“Although USB connectors in monitors appeared many years ago, they have performed only secondary functions all this time. However, now Samsung offers an LCD monitor that is connected to the PC via the USB bus and can work without a graphics card.”
“Although USB connectors in monitors appeared many years ago, they have performed only secondary functions all this time. However, now Samsung offers an LCD monitor that is connected to the PC via the USB bus and can work without a graphics card.”
That’s kinda weird. Poor USB chipset. I bet they will burn up after awhile ;P
USB Mice and Keyboards – standard.
USB Sound – I have one, works with Windows but not Haiku yet.
USB Printer – almost the standard now.
USB Network interface – basically required for cable modems now a days, and USB <=> EtherNet is easy to find, if not always very fast.
Looks like a computer with only USB is now possible.
USB Scanner (no paralell port needed)
Don’t forget USB storage devices (CDROM, HD, floppy, flash memory)….
PCI Express is conceivably a re-hash of USB in a higher-bandwidth design… I’d like to see machines start going this route soon
Edit: Ok, “rehash” is a bad way to describe it – since it’s not – but what I meant was that it can perhaps be used as a USB replacement in the future with a bit more flexibility.
Edited 2007-06-18 20:45
there was some talk about pcie cables when the first drafts where released, dont know what happened to it.
it was even talk about using it to connect together motherboards so that they would look like a single computer to the software.
Well, where is that *required*?
Thank goodness it isn’t where I live.
USB network interfaces are a major PITA on, for example, Linux.
Got nothing against USB, but let’s take the right tool for the right job.
Every ISP I’ve checked in my area (Toronto, Ontario) offers USB versions of their DSL or Cable modems, but they’ve also all got Ethernet versions, which are the default if you don’t specify.
– chrish
I’d like to read that review, but the site is down for now, “can’t connect to MySQL socket…”
I got the first page using google to search for ‘samsung 940ux’.
> the site is giving me a “can’t connect to MySQL” error
Well, that’s because the site is connected to MySQL using USB.
Edited 2007-06-18 22:25
USB must be the default connection for MySQL then, I see that message all the time.
*makes note to buy a dedicated USB card if he ever sets up a MySQL database*
– chrish
If the monitor is connected to the PC via standard USB, it does mean that the “video card” is integrated to the monitor. Otherwise, the “video card” must be all software (good-bye hardware acceleration).
Seriously, think about it. In the former case, it means that if one wants to get better performance, one needs to get a new monitor. That’s the craziest idea ever.
Maybe not so crazy, unless you are buying very large monitors the prices of the gaming video cards is sometimes more than the monitor they are playing on.
But it looks like it is not that type of design, which is a shame to me. A computer that interfaces to everything using only USB should be one of the simplest design hardware wise.
not necessarily, because I think that computer still needs the video card to do all the processing (I didn’t read the article so please don’t RTFA me ;-)) and driver just ‘intercepts’ already processed images from the output of the video card and passes it onto USB port and then to the monitor. If the computer itself didn’t have video card you probably wouldn’t be able to start the GUI as it depends on video device availability. The only difference with using the USB-based monitor is that the video card itself no longer needs to provide D-Sub or DVI connectors but it still must be present to perform all the drawing.
Edited 2007-06-18 18:52
Seriously don’t comment if you don’t read. People like you are ruining this site which is supposed to be discussing the technical merits of such things. You couldn’t be more wrong so next time please read the f–king article or just don’t bother commenting.
That said I think this is a pretty cool idea. Technically now we could have a fully funcioning PC with just a USB controller and no VGA at all. CPUs are already plenty fast enough to do the drawing on their own so this could help usher in a new brand of affordable computing, especially for the developing world.
Moving complexity into software is always a good thing in terms of lowering cost. Especially now with machines with 2+ cores becoming very common, why can’t one core do the basic drawing.
