Time to open up the Duo's mailbag and award a paragon of publicity from the PR Piñata, where Steve and Angela put all the dumb doohickeys that public relations folks send them to be cute. Today's letter comes from a group of workers at one of Angela's favorite entities, NASA. Charlie writes from Cape Canaveral, Florida:
"I work with a team of six people at Kennedy Space Center who provide on-line launch coverage for space shuttle and rocket launches. As I'm sure you can imagine, during a launch we have 4000 different windows open on our monitors and it can get pretty crowded. I myself end up totally cranking the screen resolution to fit everything on my screen. In the interest of human space exploration and half a dozen very big fans of your show, could you please recommend your choice for a robust 23-inch, flat-panel monitor?"
Angela's a tremendous space geek--but, as mentioned earlier in the show, the bigger monitors are no bargain, especially when budgets are thin. A 23-inch monitor can cost more than a thousand bucks--and for that you get about 2.28 million pixels. So Steve and Angela recommend that Charlie and his cohorts get two 17-inch monitors and an extra video card. Total cost, maybe $600, and they'll get 15 percent more pixels. If possible, the gang might consider going to three 17-inch monitors, and a three-headed video card like the Matrox Parhelia APVe. The whole setup may cost a few more bucks than that 23-inch monitor they were asking about--but they'll have a desk that looks more like the cockpit of the Starship Enterprise, and plenty more pixels to play with.
For sending us that question, the crew at KSC will be getting a lovely dreamcatcher; as Angela points out, folks in the space program really do catch dreams--and much bigger ones than that little tchotchke can manage.
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