Slashdot Mirror
A Dual Monitor Experiment
backBeat writes "This is a descriptive article about one man and his dual monitor odyssey. After reading the snippet I had to read the article: "The productivity increase lasted for about two days. At this point I realized that I could to work on one monitor and watch a full screen DVD on the other. This was pretty cool until I realized how counterproductive it could be. Luckily I am quite adept at concentrating on my writing, while typing, while watching a movie." The Dual Monitor Experiment did not disappoint."
Dual monitors isn't news for anyone. It's been easy to do for years and years. Hell, Win98 did it just as easily as the current Windows versions. I remember the difficulties I ran into when I was trying to do it with two different sized monitors with X and no GUIs. I wish there had been a single repository of easy to interpret information back then.
Yeah, two monitors COULD be more beneficial if you're looking to be productive. This guy mentions that but then switches to say that he enjoys multi-tasking and watching a movie at the same time as he is working. Personally, that's not exactly "productive" and honestly it's likely not something that's permitted outside of your home. The only time I am TRULY looking to be productive is when I'm at work and Slashdot has cornered the market on hoarding my time while I'm there.
He talks a little bit about the cost of having a dual monitor setup. Yeah, CRTs are cheap and LCDs are costing less and less but I'm mostly concerned with the amount of electricity that two monitors use up when they are both fired up and running constantly. I ran a 17" and a 15" CRT on my desktop for several years but recently I have switched back to just running one. Why? Even if it saves me $1 on my electric bill (it actually saves a bit more than that) it's beneficial. That's a beer, a burger, or $1 to go towards something else that's more important than being able to have Word open on one monitor and AIM on another.
Personally, I'm going to stick to running a single CRT for now and have to waste all that time hitting ALT+TAB to get to my AIM window when it starts flashing. So much for being able to watch a movie and do my work while being productive at the same time.
I often work with both my LCD and notebook displays on using the notebook display as my primary and the LCD for reference guides/schematics/etc. Big boost to productivity and less mousing!
-nB
whois gawk date unzip strip find touch finger mount join nice man top fsck grep eject more yes exit umount sleep dump
There was a good article about dual-monitor setups on Extremetech recently.
Shouldn't he have had some witty comment on Slashdot on one monitor and his work on the other?
This is not one of those witty comments.
A tv attached to your computer also works well for this sort of thing.
Honestly, is this really that special? I've been using dual monitors for a while and KNOW I'm not the first nor anywhere close to it. Yeah, its nice if you can afford to have two monitors (and the hardware to support it).
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
Is that you soon realize that going back to one monitor is impossible.
Second, and more importantly, I really detest people who post their own stories as if they were a third party. Look at the story above, and note that backBeat lists his email as salcan@gmail.com. Then go to the article and you'll see that it is written by one Sal Cangeloso. He claims that "after reading the snippet, I had to read the article", which is strange, since he wrote it in the first place. If you wrote something interesting, take credit for it. Say, "I recently did some experimenting with a dual monitor setup, and I wrote up some of my conclusions." But don't try to pass it off as anything except self-promotion, as if all of us are idiots who won't catch on.
No, I am not productive, I am addicted. But I don't need a lot of monitors. Fvwm does it all for me.
I am a teacher and the computer I have at school (running WinXP Pro) has three video cards in it and I love it. The main monitor (a 22") always has my current project displayed and the other two monitors (17", one on each side) have email, MSN Messenger and a news web window always up. It was distracting at first but I found that it eventually gave me freedom to complete tasks without constantly switching between windows. It's especially nice when I am working on lecture notes and I am reading a web-based source at the same time.
looks like the dual montior experiment would need at least a dual processor, or better
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I work as a ISC in the miltary, or as an IT in the civian sector, I started using duel montiors when I noticed we where using laptops with a docking station, with a hook up montior, it wasn't long before thinking about it I found a way for it to be done, after being able to look at HTML and cheack my e-mail, and surf the web it wasn't long before I wanted to try it in home, The only downfall i encourted was for games the video card had a hard time strugling to keep up both displays and often caused lower fps for most games, with that being said it definally does increase your productive rate, but if you play games alot its not really worth the extra money.
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My dell laptop is ancient, but one of the features of the dock is a half-size PCI slot. As I recall from 4-5 years ago, there was at least one video card that could give you a dual-headed display when docked.
:-P
Now I'm inspired again to go Googling to find the particular card, then go eBaying to see if I can find one on the cheap!
And yes, I do know how annoying it is when someone verbs as much as I do.
--
Free Gmail Invites -- only two left.
Dual monitors can be more productive. Wow, now there's a piece of news I never heard before. Hell, Mac's have had native dual monitor support since at lest the first powerbooks and probably earlier.
If you don't know what I'm talking about, there is an icon on the panel divided into four sections. Each of these is a separate desktop in which you can open separate windows, etc. and their contents are graphically represented by the icon. To move between desktops, you simply click on the appropriate panel, or use a hot key.
For me, it was seriously like having four computers in one. Under Windows, after a certain point, you can no longer navigate between the windows you have open. Under linux, I can have all my windows divided into sections based on their content. I have never, under this setup, had the number of windows I had open become impractical or unimaginable.
So, I haven't worked with dual physical monitors, but I can saw from what I consider to be a software equivalent under Linux that it should be able to make your life easier. Especially with a stable operating system that can handle running a bunch of programs at once without crashing. *cough*
When things get complex, multiply by the complex conjugate.
At this point I realized that I could to work on one monitor and watch a full screen DVD on the other. This was pretty cool until I realized how counterproductive it could be.
Seriously, how didn't you realise that it would affect your productivity beforehand? I find it hard enough to work when I just have a small video window playing in the corner of the screen, let alone having an entire monitor dedicated to it.
Dual head is really helpful for productivity for certain jobs. The most obvious and common job is the kind where you have to work on one document, while referring to other documents or webpages. I found that being able to keep my own document open while reading stuff on the other screen, really helps me to keep my flow of thought. Even a small extra screen provides much more useful desktop real estate than a single, high resolution monitor: I have a 1200x1024 17" main screen and a smaller 1024x768 15" one... both LCDs. I found this to be such an improvement over a single 21" 2048xwhatever tube, that I now got dual head at work as well.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
Q: What's worse than linking to your site in a Slashdot article?
A: Linking to your site twice in a Slashdot article.
Were they scared it wouldn't go down fast enough?
Dual monitor setup, cool!
Enter the Macintosh II, introduced in 1987, it was capable of driving up to 6 monitors at a time.
Fanboy mode: ON
/etc newsfeed, the flash for some seconds as the updates come in. You can only look at one screen at the time, but your eyes notice the flashing to make youu aware of the news coming in. Red flash = important! look at me NOW!, Green flash = Just some 'ol news coming in, Yellow flash = Just a lead (followup).
Windows: Letting users discover the niftyness of Mac, a decade later
Fanboy mode: OFF
Seriously, this guy don't get it. Having to screens filled with two full space windows is very, very inefficient. Having switched to Mac recently, I find the mentality of MDI-ness a bit strange, as I'm used to the fullscreen windows on Windows. But on my Powerbook, during a lecture I can actually juggle Powerpoint to see the professor's notes, Word to type my notes and iChat all on my laptop screen at one time. It is not a matter of size. Sex is, but not screens.
At work I use Windows with dual monitor, but nowhere near as inefficient as he does. The setup (a newsdesk) has one screen constanly reloading a Reuters / AP / APTN
So thats where my tax dollars are going, to some asshole teacher wanting to have messenger and the web up while they work
Excuse me, but this sounds like geek overkill. Really, email and MSN Messenger open all the time, and a monitor dedicated for them? Well, come to think of it, my daughter (15) would love this. Perhaps if you were in IT support/management and HAD to be in contact with lots of folks at any moment, then maybe. Like so many others have said, maybe one monitor for a current project, and a second monitor for reference is understandable.
If your on a multi-head windows machine check out Ultramon. The ability to have a taskbar on the extra displays is worth it.
On a similar note, if you have more than 1 PC and are looking to have a more efficient setup, I highly recommend the use of a KVM switch. They are cheap and save you the cost of another monitor besides the inherent power savings.
I was considering going the route of dual monitors; but I decided that the more simple solution would be to simply forego my next visit to the optometrist.
The only trouble is getting the "continuous desktop" option on your double vision. . .
And using AIM is also "likely not something that's permitted outside of your home". I would come unglued if it was running on any of my systems. I was unable to RTA due to the server being slashdoted at a record rate. I found his comment about viewing movies while working are probably true.
and just put in any old PCI video card (I used a matrox millennium), remember to set the BIOS to AGP-primary and voila', dual display without many hassles: works perfectly in 2000 and Linux.
-- the cake is a lie
I don't know why you'd want dual monitors if you were not a developer, digital media designer, etc. Development and design require you to have multiple windows and applications open at the same time. Therefore, having the extra desktop space is VERY useful.
Nevertheless, if you're just some schmoe who primarily uses MS Office and iTunes, I highly doubt a second monitor is going to increase your productivity. If anything, it's going to provide space for distraction.
"Things are more moderner than before- bigger, and yet smaller- it's computers-- San Dimas High School football RULES!"
i was a system engineer for a very large military contractor/airplane maker - and i insist on at least two monitors, even if that means buying the parts myself... which i had to.
in any case - when doing documentation review, action item lists, and various document comparison tasks - the bulk of systems engineering for a big contractor - having two monitors should be a requirement. otherwise, one needs to keep switching between two documents, and you can never actually look at both at the same time.. so missing things is quite easy.
most people in my office would print documents so that they could work on the other document that they were doing the comparison work to...
before i left - 4 people had badgered the IT geeks to give them dual monitor setups, and from what i hear, its up to 7 now - because for the MS Office drones, dual monitors is the greatest thing on the planet.
The worst part is that the IT geeks - who could also have benefited from dual monitors by setting up status screens 100% of the time on one monitor, and their daily tasks like email on the other - would bitch like John Stweart on Crossfire about how it was a waste and an over the top luxury...
but they never concidered how much time and paper it saved me... and if everyone had one, how the paper would go down tremendously.
oh well, most major corp IT drones are asshole MSCE singles with bad skin and worse interpersonal skillz anyhow.
guns kill people like spoons make Rosie O'Donnell fat.
I don't know how this is news, but I'm not aobut bashing. Anyway, with Nvidias drivers, you can have two monitors running and have another desktop as well - resulting in virtually four monitors. All I do is rotate the mouse clcckwise and the second desktop pops up (though it could be argued that it is similar to Alt-Tab). I'm sure ATI has something similar as well.
Luckily I could go read the article and reply to your post at the same time easily since I have a dual monitor setup! Seriously though, I would rather have a multi-desktop window manager than two big monitors taking up my whole desk any day of the week, at least until I can afford a gigantomondo plasma TV that I can hang on the wall instead.
I Am My Own Worst Enemy
I find at certain tasks I am FAR more productive with dual monitors.
When I have a lot of data manipulation to do it is very advantageous to have one document open on each monitor. Copying and pasting is simple, and doesn't involve switching between programs. They are both open and visible at once, just copy from one and paste to the other.
I do think that sacrificing an increase in productivity (the personal tendency to watch a DVD on the other monitor aside) to save $1 a month is very short sighted.
With LCD's (very low power consumption) that is far less of an issue.
Several studies have shown at least a double digit increase in real world productivity. My own experience would suppport that.
Lose Weight and Feel Great with Isagenix
The second monitor is either:
1)A second monitor for my main system when I'm programming(I keep documentation and compile results in that window)
2)My email machine with TV Tuner and DVArchive so I can watch shows off my ReplayTV
3)Windows 2000 Development Server
4)Redhat Development Server - although I do not have X on this system and frequently use this port for connecting other peoples systems that I might be fixing
I've had this setup for a couple of years now and could not imagine going back to single monitor.
And if you do a WHOIS on the domain, you'll see his name as the registrant as well.
He talks a little bit about the cost of having a dual monitor setup. Yeah, CRTs are cheap and LCDs are costing less and less but I'm mostly concerned with the amount of electricity that two monitors use up when they are both fired up and running constantly.
If you do video, image, or web editing, it can be very useful to have a second monitor (for option pallettes or previewing, or browsing documentation on the second screen). If you're worried about power consumption, why not just turn off the supplementary monitor when you're not using it?
I'm personally a fan of dual-heading. I use a POS 15" monitor along with my (somewhat less POS) 17" at home, which usually just has Moz eternally open in it to preview the page I'm working on, or to look stuff up.
Information wants to be free.
Entertainment wants to be paid.
You just want to be cheap.
I find myself quite *IN GOES THE RED PILL* capableo f concentrating on *HA, HE THINKS THAT'S AIR HE'S BREATHING, LOL!! OMG!! THIS IS THE BEST PART* reading, thinking, *MAN, TRINITY IS TEH ROXXORZZZ* typing and watching a movie *THERE IS NO SPOON LOL!* at the same time.
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
I have put two monitors on several systems I use (home, work, church a/v) and have found it increases productivity and usefulness.
I did it the cheap way. I used whatever extra video card I have laying around, usually PCI, and whatever monitor I had laying around, often the smaller screen I upgraded from. Since I had this stuff available, the cost was $0.
In Excel, I use one monitor for the worksheet and one for the VBA code I am writing. In PowerPoint, I use one monitor to display a slideshow and one for better control of it. For web development, I use one for the page in my browser and one for the code. The possibilities are endless for many applications. But, for just word processing, it is not nearly as useful.
The whole point of having more than one monitor is to present you with as much information as is possible at one time. This isn't for watching movies - this is for having source on one monitor and your executing program/script/web/whatever output on the other, which does actually increase productivity. This is why all of my code monkey coworkers have at least two monitors. Sure, it's nice for AIM/MSN/ICQ/Chat and news, but the killer app for multiple displays is writing code.
it's ok.. he's getting punished via the slashdot effect right about now
This is funky
I have two 20" flat screens at work and couldn't live without them. As a code monkey I find the extra screen area invaluable for both coding and testing. I can have a number of terminals displaying the source I'm working on, a terminal to run tests and a web browser displaying documentation; all visible at once. This is huge productivity boost and avoids the need to constantly hunt for which window contains the information I'm after. It's also a lot cheaper and easier than having two computers with a monitor each.