Nearly all modern OSes can run “headless”, or without video hardware. Certainly all the Linuxes, BSDs and probably any other POSIX-compliant OS can run perfectly well without any video hardware at all. If I remember correctly, even BeOS, which was a very GUI-oriented OS, could run headless to a serial terminal if necessary (any BeOS wizards out there correct me if I’m wrong but I’m sure I read that back in the day when it was still being sold).
As for the computer itself, it doesn’t care at all about the video. Any modern mainboard has BIOS settings that allow you to boot from as little as the mainboard, some RAM and a network connection. This is especially true in the embedded market, where a USB video solution would make a lot of sense compared to a bulky and power-hungry AGP or PCI-e card.
Given all the DRM that is required these days it’s probably the cheapest solution.
I think the benefits of this are more for IT technitions to use on clients PCs or in server rooms (etc) than home gaming.
Sorry to sound harsh but did you RTFA? It says explicitly that the graphics processing is done by the CPU. I.e. a new monitor will NOT improve performance (at least not in this case); only a new CPU will.
Edited 2007-06-19 21:02
It seems that the number of different connectors that are widely used is decreasing.
The transition of mice and keyboards from PS/2 to USB connectors is already happening, Firewire has also lost the battle against USB in most areas.
The transition of printers to USB is almost finished.
However, it must be noted that data rates for most of these devices are significantly lower than VGA/DVI output. Furthermore, USB is quite CPU hungry, IIRC.
At least when I’m using my external harddrive, the CPU is struggling pretty hard.
It would be nice if someone who knows more about this could comment…
While you wouldn’t currently use this kind of setup for gaming, I think it will inevitably happen in the near future.
Graphic logic will be integrated into the CPUs and most if not all devices will use a USB connector. Maybe we will even see USB used _internally_ so that there is virtually no difference between an external and an internal hdd except the case of the drive.
Not sure if this will happen…
Anyway, I think USB is the right sort of connector to use, because it’s pretty hard to break or plug in the wrong way. This is important, since noobs constitute the majority of all computer users.
It will be interesting to see how wireless USB comes along, too…
usb for harddisks, even internally? you’re kidding, right?
eSATA is the way to go
As I said, I’m not sure if it’s going to happen.
Technically eSATA is superior.
On the other hand USB connectors are pretty much everywhere, so I guess we’ll have to wait and see.
All I’m saying is I wouldn’t be surprised if USB tried to enter a new ecological niche, just like SATA is doing with eSATA.
If it did, it would be technical merits against mind share and we all know who usually wins these games in the computing industry.
How fast is your cpu and are you using usb 1.1 or usb2.0? I’ve never had any of my systems struggle with my 500gb external usb drive.. and thats on a p3-933 with usb 1.1 and a p3-1.4 with a usb2.0 pci card…
My CPU is an AMD64 3000+ and I’m using USB 2.0.
I’m transferring lots of small files in hundreds of different directories (if this makes a difference).
I got the drive one or two weeks ago and haven’t had the time yet to check if it needs to be that slow and CPU intensive.
Ok, USB uses more CPU than Firewire but near 100% at under 10 MB/s seems pathetic to me
I mean, it doesn’t really matter because I only use it for backups, but still.
I’d of course appreciate if anybody had an idea what’s wrong with my pc and/or external hdd (which is only 80GB, btw.).
Thanks in advance
Edited 2007-06-18 18:51 UTC
For reference, here are some bonnie++ results for a 250GB LaCie USB 2.0 drive connected to a 3.4GHz Pentium 4 box running Fedora Core 6:
Version 1.03 ——Sequential Output—— –Sequential Input- –Random-
-Per Chr- –Block– -Rewrite- -Per Chr- –Block– –Seeks–
Machine Size K/sec %CP K/sec %CP K/sec %CP K/sec %CP K/sec %CP /sec %CP
excelsior-b.loca 1G 30625 11 13977 4 26549 2 151.9 0
BTW, is there a way to force a fixed width font here?
Edited 2007-06-18 18:59
This is why I only use Firewire for external disks. USB is slow as hell to initialise, eats CPU all the time, struggles with lots of small files, and is slower than Firewire in actual real use (despite being a faster bus on paper).
