DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

The current issue of Nature reports a fantastic breakthrough in LCD manufacturing, which IBM will have in production by the end of the year, dropping prices on flat-screen LCD displays as well as improving their quality. The full article is here: Atomic-beam alignment of inorganic material for liquid-crystal displays.

This has huge implications for energy savings, too: LCD displays weigh less, and therefore cost less to ship. More importantly, they consume significantly less power to operate.

LCD displays are visually clearer (and don’t flicker) and do not emit radiation, so there are benefits to users’ health and eyesight too.

Within a few years everybody will be using these, without question. We’ll look at trinitron displays the way we currently regard black-and-white televisions or old ASCII terminals, like relics from the distant technological past.

(And a few years after that we’ll all be wearing personal display systems… and after that I guess we’ll all be fitted at birth with a video jack at the base of the skull, neurologically soldered directly to the visual cortex, as predicted by the early William Gibson novels.)