I discovered Synergy a while back, and I use it at work all the time now. I have a PC sitting on my desk (Linux), and most of the time have my laptop (Windowws) sitting next to it. With synergy, I basically use my laptop as a second monitor, for browsing the web, reading email (since I have it with me all the time), looking at reference manuals, etc. It's very handy to be able to have a web page open explaining a problem, showing example code, etc, while coding in the other monitor. It's an extra boost to be able to control them with one keyboard/mouse, and be able to copy&paste.
.. however, if I actually render and watch the output of the project on the CRT, it looks fine .. likely this is an issue with the way it's doing preview or something, but either way having the TV is functional).
I've also been using a dual-monitor setup at home lately (one PC) while working on a video project, though my second monitor is a TV. It's handy to have the output preview on there though, as it keeps my main screen less cluttered, and I can see what the output will actually look like on a TV. (For some reason, with strobe lights in the background for example, if I watch it on a CRT the whole picture flickers, while on a TV it looks normal
Speak before you think
He should have gone for dual CPU's instead, two comments above my threshold, and slashdotted to pulp.
Anyhoo, I've had dual monitors under linux (KDE) for about six months now. This was with a Matrox G400 dual and two 19" Samsung 900NF CRT's.
The good things:
-plenty of space. Hardly ever used virtual desktops anymore.
-great when coding, writing in LaTeX, or anything else that has one window editing some source, and another compiling it.
The bad things:
-everything broke. All the time. KDE seemed to acknowledge that a window that was miximized should not expand over two full screens, but after an upgrade, that went out the window.
-mplayer, a long time favourite of mine, did not play well. It refused to play on one monitor (but it always started there), fullscreen just turned one monitor blank.
-Having just upgraded XFree86, it broke something. Back to one monitor untill I get four hours to muck with XF86Config again.
-Takes up a boatload of desk space (I know, TFT's would help, but I don't have $1500 to blow on a set of them.) Same goes for heat and electricity, although I don't pay (directly) for that.
OK, one might get better results with two video cards (Why, oh why, did I give away 3 (three) Millenium II's with 4mb RAM?), ironically.
Bo
This is a descriptive a article about one man and his slashdot post odyssey. After reading the snippet I had to read the article: "The productivity increase lasted for about two days. At this point I realized that I could see my bandwidth bill skyrocket and watch my server melt down at the same time. This was pretty cool until I realized how counterproductive it could be. Luckily I am quite adept at concentrating on my writing, which is now done on paper." The Slashdot post Experiment did not disappoint."
The Toothbrush plus Toothpaste experiment.
Umbrella in the rain experiment.
The darkness and light switch experiment.
XML causes global warming.
It's really beneficial for developers. It makes it SO much easier to do web development. In my case, monitor #1 has has the dev environment (for me, most of the time it's a fancy text editor) and monitor #2 has the test area (browser window, etc).
The biggest improvement comes when you're using a program like Flash MX 2004, with all the windows/panels. With one monitor it's a pain in the butt, having to open/close panels all day. With 2 monitors, you can actually see what you're doing all at once. If I had to choose between 1 20" LCD and 2 17" LCDs (and a video card for support), I'd take the latter any day now.
The only real negatives are 1) desk space can be an issue for some, and 2) explaining to envious coworkers why you need 2 montiors gets really old fast...
Dual monitor setups also work good for comparing 2 documents, or when writing a document and reading another for reference material. I do this all the time at work on my setup. I can have my report open on one monitor, and another document on the other where I pull information from. It saves the headache of ALT+TAB. True, I could tile the windows horizontally or vertically, but then each window would be much smaller. It's good to be able to see a full size window for each document.
Having a smoking section in a public restaurant is like having a peeing section in a public swimming pool.
At my work many users have laptops that plug into docking stations with desktop monitors and keyboards. What blows my mind is that they didn't set the laptops up so that we could leave the monitor flipped up as a 2nd desktop. Talk about wasting hardware...
Stop by my site where I write about ERP systems & more
*multi-desktop window manager than two big monitors*
and why wouldn't you? it's not that hard to setup on windows either.
i use virtual desktops(through some litestep extension), and a second computer(thats running debian).. and cut'n'paste between the computers with synergy( http://synergy2.sourceforge.net/ ).
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
For *most* uses virtual desktops is more then enough to be productive.
When you get into 3d modeling, CAD, etc then having 2 active monitors is a godsend..
---- Booth was a patriot ----
I'm sure Sal wished he was "mirrordotted" right now.
/.ed before. So Sal gets around.
He's been
Wearing pants should always be optional.
I've been wanting to get a second monitor for home, but then I figure I'll find it even harder to drag my ass into the office and get work done, because I'll spend the whole time thinking goddamn it how do they expect me to get work done with one lousy monitor. So I'd either stay home all the time, or end up buying an extra monitor for work.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Personally, I run three monitors on my work computer (an OS X machine). There's a CRT on the left that has my iTunes list, Stickies, iCal, and other "need to keep an eye on it" sort of stuff. There's a fullscreen iTerm session on the rightmost CRT that has tabs for half a dozen or so SSH sessions. And the middle display is an Apple Studio Display (the retired 15" model) where I do most of my serious, interactive work.
Changing from one monitor to two takes some getting used to, but going from two to three was (aside from some geometrical issues trying to fit everything onto my desk) pretty painless.
Just another data point.
--saint
Yeah, and now that you pointed it out, I found out he's pulled this crap before:
0 7&tid=201&tid=133&tid=190&tid=1
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/09/29/19462
This article is a good troll. Almost as impressive as sneaking a goatse redirect past the editors.
The thing I find most useful (as a software devloper) about having two monitors is having your source debugger (I use Visual Studio but that is sort of beside the point) open in one window and the application running on a second window. Lets me see more of whats happening.
The other useful thing (at least in win2k3 because I haven't tried it elsewhere) is having fullscreen termserv in one window and then the apps in the console on the other. Makes 2 computers behave as if they are on the same desktop (mouse moves seamlessly between the two and cut and paste works between the two). This only seems to work if the termserv window occupies the 2nd monitor. To do this minimize the window when you first make it, drag it onto monitor 2 and maximize.
From the sounds of it the "purposes" of a 2nd monitor seem to be lacking from the original article so hopefully these two "tips" (for what they are worth) help someone out.
"You can now flame me, I am full of love,"
Here's a good site about multi-monitor setups.
Dual screens are very useful for 3D CAD work (ortho views on one screen for precise placement of objects, skewed view on the other for 3D view[1]) and for webpage work (HTML on one screen, preview in the other).
Enabling x-mouse (I.E., focus follows cursor) is probably a good idea.
[1] Some people like to put onscreen menus and buttons on one screen and the image on the other, but that seems like a lot of extra mouse movement compared to using keyboard shortcuts for commands.
Be sure to write backBeat at salcan@gmail.com about how you, too, were hooked as soon as you read the blurb for Sal Cangeloso's article.
Hint Sal: Don't use an identifiable email address when posting links to your own articles on Slashdot.
Why does this crap get posted, anyway?
Withdrawal before climax is very ineffective and those who try this are usually called "parents."
I have to say I like my dual monitor setup, however having dual 21" monitors is a little overkill. I frequently run my IDE full screen on one, and run the project I am working on on the other. This works great as I can be debugging and stepping through the code and see where the app is at the same time. I do have to admit that these monitors are a little oversized, and I usually find myself with the left monitor more in front of me and only using the left 1/2 to 2/3 of the right monitor, since I have to actually move my head sideways to read anything that is on the far right side.
Yeah, my first dualie setup was a Mac SE (with 30mHz upgrade!) and an Eahman 20" grayscale. We used to run CAD and the Wingz spreadsheet on that setup, quite nice in the day--1990!
The white zone is for loading and unloading only. If you need to load or unload go to the white zone. It's a way of life
At work I use dual monitors, and was suprised how easy it was to setup with WinXP on my laptop. Using 'synergy' I can also use the Build server beside me with its monitor, without having to switch keyboards and mice. Three monitors, two computers, no waiting. Of course I probably have killed a ton of my 'little soldiers'. ;)
I find it extremely useful for coding. A lot of times I'll have my java ide open (fullscreen of course), and I'll be coding based information in another window, such as email, a web page, ssh connection, etc. I'm constantly looking back and forth between the two monitors, and having to switch tasks constantly would really slow me down.
I also have one monitor on a kvm switch, so I can be looking at two machines at the same time, comparing settings, or what have you. If saving $10 bucks a month (probably over-estimating) really meant that much to me I probably wouldn't do it, but I believe it's something that makes me more productive and marketable as an employee working remotely so it's a cost I'm more than willing to incur, especially because if I'm not productive enough compared to everyone else, that may mean my job.
-- gid
He outta know better... After all, Wired Magazine wrote a freaking ARTICLE two weeks ago about how his site got slashdotted on a prior stunt. Sounds fishy to me.
, 00.html?tw=wn_story_top5
http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,65165
what kind of geeks are you?
I have 3 monitors on my desk. And I'm thinking of replacing one of the CRTs with an 20" LCD. BTW, production is only limited by your own motivation regardless of the number of monitors.
No one gives more? 3 or 4 monitor set-up Where is my matrix wall?
If I decided to assembly 4 PCI radeons with dual connection I could swim in an ocean of electronic pulses..... arghhhhhhhhhhhhhh
Send a message to Sal Cangeloso and let him know he's as big a kneebiting jerk as Roland Piquepaille!
I've had good luck with Windowmaker -- but then again, maybe that's because I use it for all of my machines running X. The only tool is a hammer, and all that.
--saint
Dual monitors are must have for GUI writers. One monitor for the application being writtn.. the other for the debugger/IDE. I've used this setup for about two years and I could never go back to single monitor. I'm looking at going to three monitors, one to keep mail client and documentation up in.
-jv
too lazy to create an account
it's very jarring to adjust to the different contrast level(s) between LCD/CRT on a regular basis (at least for me) so why not stick with a similar one to what you have?
I personally have two aperture grille CRTs (19" and 17") and run them one at 1600 and the other at 1280 to have roughly the same DPI and calibrated them so they have very very similar color rendition, it's much better to move a window between the two and have it NOT change apparent size or colour.
-- the cake is a lie
recently I have switched back to just running one. Why? Even if it saves me $1 on my electric bill (it actually saves a bit more than that) it's beneficial. That's a beer, a burger, or $1 to go towards something else that's more important than being able to have Word open on one monitor and AIM on another.
Your problem is running something frivolous like AIM on the second monitor. When I'm writing a paper I have one monitor with gvim, and the other monitor has half a dozen or so virtual desktops each with a journal article open so I can easily refer back and forth. Or if I'm coding, I can have gvim in the one monitor, and Programming Perl open in the other one.
Really if you have trouble not using AIM when you should be working, you'll have trouble no matter how many monitors you have.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Done with x2x or DMX, depending on if I want 2d acceleration or not.
Why not use more ? Here is a image of a 10 monitor setup.
$1 to go towards something else that's more important than being able to have Word open on one monitor and AIM on another.
Wow a whole dollar, good job. You had dual monitors running for how long and the only thing you were using them for was to have IM and Word open on seperate monitors?
There are some really productive and legitimate uses for dual monitors that in the end save you much more than a dollar in productivity.
A couple of examples of how I use dual monitors:
- Browsing coding/troubleshooting forums in one winow and working in the other, this way I can look at my code and compare it to the examples with out having memorize information before swapping between programs.
- Macromedia Flash, Illustrator, Photoshop, all of these have movable tool winows that I put on my second monitor so I can see the project I'm working on without all the clutter.
As a programmer, I find it far more useful to have the two monitors attached to different computers. That way, when the program I'm debugging kills one computer, it doesn't affect the computer with my development environment.
"They redundantly repeated themselves over and over again incessantly without end ad infinitum" -- ibid.
Not only that, but I would say that his productivity hasn't increased at all. It seems that while he's watching his movie while spending hours writing, his spelling skills deteriorate.
--When I have a lot of data manipulation to do it is very advantageous to have one document open on each monitor. Copying and pasting is simple, and doesn't involve switching between programs. They are both open and visible at once, just copy from one and paste to the other.--
This is so true. With CAD & engineering people this saves lots of time cutting and pasting between CAD program and spreadsheet. It eliminates much ALT tabbing.
I begining to think that dual monitors would pretty much help everyone if they have the room.
Right now I have a 21" CRT and a 19" LCD. When the CRT's die I will replace with LCD's since I got video cards with dual DVI this should be easy when the time comes.
What kind of crap is this? The article on Top 10 Technology Innovations that will change our lives at Newsweek gets passed up so we can read about some guy who just discovered he can use two monitors at once???
...but, then, what isn't? ;{)
But seriously, folks... the Macintosh has been able to do this since the Macintosh II came out in 1987. Back then color monitors were relatively pricy and low-resolution; many graphic artists would hook up an older B&W tube for tool pallets and text windows, so they could use all those colors pixels for the main document window.
What's more, Apple's version of this feature supports as many monitors as you can connect, and supports spanning the desktop across monitors of different resolution and/or but depth, too. There's a panel that shows you all your monitors' display spaces, and lets you drag them around to indicate their physical arrangement. Microsoft shamelessly ripped off the feature and interface for Windows, but of course, they did so ten years laters, and their solution is limited to matching resolution/bit depth.
Learn from the mistakes of others. You won't live long enough to make them all yourself.
I have been running a dual monitor set-up for at least the last five years. I started off with twin 15" CRTs. Of course I was running on a Mac.
I am up to a 17" LCD and a 15" LCD. I am looking to replace the 17" with a 20" LCD.