Apple were way ahead of the game with Firewire, they should have licenced it for free and they probably wouldn’t have been supplanted by USB, but that’s Apple arrogance for you
yeah, ‘mediocre’ always wins out… sadly
x86, windows, usb… etc etc
“yeah, ‘mediocre’ always wins out… sadly
“
Worst solution always prevails…
USB has been designed for input devices such as keyboards and mice. Unlike the standard interrupt routine procedures that traditional hardware uses (used), USB requires polling procedures which are eating up expensive CPU cycles. USB is nice, but surely not for everything. Not fast enough for external storage. Bad idea for network interfaces. There are better alternativees, but they may not be the cheapest ones.
People want cheap, they get cheap.
There’s another problem: Some USB devices do not conform to existing standards and do not offer protocol specifications, this makes these hardware incompatible and limited in regards of interoperability. Reminds me to the time when PC scanners needed special controller cards while standard SCSI scanners worked everywhere with the drivers the OS came with…
From the standard x86 PC some ports were removed, such as the serial ports (which lead them the way into industry and furthermore the home usage) or the parallel port. We’ll see what’s next.
Not counting some usb-powered DSL modems that exceed power limits from specs and risk burning your mobo…
So much for “legacy free” PC… no serial port, no // port… MS had to force USB2 specs into having a special mode on controllers to allow kernel debugging (with a custom expensive USB cable of course…)
If only all this was for a simpler driver model… but USB device classes are never implemented correctly, when used at all.
Edited 2007-06-18 21:14
“Not counting some usb-powered DSL modems that exceed power limits from specs and risk burning your mobo…”
Do you know USB cables that are 2,5 meters long? I don’t think the USB specification allows more than 1 meter.
USB power users need power tools such as the USB fondue, the USB percussion drill, the uSB home bakery or the USB soldering iron.
Furthermore, USB was initially developed to have ONE plug for input (hub) and ONE plug for output (terminal note: printer, scanner), known as USB-A and USB-B. But today, USB offers a huge variety of plugs, USB, mini USB, mobile phone special USB, camera special USB. And people complained about 9 pin and 35 pin serial connectors…
“If only all this was for a simpler driver model… but USB device classes are never implemented correctly, when used at all. “
Sadly, this seems to be correct. While there is hardware that works properly, such as this:
% dmesg | grep “^u[km]”
ukbd0: Sun Microsystems Type 6 USB keyboard, rev 1.00/1.02, addr 3, iclass 3/1
ums0: Sun Microsystems Type 6 USB mouse, rev 1.00/1.02, addr 2, iclass 3/1
ums0: 3 buttons
there’s still hardware that is “nothing” without a proprietary driver; I’m thinking about mobile phones, cameras and video cameras at this moment. My uncle has a JVC camera that is nothing more than “ugen0: vendor 0x1234, model 0x5678”, while everything I’m currently using is either DASD (direct access storage device) compatible or accessible via gphoto2’s command sets.
Similar problems occur when you want to use one of these “all purpose devices” (eierlegende Wollmilchsau) consisting of a printer, a scanner (used as a copy machine or fax, too) on a non-MICROS~1 platform.
Well, USB is quite okay for keyboards and mice, even if there are some mice that do seem to require special “drivers” in order to be recognized. After all, all this USB mice consumes more CPU cycles than a serial or PS/2 mouse would do. But as we all know, modern CPUs have plenty of cycles, gigacycles, to be precise.
There are specifications and standards, but – business as usual, almost no hardware vendor seems to be interested in them.
“””
And people complained about 9 pin and 35 pin serial connectors…
“””
The *hell* that was rs232 had less to do with the DB9/DB25, and everything to do with complexity, and the freedom of choice that the spec allowed.
2 to 2, 3 to 3, and 7 to 7? Or 2 to 3, 3 to 2, and 7 to 7?
Do you cross 8 and 20? Or do you need to jumper 6,8, and 20 on one end… or both, or neither? (What the hell was DSR good for, anyway!)
