboard, or the ethernet chip, or wireless chip, of even graphics chip that you decided to get. These days, the task looks decidedly easier, so I might just give it another shot.

My coworker just got a new HP EliteBook, and we put Ubuntu 8.10 and it and it works, well, suprisingly well. Almost everything works out of the box, and suspend and resume is actually fast. It is tempting me to try 8.10 on my X60 again (I still have a partition). I know this is not going to end well. Damnit.

Ok, I've had the 2490 for about a week now, and I can definitely say I made the right choice.

No crappy wide gamut. No crappy screen coating. Fantastic viewing angles. Fantastic color and brightness uniformity. And ghosting and input lag don't seem to be issues. There is some bleeding when the screen is dark, but all reports seem to indicate that the screen needs to be "burned in" for these effects go away.

I really should have just started with this one. It would have saved me a lot of headaches. I guess I just have ot resign to spending $1k on a monitor ($1099 from Amazon, to be exact) every few years. I am still nagged by the thought that I could have gotten a 30 inch instead, but I think I'll way X more years until the wide gamut issue is sorted out, and the uniformity issue on large screens is also fixed.

So, in the end:

• Dell 3007WFP-HC: Crap
• HP LP2475w: OK, but uniformity issues and wide gamut
• NEC 2490Wuxi: Sweet. Worth the $ if you care about those things

Yes, I know. This blog is turning into me rambling about monitors. Or maybe it always was. I dunno.

Anyways, I returned the Hp 2475w because of the green/pink tints. I bought it through CDW since a sales rep that told me that they had a 30-day refund policy, but I found out through all this that HP products are excepted. So I had a fun time trying to talk to HP customer support (I later read on HardForum that one should call the Business support line, since this is a business product. If you call the consumer line, they don't even list a category for monitors).

Long story short, the CDW rep eventually set up an RMA for me so that was that.

And today, I finally ordered the 2490. This is silly, I've been working up to this for how long now? Like 9 months? And the thing hasn't gotten any cheaper either.

So the theory is that the 2490 appears to be the last of the good sRGB monitors. Maybe wide gamut is the future, but it's not an overstatement to say that the rest of the industry hasn't figured out how to deal with it yet. And by the rest of the industry, I really mean Windows and it's ecosystem. Yes, there are some expensive color-managed apps out there that work today. Yes, there are a very small number of video cards that can do 10-bit color, over display port. Yes, Vista makes things a little better (except for the whole UAC blowing away your gamma LUT thing). But what I really mean by "figured out" is having all apps work the way they were intended, including non-color-managed ones. I'm not sure exactly how that would work, but you'd think with graphics cards being so powerful, something can be done. Maybe the future is Microsoft's scRGB and 10 or 16bits per channel over some nextgen interface. I've been around long enough to know that that ain't going to be pervasive for at least another 5 years, and in the meanwhile, the 2490 will do just fine.

I'm also liable (unfortunately) to be hooking up a Linux box to my monitors for many years to come, so going with an sRGB monitor is still the safest bet. Whatever solution the Windows people come up with, it'll probably land on the Linux side another 2-3 years later. The 2490's hardware calibration means in theory I can even have correct colors under Linux today. Surely, that's worth something.

And in a final bout of self-justification, I realized that when I purchased my Planar PL201M 5-6 years ago, it cost $900 or so. If I were willing to spend that much then, this 2490 is actually cheaper to me after inflation.

Anyways, hopefully finally, I can put this whole thing to rest now, at least for another few years. It's about time.