Depending on what I am doing, dual monitors range from "useful" to "wow, I cannot imagine not having two monitors". In college, working on a paper, I could have research notes open on one screen and my paper on the other.
Following directions listed on a web page? Simple - just yank the web page over to the second monitor, and do the actual work on the main screen.
A problem I have run into: I have yet to find a video program that will run on the main screen in OS X (the display with the dock and menu bar), run full-screen, and will block the menu bar even if it is not the front-most application.
Explanation: I run my AIM and IRC clients on the smaller monitor. On occasion, at night, I like to watch a movie and AIM/IRC at the same time. I can full-screen the movie on the 17" LCD, but as soon as I make the AIM client the active application, the menu bar appears on the 17".
Now, I could just make the smaller screen the primary display when I want to do this, but it would be far better for me to find an application (VLC, you listening?) that would hide the menu bar unless I moused over that area.
The only other drawback to dual displays? Knowing that on occasion you will have to use a computer with only one display.
- (c) 2018 Hank Zimmerman
A *leedle* earlier than that.
A two monitor setup was pretty common for the original IBM PC starting around 1981. The CGA and MDA (or Hercules) cards would address different memory. Many apps would use the MDA for one view and the CGA for the other. Spreadsheet on MDA, graph on CGA for many spreadsheets (remember, spreadsheets were the "killer app" of the era). Borland's IDEs used MDA for source, CGA for output.
You can go back before that (I've seen S-100 bus systems with multiple monitors, and I think the Z80 plugin card to run CP/M on the Apple ][ allowed a second monitor), but dual monitor usage was fairly common long before Win98.
--
Evan "using 4 monitors in xinerama, 6 if you count X exports onto the laptops"
"$30 for the One True Ring. $10 each additional ring!" -- JRR "Bob" Tolkien
Users of dual monitors and Windows would be well served to check out this handy little application: http://www.realtimesoft.com/ultramon/
I find it not only a pleasanter way of dealing with multiple monitors (over the default vid card or windows handlers) but it has some productivity enhancements that make me more productive and make it easier to relate to the switch.
from their website:
Well this story happened to appear in the second of my monitors. For the mathematically astute among you, this implies that, yes indeed, I am a dual monitor user.
Am I more productive at this moment? Most definately not as I am reading slashdot rather that 40% essay due tommorrow. Infact I dare say no dual monitor users could reply to this thread and say they are increasing there productivity at that instant. Anyway...
Can dual monitors increase productivity? Why yes, I often take political science electives and find it a blessing to have a journal on one monitor and take notes on another. Or an spreadsheet and a end of month report in another. That is exactally the split focus task better suited to dual monitors rather than one huge monitor.
I also use it extensively for monitor based programs. Things like your mail client, media player, or p2p software. Applications you wish to check the progress of freguently, but which don't need to hold your focus. Its great having iTunes sitting there and be able to check which song is next or change the playlist.
Other distractions are certainly DVD's, but try as I might to train my eyes to focus seperately, alas I cannot watch two things at once. So dvd's are usually set to the directors commentry.
Or if I am playing some online game like Day of Defeat that has down time, I run a movie in the second monitor and watch it inbetween rounds.
However the most useless and least productive occupations I do is load up auto refresh sites. This one takes the latest pictures from live journal users and refereshes every 30 seconds or so. http://media.admirald.net/ljimages/?n=30&r=15+Sec
Back towards the practical sense of things, I find an application called Ultra Mon useful. http://www.realtimesoft.com/ultramon/ Is a program I use to have a seperate task bar for each screen, and be able to set independant sizes, refresh rates and wallpapers. No, I am not part of them, just found the program helpful. And I apologise for being a Windows user.
Having a bright crt monitor to the right in my peripheral vision caused me to have headaches... I miss the productivity of having my email client maximized all the time, but I don't miss the eye strain.
I bought a 32" Sony HDTV (used, for $550) and was looking forward to using its DVI inputs with my computer, since I assumed the DVI input combined with the HD image quality would produce a sharp picture.
Unfortunately, it does not. The picture is fuzzy and generally not good enough for much other than showing a desktop image. I'm pretty disappointed.
One peculiarity is that the picture's letterboxed at HD resolution. My TV has a standard aspect ratio, which is good since it shows standard definition TV at full size. Strangely enough, this extra space is not offered to the host computer.
My TV is excellent quality otherwise, with a beautiful NTSC picture, although I haven't found a HD signal source other than my computer to check it out with. So I think the TV is fine, but TVs are just not optimized as computer displays, at least not yet. So if you're thinking of using a TV as a monitor as well, be sure to check it using a computer - preferably your own - before making your purchase.
D
I know it goes against the groupthink, but people who use MS Office do actually do work, also. Being able to put two documents side by side is very useful, no matter what word processor you use.
porn is redundant eh? I guess the guy who modded my post wasnt a /.er afterall
"goodbye and hello, as always" ~Prince Corwin, from Zelazny's Amber series
Does anyone know of a way to get two X servers on different machines to behave like one dual-headed machine?
I used to have a dual headed setup at work and liked being able to have 4 large emacs windows with different source files. At home, I have two side-by-side linux boxes and I can get a similar effect with the emacs command make-frame-on-display, but then I have to use the other machine's keyboard and mouse to control those windows. Is there any way to forward X events so the remote server will treat them as local, i.e. so if the mouse goes off the right edge of my main screen, it will appear on the other display? I looked into it a few months back and couldn't find anything obvious.
I've been doing this for years, thanks to x2x and x2vnc (search freshmeat). I currently have my linux machine in the center on a 24" monitor running fvwm2 with 2 3x3 pagers. On the right I have a Solaris machine on a 24" LCD and on the left a WinXP machine on a little 21" monitor.
Smooth mouse scrolling across all screens, both virtual and physical. This is extremely useful at work as our corporate apps necessitate the use of WinXP, plus it's a laptop. The Sun is needed for some specific applications I need to run that are very unfriendly with 32-bit displays (they can only handle 24/8-bit) as well as for testing alot of gnu tool compiles and 3rd party application installs.
The fact that I can run an xmatrix screensaver across all 3 screens simultaneously, randomly interspersed with the Hellraiser cube, is just a bonus.
I figure this will do until I can get one of those giant multi-screen things or plug my brain in directly.
should probably read:
"Luckily I am quite adept at concentrating on my writing, while typing with one hand, while watching a movie."
I've got two monitors at work, where I do web development. I keep whatever I'm working on open in one monitor, and I've got Firefox running with the finished product open on the other. It's pretty handy to see what exactly you've done instead of just a preview in Design Mode in Dreamweaver or whatever. Also, I'm using Firefox's GMail notifier, so I don't have to dedicate an entire monitor to e-mail.
At school , I do things a bit differently. In Flash, Photoshop, Director, etc. I generally try to have one screen dedicated to the visual stuff and another screen for code and/or toolbars. The bigger the screen, the higher the resolution, the better. It's all about cramming as much of what I'm working on into the screens as possible.
At home, I get along with just one 17" CRT. Blah.
If life is a waste of time and time is a waste of life, let's all get wasted and have the time of our lives.
I've never seen such a blatant self-promoting assclown in my entire Slashdot life. Is there some sort of e-mail blacklist to filter out these kind of "article" submissions?
"Ask not what your country can do for you." --John F. Kennedy
you could just use 2 windows instead of 2 monitors.
(Its called windows anyway)
That would be great if laptops had two video heads. Every one I have had will only display the same image on all ports. I suppose there has to be some out there that can do that, however.
-----
Web Hosting @ HostForADollar.com
You would need more hardware for that - i.e. dual video chipsets or a dedicated dual-head chipset a la Matrox. This means more cost.
Laptop's external video ports are just intelligently switched replicators of the signal to the built-in LCD.
Perhaps some laptops do come with proper dual-head functionality but you'll pay for it, and it's a bit of a niche market.
Yours Sincerely, Michael.
Dual monitors are brilliant for this. Take Propellerheads Reason for example: You have the Pattern editor open on one monitor and the Mixer/Machine view on the other.
This is very important since most of the switching/scrolling when writing music (and thus most of the time wasted not composing) is between the pattern editor and the mixer.
Windows XP Powertoys I've been using the Desktop Manager powertoy for a while - limits you to four (4) desktops, but hey. Just remember to turn OFF 'Shared Desktops' (else all windows show up on all desktops - dumb defaults) I also turn off the 'Use Animations' and 'Show Quick Switch Buttons' as well - Start + {1,2,3,4} to quickly switch between.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
It's way more difficult to aim when your crosshairs straddle that "monitor gap." Especailly if they have wide borders or any degree of separation.
Now, three monitors? Yeah, that's the ticket!
R
Stuff that matters: circuitbreakers, vacuum-cleaners coffee makers, calculators generators, matching salt+pepper shakers
The best graphics card for dual monitor is http://www.matrox.com/
All recently made (or not so recently) laptops with ATI or NVidia display adapters should be able to do it. Even my puny Toshiba w/ Radeon 7000 video that cost me $1200 CAD new can handle dual-head. At work I use a Thinkpad with a 9000 dual head as well.
1 monitor.
/var/log/messages and apache access-logs :)
It sucks.
2 monitors.
good. code on one screen, test on the other.
3 monitors.
even better. code on one screen, test on the other, watch a movie on the 3rd.
code on one screen, test on the other, have your mail / icq / feedreader on the 3rd.
4 monitors.
geek! but i really couldn't find a good purpose for the 4rd one, but it looks cool...
Oh, wait. PuTTY to watch the tail -f
Privacy is terrorism.
A lot of my work involves TeX, where it is just convenient to have Emacs on one screen and the DVI output on another. I've done extensive image cataloguing and indexing, too, where you can have the image full-screen and your database next to it. This is just so convenient that I have trouble doing without it. When I bought a laptop, I always took care to pick one where the graphics chipset supported driving two monitors simultaneously.
As a state gets corrupt, its laws multiply; the most corrupt states have the most numerous laws. (Tacitus, Annales 3:27)
It would seem that this person has a history of using Slashdot as a vehicle to increase traffic to his website, presumably to generate ad revenue.
IMHO this is abuse of Slashdot's popularity, and thus his accounts (and any new ones created with his e-mail address) should be pulled.
"Ask not what your country can do for you." --John F. Kennedy
This might have been a more impressive "stunt" a serveral years ago and there had be a C-64 involved. Not that big of a deal today.
When I got my Radion 9700 last year I read that it could do dual monitors. I got out my old spare crt I keep. Plugged it in, fiddled with the settings, and up it came. Two monitors on one PC. Total time, a little over 5 mins. Then I chunked the monitor back into the closet.
Not a big deal. Now the fact that I was slightly inebriated when I attempted and acomplished this task must rate something.
Supporting World Peace Through Nuclear Pacification
Not all of us makes those programs you know. Some of us dont kill their machine more than a couple times a day, and that is called a cigbreak ;)
The system had the verbosity of HTML combined with all the readability of compiled assembly viewed as bitmap images
-phixxr
ungggghhhh
Simply turn OFF the second monitor for the game. Takes what, 10 seconds?
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
I've got four 22" LCD's and six 60" plasma displays running on a dual AGP motherboard and 6 PCI Radeons as well as 16 GB of RAM and 8 Xeons, 6 TB of storage and a cryogenic cooling system which allows for 2x overclocking. And the case glows in the dark. As well as the keyboard and mouse. And I have an Aeron chair.
*Cough* what do you mean these people really own that kind of equipment? Are you serious? *Two* LCD's? Really? My gosh, and here I was thinking that we we're just having fun. I had better carry on pedalling before the power cuts ou.. . . .
The coolness factor of having dual monitors is usually achieved easier than setting it up a dual monitor system for productivity. I think a virtual setup that you can tab to like NVidia's cards are capable of is a solution to be more productive than a dual monitor setup for a windows enviroment. Of course in a Unix enviroment it is much easier to have virtual monitors or screens and in my opinion much easier to control.
I have 2 IBM P260 21" CRTs on my desk. I just happen to be messing with a plug-in electricity meter and discovered that each monitor requires .83 Amps, 99 VA, 98 W.
/mo * 98 W * (1 kW / 1000 W) * (7 cents / kWh) = $1.19 / mo
Assuming a 173.33 hours per month (2080 hours per year / 12 month per year), thats:
173.33 hrs
If, in that month, I can get 40 seconds more work done due to the second monitor, the electricity will be paid for.
- Tony
As a long-time Photoshop user, I couldn't live without dual monitors. I use an LCD as my primary, and have a calibrated Lacie 19" CRT as a secondary. The only thing the CRT is used for is working on images - all the palettes and everything else is left on the LCD.
How about both?
I have a dual-monitor setup, with multi-desktop ability. I hate the thought of having to go back to working on a single monitor - fortunately, I don't see that happening anytime soon.
It's especially useful when I'm doing a remote desktop into another machine - one monitor shows my machine, the other the remote machine. I have a switchview that will let me select between the machines, but I rarely use it because it is just more useful to have them both accessible at the same time.
"You know your god is man-made when he hates all the same people you do."
The original IBM PC has supported dual monitors ever since the CGA came out in 1981. All you need is a CGA/EGA/VGA card & monitor alongside an MDA/Hercules card & monitor. (The monochrome graphics buffer is at B000h, the color graphics buffer is at B800h or A000h.) Many DOS debuggers take advantage of this, using the monochrome display for their output.
I buy my own equipment, thank you.
Having two or more monitors is way more efficient. You do not have to remember what is on each screen, you can just look at it. I've used two monitors a lot and I have to say that going back to single monitor sucks. Using a virtual monitor helps but it's not nearly as interesting as having real monitors in front of you.
I think it would be even more productive if you have different OSes on 2 monitors. /. reader, and I can still play games on friday afternoon :)
Therefore I have a Linux (FC2) box on the left, and a wintendo (XPsp2) on the right. Since I don't want 2 keyboards/mice, I use Synergy2.