Of course, if you are going from DB25 to DB9, 2 goes to 2 and 3 goes to 3 for a null modem cable. But for straight thru, you’d cross 2 and 3, and 3 and 2. In any case, 7 on the DB25 would go to 5 on the DB9.
This all assumes software flow control. If you wanted to use hardware flow control, things got slightly complicated.
Likewise, if your printer used those optional secondary DSR/DTR thingies that were defined up around pin 11, IIRC.
Whenever I hear people chanting that “Choice Is Good!(tm)” I think of all the joys that were mine in my RS-232 cable making days!
Edited 2007-06-18 22:20
Ah, I see you know what I was talking about. While most complains were about the number of pins, the “big” and the “small” plug, the real problems started when you questioned the wire connections itself.
“Whenever I hear people chanting that “Choice Is Good!(tm)” I think of all the joys that were mine in my RS-232 cable making days! “
Of course, choice is great if you know what to choose, and what to choose from. Here, good documentation is your key to success. No documentation – experimentation. Interesting to see that USB is going to repeat a bit of this history. At least you have a mechanical factor here (fits vs. does not fit).
Apropos “making cables”… these were the times of… hamcomm modem… robotron terminal controllers K8924 with strange soviet plugs… and no USB soldering iron at hand.
“””
“making cables”… these were the times of… hamcomm modem… robotron terminal controllers K8924 with strange soviet plugs… and no USB soldering iron at hand.
“””
For me, Hayes modems and Computone serial multiport boards. Later, Digiboards. (And I always crimped rather than soldered.)
Wyse 50/60s, AT&T 605s. AT&T 3B2 Unix… Unix ‘386… Xenix…
My God, all the things we can be thankful for in the 21st century!
Even The Hurd seems advanced!
Ah, yes, but you forgot the transition!
POJ White box machine, stock “legacy” 9 pins and parallel port. Port A for the modem, Port B for the Wyse60, PPort for the laser printer. Running Linux, PPPd to a WinNT box to plumb the network to the HP G50(!!).
Users used PC console and Wyse60 (Check your TERM variable kids!) to telnet in to the HP to do remote order entry, and then the lpd on the PC was used by the HP to spool invoices. They needed this remote capability for 2 weeks a year.
They tried this the next year, only using a public internet service (to save on long distance charges) and we couldn’t get the thing to route the LPD. So, I opened up port 25, disabled SMTP on the Linux box, and simply stuck a shell script consisting of “lp printer”, and connected it up in INETD(!!). Simply put, any blob of data that poured in via port 25 would show up on the printer. I had a shadow script in the spooler side on the HP, that simply opened a socket to port 25 on the Linux box and copied the file (Perl ftw!).
God, those were the days. Imagine having an open port 25 on the internet today. What wonders would pour through it.
So, here we get the wonders of modem cables, terminal types, termcap AND the wonders of the internet at the SAME TIME! w00t!
And, no, I have no idea how you would pull that off using Windows.
“””
Simply put, any blob of data that poured in via port 25 would show up on the printer.
…
God, those were the days. Imagine having an open port 25 on the internet today. What wonders would pour through it.
“””
Paris Hilton naked in ascii art?
You may need to cut and paste, if this doesn’t show
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3B2!! I’ve been trying to get one of those for ages!
It’s a 68k powered machine running unix. two things I dearly love
I’ve had absolutely no luck in aquiring a unit… 
USB 1.1 might have been a CPU hog, but USB 2.0 is far from being anything like 1.0/1.1. Most operating systems make the device force its registration known rather than constantly polling devices for their existance – the equivilant of kqueue on FreeBSD.
Pardon? External storage it is more than adequate; I’m sitting here with my a 2.5″ USB2 drive hooked up to my Solaris 11 B66 system and the speed is nothing to be sneezed at.
Sure, there is firewire and eSATA, but for most people, USB 2.0, although not the most elegant of solutions, does the job with minimum fuss.
As for network interfaces; again, bandwidth isn’t the issue but the softare uss for the USB -> Ethernet translation – seen it in action many times, and each time crappier than the last.
