disk cache is useful in that it makes frequent HDD based tasks go faster, as then they don't have to go all the way back out to the physical HDD to read/write data.

also, in cases where programs suddenly need a lot more RAM, then stuff can get pushed out to disk and the RAM is there and ready to use.

Recent versions of Ubuntu seem to be shipping with a pretty iffy disk caching policy. Not only will it use the entire set of available RAM as disk cache, but it'll then starve running applications of memory, rather than release portions of the cache. Every time I run a full build of our source tree, I'll end up with a nice, full 12-14 GB of disk cache, which will then persist till next reboot.

Thank god for sync; echo 3 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches, but I'd rather they made the disk cache policy tunable, and/or gave it sensible defaults...

fair enough...

I was mostly thinking Windows here, where it seems to work fairly well, though it does have the tendency to push programs out to disk after a while, so even with a lot of RAM it still grinds occasionally, but usually this is when switching back to an app which has been left in the background for a while.

I wonder if the current multi-monitor setups will eventually give way to larger (~2 feet) and wider (~3.5 feet horizontal) monitors with slightly curved screens that curve towards you on either end?

You mean like the newest crop of OLED TVs?

I'm pretty happy with my 27" 2560x1440 IPS panel, from South Korea by way of ebay. It's a metric ton of pixels, so you would need one hell of a GPU to run the latest games at full resolution, but that's not what I have it for - it is absolutely amazing for throwing up walls of text.

Having big monitors is a nice proposition, though it can get expensive. At home and at work I have a 30" Dell U3011 as my primary monitor, which is 2560x1600. I have it flanked by 20" Dell 200nFPs (One 2001FP on either side at home, One 2007FP to the right at work) in portrait mode as secondary monitors with 1200x1600. The screen size and dot-pitch is such that the extended desktop is essentially flawless (just a couple millimeters off -- you can't notice because of the bezels).

Its begins to border on extravagance for sure, but its really nice to be able to have VS open in the main monitor, a bunch of chrome tabs in the screen to the left (research), and Outlook on the right. The primary monitor is plenty wide enough to diff two source files side-by-side, even if they lines might extend out to 120 characters. A screen that large is also nice because you can have a 1920x1200 remote desktop session open without taking over the screen entirely. A large monitor, or a pair of 1920x1200s is probably one of the bigger things you can do for your own human productivity, right up there with a comfy chair and good ergonomics.

Having big monitors is a nice proposition, though it can get expensive.

When I picked mine up, it was $275 shipped.

People get a little worried about buying overseas via ebay, but it's a pretty good deal.

Yeah, I've heard alright things about those Korean monitors, they generally work from what I hear, and they're far cheaper than their American, brand-name counterparts. However, they do use panels that are imperfect (perhaps a few dead pixels or out-of-band color reproduction -- not every monitor of theirs has these defects, but they won't replace one that does under warranty), the backlighting and color reproduction is often not of the same caliber as the name-brands, they have far fewer inputs by choice and by numbers (mine has axDisplayport, 2x Dual-link DVI, 2x HDMI, 1xVGA, 1xComponent, 1xS-Video/Composite, 7.1-channel audio out (via TOS-Link or standard mini-jacks), audio in over Displayport/HDMI/Tos-Link, a bunch of USB 2.0, and an SDHC card reader. The on-screen-display is better than the Korean ones, and has more options too.

$275 is an amazing price of entry to be sure, even $350 would be good, but you do get what yo pay for, to a certain extent. If you're happy with the out-of-the-box experience with those, Don't need every port under the sun, and willing to risk a few minor panel defects, they're a great deal.

They have another often-overlooked advantage: no scaler.

It's incredibly hard to find an IPS panel in the US without a scaler, and for a computer monitor, I'm not sure why you would ever want one. They add ~8ms of latency to the display, and your GPU is capable of scaling to the full resolution anyway.