Works quite nice, and is good for my productivity as a webdesigner (don't hit me!) and fulltime
I have a KVM switch on my desk, but because I have a dual monitor setup, I hardly ever use it, finding it easier and more efficient to just remote desktop into the machine, and show that desktop on one of the two monitors.
I still have instant access to both monitors, useful when I need to open a document or scroll through it, copy/paste between the two machines, or talk to a cow-orker on IM about something while working on the secondary machine.
I have seen something that women find multi-monitor setups to be more helpful in productivity than men do, so that might have something to do with the differences in opinion.
"You know your god is man-made when he hates all the same people you do."
... at the same time.
"... I could to work on one monitor and watch a full screen DVD on the other.
As a lazy programmer I find I'm much more productive when I have other people do my work for me. This allows me to get ahead in my projects without the necessary work that would normally be required. I have plenty of time to read slashdot as a result and my productivity hasn't been compromised at all!
I started fooling around with multi mon at work several years ago. I grabbed some 8mb video cards out of old machines, and put them into my primary system. It was easy to find an extra moniter to scavenge, and voila, dual moniters.
But dual moniters is a gateway drug. I soon dug up a third video card, and set up another one. And then a fourth. I only stopped there because I ran out of desk space and pci slots. You think it's bad to have a monkey on your back? Try four 17" Moniters...
Its awesome because you cand have an IDE open, a DB manager open, several folder that you are developing out of, and doccumentation open all at once, and you don't have to flip back and forth. If you are a serious coder, it cannot be beat. Just...try to control your habbit....
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
I have used a 2 monitor system myself (15"+17" crts) and I didn't find any benefit from the additional monitor. Maybe if you don't have virtual desktops it is cool to have a place where you can throw windows to, but with pwm a simple Meta+number changes virtual desktops and I don't see the point. Turning my head needs more work than that simple keyboard combo. And two screens slow XFree86 a lot.
I've had a pair of monitors at home (and another pair here at work) for quite a while and I too am thinking of adding a third.
There's plenty of things for that other monitor to display without resorting to movie playback.
- Email client, irc client, compiler progress, IM client, development environment, media player
- Email client, irc client, BT client, IM client, media player, game
- 800x600 browser, email client, irc client, IM client, development environment, media player
- query window, email client, IM client, media player, browser-containing-specifications, a few folders, etc
The list goes on, and on, and on...::jafomatic
At work I have a laptop computer (fairly new IBM Thinkpad with Centrino chip; ATI Mobility Radeon 7500) and I also have a CRT (running Win 2000). I can easily set it up so they are both on at the same time. But they just match each other. I can't extend the desktop onto two monitors. Guides I've seen on the internet are of no help. Is there an easy was to get multiple monitors on my computer? Or do I have to buy a PC Card with?
If someone knows how to make this work, please lemme know. I've been on this quest for awhile.
I'm a desktop support tech at a mid-sized company. I decided to try a dual monitor setup about a few weeks ago and now I wonder why I did without it for so long.
As a part of my job, I often need to remotely connect to another computer via VNC or DameWare. Having two monitors lets me monitor the progress bar on the remote machine on one screen while I get ACTUAL WORK done on the other screen. It also lets me view a webpage with a HOWTO or a solution to a problem on one screen while I try it out on the other.
-- Halfabee
http://www.yipton.demon.co.uk/content.html#DESKWIN
Also open source and nice features. Configurable hot keys + gui.
Using it right now. Have CNTR 1,2,3 for intant access to my windows and CNTR J, K for next, prev.
doing this for years. without multiple monitor set ups graphic designers, animators, drafters and 3D artists would never have been able to manage. To be able to put my pallettes from Photoshop or Illustrator in one monitor while working on images in another has made a huge difference and increased my productivity enormously.
AutoCAD, Maya and 3D programs use so many pallettes that it would seem almost impossible to NOT have multiple monitors while working on projects.
When I work on PHP and HTML projects having one monitor with code and the other with my browser window open also makes the difference. I can check the results of my code revisions while still looking at the revision I just made.
he's getting punished via the slashdot effect right about now
/. editors will simply blacklist submissions pointing to his domain, since someone else in this thread pointed out that this is not his first offense.
/. in order to drive traffic to one's site, but from the comments so far I'm being led to believe that the article has little more meat than, say, http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=307873
Or paid via advertising revenue from his site (I can't say for sure, it's not loading for me). Hopefully the
I realize the temptation to submit geek-enticing articles to
http://publicvoidlife.blogspot.com
Dual-headed monitors can be great, espically if your heating system isn't up to much, seems the PC's in my room are the only think keeping it semi-warm :)
I also have 3 monitors at work and I find it very useful. I had 2, but found an old graphics card in a discarded computer and figured I'd stick it in my current machine. I typically run simulations on 2 monitors, and email/chat on the third. I wouldn't bother doing it at home no matter how much I use it at work. At home I'm either playing games or doing 1 thing at a time.
True once upon a time, no longer so. Most laptops I see these days will do it. My powerbook certainly does (and is, at the moment).
Why?
I have dual on one machine in the office and I am always using it, even though my machine is 5x the power. It is really usefull for things like expanding photoshop to both screens and using the toolbars on one of the two. Photoshop also remembers where they go when you load it. Awesome that you can have a monitor full of toolbars.
Also, I have multiple email accounts and it is great to have both up at once.
Finally, having a monitor devoted to winamp or wimp is great for staying productive and listening to your own choice of programming.
DUAL MONITORS are the future of computing!!!
Not the story, but the fact that a guy hooking up a second monitor would be worthy of a /. story.
/. crowd?
I've been using my 42" television as a second monitor for a while (s-video) for watching movies or keeping an eye on my bittorrent transfers.
Who hasn't ever hooked up a second monitor among the
Not a Twitter sockpuppet... but I wish I was.
Im a fan of 3 head or more.
with video editing 3 monitors is a blessing. 2 monitors for Premiere 1 monitor for after effects and 1 monitor for a web browser so I can look up information.
at work I have a 3 head on my desk as well as a laptop and a seperate X terminal all running so I can program in php and do my regular IT duties all at the same time.
it's great if you can handle the insane fight to get 3 cards working in a machine or afford the matrox 4 head cards.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Reading the article led me to some google searches to this little utility. http://www.mediachance.com/free/multimon.htm It extends the task bar across both monitors. Best of all it shows the applications in the correct bar. I've only used it for an hour or two, but thought I'd pass it along.
Virtual Desktops!
With something like VirtuaWin you can actually have a simulated dual screen setup. Enable audio on your AIM, and you know when to jump to the next screen.
I use ALT+# where # is the desktop I want to jump to. I have 1-9 configured, but normally use 1 & 2 (1 - Web surfing, 2 - Email). Then they expand from there. So 3 gives me a screen for all my putty terminals when I'm troubleshooting server issues, 4 can be a development window. 5 is for database-specific stuff (ie: 4: ASP.NET, 5: SQL Enterprise Manager). And so on. Exceeding 6 though, can get annoying due to the extra finger stretch, so I try not to, but if need be there is the ALT key on the right.
VirtuaWin!
IBM even allocated a register range for a secondary EGA card, so in theory it would have been possible to have two EGA or VGA cards running simultaneously under DOS.
As a state gets corrupt, its laws multiply; the most corrupt states have the most numerous laws. (Tacitus, Annales 3:27)
Which would you prefer, at the same price?
(1) A 23" LCD as a second monitor, or
(2) A second laptop, and then using Synergy to work both PCs from one.
The advantage of (2) I guess is that you also get a another processor, hard drive, etc. The disadvantage, of course, is that the "second screen" is not 23".
I don't know about all of them, but at least with Dell C400/D600 laptops it possible, but is implemented poorly. What Dell does is expand the monitor resolution to 2048x768 and span it across the external monitor and the laptop screen. It doesn't do a true dual monitor setup where there are 2 displays each at 1024x768 and each is treated independently by the OS and applications. You need a Margi Display-to-Go card or similar to acomplish that. If there is a hack or different drivers that fixes this, I'd love to know about it.
Specs for the P260 say 160W worst case, so your number is about right for typical. but 7 cents? You live next to a dam or something?
I'm wondering if there might be a dual-display KVM switch out there? That would be great to be able to swap your dual-monitor setup between two (or more) systems.
Having a smoking section in a public restaurant is like having a peeing section in a public swimming pool.
... have recently read a /. story on a dual monitor setup that just should not have been approved in the first place.
But I may be wrong. Stay tuned for another very exciting story on how Sal, I mean, someone read about someone who managed to increase his productivity by using velcro fasteners instead of shoelaces. Using velcro fasteners instead of shoelaces is basic as ABC and it may actually help save your life when you are being chased by a mob of irate /.ters, but it will not make your XYZ company's web servers immune to the /. effect, mkay?
This is a prime example of why we should always RTFC before blindly RTFA!
I don't wanna hear anymore about how I should RTFA before I do anything else.
Maybe somebody should just pull this story.
Just another angry Monday,
- OrbNobz
No, I refuse to vote. It's a sham.
I can't imagine using less than four monitors. Or, rather, when I'm forced to, I find it horrible.
-russ
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
Seriously though, I would rather have a multi-desktop window manager than two big monitors taking up my whole desk any day of the week, at least until I can afford a gigantomondo plasma TV that I can hang on the wall instead.
Multi-desktops don't do a thing for me. What is the use of a graphical application running in a window I can't see? Multi-desktops with a useable preview window might be worthwhile, but the way it's done in KDE/Gnome right now is worthless.
Multiple monitors...that's a different story. Put your IDE in one monitor and your web browser (for documentation) on the other. Leave Kontact running in one monitor while you're screwing around on Slashdot in the other. GTK-Gnutella or Pan in one monitor while you're watching a movie on the second. Once you've been using a multi-monitor desktop for a while, you'll find it annoying to work on a system with a single monitor.
I have a Dell Inspiron 600m. While not as Linux-compatable as I would have liked, I've been able to get ATI Mobile M9 video system in it to run alongside my 19" CRT in a "dual head" configuration, even with different resolution monitors as a single desktop.
Until you've done it, you just can't really comment.
When I get into heavy coding, nothing beats having two monitors. Typically, I'll have my Fedora Core desktop running, VMWare running in a window with whatever O/S inside that (frequently Win2000), 6 or so xterms, and a few Mozilla windows, all at once.
Trying to get this to fly with just one monitor is quite difficult and requires very careful attention to the location of overlapping windows so I can switch between them easily.
But, with two monitors, 6 virtual desktops, and an ergo keyboard, I find that I can just FLY, unencumbered.
BTW, I've posted my XF86Config file for your use and tweaking if it should prove useful for you. To use dual-head, I start Xwindows with "startx -- -layout multiple". (I boot into runlevel 3)
When I "go remote" I really, REALLY miss my extra screen real-estate!
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
Even if it saves me $1 on my electric bill (it actually saves a bit more than that) it's beneficial. That's a beer, a burger, or $1 to go towards something else that's more important than being able to have Word open on one monitor and AIM on another. ;-)
You pay for your electricity ?.. MAN, you need to phr3ak s0m m0r3!
Probable impossibilities are to be preferred to improbable possibilities.
Aristotele
Maybe the guy is schizophrenic! Think about it: two personalities, one writes the article, then the other one finds it open on the desktop... makes sense, in a schizo-kind of way. But in any case, he needs to get off /. and search help from a psychiatrist, whether he is schizophrenic or not, because he's abusing of our time, and I don't like wasting mine. In fact, I can't read the article because it times out.
But guess what? I did that before he did. Except I thought /. had more interesting things to post than that kinda stupid stuff. Are the moderators of the story half-groggy? I thought they had a little more judgement than that... Guess I was wrong.
---- I am certain of only one thing : I know nothing else.
I'm not sure if this is doable in linux/*nix but is it possible to have multiple (interested in 2 at the moment) monitors as well as a set of input devices (mouse keyboard etc) for each monitor with X? I know this is slightly off topic in the sense that it doesnt increase the productivity of a single user, but it does increase 'productivity' of my pc ;)
Dual monitor + VMWare, the most productive set up I've used. Now if only NVida would get R+R working then my manuals would display correctly.
I prefer dev in one monitor and API docs etc in the other.
"America has done some terrible things. But I know that Americans don't cheer when innocents die." -Dave Barry
But don't try to pass it off as anything except self-promotion, as if all of us are idiots who won't catch on.
Someone obviously fits your description of not catching on.. the article was posted...
From the Wired article mentioned in jmulvey's post
Maybe it would be a problem the first time Slashdot posts a story, but by the time the dupe rolls around...
There was a point at which I had four monitors. When I was doing something useful, the first monitor was work, second was documentation, third was communication (email, IM clients, etc) and the fourth had system monitors. I probably have several forms of cancer now, since three of them were old CRTs that I bummed from friends. During that time, I very rarely used Alt-Tab, and only sometimes had overlapping windows. It was nice. I usually think of it like this: One monitor is like having a school desk, two is like a nice office desk or workbench. I just went with an entire conference room. Excessive? Yes. Geeky? Without a doubt.
"The government of the United States is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion."
I've been working with three monitors on my Slack system for about two years now. This is my typical desktop:
One monitor gvim, with the current program I am working on.
Second monitor with konsole, 10 sessions open.
Third monitor with the current program compiled and running (for testing).
Somewhere in there there's a pdf reader VNC and Mozilla.
I also have 8 virtual KDE desktops with about 100-150 windows running.
All three monitors are Sony 21"
This is the problem: Now I want six monitors. The best would be if I had a monitor about 60" across and 25" high. Not straight across but wrap around a bit.
I think I will be able to get this in about 5-7 years.
X does a very good job of managing all this.
Doing Alt-tab or virtual desktop sucks because everytime I switch view (or do alt-tab), it interrupts the work flow. Sometimes I have tons of windows opened and I have to Alt-Tab several times to get there. It's really distracting.
http://www.up0.com/
it's ok.. he's getting punished via the slashdot effect right about now ;-)
I guess you never read his previous article, "dual-head bandwidth setup", aka "Aviod the wrath of slashdot"
Probable impossibilities are to be preferred to improbable possibilities.
