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Digital and analog combination
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Many monitors have analog signal relay, but some more recent models (mostly LCD screens) support digital input signals. It is a common misconception that all computer monitors are digital. For several years, televisions, composite monitors, and computer displays have been significantly different. However, as TVs have become more versatile, the distinction has blurred.
Configuration and usage
Multi-head. Some users use more than one monitor. The displays can operate in multiple modes. One of the most common spreads the entire desktop over all of the monitors, which thus act as one big desktop. The X Window System refers to this as Xinerama.
A monitor may also clone another monitor.
Two Apple flat-screen monitors used as dual display
Terminology:
— Dualhead - Using two monitors
— Triplehead - using three monitors
— Display assembly - multi-head configurations actively managed as a single unit
Virtual displays. The X Window System provides configuration mechanisms for using a single hardware monitor for rendering multiple virtual displays, as controlled (for example) with the Unix DISPLAY global variable or with the -display command option.
Assignments
Task III. Give Russian equivalents of the following computer word combinations with nouns used as modifiers:
computer display monitor, cathode ray tube, CRT Computer, display pixel array, dot pitch, refresh rate, beam scan, scan line, image persistence.
Task IV. Translate & remember the following phrases, make sentences of your own, using these phrases:
In particular; either … or; to be measured in …; top left; to draw a picture; at low refresh rate; depend on; to line up; to make use of; with the exception of smth; in the original specification; to result in; to operate in multiple modes.
Task V. Topic for discussion:
The most popular display device and its specifications.
Task VI. Question for discussion:
1. What is one pixel?
2. What is the dot pitch?
3. What is the refresh rate?
4. What is a computer display monitor?
Task VII. Role-play
Play a game “Just a minute”.
Rules of the game.
A student speaks for one minute on a subject given by the teacher. The rest of the group listens to 3 things: repetition, deviation, and hesitation. If anyone hears one of these things, he is interrupted. The student speaking within 60 seconds of speaking time is a winner.
Subjects to speak on:
1. Every country has its custom.
2. The customer is always right.
3. The PC revolution.
4. PC is the main source of information and a cheap form of entertainment.
5. Computer displays. Application of modern technologies in their manufacture.
Task VIII. What do the following acronyms stand for? Match the equivalents.
TFT, LCD, VDU, CRT, OLED, SED, VP, TTL, CGA, EGA
_________________________________________________________
Thin film transistor, liquid crystal display,
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video display unit, cathode ray tube, organic light emitting diode, surface-conduction electron-emitter display, video projector, transistor–transistor logic, color graphics adapter, enhanced graphics adapter
Unit 4. Mouse (computing)
Task I. Key vocabulary.
Find the Russian equivalents of the following words and word combinations:
Resemblance, attach, extensive, usability, simplicity, convenience, envisaged, full-size keyboard, connecting wires, to embed, pointer, eliminating, mouse-pad, precision, designed specifically, emitter, however, to drift, random, cordless, scroll-wheel, default, foot cover, wrist-rest, resemble, shield, eyeball-controller, cursor-manipulation, finger-mouse, gyroscopic, laptops, to employ, issue a command, occur, pointing-and-clicking, to require, conventions, widespread, to delete, the file, applicable, in response to, to attract, the amount of, controversy, ship, to promote, scroll-ball, to treat, to advocate, emedy, drawbacks, lag time, daunting task, disabled user, workaround, experienced user, user instructions, convention, appropriate for, to depend on, programmer, the combination with, features, adjustable DPI.
Task II.
1) Read texts to comprehend its subject matter and to note the terminological words and word combinations.
2) Look through texts below to copy out the key words and sentences containing the main idea of the texts.
3) Make use of these key words and sentences to compile a short topic to be presented to your classmates at the classroom.
4) After this, try to make common Abstract (orally or in writing).
A contemporary computer mouse, with the most common standard features — two buttons and a scroll-wheel.
In computing, a mouse (plural mice or mouses) functions as a pointing device by detecting two-dimensional motion relative to its supporting surface. Physically, a mouse consists of a small case, held under one of the user's hands, with one or more buttons. It sometimes features other elements, such as "wheels", which allow the user to perform various system-dependent operations, or extra buttons or features can add more control or dimensional input. The mouse's motion typically translates into the motion of a pointer on a display.
The name mouse, coined at the Stanford Research Institute, derives from the resemblance of early models (which had a cord attached to the rear part of the device, suggesting the idea of a tail) to the common eponymous rodent.
The first integrated mouse — shipped as a part of a computer and intended for personal computer navigation — came with Xerox Star 1981.
Technologies
The first computer mouse, held by inventor Douglas Engelbart, showing the wheels that make contact with the working surface
Early mice
Douglas Engelbart of the Stanford Research Institute invented the mouse in 1964 after extensive usability testing. Several other experimental pointing-devices developed for Engelbart's oN-Line System (NLS) exploited different body movements — for example, head-mounted devices attached to the chin or nose — but ultimately the mouse won out because of its simplicity and convenience. The first mouse, a bulky device (pictured) used two gear-wheels perpendicular to each other: the rotation of each wheel translated into motion along one axis. Engelbart received patent US3541541 on November 17, 1970 for an "X-Y Position Indicator for a Display System". At the time, Engelbart envisaged that users would hold the mouse continuously in one hand and type on a five-key chord keyset with the other.
