Sorry, but it just is.

 The thing your missing here, is its not as simple as "adding or dropping" a few pixels. Its a conversion between 16:9 and 16:10 and this conversion happens quite often, depending on what you are runnign and how you have it set up. Some game engines can only nativly output into one of the other, and the scaling is handled by your video drivers, other engines can nativly output in both . When you watch video, plenty of noobs go fullscreen with a 16:9 encode when their aspect ratio is 16:10, and I lawl@them when I see it, because it doesnt look right.

 The only thing you are correct about, is that it is true there are probably very few instances where something is hard coded at x1200 that need scaled to x1080... but there are things that are 16:10 that need scaled, though the native output will generally be available for all 16:10 resolutions 1400x900 etc

 Ofc there are myriad ways to configure it, and with a little effort you can get good picture out of either. But I have seen enough people manage to screw it up that its worth noting. Mostly in video, if a game looks off its usually the developers fault.

The human eye views in 16x9 (thus "Full HD is 1920x1080p for 16x9 aspect ratio). This is why all our widescreen dvds / bluerays (and tvs) come in this resolution.

Computer monitors switched to a 16x10 resolution so 2 documents could be viewed side by side.

What do you mean by that? I haven't done ANY work on the PC with the 1920x1080 monitor yet, it's been solely used for games. However on my 1920x1200 laptop I know I can see 2 Word documents side by side, or PDFs, depending on the reader, and so on aand so forth. Is it any different on the 1920x1080? I wouldn't think so since both have the same amount of horizontal space.

The extra horizontal space is for your taskbar. 

Full HD is just the name of the standard, 1080p@16:9. It doesn't actually mean that it's full in any real sense because even if there weren't other resolution standards above that at this time, it's certain there would be at some time in the future. It's just to contrast with the other major TV/movie standard of the past few years i.e. 720p.

Computer manufacturers are just trying to fall in line with what is now commonly accepted nomenclature which can be understood by the average consumer. If you are the kind of person that actually cares about resolutions above 1080p you aren't going to be fooled by what boils down to simple marketing speak.

I think Vlad's original point was the ambiguity of the word 'HD'. What does high imply in definition? The name itself doesn't specify anything and is just a marketing term to make products sound good. That, and a lot of consumers don't even know what it means beyond "picture looks better".

This.

I can remember when my friend had just gotten his Blackberry.

"Oh, the screen is so great, it's HD quality!"

When obviously, it was probably barely SD.

lol, I would be surprised if it was 640 x 480, being so small.

The funny thing is that PC has had what many people have considered "HD quality" for a long time, if not the resolutions.  CRT monitors had much higher clarity than SDTVs.

They also had LCDs first. The first OLEDs too, then some years later I'll be hearing "ZOMFG! OLEDS ARE THE SHIT!"

OMG... this thread is noob town.

The FULL HD name is only a standard that the media studios and electronics come up. The SD standard was outdated, so all electronic decided to do higher resolution TV, choosing the 16:9 because that was already the movie standard. The choice of being 1080p lines was also because would give the same detail as movies did.

The 1920X1200 was created only for monitor because monitor have the 16:10 standard, created because unlike the TV the monitor needs the TAB/options bar/explorer/ USER INTERFACE etc. So these 120 lines were for the UI not to affect the 16:9 view.

The is no max resolution.... the 1080p is the standard now, simply because there is no need for more now.

There is already lots of monitors, 30''sizes with 2560 x 1600. In fact the 2560 x 1600 is becoming now the new PC ENTHUSIAST RICH GAMERS standard, slowly getting mainstream in the PC core gamers. The 3 SLI 200series gamers out there sure love maxing Crysis at that resolution.