Aristotele
Quite a few groups can benefit from dual monitors; developers, writers, graphic artists, finance people, HR folks, legal people... I'm gaving a hard time thinking of anyone who wouldn't, unless it's the sort of receptionist who never does anything besides look up phone numbers.
/. discussion!)
One of the worst things about XFree86 becoming the primary public face for X was their lack of dual monitor support (though this gradually changed). Many vendors had multiple monitor support; the best example I personally worked with was AIX in the early 90s. I recall testing AIX systems with 4 and 6 monitors in both 1 and 2 dimensional configurations, often using extremely dissimilar graphics cards and monitors.
I currently have two monitors (via Matrox 450) on my desktop. Three would be even better, and 4 ideal. I'd love to have a 3x2 monitor array in the computer room (to monitor several hundred systems, the network, the power, etc). We may well do something with DMX for that.
(OK, what I'd really like is a 3x2 holographic display of same in my cube, but that's another
7 pennies per kiloWatt hour?
7x10^6 pennies per gigaWatt hour?
I wanna live next to your fusion-reactor driven electrical source, matey. I'm paying just a smidge over 23 cents per kWh currently, and back in the enron-electrical-hijack debacle of 2002, I was paying over 56 cents per kWh in La Jolla.
Take a look at ALL of your bill: they like to unbundle the charges and charge the 7 cents maybe for the generation cost, but they've added on transmission costs, facilities maintenance, and many tax-sounding-like-items-which-are-not-taxes onto that bill.
Or maybe I need to move...
Definitely a slow news day. I've been running 2 x 19" monitors since June 2000, and 3 x 19" since January 2001. I'm not the first. I copied most of the X config files from my co-workers who did it before me. 3 x 1280x1024 x 2,3,or 4 with enlightenment multiple desktops. Enlightenment / XFree86 / RedHat 6.2 Enlightenment / Xorg / Fedora 2 install each video card by itself, let your distro's config system create an X config file for that card, save the config files off to seperate files, and manually dither them together.
Dual monitors do little to increase production these days because even with the extra real estate you still have way to many applications running. I found between 4 and 8 to be idea depending on the task.
Consider a typical power user
3 instant message applications
1 IRC
1000000 web browser windows, each with their own set of tabs
2 office applications
1 iTunes (because really, it just rocks)
3 local system monitors such as task manager or a temp and fan speed monitor
1 email
4 login windows (or Remote Desktop Connections)
I use 1 monitor for my MP3 player, that gives me the width to see all information and depth to see many songs to move on to something better when I don't want to listen to whatever's on now
1 monitor for all my IM applications. In my case it's a bit low res (all used monitors). If I had a higher res monitor I'd include irc here
1 monitor for IRC, because really, one channel isn't enough
1 monitor for various status screens about local system operation
1 monitor for a DVD or TV
1 monitor for my email
1 monitor for my "current work", that is whatever I'm doing now
I use whatever is left or not being used for various browser windows, usually with system or network status screens for work.
I found the ATI video cards work great for this. Pop in a 9700 AIW Pro and as many 7500s as I need running two monitors each and blam-o! Monitor madness.
Darthtuttle
Thought Architect
I had 3 monitors at work for a while, with the one switching between my server and the 3rd screen of my coding box.
;) The only drawback to multiple screens for me was the fact that I often look at a screen and start typing without giving that application focus. While code usually just stops compiling because of that, I have found quite a few snippets of my IRC conversations buried deep within comments.
:(
I found the 3rd monitor ended up just staying on the server because I almost never needed it on my main machine. While I often have many windows open, it seems I am never using more than 2 at a time. Coding + help file, slashdot + email, Movie + pretend work.
Of course working at home with a single monitor is absolute hell.
East Coast Brewers
You need wallpaper set up before you can be productive? Just to be clear, you're talking about the background graphic that gets covered over by your application windows, especially the maximized ones, all the time?
And then what's the productive part but setting up the screensaver!? That program that wastes processor cycles and only runs when you're not even there? And somehow setting up the wallpaper first was necessary for this?
I think I can quantify your productivity increase. You've saved the time that it takes to switch between working and goofing off. Before you could only do one or the other; now you can do both at the same time!
You know, you can get that same effect by putting a picture on your desk, and it doesn't draw as much power. Really, your most productive use of your second screen is to display a static image?
I find it difficult to believe you even work in an office environment, and if indeed you work from home, I should let you know that they have these glass-covered portals in walls that offer a view of the outside world. Coincidentally, they are also called "windows". Try moving your computer closer to one.
And I still come away with nothing about what your work is, other than it involves word processors and possibly spreadsheets. If it is writing articles for the web, you could have at least touched on having your research materials on one screen and composing your articles on another. If you were a coder, you could be viewing the application on one screen and tracing code execution in a debugger on another.
Sorry, but your article is useless. It's nothing but talking about your new toy and you really offer no work benefits to the configuration other than it makes your goofing off more efficient.
There are those of us who are trying to get dual monitors in our workplace. If management goes by articles like yours, they'll only see them as tools for more goofing off in the workplace and refuse the requests.
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
My HP Compaq laptop does it, but I don't take advantage of it. I have a 21" CRT running at 1600x1200, and the laptop's LCD has a native resolution of 1024x768.
It sucks. Any applications that open up when the laptop's not connected to the CRT shrink their windows to fit in 1024x768. That wouldn't be so bad if they remembered their sizes and positions when the CRT was available again, but I just end up with a bunch of uselessly small windows I have to go re-size.
And another thing: There's no power button on the port replicator, and the laptop docks with it vertically. You can't put this thing under a monitor stand! What kind of desktop-replacement laptop doesn't do this right?
The 4 year-old Dell Inspiron this thing replaced had all that, plus a usably large 1440x1024 screen. Shame on you, HP. If these weren't provided by my place of employment, I would have returned it. As it was, we almost *did* return the things.
Little Debian: America's #1 Snack Distro!
Having to buy the right kind of video cards, and then only being able to use your setup with certain programs, is not done "just as easily as the current Windows version", where you basically plug and go, and it works with any windowed app.
Mod down posts with a "Free Mac Mini/iPod" sig, they're spam!
Yeah, what an amateur. When I plugged my own website a year or so ago, I made sure to cover my tracks!
At work, I have a setup to die for. At my far left, I have my laptop, docked. At my far right, I have an HP 1825 18" LCD, which displays at 1280x1024. This I use intermittently as a console to various linux machines. Center-left and Center are a pair of HP 2025 20" LCDs at 1600x1200. These are hooked up to an HP Itanium 2 Workstation through some kind of dual head ATI card. It runs Debian and it my primary work machine. Center-right is an HP 2035 20" LCD display connected to an HP xw8000 workstation running Windows and various proprietary apps.
This setup pretty much takes up my entire horizontal field of view, plus a bit. I usually have the entire surface tiled with various apps and terminals and rarely have anything minimized or hidden behind something else. I have about 6 terminal windows open to a shared GNU screen session. Mozilla runs in the upper-left. Irssi's extra-wide terminal runs below it. Evolution runs on the left half of the right monitor. The rest is all terminals.
All of this is hooked together with synergy2, though I don't leave it on all the time.
The next evolution of this setup will be to run all of the displays from one linux box and use rdesktop to remote an 800x600 windows display.
As many have mentioned, LCDs are easier on the eyes than CRTS. They also take up less desk space and are decreasing rapidly in price. Drawbacks include poor contrast ratios, limited resolution, and price. Still being a developer I wouldn't go back to manual context switching. If you have any questions about this setup, please feel free to ask. I'd be happy to post, for example, my XF86Config file.
I started using dual monitors years ago. I was taking data from PageMaker files, putting it into Excel files, and then cutting and pasting the stuff in Excel into html tables for a web site. Without dual monitors and a 5 button wheel mouse, it would have taken twice as long. Ever since I've been a dual monitor junkie. Even when working in a single program, it's great to have a folder open n the other monitor with all the files I need in it. Or have my e-mail up so I can see if that message that just came in is important enough to stop what I'm doing and attend to.
Messing with, let alone discussing messing around with wallpaper, screen savers, music folders and watching movies is not only counter productive to work, it's counter productive to writing an informed article about using dual monitors in a work environment. 1, 2 or 10 monitors- if I were watching movies at work, productivity wouldn't be an issue for very long.
666-607: 6th floor apartment of the beast
Dual monitors can be very beneficial to productivity, but from a health and safety point of view they can be a nightmare.
What didn't come up in the article, as LCDs were used, is that if you don't have both screens running exactly the same refresh rate then it can cause appalling eye strain. Trying to focus on screens running different refreshes becomes very difficult and within 20 minutes or so the eyestrain gets very noticeable
I used a dual monitor setup for a week before giving up after developing a very annoying twitch in my left eye. My right eye was fine looking at a 17" screen running at 1280x1024@85hz but the left was trying to focus on a crappier 17" at 75hz.
The lesson being that if you can't afford to go the LCD route then choose your second monitor carefully, as you will want it to match the primary as closely as possible.
very good. here's a fish for the seal who figured out the trick.
...and if you can skip being lazy for long enough, remember to change job-title to "manager"
If I was developing for a desktop I'd probably go that route; though you have to be doing something pretty hardcore to take out the whole machine. But as a Unix developer I basically use my desktop machine as a dumb terminal with loads of SSH sessions (good old Putty) providing the interface to the development server. The head of systems was most amused to discover I was using a 3.2Ghz dual Xeon as a high resolution VT100.
Just did a quick search on the web. Those Dells use the Intel graphics chipset, pretty typical of Dell. No reason to get crappy Intel video when you can find laptops just as cheap with ATI.
I have a very small short term memmory, and dual monitors helps me juggle large abounts of windows without forgetting what I am working on.
It is very usefule for copying large amounts of random files too.
I have a laptop with a small monitor on my desk, and when i get stuck with a desk that has no monitor it is torture.
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
Multiple monitors were available on the Macintosh since the Mac II (1987 I think), and were used quite extensively by those developing multimedia. The authorware program Macromind Director (the predecessor of Macromedia Flash) required two monitors if you actually wanted to get anything done. You had the presentation running in one screen and the "score" window in the second.
Later, we would develop using three screens, as the screen for the Lingo code would also require it's own monitor.
These multiple monitor setups became handy when the web appeared, as you could edit your HTML in one screen and see your results on the other monitor running the browser.
As for watching TV while coding, this was solved with a single monitor back in the days of the Amiga. The purchase of the Amiga "genlock" allowed you overlay the amiga screen onto live video feeds (for doing things like subtitling anime) -- however, it also allowed you to watch TV while coding -- all on one monitor, because your text editor, running against color zero would display the text over the TV feed.
Frankly, for anyone that has worked with a variety of platforms over the years, this is hardly news. It's just now that the PC is catching up to what other, more powerful and multimedia friendly computers had in the early and mid-90's.
I still wish modern PC's would allow me to pull down the desktop and display a screen behind it with an entirely different resolution, like the Amiga did.
(and frankly, I'm sill looking for a dynamic ramdisk program for the PC, to emulate the Amiga's really, really cool ramdisk)....
Oh, and if anybody remembers the Macintosh game F-18 Hornet -- that game allowed a multiple monitor Mac to display the front, sides, and rear view of your cockpit, and the updating was pretty impressive.....
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
Yes, dual display KVMs do exist! I'm considering asking for one for Xmas, but there so many other toys I'd like too.
Newegg sells them, among other places.
I upgraded my dual-head machine (zaphod) to triple-head over two years ago (now triphod). I wouldn't do with less than my three by 19" monitors now. I'd like to add more monitors!
Check it out Here. (Raaalph is the Windows box on the right,,,)
Slackware and KDE.
You typed all that and made first post!! There is only one explanation: its nap time for all those first post Anonymous cowards!
A citizen of America will cross the ocean to fight for democracy, but won't cross the street to vote in an election.
Are there kvm switches that handle multi-monitor setups?
emt 377 emt 4
Are you trolling or do you just have limited experience?!? My *El Cheapo* Thinkpad G40, bottom of the line machine, can do dual head. I repeat, it can do mirroring *and* extending the desktop. I'm sure it will continue to be added to laptops in the future as manufacturers want to differenciate between budget laptops.
Multi-desktops don't do a thing for me. What is the use of a graphical application running in a window I can't see? Multi-desktops with a useable preview window might be worthwhile, but the way it's done in KDE/Gnome right now is worthless.
For people that basically have every application always maximized, multiple desktops really don't do anything useful. It's most useful if you have several windows open at once. Say one desktop has IM - the client and several conversations. The next has several file system windows open so you can drag and drop files with ease. The next desktop might have several system monitoring tools open. So for instance, you can bring up all your monitoring windows with one click, instead of several clicks to bring up each individual window to the foreground. It's handy. But hardly nessecary.
hey, im all about efficiency, theres nothing like having a game up on my main screen and the walk through up on the 2nd display :D
on a serious note, i cant stand single display anymore, when im coding its invaluable to have a 2nd display with my reference material, or when i work in various sound production apps, and desktop real estate is an important factor. hell if my pci bus wasn't maxed i'd be hooking up a 3rd display for sure. one key factor i found after several configurations is the best setup is if both displays are running at the same resolution, and my only complaint would be how some fullscreen windows want to go and minimize when i access the other display (remote desktop, etc)
A person utilizing dual monitors so they can have Word on one screen, Aim on the other or some such other purpose is doing it for sheer pleasure. A more practical usage, however, for dual monitors is when using apps like Macromedia Flash. I work within this program and I tell you what, it helps (immensely) to have two monitors so I can have most of my menus open. :D
I was also at Bloomburg Communications in NY on a school trip. Each person has either a dual or quad monitor setup. It is very important for them to utilize such a setup...each person also has the Herman Miller Aeron chair (drool)
It all depends on what you need and what you are going to use it for.
I mod down so you can mod up. Your welcome.