Basically, unfortunatly, it is an attempt by phone companies to ‘lower the bar’ for customers – but in the end, they’re asking for trouble given how unreliable these things are – ie more support phone calls. They would be better off getting the end user to use a ethernet connection which has far less problems.
fireware = scsi.
usb = 9-pin serial port.
two different beasts for two different tasks.
firewire was really only designed for one thing, push data from a storage medium to the ram&cpu.
usb was designed as a ubiquitous connector for all things external. im just surprised that they didnt build it to support 12v from day one.
from what i understand, firewire was built to be daisy chained. something i guess results in a bigger chip need for controlling dataflow. then its the interesting thing that almost no firewire device in sale today (that i know of) come with two firewire ports.
usb on the other hand have this hud system in place. want to attach more devices? add a hub. and dataflow was centrally controlled on the motherboard (resulting in the cpu taking the brunt thanks to cheap chips with most of the stuff being done in the driver). it all adds up to cheaper devices.
so usb was never designed from the get go to do data transfer (usb1 could what, 1MB/s?), but got shoehorned into doing so. most likely because it was cheaper to build in support for it, and you have stuff like usb flash devices (storage and mp3 playback). outside of the ipod, how many dap devices use(d) firewire?
1.25MB/s
slow as crap.
AFAIK only the name “FireWire” needs to be licensed, or am I missing something?
I’d of course appreciate if anybody had an idea what’s wrong with my pc and/or external hdd (which is only 80GB, btw.).
Have you tried updating your chipset drivers lately? Also (if you have any PATA disks) you might want to try going into device manager and making sure your IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers are set to use DMA if available. If something is set to PIO mode that will cause some major slow downs.
Re: FireWire
-It’s the digital video standard.
-It’s the only way to edit video on all platforms -without requiring proprietary drivers.
-It takes the load off the CPU since it uses a dedicated chipset (which does add a smidgeon to the cost but it’s worth it)
-It’s got guaranteed throughput due to said architechture which means its the only solutions professionals will touch for audio or video editing.
-It’s got daisy-chaining
-At this point it’s built into almost all computers anyway, even if you never use it
I think, and I certainly hope, that FireWire won’t go away anytime soon.
It looks like the USB is used like a regular video cable, a lossless compressed video is continuously sent to the monitor. Talk about a bandwidth hog.
I thought the monitor would have a frame buffer in it and only changes to the screen would be sent. Instead this uses special chips and just uses the USB cabling to send video. It is not clear from what little of the article I can read if this is a true USB that can support other devices at the same time.
I thought the monitor would have a frame buffer in it and only changes to the screen would be sent. Instead this uses special chips and just uses the USB cabling to send video. It is not clear from what little of the article I can read if this is a true USB that can support other devices at the same time.
The article describes how the software video driver only sends updates when required. The device appears to be a simple USB video frame buffer and a Windows video driver that feeds it. Simple and elegant, really. And from the sounds of it, sufficient for Office and most home uses. The 5% of PCs that play new games need not apply.
and those rarely use more then one display anyways.
hell, this can even be used in 3D modeling.
do the modeling on the usb display and have the 3D model be rendered in real time on the 3D card and a dedicated display.
the only problem is the ongoing movement towards using 3D cards to model 2D desktops.
A better way of doing this might be to standardize external pci express ports somehow; and I don’t mean standardize them in the sense of writing out a spec. Rather, get a a couple on every single computer out there. That way there’d be no usb overhead, full video acceleration and you could boot using it.
Chipsets these days have what, at least 32 pci express lanes, and you only really need 8 lanes (so far anyway). maybe they would even cook up some kind of auto negotiation protocol where you could hook up as many monitors as you wanted, and the ones with the most need for bandwidth would automatically be allocated more pcie lanes? That’d be pretty sweet.
Now..this brings possibilities…
Connect this monitor to a wireless 802.11N USB HUB
(those are comming too) as weel as your keyboard and your mice…
And you can put that damn noisy tower like 10 meters away in another room.