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Mechanical mice
Early mouse patents. From left to right: Opposing track wheels by Engelbart, Nov. 1970, U.S. Patent 3,541,541. Ball and wheel by Rider, Sept. 1974, U.S. Patent 3,835,464. Ball and two rollers with spring by Opocensky.
A Smaky mouse, as invented at the EPFL by Jean-Daniel Nicoud and Andrй Guignard.Bill English, builder of the original mouse, invented the so-called ball mouse in 1972 while working for Xerox PARC. The ball-mouse replaced the external wheels with a single ball that could rotate in any direction. It came as part of the hardware package of the Xerox Alto computer. Perpendicular chopper wheels housed inside the mouse's body chopped beams of light on the way to light sensors, thus detecting in their turn the motion of the ball. This variant of the mouse resembled an inverted trackball and became the predominant form used with personal computers throughout the 1980s and 1990s. The Xerox PARC group also settled on the modern technique of using both hands to type on a full-size keyboard and grabbing the mouse when required.
The ball mouse utilizes two rollers rolling against two sides of the ball. One roller detects the horizontal motion of the mouse and other the vertical motion. The motion of these two rollers causes two disc-like encoder wheels to rotate, interrupting optical beams to generate electrical signals. The mouse sends these signals to the computer system by means of connecting wires. The driver software in the system converts the signals into motion of the mouse pointer along X and Y axes on the screen.
Modern computer mice took form at the Йcole polytechnique fйdйrale de Lausanne (EPFL) under the inspiration of Professor Jean-Daniel Nicoud and at the hands of engineer and watchmaker Andrй Guignard. This new design incorporated a single hard rubber mouseball and three buttons, and remained a common design until the mainstream adoption of the scroll-wheel mouse during the 1990s.
Honeywell produced another type of mechanical mouse. Instead of a ball, it had two plastic "feet" on the bottom which sensed movement. Keytronic later produced a similar product.
Optical mice
The optical sensor from a Microsoft Wireless IntelliMouse Explorer (v. 1.0A).
An optical mouse uses a light-emitting diode and photodiodes to detect movement relative to the underlying surface, rather than moving some of its parts — as in a mechanical mouse.
Early optical mice, circa 1980, came in two different varieties:
1.Some, such as those invented by Steve Kirsch[11][12] of Mouse Systems Corporation, used an infrared LED and a four-quadrant infrared sensor to detect grid lines printed with infrared absorbing ink on a special metallic surface. Predictive algorithms in the CPU of the mouse calculated the speed and direction over the grid.
2.Others, invented by Richard F. Lyon and sold by Xerox, used a 16-pixel visible-light image sensor with integrated motion detection on the same chip and tracked the motion of light dots in a dark field of a printed paper or similar mouse pad.
These two mouse types had very different behaviors, as the Kirsch mouse used an x-y coordinate system embedded in the pad, and would not work correctly when rotated, while the Lyon mouse used the x-y coordinate system of the mouse body, as mechanical mice do. As computing power grew cheaper, it became possible to embed more powerful special-purpose image-processing chips in the mouse itself. This advance enabled the mouse to detect relative motion on a wide variety of surfaces, translating the movement of the mouse into the movement of the pointer and eliminating the need for a special mouse-pad. This advance paved the way for widespread adoption of optical mice.
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Modern surface-independent optical mice work by using an optoelectronic sensor to take successive pictures of the surface on which the mouse operates. Most of these mice use LEDs to illuminate the surface that is being tracked; LED optical mice are often mislabeled as "laser mice". Changes between one frame and the next are processed by the image processing part of the chip and translated into movement on the two axes using an optical flow estimation algorithm. For example, the Agilent Technologies ADNS-2610 optical mouse sensor processes 1512 frames per second: each frame is a rectangular array of 18Ч18 pixels, and each pixel can sense 64 different levels of gray. Optomechanical mice detect movements of the ball optically, giving the precision of optical without the surface compatibility problems, whereas optical mice detect movement relative to the surface by examining the light reflected off it.
Laser mice. 
Miniature wireless laser mouse with a scroll wheel.
As early as 1998, Sun Microsystems provided a laser mouse with their Sun SPARCstation servers and workstations.[16] However, laser mice did not enter the mainstream market until 2004, when Logitech, in partnership with Agilent Technologies, introduced the laser mouse with its MX 1000 model. This mouse uses a small infrared laser instead of an LED, which increases the resolution of the image taken by the mouse. This leads to around 20Ч more sensitivity to the surface features used for navigation compared to conventional optical mice, via interference effects.
Engineers designed the laser mouse — as a wireless mouse — to save as much power as possible. In order to do this, the mouse blinks the laser when in standby-mode (Each mouse has a different standby time). This function also increases the laser life. Laser mice designed specifically for gamers, such as the Logitech G5 or the Razer Copperhead, appeared later and lack this feature, in an attempt to reduce latency and to improve responsiveness.
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