While I don't have a triple-monitor setup, I've gotten so used to my 19"CRT@1600x1200 + 17"CRT@1280x1024 setup that I almost get claustrophobia when using a lower-res or single-monitor setup (though my laptop's okay, probably since it's a laptop and thus not made for multi-screen setups and the res is very good anyway at 1400x1050).
:-P
I'm waiting for high-res LCD's (<=18" at >=1600x1200px) to get cheap enough for me to buy 2 of them
I did not take the time to read all the 200+ comments, but what about a multi workspace desktop? Blackbox+BBkeys or fluxbox (but I never tried the latter) can do it quite easily. On my GNU/Linux desktop, I use blackbox mostly because of its ability to organize things into multiple workspaces. To move from one workspace to another is just a matter of pressing Control+Alt+Left, or Control+Alt+Right. Additionally, this allows me to have a virtually unlimited amount of workspaces, which is much better (at least wastes less space) than a handfull of monitors. You can have two documents open on two different workspaces, and better than that, you can have blackbox auto-focusing a program as soon as you focus its workspace, so it's just a matter of copying, pressing a key combination, and pasting. If you do spreadsheet, you can also stretch your window to fill multiple workspaces, which is not much different from having two monitors. If you do CAD, you can have your preview display in one workspace and your work display in another.
My video card supports dual heading. I've used it once to contemplate the size of the big virtual display it created with the two monitors aside, but honestly, I scrapped the second monitor as soon as I watched google's search textbox splitted because Mozilla was maximized on my virtual screen. It was hard to get used to the mouse jumping from one screen to another, and I found it difficult to know where the text cursor was.
My point is: since our brain can only pay attention to one screen at a time, why do we need two of them?
You may be interested then in multi-head displays from PanoramTech. We tried their 3 headed displays for a demo environment and it was well received by analyst who typically leave their main application up on one, a web search on the second, and email, reporting tools,and other apps on the last screen. While not practical for all users, multiple screens have their use.
my IBM Thinkpad iSeries allowed for dual head (one screen on lcd, second screen via the VGA out). It worked great and use to wow all the kids at the computer lab. The iSeries was the cheapest Thinkpad at the time (replaced by the R series), it wouldn't surprise me to see the same features in other notebooks(although my current Toshiba Portege 4000 lacks this feature).
I'm a writer, a poet, a genius, I know it. I don't buy software, I grow it.
That's the point I would make. Here at work, I have duals (wouldn't go any other way) and when I write code or monitor network traffic, I NEED them. Someone saying that two monitors is excessive or unproductive just doesn't do as much as someone like myself, or yourself, or the countless other computer operators whose needs aren't met by one monitor.
Slashdot is proof that Sturgeon's Law applies to mankind.
I wish I were trolling... my old Dell just ain't up to the task. Other than that, my Toshiba (albeit VERY old) doesn't do it either. Seems both responses I received were about Thinkpad's which I have never used.
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Web Hosting @ HostForADollar.com
Hells bells, let's just give them the ability to edit the stories too, that way the editors wouldn't really have to do anything at all.
Seriously, I know the editors here get crap all the time for the grammar/spelling/duplicate stories, but isn't that what they are supposed to be doing? Don't they even read Slashdot themselves? I mean, this is a blatant example of a known abuser of the system, and the article was posted by Hemos himself. WTF? I don't WANT to wear a tinfoil hat, but I almost feel like I can't avoid it much longer.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
Speaking of limited experience, have you seen other older laptops (aside from Thinkpads) that do this? Seems to me I have not but, admittedly, my experience is with only what I was issued at work and some crappy other laptops (CTX, for example).
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Web Hosting @ HostForADollar.com
while watching the World Series of Poker on my other monitor? What do you mean, not productive?
There was a device driver called OX.SYS that would redirect debugging output from Windows (via the AUX device) onto a monochrome screen -- always fun for debugging Windows applications.
For the terminally curious, Hercules made a monochrome video card called the RamFont, in which you could load your own text font for use. It came with several very interesting text fonts like computer OCR and Old World. The MDA and CGA cards of the day could not redefine fonts. You could detect a RamFont in a system by looking at one of the undefined bits in the CRTC registers. I think there was a WordPerfect driver that took advantage of the feature.
Even more weird was the Hercules InColor card. Looked like a monochrome video card to the system, but was actually a EGA card in registers and resolution. Not many applications took advantage of the extra hardware, but writing programs to use the features was loads of fun.
Technical notes on classic dual-head setup is here. With the advent of Plug'n'Pray systems and the ability to move I/O and Interrupts, it's possible to have several VGA video cards in a system without much difficulty. Does Windows XP even recognize an MDA or CGA card?
A coworker hooked me up to using dual monitor workstations. It is a great experience!
Sometimes, one monitor has my code, the other monitor has my rendered output. Sometines, one monitor has the design specs, and the other monitor has my preliminary code.
My standard configuration is to use one as my programming window. This way I can maximize that one easily and create the most amount of space for toolbars and other sub-windows.
The second monitor contains my Outlook, SQL Server Enterprise manager (when I'm programming VB on the main monitor), help files (when needed), and occasionally Notepad for cut,edit,paste.
It's also great for Photoshop. All your pallets on one screen, and the full-screen image on the second (hopefully better) monitor.
All this beats the heck out of Alt-Tab all the time.
And one other benefit, I often develop for users running lower resolutions. I can do my development on the hi-res setting, and preview the results at the user's resolution without a lot of awkward switching of screen properties.
The only downsides have been cost (essentially free, because who doesn't have an extra monitor and display card, or 3, kicking around), space (get yourself a decent workarea for Heaven's sake), and power (get real, or turn off the second one when you don't need it).
All in all, much cheaper than an Apple Theater-view, much as I'd enjoy that.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
I remember working dual monitors on a CAD machine in college in '89. Wasn't quite so geeky then, so don't remember the specs.
Heck - the same computer lab had a MAC Classic (or whatever...w/ built-in monitor) and a second page lay-out monitor connected to it, worked just as well as my current dual monitor setups now.
legal. fun. profitable. pick two.
Thanks. That would be a nice addition to my cubicle, that is if my second system doesn't get taken away.
Having a smoking section in a public restaurant is like having a peeing section in a public swimming pool.
So, my approach was simple: I've got a Linux box (my primary workstation) and an XP box (my company's e-mail and calendaring box) and joined them with synergy2 (http://synergy2.sf.net). This setup is slicker than hell and allows me the maximum productivity that you would get from a 'traditional' dual-heading setup, 'cept the benefits matrix is now three dimensional -- productivity, resources, and stability.
I've got all the screen realestate I need (I'm running at 2560x1024) and Synergy2 has shared clipboard space, etc. My desktop experience isn't bogged down by how fast my single processor is or how much memory one system has v. the other, I've got two boxes I get to tap for computing. I also have some insulation from system outages -- oh, XP needs to reboot to apply the latest patch, okay, no problem, lets go work on the Linux-side wilst its rebooting.
Of course, with twice the joy, there's twice the sorrow... sometimes synergy2 flakes out (albeit VERY rarely), and sometimes there's lag between the screens (usually only under HEAVY loads), etc., but generally the setup is ideal. I also get a lot of looks for having dual monitors. on my desktop.
But... anyways, Synergy is a cheap way to accomplish for free what this guy spent a few hundred dollars doing -- provided you've got two full workstations (CPU, and monitor) and a KVM to share your mouse and keyboard through.
DO IT!
-C
"This above all, to thine own self be true"
I use to have a dual monitor set up... that was like 2 years ago.
Now I have 1 monitor and 1 laptop on my desk. I like this arangement a lot (easy to play CS while on IM).
Look for an 8 x 2 KVM. I'd Love one of these, but they are pricey. 4x the price of a descent 4 x 1.
When I switched from a 24" Sony Tube and a 19" Sony Tube to two matched flatscreen lcd monitors, the drop in powerconsumption was noticable.
Now the only big glass left in my place is the TV. I haven't bothered to replace it because it works just fine for the little tv I watch.
This is a descriptive a article about one man and his dual monitor odyssey. After reading the snippet I had to read the article....
Sal has done this before on 9/29/04. Heck, he got a mention for it with regards to slashdotting in this Wired article. This article was submitted by SpaceCanary but with the salcan@gmail.com email address. This /. article is also worded oddly, as if he was just some random surfer who stumbled upon the article:
I recently read this open letter to Windows and I think it's pretty funny. The guy writes a letter...
A search through Slashdot revealed only these two articles containing xyzcomputing but I have no doubt he'll strike again. I wonder if this is an example of slashvertising.
I call shenanigans!
Speak truth to power.
After reading the article I feel like I should preface it by saying, I am MajorDicks rising anger, when people write about themselves in the 3rd person for obvioulsy misleading resons it drivers me batty.
I use two 17 inch monitors because I get a lot more real estate than I would on a 21 inch (or bigger) for less cost. I also like how I can open a full window document or application in one, and still have access to other windows without having to obscure it.
As flatpanels get cheaper (2 CRT's take up way too much space), I expect to see dual monitor systems everywhere.
Fucking owned. I want to spend all my mod points on you. Already a 5 though ;[
REPEAT OWNED
_________ Help me get a PSP!
"This guy mentions that but then switches to say that he enjoys multi-tasking and watching a movie at the same time as he is working. Personally, that's not exactly "productive" and honestly it's likely not something that's permitted outside of your home."
I do this at home now with a single monitor and a *TV*. My sister used to watch DVDs on her computer, since she didn't have a DVD player for her TV. However, for the price of a decent sized monitor, one could buy a TV and DVD player. I don't see the point of this.
There are productive uses for dual monitors. For example, I would use them to have a web page (and/or email client) on one monitor and a PHP code editor in the other. Or slashdot in one monitor and TFA in the other (in play circumstances). In a more office setting, perhaps your spreadsheet in one monitor and the base data in another.
I'd rather have a triple screen 'cave' for FPS gaming, as long as the game could support the resolution (say, 5120x1200 ;).
;)
Of course i'd have to be able to drive them together in Xinerama, and be able to support 2x accelerated cards, like 2xPCIe without SLI..
But still.
(and yeah, I had 3 unaccelerated heads, got the Mac video editor all jealous at one of my jobs
I've been using a dual monitor setup for the last 2 years or so. Like someone else said, it's nice being able to have your IDE on one screen, and some documentation on the other. For web development, you can look at your code and your site at the same time. For me, it helps me visualize where I want to edit code. There's plenty of other things you can do. I am never going back to single screen unless I have no choice. I run a 19" CRT and a 15" LCD. I had the CRT first. I really could care less how much extra electricity the LCD uses. But now that I am thinking about it, I'm going to find out.
D oLCDMonitorsSave.html
http://www.gadgetopia.com/2004/06/01/HowMuchPower
That article says an LCD run for 24 hours a day uses about $4 a month. I figure mine is running about 12 hours a day, so maybe I'm using an extra $2 a month. I'd rather have the extra productivity than an extra burger.
SproutWorks Software Design
First, I never stretch things across both monitors (they are different sizes and resolutions).
I do, however, keep palletes on my left monitor and the workspace on the right monitor, and in programs like Photoshop or Dreamweaver that makes a huge difference.
Second, it is far harder to pay attention to multiple workspaces than it is to pay attention to multiple monitors (I've tried it both ways). There is simply no comparison. And yes, using multiple monitors takes a few days or a week to get used to, but I know of no one that has used multiple monitors extensively that wants to go back to just one.
It is also really nice to have your chat window open on one monitor, and be working on the other. You can glance at the reply and be back working in an instant. I also drag things I'm monitoring off to the side (burning a CD, copying files, downloading, etc) so I can monitor them at a glance but they aren't in the way.
If I had the money I'd get a third monitor right now.
Lose Weight and Feel Great with Isagenix
Same here.
Ever since I've tried Goscreen I've been looking for a similar alternative and found it in Virtual Dimension. When I sit behind someone else's pc or laptop, I get kinda frustrated at not being able to switch desktops. But because I also want to be able to work on one screen and have another open for reference/status/whatever, I started the trend at work to use a second workstation. Soon after that I started using tightvnc with win2vnc (the improved version).
Thanks to the link to synergy provided by gl4ss I'm going to hook up my third workstation running FreeBSD as well (had a bit too much trouble with using vnc for X).
I'm going to get sooo spoiled. *grin*
home
How about a multi-desktop window manager AND two medium sized monitors(19" lcd's). That is the setup I currently use at work, and I'm in love! It works especially well for Java development, because I can have the language docs open on one monitor while my editor is open on the other, and I'm not constantly flipping back and forth between them, and interrupting my train of thought to go back and look at what the language docs said. With the multiple desktops, I put other applications that I need to use, but only at infrequent intervals (such as my email program). That way I can switch to them quickly, and then get back to my development window without having to flip through a number of other applications to get back to my editor/browser setup. It works very well, a definite productivity improvement!
IANAL... But I play one on
My point is: since our brain can only pay attention to one screen at a time, why do we need two of them?
Three good reasons come to mind...
First, peripheral vision. I almost always keep SysInternals' Process Explorer (similar in use to Windows Task Manager, but about a million times better) open on my second desktop. If a process starts or stops, I notice it instantly without even needing to change focus off my primary display.
Second, I also keep WinAmp and Yahoo IM (which I use for work... No, really!) open on the second display. I could get by without them always open, but it takes less time to flick my eye over at the other screen than it does to pop up a minimized window.
And, of course, when needing to use a reference for something (say, the parameters passed to a hellishly long function), having the reference material (such as a webpage or help file) open on the second screen makes life FAR easier than needing to keep flipping back and forth between to fullscreen windows.
I do lots of design work and have always used duals. I have three 17inch monitors which allow me to have my three computers to each have dual monitors!
My Windows box uses the left two, my Linux box uses the same left two through a KVM and a VGA switch, and my Mac uses the right two, sharing the center with the pcs through another VGA switch. Works great! If I need to do somethin on the Mac, its a switch away!
One problem though....it scares my wife....oh well.....
____________
Huh?