You could have one tower somewhere and one usb monitor in every one of your room for that matter…
now…add in a wireless headset (for speach recognition and remote control by voice of your comp) and a finger mouse and well….who knows….
(my sore back tyhat is fed up with staying sat at a desk for hours just to use a computer would be gratefull)…
^_^
It’s a tempting pipe-dream, but I seriously doubt that you could get acceptable, unlagged kvm performance over a wireless interface. I’m reading claims that 11N will deliver >200 MBit, but somehow I don’t believe that in practice, real-world performance will approach 100MBit sustained, (Level 7[sic.]) throughput.
What you’re looking for is called a thin client. I haven’t heard of an 802.11n unit yet, but I know there are some 802.11g-based thin clients.
If your CPU power is not wasted already, now you have to emulate the GFX card by software.
In the future Your cpu has to run vista then emulate the gfx, feed all other USB peripherals……and more before open any app and when you will run an app you will discover that your 3000++ GHZ CPU has not enough power to run even a basic app, And that your old Amiga (or insert here any other ancient computer) at 7 mhz can do more things
I think that this is another attempt to make the things slower and force you to upgrade and upgrade
When you’re engineering a 6 gazillion core CPU instead of actually developing something useful…what’s a few cores dedicated to video?
Somehow, I doubt this thing is legit, though. It sounds like something someone came up with because they could, but has no real purpose. Like Vista, for example.
I think you’re thinking way too mainstream here. A target audience like the one mentioned in the article, where a bunch of monitors on a display floor might display a bunch of static images that change periodically, seems to be a much more sensible usage.
And dual core CPUs are just the beginning. Intel is talking about 64 cores CPU in a not so distant future. Dedicate some cores to video and usb processing and your done.
what i wonder is will this work on little NAS boxes? i have one with no graphics card running linux and i am corious.
Unfortunatley, it looks like you need special drivers (according to TFA), and the device is too new for anyone to even have started on a Linux driver yet.
what i wonder is will this work on little NAS boxes? i have one with no graphics card running linux and i am corious.
From TFA : “Windows XP (the drivers for Vista were under development at the time of our tests; the support for alternative OSes was not even on the agenda)”
“Alternative” presumably meaning “anything that’s not windows”.
Too bad about the royalty issues initially.
Although it is only $0.25 per end-user now, people seemed yp be in love with USB2.
Its a shame because Firewire does have some clear advantages over USB2 and planned future extensions to it looked great.
“On the downside of the USB connection is the total lack of any 3D acceleration (by the way, we wonder how this monitor is going to work under Windows Vista whose interface requires 3D acceleration). However, the target audience of the SyncMaster 940UX consists of people who want a multi-monitor configuration for little money or within technical limitations. Such people are not supposed to be interested in latest 3D games. And when it comes to work only, the SyncMaster 940UX is going to fully satisfy them.”
Samsung makes excellent products IMHO. A few months ago I put four 500 GB Samsung SATA HDs in my Mac Pro – they are working like a charm without any surface errors. Since Samsung has impressed me, I decided to replace theViewvSonic POS CRT monitor I bought for the Mac Pro with two of the Samsung SyncMaster 226BW LCD monitors. Let’s just say that I will never go back to CRT monitors.
Edited 2007-06-18 21:06
Not sure why a software-driven display is so ground breaking, except that it does have some smarts to it, to only send changes to the monitor.
This is ancient technology. The USB monitor is basically an X terminal. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_terminal
Popular in the early 90’s. The Ethernet has been switched to USB and the thin client has been integrated into the monitor.
If Sony would open up 3D on the PS/3, the PS/3 would make an excellent 3D X terminal for a Linux box.
All of the software needed to build something like this is already in Linux.
Actually, it’s more related to the modern SunRay than an X Terminal.
An X Terminal uses graphic primitives (lines, boxes, etc), whereas this, apparently, is more a remote framebuffer. Which means the lines etc. are drawn within the CPU, and the updated rectangle of changed bits is compressed and sent to the display.
