You're viewin' it wrong.
I don't know - you have a task bar on the bottom, a tab bar and menu bar on the top, and if you've got windows 7 and havn't defanged it yet (which requires replacing system files that they try very hard to prevent you from touching in order to get rid of the folderband at top), you have a folderband at the top and a bulked up something on the bottom of any explorer window. My point is, there is tons of crap taking up vertical screenspace, yet monitors are instead supplying us with an abundance of unusable horizontal screenspace. The only time I run short on horizontal screenspace is when I'm writing python code in IDLE, which has neither word-wrap nor a horizontal scroll bar - and that's a case of crap software.
I think what's driving it is that monitor manufacturers measure screens diagonally, but cost scales with area - so it's cheaper to make a 20 inch widescreen than a 20-inch non-wide-screen, but the creeps in marketing managed to trick people into believing that it was a feature. That it was bigger, even - "wider". Wouldn't have sold well if they'd been up-front about what it meant - lower costs for manufacturers and less screenspace for customers. Oh, and not only that, but the wide screens take up more desk space too. I don't know about you, but I've never had trouble fitting a monitor on a desk because of it's height - I've got plenty of space between the desk and the ceiling.
It's real madness - horizontal desk space and vertical screen space are at a premium, and yet we make monitors that are wider and shorter.
16:9 is for MPEG compliance, it will be divisible by 16 / 8 - not to mention that it is pretty close to what movies are shot in so DVDs no longer need to be cropped, so people won't complain about letterboxing ( the black bands on top and below the video ) as well as being more natural to look at.... you see a roughly rectangular shape in your vision, if your vision has compressed to a square you should probably go get your eyes checked since you lost almost 100% of your peripheral vision. This does lead to either pillarboxing ( black bars on each side of the video ) or stretching when watching something cropped to 4:3... such as SD TV broadcasts.
That said, I'm tempted to show off my old RO rig.... I'm using it as a server / encoding box right now and it is literally hanging off a nail in a wall with the HDDs hanging from their IDE cables
My main RO / only Windows running PC now is:
Intel core2 duo E8500 or something I got cheap over clocked to like 3.5-3.6Ghz with the stock cooler
4GB random cheap crap 800Mhz DDR2 dual channel RAM
6x seagate 1TB SATA drives withOUT RAID for mass storage
1x cheap DVD burner
1X seagate 500GB IDE drive for system drive
NVidia gt440 GFX card
A free case my friend gave me with clear plastic sides and a red halogen light to make my PC go faster
Finally had to upgrade my SB Audigy gamer pro to an x-fi when the pro either started to fry or the drivers didn't work right in win7 ( Mic on vent sounded like I was in a dubstep song )
Access to the rest of my network which has another 10TB storage total and is a small cluster for encoding / compiling .
EDIT: forgot monitor: Sony Bravia 40" 1920x1080 TV. And yes azzy it fits on my desktop just fine
I built this rig a year or 2 ago for like $350-400 using cheap middle of the road junk that PC places unloaded when newer "better" stuff started coming out. Thats what I always do, most of my PCs are just used a nodes for compiling / encoding stuff not super high end gaming.
Edited by meoryou2, 18 June 2012 - 03:17 PM.