Nadav Har'El wrote:
On Thu, Sep 23, 2004, Omer Zak wrote about "Dominating the world of screen savers?":
During the last few months, I noticed that the first thing, which people
notice about my Linux installations, is the screensaver.
For several years I've been wondering why the concept of "screen saver"
even persists. Once upon a time, it was believed that constantly showing
the same screen can damage the display, so after some time of inactivity
a "screen saver" would run and show random, moving, graphics to prevent
this damage.
But quite a number of years ago, displays started to have standby modes,
whereby the display could be shut down by software (supposedly not damaging
the display in the process) and even save electricity in the process.
For many years now, this is what my "screen saver" does - shows a black
screen and after a few more minutes it moves the display to standby mode.
So I wonder why do people still use graphical screen savers. Is this the
"coolness factor"?
Definitely yes. The coolness factor was there all along. The displays
that get damaged by showing the same screen [1]_ are gradually damaged
by showing anything at all, so the only program that really saves the
screen is the Blank Screen saver. The more conscious screen saver try
to keep most of the screen black but enough psychodelic screen savers
are as bad or worse than the typical working image. Yet very few
people select the Blank Screen saver. Most do realize they are not
really saving the screen but go for the coolness factor.
There is also of course the coolness factor in writing a cool screen
saver. See `display hack`__.
__ http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/D/display-hack.html
. [1] The damage from showing the same image is that the phosphor at
the brighter areas gets burned out more quickliy and the image
becomes "imprinted" upon the screen. The most damaged one that
I've personally seen ironically had a burned-out image of the
NT Logon screen saver at one place on the screen ;-).
--
Beni Cherniavsky <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Note: I can only read email on week-ends...
=================================================================
To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with
the word "unsubscribe" in the message body, e.g., run the command
echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