This is much like what modern SunRays do, using thin clients as remote frame buffers. The SunRay server acts as a headless X Server, and then mirrors its framebuffer to the SunRay thin client. This is how you can simply yank your pass card out of the client and plug it in to any other SunRay on the system and “pick up where you left off”.
Virtual PC essentially used this technology (but was obviously hampered by things like the 14K modems of the day). But modern things like Citrix/Terminal Services are more “object based” like the original X is, which is why Citrix/TS based remote clients are SO much better.
Right now I use my laptop’s screen along with an external monitor via the VGA connector on the laptop.
I’m basically maxed out.
This would be nice because I could use two external screens. Right now my monitor is at a different resolution that the laptop’s screen.
Will Vista give people permission to watch “premium content” on the monitor?
http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/vista_cost.html
Team
It’s a pity that Samsung went for the ‘safe’ option of only doing a windows driver.
If they had been a tad braver and developed support for Linux they would have been a shoe-in for this type of product: http://www.omni-ts.com/workgroup/
Oh well, at least they are proving that USB video is viable, hopefully a more “brave/innovative” hardware company will release a Linux compatible product.
Darren
Re: trend of everything being plugged into USB ports
USB keyboards suck for gaming (though maybe less so with dual core now). Plow through this post if you want to know why I think so
Along with a lot of other people in this thread ( http://hardware.mcse.ms/showthread.php?s=72bf19e4fda12f36337a6d5e67… )
I was having problems playing games with a wireless keyboard. Buttons wouldn’t stay pressed (that is I could hold the button for moving forward, and after a short while I would just stop, until letting go and pressing again). I assumed the problem was something to do with the wireless connection between the keyboard and the laptop.
I tried using a different KB (from my desktop system, where there were no problems), but plugged into the laptop, the same problems occurred. It was a ps2 KB, and the laptop had no ps2 ports so I had to plug it in to USB with an adapter. Using the adapter back on the desktop (where the keyboard had worked fine when plugged into the PS2 port) caused the problem there too.
On both machines, the problem manifested itself in Windows and Linux. It was therefore independent of OS, machine and KB model. All the other variables were irrelevant; keyboards plugged into USB didn’t work, while KBs plugged into PS2 did.
I tried it out with an older game (Unreal Tournament) so the system wouldn’t be fully taxed. With no bots, KBs worked with PS2 and USB both. With a ton of bots to occupy the CPU, the USB KBs displayed the problem (I would hold down a key and after a short while the machine no longer recognized that it was still held down)
As far as I can tell when the CPU gets busy, keyboards plugged into USB don’t work as well (that is to say they seem more dependent on the CPU having free cycles). For this reason I refuse to buy a motherboard without PS2 connections. [/OT]
Obviously a gamer would never use a USB monitor, but it could be interesting. I’ve seen similar products ( http://www.usbgear.com/USB2_SVGA_USB_video_carD/ ) where a graphics card is plugged into the USB port. The USB monitor just streamlines things a bit. Performance would have to be bad, but should be just fine for spreadsheets, either as a primary monitor or an easily added second monitor. Heck, one could have a monitor connected to an 8800gtx for gaming, and a USB monitor used only for an extended desktop when doing spreadsheets
Couldn’t read all article (didn’t opened) so I could not find about power supply. Will it be powered through USB? If so it’s cool – less wires.
How is that going to happen when said LCD screen would eat at least 30 Watts? Can you power a monitor with a 5 volt power supply?
Let me just say that to me, 3d acceleration on my SECONDARY displays means absolutely nothing to me, because even with a 8800gts sight few games allow you to run on more than one display, much less FMV – and the ones that do even my system STILL doesn’t have enough horsepower to do it ‘reliably’.
As such, this device makes a good deal of sense – people talk about slowdown and CPU use and bandwidth without THINKING about what’s actually involved.
First, on the PC side it probably works much like a VESA 2.0 driver – you set up a framebuffer (I figure 5 megs for 32 bit@1280×1024, which in modern terms is bupkis) in RAM and pretend it’s video memory… Then, you draw to it directly… given this was completely feasable across the ISA bus for windows 3.1 video drivers, with direct access to system RAM I really don’t see cpu use being a big deal from that part of it.
