Daily Archives: September 19, 2006

EU: do the people have any say?

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Well, given the way the vote was swung by national governments in the last referendum for the consitution, it’s starting to look like the people might have something of a say, but given it’s track record on eg. Patents, I’m still waiting and seeing.
Now one million signatures have been collected to stop the EU parliament from going on holliday once a month to Strasbourg at a cost of EUR. 200 million per year. Aside from the ministers, aides and paperwork having to be carted around, the rent in Strasbourg (for buildings only used 12 times per year) is inflated.
France especially wants to keep it’s parliamentiary perks.

Matrox Triplehead2Go

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Matrox released this some time ago, but I just found it, so here it is:
The Triplehead2Go is a box you connect a single VGA (analog) out from your PC to and then connect 3 monitors to through it’s own VGA (analog) outputs. It’s not a graphics card – Matrox has decided to not compete with the likes of Nvidia and ATi, it processes the signal to create a max resolution of 3840×1024.
Reviewers rave about the size, immersion and cost of the product (3 monitors + the Triplehead2Go cost less than $1000) but unfortunately the desktop management software falls short, getting games to work properly can sometimes be a fiddle and if you have an ATi card you can forget about it. What surprises most reviewers is that there isn’t much of a framerate hit, and the bezels between the monitors doesn’t cause much disturbance to the viewer.

Good out of the box thinking by Matrox, but unfortunately it looks like this technology will have to mature a bit (by games manufacturers, ATi and Matrox) before it becomes a ‘must have’.

AVSim review
Tomshardware review
SimHQ review
List of compatible Matrox games