OK - I looked at my bill again and noticed that 7 cents didn't look right.
/mo * 98 W * (1 kW / 1000 W) * (14.3 cents / kWh) = $2.82 / mo
531 kWh / $75.92 = 6.99
which is "kWh / dollar", not "cents / kWh". D'oh! Sorry about that.
The correct calcs are:
173.33 hrs
Which means I have to be 1 minute, 21.6 seconds more productive in a month to justify the electricity cost of the second monitor.
- Tony
I don't understand this comment. Let me try to rephrase your viewpoint for a second:
Multiple monitors don't do a thing for me. What is the use of a graphical application running in a part of my visual field that I can't pay attention to?
Not all graphical user interfaces improve productivity through constant user interaction. Some are useful to have in order that they alert you if something happens (like gaim, thunderbird, or an RSS reader). Some are useful because you can switch between threads of thought or work more easily (I always have a dozen Firefox windows because they each represent a stream of thought that was interrupted). And some are useful only once in a while, like reference manuals, and it is worth having them "available" only for those times when you need to switch your attention to them. Just because you can turn your head instead of activating a "switch virtual desktop" command doesn't make it any less of a switch of attention. You may find it easier, but it's still a motor activity.
In '98 I had a PowerMac 8600 w/ FOUR monitors hooked up. What's so impressive about a dual-monitor setup in 2004?!?!?!
I thought of that, but I was hoping for a "everything points at machine 'x'" solution, for those brain-dead moments. :-)
Also, I am used to switching with the key commands, not by hitting the buttons on the front of the kvm, so...
I dont yet have two monitors, ( waiting, waiting ).
Thanks!
emt 377 emt 4
AIM in MacOS X lets you have your IM windows speak the text out-loud. This is a great productivity booster (even with just one monitor) because you can instantly filter out the BS messages like "OK," ":)," or just "...," that you get tons of on a daily basis.
Comment of the year
What's the big deal. At one time, I had three monitors running off of my Quadra 650. I'm running dual monitors right now, too. You just throw a second card in and hook up another monitor, or, with some of the Apple OEM ATI and Nvidia cards, just get adapters to run off of the DVI and ADC ports on the one card.
I drank what? -- Socrates
I took a shit this morning. Then I flushed!
Thank you slashdot for reporting; I expect my royalty cheque in the mail.
-b
myselfmusic
I just looked at my last month's electric bill. Totaled $15.29 for 185kwh, or 8.26 cents per kwh. But that includes a $5.50 'customer charge' which I pay regardless of usage, so the actual marginal rate is 5.29 cents per kwh, inclusive of all taxes.
Please note that I am not affiliated in any way with Ultramon, other than as a pleased user.
okay, I might be exagerating a bit, but I seem to lose just as much time/efficiency as I gain simply because I lose the friggin mouse cursor across more than 1 monitor. It's especially frustrating when I have 1 window maximized on, say the left monitor, and I have to be pretty exact in clicking on the scroll bar, since the cursor keeps drifting over to the other monitor... any tools in, say XP, to create a little "speed bump" at screen edges?
Yeah, but what about for those of us who don't make $107.10 per hour like you do?
(Or did you mean 40 seconds per week or something?)
I just happen to be messing with a plug-in electricity meter...
$1.19 =... 40 seconds
Admit it. You're just boasting. You wanted us to all know that you've got two big honking monitors, and you're getting paid $107 per hour to screw around with an electric meter.
Insensitive clod!
~Idarubicin
i use 2 17" hansol monitors and been using 2 for a couple of years now. At work i get to use a shitty 17" one and really hate the alt+tabbing.
I know the above was meant as a joke, but I have to add one comment since I had a close friend who is schizophrenic. Schizophrenia and multiple personality disorder are separate mental illnesses. You can be affected by one and not the other. My friend thought she had proven Fermat's Last Theorem on a math exam (this was as an undergraduate), among many other things, but did not at any time have two personalities not aware of each other.
Offtopic, I know - but it's important to make these minor corrections when possible.
Just because you can turn your head instead of activating a "switch virtual desktop" command doesn't make it any less of a switch of attention.
Very true, but the difference between noticing a state change out of the corner of your eye and noticing a state changes after a few key presses is dramatic to me. The multi-desktop paging idea that Gnome and KDE are trying to sell would work if the preview windows into the background desktops were large enough to notice when something changes in those desktops. I could almost see working with a multi-desktop system where one of the two monitors I'm using is filled with four 1/4 scale preview windows looking into the other desktops. I'd still want the option of having one of those desktops fill the second screen when it's preferrable to have two full screens. When I want to use IDE and Browser for instance. YMMV. Choice is a beautiful thing.
Thank heavens, the last 2 jobs I've been at shared the view that multiple monitors -- or screen real estate in general -- were a necessity, not a luxury.
:( To effectively and cleanly debug our code, we had to go with a debug layer that we could turn on, and encapsulate tests and their results on each page. This would have been madness on a single monitor.
At my first job it was a fair-to-middlin' double monitor setup. It rocked for coding, obviously, particularly since we were dealing with the most obnoxious environment for coding: ColdFusion/ASP.
With my new job (where I get to work from home) we took a different tack. I also have to be mobile -- so we went with a desktop replacement laptop with a 1920x1200 screen.
I have to mention that this would not be for everyone, not by a long shot. It takes some getting used to, and you need to have good eyes to begin with -- so that it will take longer for the laptop to destroy them -- but I've ended up actually preferring it! Here's why:
The windowed environment exists for a reason; the overlapping windows make it easy to switch between apps; very intuitive to just move a window out of the way and switch to another one for a little while. Everyone but Xerox knows that, but how often are we taking advantage of it on single-monitor, or even multimon with limited resolution? Stop and think about even multiple monitors that are constrained to, say, 1280x1024. How many times are you essentially constraining yourself to an SDI (Single Document Interface) instead of a potentially more information-dense MDI? BUT YOU HAVE TO -- it isn't worth it to try and navigate Visual Studio or Eclipse at an effective resolution of less than 12280x1024 (via resizing) if you have a job where you have to deal with many different levels of an application simultaneously (make changes to the database/to persistence mappings/to Business Service Objects/to UI/to XSL). You need every bit of screen real estate you can grab; in Visual Studio, if I maximize it, I can actually cleanly use three sets of tabstrips -- three sets of SDI viewpanes, but with the names of the other documents clearly accessible via the tabs.
But I don't maximize anything anymore, unless I'm going to have a 20-hour day within the confines of a single app; generally, I do all of my work with my windows floating. There's enough screen real estate to do it now, and make sense of the windows!
It's really ironic, in a way. Essentially, the philosophy here is "Give us more screen real estate, so we can use it sloppily, and not be hassled". Give us more, so we can waste it! But just like Beer And Hooker Thursdays and Casual Fridays (you guys have those in offices, right?), what doubtless seems to a penny-pinching scrooge like an excess to be trimmed ends up resulting in an increase in productivity that would be hard to deny.
For home, I'm trying to save and snap up a pair of Dell 2100FP's -- they're going for $450 on ebay; 3200x1200, here I come . . .
This is spamming and should be a TOS violation with his ISP/Hosting service.
I too, don't have much use for desktop managers. What I like is using a KVM switch, normally intended for 2 computers and 1 monitor, but I add a VGA splitter as well so that I can use 2 monitors, still only 1 mouse and keyboard. This way the second computer's output is always visible to the right side of my main display. Hit the switch and that secondary view is now right in front of me and under my control, and because it is split it's still on its 'native' monitor as well. Hit the switch and I'm back to looking at my primary machine, but the secondary is still there, to my right side, thanks to the splitter. Works great. Split tasks to different computers, never mind different desktops. That way if something crashes out one of the systems, your other bit of work is totally unaffected. Good for working and gaming at the same time.
I was using dual monitors in 1992 on a Mac II .. once I set it up with FOUR monitors just to show off to DOS users.
.. it would dither the part of the window on each monitor appropriately (B&W, 256, or millions).
The coolest thing was you could drag a window so different parts of it were on different monitors
Now I use my Powerbook G4 with the built-in screen + an external screen. Nice!
Doom v1.2 which could be configured for a forward view, a left view, and a right view, and run on 3 monitors for a "virtual reality" feel.
It's a perfect time for being wasted.
A perfect time to watch the stars.
- Burden Brothers, "Beautiful Night"
Weird. You have the exact same tubes that I do...
Can I ask where you got them? A local place had them off-lease (and less than a year old at the time) for $180.
Talk about a swanky monitor...
I can't believe how much a second display has helped out when working on things. A terminal/browser for reference, the TV tuner, IM / IRC windows, etc. It can all be open, and visable, at once.
I do find myself using Exposé a lot less now, though...
7 cents / kWh? Wow, electricty is cheap where you are. We have a graduated scale here in California. Under my baseline, it's $0.11 / kWh, but it's $0.25 / kWh for incremental units at my typical monthly usage.
The baseline allocations are pretty messed up. They seem to be based purely on climate (by ZIP code) rather than the size of the dwelling, the type of heating/cooling/cooking, and the number of occupants. My 4-bedroom house is allotted a barely than half of what my old 1-bedroom apartment two towns over used to get.
How about Laptops? They have usually an external monitor connector. Is this in any way usable for that?
This setup will increase your productivity far more than dual monitors...
. jpg
http://www.veryfunnypics.com/work/images/nobreaks
:: drools ::
Information wants to be free.
Entertainment wants to be paid.
You just want to be cheap.
I would come unglued if it was running on any of my systems.
Boy that sounds like a fun place to work. Are you hiring?
Kevin Rose tried similiar to this on The Screen Savers on G4TchTv.
I believe it was fillmybox@gmail.com and he asked everyone to send him attachments.
Link
Winner of The Second Annual Montgomery Burns Award for Outstanding Achievement in the Field of Excellence.
There are some new advances in the field of dual-monitor applications however.
I was speaking with a guy on IRC the other day who is planning on using 2 21" LCD screens as his display. This will allow him to watch fullscreen letterbox DVDs on his comp by spanning across the two screens.
I asked him about the big black bar running down the center of his 'screen' from where the two monitors join, and he says it's only about 3cm because of how the LCD screens are designed. He also said that after a while he just got used to it.
I wish the LCD/monitor industry would advance at a faster pace(bigger, better screens, for a lot less money). Memory, cpu's, harddrive have all made incredible advances over the last 20 years....screens are still very behind =(.
It's pretty telling when someone would rather have a black bar in the middle of his screen than use a standard 21".
The government has a defect: it's potentially democratic. Corporations have no defect: they're pure tyrannies. -Chomsky
I have two desktops at my desk. One of them is my 'main' system and is setup with you keyboard, mouse, speakers, etc...and two 17" monitors running extended desktop.
However, where it gets strange is that my second desktop has no keyboard, mouse or monitor. I just connects to the network and is kept on all the time.
I then remote desktop into that computer from my main one and pull the window to my second monitor. That way I am working on two computers at once (and yes, my work requires that) while only using one mouse/keyboard setup. It works great for me!
"Never be afraid to tell the world who you are."
-- Anonymous
Open any massively palletized application like Adobe GoEvil or Macromedia DreamReaver and you'll quickly see why a spare monitor is cool. Drag all those necessary but not super necessary palettes over to the palette monitor and enjoy being able to access anything without it obscuring your page.
Another use for web coders--have your browser on one screen, your PHP text editor on the other.
And of historical interest, Macs have been doing this since the II came out. It became pretty common-place with the iici and the Quadra because if you wanted a 20" monitor, you had to buy a video card to drive it. Thus the onboard video could be used to hook up a palette monitor essentially for the price of the monitor. We recycled a bunch of 15" monitors in for this purpose when we switched over to 20" displays in the early 90's.
If you wrote something interesting, take credit for it. Say, "I recently did some experimenting with a dual monitor setup, and I wrote up some of my conclusions." But don't try to pass it off as anything except self-promotion, as if all of us are idiots who won't catch on.
In Sal's defense, the editors apparently are idiots who didn't catch on. Ofcourse, the editors sometimes don't catch on when they post a story which was posted already less than an hour earlier, so it might be expecting too much from them to notice Sal's not-so-clever ruse.
In my school job, I decided to try a triple monitor setup because there are a lot of CRTs just lying around unused after the acquisition of flat panels. Ultimately I settled on my assigned flat panel and two 17 inch trinitron CRTs.
My main screen has always been the flat panel. At first I tried using one of the extra monitors for my email and IM client, and using the other as a preview window so I could have vim open in fullscreen mode on the flat panel and see my changes in the web browser on the extra monitor. After a few months of usage I'm pretty sure that I would prefer a single widescreen flat panel over my current setup. For one thing, I don't get so many emails and IMs that I can justify having an entire display devoted to it and running all the time. I end up using the preview monitor a lot less now that I have tabbed browsing in Firefox. Also, looking from the flat panel to the CRT is sort of a painful transition because of the differences in sharpness, brightness, and contrast.
At home I wouldn't mind having dual LCDs: my current 17" flat panel for studio/development work plus a 15 inch for browser windows, palettes, IM, and email (or DVDs) would be a great combination. As the parent post says, energy use is a concern. I doubt that radiation levels are that much worse with two displays than one but it can't be great for your eyes to have to constantly switch between the two. The flat panels are certainly easier on the eyes and probably consume less power to boot.
If I had to do it over and I had the cash I would have bought a single SGI 1600SW or Apple 23 inch cinema display for the ultimate single monitor setup. At work I still have the triple setup but I leave the CRTs off most of the time and turn them on when I get an IM and every so often to check email, or when I actually need them to preview in a browser. It seems to be a pretty good compromise.
thanks for the info, I did not know that. I always welcome constructive criticism. Also, in case you didn't know it, Fermat's last theorem HAS been proven, or at least so I've heard. I can't remember by whom or when though. Now how DO you call someone with separate personalities?