Then there’s sending the data – and one of the most important bits of sending the data is that you only need to send information when the screen changes. The monitor likely has 5-8 megs of RAM as it’s framebuffer… If the screen or sections of the screen don’t change, don’t resend it. This is a tried and true technique used in everything from the classic .flv and animated .gif, right up to high-end Ogg Theora. Easiest way to determine what actually changes is probably a bounding box, though a bounding box stack may also be better depending on how good your compression is… or a double bufferred compare would use the least bandwidth, though that would be cpu hungry. (I’d probably go the middleground with what’s called a ‘scanline bounding stack’)
For a ‘normal’ non motion heavy program – text editor, spreadsheet, Instant message session, taskbar – you know, the stuff most multiple display people put on their secondary monitor? that 12Mbps USB 2.0 would barely get touched by those types of applications… Why? BECAUSE YOU ONLY NEED TO SEND DATA WHEN SECTIONS OF THE SCREEN CHANGES, AND ONLY THOSE SECTIONS.
Sure, it’s not going to do full screen video without chewing CPU and isn’t gonna do 3d. Big deal. That’s not what a third display is usually for… and I say third display because with so many cheap video cards being dual head these days (How much does a Ge7100 or X1050 cost these days? $40?) The only people that would add this are the ones looking to add a third display without opening the box, or the folks who were DUMB ENOUGH to get saddled with integrated video and no expansion slots.
As to Vista and linux, I still haven’t moved to them as my primary OS (I have them installed, I do not use them, I use XP) because in neither OS can I get all three displays running as well as they do under XP without buying even more hardware… an attitude a LOT of multiple display users are arriving at. Past decade all you had to do was take a PCI video card, throw it in and boom, 3 or more monitors under Windows as simple as an automated driver install and ticking one checkbox – My current selection of available cards is a x16 Ge8800GTS, a x16 Ge7600GT, and a standard PCI Radeon 9250. (my board has 3 x16 slots – slot1 = standalone/SLI1, slot2=standalone, slot3=SLI2) To get it working in vista at ‘full capacity’ not only must both cards be the same manufacturer, they have to be the same series/driver meaning I need to go buy another Ge8 to use x16 – In linux, spanning three monitors is such a headache I usually say **** it and reboot in XP where I can just slap that 9250 into a empty PCI slot and be done with it. (interestingly XP BSOD’s on reboot after installing the drivers with the 7600 and 8800 plugged in at the same time – XP doesn’t need same manufacturer, but if you USE two nVidia, they have to be the same version – and only nVidia cards have this problem – WTF?)
Of course, I get a kick out of the linux nuts going “Look, I’ve got twinview” since I’m thinking “Welcome to 1991 dumbass” – since that’s the first multiple-display setup I had using a Targa board…. at the very least it’s welcome to 1998 since it’s been a standard feature of windows since then… and apple has had it just about as long (and now not offering machines with PCI slots for under two and a half grand means they too cannot break the two monitor barrier)
Of course, being that in Vista I turn all that goof assed eye candy aero bullshit off, it means I could probably run this usb Samsung under Vista using the XP drivers. I’d be interested to know if that works.
Edited 2007-06-19 09:30
First off, I agree this is a great idea for extra monitors for near-static displays. But why stop at three(3)? If the monitor is cheap enough, I have uses for up to 6 displays before I run out of room. Developing code can make use of lots of screen space.
The reason I mentioned bandwidth before is because I could not get the full article and the part I did read seemed to imply that the video was being continuously streamed to the monitor. Others probably had the same problem.
As for the first dual displays, the first one I saw was 1986 on a Commodore C128, someone wrote routing/inventory program that accessed both video chips in that machine. And I pretty sure a number of Apple programs did that even earlier using the 80 column card.
host controller will work hard i think… http://www.prevedgame.ru/in.php?id=20508