OK, I've had the monitor for about a week now, and I also got it calibrated with the Eye-one display 2 calibrator that I got from newegg. Here are the full notes:

• Wide Gamut: It's still there. It's still kind of annoying. Firefox 3 makes the experience quite a bit more bearable, but Flash doesn't support it yet so video's often look like candy colors still. I also get the feeling that cleartype might not be tuned for wide-gamut monitors.. but I don't understand the theory enough here to really say. Even with the calibration-corrected gamma, text looks every so slightly more fringy. It could also just be the bigger pixels when compared to my NEC 2070NX.
• Color uniformity: A few readers on the HardForum thread for this monitor have reported a green-to-pink color uniformity problem. I think I see it too, though it is very faint. Here's a picture that I took that exaggerates it:
  
• Ghosting: I don't see too much motion blur, but there is some inverse ghosting. Doesn't really bother me that much though.

I'm new to calibration, but my with my first profile, the monitor validator that comes with Eye-one Match tells me I have an average deltaE of 0.69, which I understand is pretty good. There definitely seems to a bit of technique to this, so I'll have to update this post if I manage to coax better numbers out of the screen.

At this point, I'm seriously debating returning this monitor and just getting an NEC 2490 instead. Everyone likes the 2490, and after I've spent 600+ on this one, spending 300 more the best thing out there doesn't really seem like a big deal. If I use the monitor for the next 4-5 years, it seems totally justifiable. I still don't really buy the whole wide-gamut thing, and it seems like it's going to take a while for people to sort out more-than-8-bit displays anyways.

After dilly-dallying for 9 months or so, I finally pulled the trigger on a new monitor, the HP LP2475w, and it arrived today.

Initial impressions are pretty good. It's definitely not as sparkly as the 3007WFP-HC was. That's good. It's still wide gamut, so now I have to go find a calibrator to buy. Joy. I'm starting to hate shopping. Thankfully, it seems like there are fewer choices in the color calibration world, so this shouldn't take another 9 months.

1900x1200 feels wider than it should. My initial theory is that 1600x1200 actually made me maximize windows when I didn't really need to. There's sort of a zone between 1200-1600 pixels wide for a window that the size doesn't really make a difference, and so even if I make a window 1200 pixels wide, I can't fit anything useful in the remaining 400 on the screen, so I end up just maximizing. When I get that extra 300 pixels to work with, suddenly it makes sense to keep my big windows 1200 pixels wide and have a new 600 pixel column to put other stuff. Besides, maximizing to a browser to be 1900 wide seems silly.

Also on the "bright" side, the big red number on my TD ameritrade account page looks nice and saturated today. :-P

More in-depth review I'll write after I get a calibrator and a some more time with the screen itself.

In a another bout of self-abuse (I should really see someone about this tendency...), I installed OpenSUSE 11 on my desktop at Work.

It's actually pretty slick. The installer looks really nice, and appears to work well. I think all my hardware was actually detected. Actually, the auto-detection worked too well. My mouse ended up getting detected twice, causing all kinds of weird problems when I installed x2vnc later (The solution was to just disable one of them using sax2).

I still don't really like the SUSE config tools, but I must say I arbitrarily find the GTK versions less offensive than the QT ones (maybe it's just the gtk style). There remains a seemingly arbitrary division of tasks between the yast control panel and the gnome control panel (even with some overlap in functionality), and the fact that they kinda look the same doesn't help with the confusion.

Also no patented subpixel rendering by default. I think it's a few SRPM rebuilds away, but I just haven't looked into it. It's silly that this is extra work though. I'm pretty sure all the various patches will be upstream in the next version. Hopefully that means it will work out of the box on many more distros.

The new package manager seems pretty good. zypper commands from the command line are reasonably fast. The only oddity so far for me is that by default, the "repository" on your install media is listed as the primary source of packages (aside from updates), which means that every time you do a big install operation you have to go find the disc. I'm pretty sure there's on online equivalent somewhere, but it's not entirely clear to me how to find it.

Anyways, I'm trying not to get too bogged down the details. The more I use different distros, the more I think it's what's on the inside of your home directory that counts, i.e. all the little scripts that you could have written to make yourself work more efficiently. Not the hours you spent finding the perfect dark theme, that's just going to get broken next time you upgrade.

Update: Here's how to enable subpixel.