---- I am certain of only one thing : I know nothing else.
well, I know gnome/KDE's virtual desktop isn't great, but have you seen Enlightenment's pagers? The nice bit is you can run E as the wm for either KDE or gnome. The pager takes snapshots of the content of the apps of every virtual desktop you have. Maybe worth a look... www.enlightenment.org Also works for several monitors with multiple desktops :)
---- I am certain of only one thing : I know nothing else.
For the past few months, I've had a dual monitor setup on two computers with Synergy connections to each other. This gives me four monitors with the additional advantage of having two CPUs.
Once you go dual (or quad?)-head, you never go back.
Dual monitors? That was 1986 on my Mac II.
Look, it's trying to think - Albert Rosenfield
What you've described is disociative identity disorder (multiple personality disorder), not schizophrenia.
Schizophrenia is the one where you hear voices, are paranoid, make unnecessary, stereotype movements and so forth. It does mean 'split mind', but not in the way you think it does.
* I'm being stereotypical here. Not everyone who's schizophrenic experiences all of these, nor is everyone who experiences any of these schizophrenic.
Look out!
You could run TWO 17" LCD monitors and use less than that one 17" CRT you have.
Brain is my second favorite organ.
true dat - and for any kind of multimedia production 2 monitors is almost a necessity these days ... the whole point is to see everything you need to by only moving your eyes - not some fancy linux nerd keystroke that switches to another desktop ... I hate wasting time by switching between different items in an application - like in nuendo, I'd love to be able to see my mixer window, my tracklist AND my video preview all at once .... it makes life easier ... of course, in most of the examples here folk mention their IM client which I don't feel really plays in - we are talking about being more productive after all (and, if you use trillian, it sits in your little system tray guy out of the way always) ....
...
or something
calling all destroyers
CyberGraphX has supported many monitors for ages (early 90s'?)
I can't remember by whom or when though.
It was actually finally proved by Andrew Wiles in 1995.
See here towards the bottom of the page for who did what when. It' was quite a convoluted precess getting there.
I lay awake last night wondering where the sun had gone, then it dawned on me.
It's all a matter of personal taste, and what you do for a living. I'm a SysAdmin who looks after 100 odd servers. I just couldn't get by without my three monitors. I have my 'comms' monitor, (mail, web, etc), then I have the other two monitors for connections to various groups of servers. I then have 6 virtual desktops, with 9 shells with a connection to each server on those two monitors. It's weird, but it works for me.
But then, at home I have two monitors. The second one has been turned off for 9 months.
It just all depends on what you do.
-- main(s){printf(s="main(s){printf(s=%c%s%c,34,s,34
I have a 200" display at school and it's called a whiteboard.
I wonder if this guy is related to Sal Wise. Are all Sals this way?
-- main(s){printf(s="main(s){printf(s=%c%s%c,34,s,34
What about the extra cost of cooling the heat that they put out? I've got dual monitors (a 20" SGI GDM -20e21 and a 19" Hitachi Superscan 753), and I find that the cost of AC to keep my apartment cool is much greater than the cost of just running the monitors.
Thing is...this guys setup is not even that impressive...If you want to see a setup with domestic equipment that measures in the MEGApixels, have a look at this...
10 MEGA-pixels
I can buy a decent 22' monitor (CRT) for 100 bucks. I have a good 19' monitor (LCD). I feel like I need (strong want) the extra real estate on my screen. Would you...
1) buy the 22'
2) muddle through with the 19'
3) use both! (the geek solution)
4) find some other hack
Power and health considerations whisper in my ear... 2....2... but my lust sends me to 1 or 3...
I'm mostly concerned with the amount of electricity that two monitors use up
That's what you're most worried about? You're kidding, right?! Talk about being pennywise and poundfoolish. It won't take very much additional productivity to earn back that extra dollar (!!?!) you spent on electicity.
For example, can having a reference page up on the 2nd desktop save you a few minutes per month? If so, you've more than made back the cost of electricity. Unless you're a really bad coder and/or unemployed, in which case you're probably just a really bad coder.
R&R works fine here with NVidia 6111 drivers, dual-monitor settings and FC2. What doesn't work for you?
Multi-desktops don't do a thing for me. What is the use of a graphical application running in a window I can't see? Multi-desktops with a useable preview window might be worthwhile, but the way it's done in KDE/Gnome right now is worthless.
Just had a thought... what do you think about being able to hold down a key and have the contents of another `desktop' displayed over the top of your current desktop, with adjustable transparency. Maybe even a toggle key.
So, you'd have say code up on the screen, with the docs on another desktop. Hit say caps lock and the docs are displayed over the top, but you are still interacting with the first desktop. Type in what you need, then hit caps lock again when you're done and back to normal.
Or maybe use the F-keys for multiple desktops. You could bring up an overlay with some key press, then another to switch to it, or remove and go back to where you were. It would need a good usable set of key bindings to make it worthwhile.
I don't know if it would actually be useful, but it might be in some circumstances.
We're not talking lots of technical selection: there were only two choices in *existence*... or you could use both. And have support right from the operating system.
--
Evan "long before the concept of 'video driver'"
"$30 for the One True Ring. $10 each additional ring!" -- JRR "Bob" Tolkien
That is two monitors isn't it? Been doing this for years! Sometimes I even have a second laptop on. Once I popped a bag of popcorn at the same time. Talk about multi-tasking!
While places like Realtimesoft have some nice multihead photos, I'm more interested in finding out where I can get some nonpermanent multimonitor mounts. I've seen extendable poles that run between floor and ceiling that have had assorted kit hanging off them - I just can't find anywhere that sells them.
And trust me, you don't want to google on "extendable poles mount".
I also cringe when I see the two conflated. Lately a lot of slashdot's MOTDs at the bottom of the page have been split personality jokes using the word schizophrenia, and it just makes them look ignorant.
Quantum materiae materietur marmota monax si marmota monax materiam possit materiari?
Like any tool having multiple desktops can be abused. If you want to watch a DVD on one screen then yes it'll detract from your ability to focus on the task at hand. However I run 2 screens both at home and at work. I find 2 screens useful if you want to:
1) Debug an application, especially GUI (without generating events get in the way using alt-tab)
2) Compare documents (especially spreadsheets)
3) Run 2 separate processes one of which only needs the occassional glance (eg. monitor a software load process you expect to succeed while reading email or browsing the web)
4) View something full screen but still have toolbars etc displayed (as in picture editing)
5) Watch to make sure that what you're doing won't kill your CD/DVD burn
When I don't need to do these things, I turn off one display. Its much better than having 2 computers your desk even with a KVM (though I still sometimes do that at home if I'm doing anything that truely ties up one machine).
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
Like many organizational UI things, it depends on the person. However, I can explain how I use multiple desktops to try and give you an idea. Each of my desktops has a theme. Desktop 4 is always my communcations. I keep an email client and my instant messenger there. If I need to send or read email or instant messages it's always "Alt-4" to bring them up. My other three desktops each get a project. For my job I've typically got 2 or 3 tasks I supposed to be working on. At the moment desktop 3 watching a long-running test. Several windows are watching logs files, another is where I run various commands to tweak the test. Desktop 2 has a bunch of diffs where I'm working on a large code merge waiting for me. Desktop 1 is free; when someone wanders in and I need to quick do some research it goes there.
In essence I'm using desktops instead of minimizing windows. Switching to a given desktop essentially hides everything unrelated to the task at hand and reveals everything I need. I find it quite convient.
Gor multi-taskers who often have multiple windows associated with a single task it can be a great way to organize things. I do agree, it's non-intuitive and unnecessary complex for many users; thus I don't recommend it for everyone.
Search 2010 Gen Con events
using multi monitors increases productivity. but i don't think in the sense that you are watching a movie in one of the screens. for me, i am using a dual monitor setup. since we use the terminals for our noc opererations, it increases the number of windows a person is able to see at a time. it is very much easier to look at status and diagnose problems. in fact, we are upgrading to a triple screen 17" lcd display (our budget was not able to reach a 4x17" display :( the matrox mms is quite expensive and bigger lcd monitor >17" is even more expensive!
Live your life each day as if it was your last.
If I had a dual setup would the article be slashdotted on both of them?
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
Yeah, I wondered about these points too.
/.. It seemed like only two years ago we scoffed at the Wired! articles posted here, as they were considered too dumbed down for the /. crowd. Now, all it takes is some 14 year old's review of hardware his mom bought him to get on the front page of this site.
There is also no question like "Do I need to go with dual displays?". If you need it, you know you do and will get it. For the masses, a single display will do.
I've been running a dual display for several years now. FruityLoops and Cakewalk are two applications that never seem to fit on one screen.
My feelings about dual displays: XP support is the best for dual displays, followed by X11 -- I can't comment on Apple, but I bet its simple. XP is nice because the only configuration (on a 9700Pro) is selecting which monitor to use as your primary, until that point the same display will show on both monitors. You will use the Maximize button much less, as stretching applications across both displays is an option. When a game goes into full-screen, the secondary display usually locks out and moves far to the right. This is ugly, but goes back to normal when going back to the desktop. Using media player, it does a gret job of running full-screen playback on one screen while leaving the other fully functional for mundane non-full screened tasks. The same holds true for most Winamp plugins and a couple of shareware games I've run into.
Going dual displays in Linux was a bit more involved. I had to google a config file for X and manually specify a bunch of stuff. It was not Plug and Play, but resulted in a very nice workspace in WindowMaker. Better documentation on the subject, or having a script for dummies would be nice here. While working with Xterms and Netscape, things are nice and smooth. Dragging media players across displays and a few other things have resulted in crashes and other screwy stuff happening.
In regards to the article, this garbage is becoming quite common on
cannot stress enough how rad synergy is
I have three screens in my setup (19", 17", 15") running a win2k, win2k (soon to be something more interesting), and redhat.
I even contributed on the synergy forums with some script tips about getting synergyc to automatically start on Fedora. I know it wasn't anything special, but it does mark the first time I gave something back to an open source project.
I cannot stress how rad synergy is
19" is medium sized? Man, I'm getting screwed. I thought 17" was medium sized.
One reads one screen and the other the other screen.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
I work out of the home office, and one day I said... hey, I've got all these extra monitors that are connected to other machines that I just use remotely... why not connect a second one to my desktop. So I did that. Got a both heads on my Radeon card working in Linux and all was peachy until I realized that I could run the mythtv frontend and connect to my mythbox. Whoop there goes all that extra real estate. So I had to go out and get another card, so I could get a third monitor working.
So now, I have a triple head Linux system (which a spare head I am not sure I could get to work even if I had room for another monitor). I rarely fireup the third since I moved into a room with a TV... The default boots to two monitors, and half the time I have one off.
But if I am troubleshooting a web app or something - nothing beats the extra real estate for log outputs, or whatever.
Good idea, thanks!
emt 377 emt 4
I started with dual monitors several years ago, then went to 3, and now I have 4. Nothing beats coding in an IDE thats 3 screens wide :) I used to drool over 21" monitors or HDTV resolution flat panels, but now, the only way I would go to flat panel is if I could go to 4 17" ones. I would miss the real estate too much to drop down less than 4.
Really, I don't know if I could live if I went back to only dual monitors. I have 4 surplus Dell Trinitron 17" at 1024x768 each, which give me a desktop of 4096x768. Ultramon is mandatory if you are living with multiple monitors for any serious work.
When coding, I will have html or pdf docs in one window, the IDE in 2 others and my Trillian, email, clock calander and other misc in the 4th monitor. I am using a Matrox G200 PCI quad card and an ATI9600 AGP. The G200 quad card was purchased off of ebay for $70 a year or so ago. If you are serious about running multiple monitors, this is a great video card for this.
At home I only have one 19" Viewsonic and I feel locked up, cramped.
Money for nothing, pix for free
True, dual monitor is just piece of cake.
;)
I've been running years back 3 monitor system, and i were planning on upgrading to 4 or 5 monitor system, just for gigs of it.
This article is worthless, show me 12 monitors on single desktop PC with normal hardware
Pulsed Media Seedboxes
VNC on X is totally pointless! It is much slower than the native remote display support X has..
And as for the virtual workspaces, virtually every window manager supports this natively... Why would you want to use anything like vnc when X11 can do everything natively and has done so for many years?
The idea of multiple workspaces is an essential and integral part of X11, and the biggest reason i feel stifled when using windows or OSX..
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
Maybe the guy is schizophrenic! Think about it: two personalities, one writes the article, then the other one finds it open on the desktop...
now it makes even more sence for him to have dual monitor set...
think about it, one personality writes review on one head, while another identy is posting it to slashdot to another...
productive? yes.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding. Here's what I understand so far:
There were only two types of video cards in existence. In order to use two monitors, you had to buy one of each type. You couldn't buy two of one, or two of the other.
When you got this set up, then you could only use both monitors simultaneously with programs that understood multimonitor setups.
Is that accurate? You haven't contradicted what I said. The situation I describe is much less convenient than a modern Windows setup (to say nothing of a modern Mac setup).
Mod down posts with a "Free Mac Mini/iPod" sig, they're spam!
So it's been 6 years now with dual screens at home, and I could never go back. I even took one of my spare CRT's from home in to the office to give my WinXP dev workstation two screens (dual 19" CRT's). You really can never go back...
blakespot
-- Heisenberg may have slept here.
iPod Hacks.com
Just had a thought... what do you think about being able to hold down a key and have the contents of another `desktop' displayed over the top of your current desktop, with adjustable transparency. Maybe even a toggle key.
now that is a very interesting idea, I'd like to see that in action, might be worth suggesting to the authors of various wm programs. I might suggest it to the author of the osx virtual desktop manager (if you don't mind?).
dave
The only reason for me to use vnc on X is to control my workstation next to me from my windows laptop by way of win2vnc. I don't want a vnc screen on my main monitor, just control the screen left of it without another mouse and keyboard taking up desk space.
Virtual desktops have become a must for me ever since I started using them on this laptop, and the only reason I run Windows on it is because it's the standard at my job (although I want to try if I can switch to FreeBSD, and use VMWare to install a Windows client with all the necessary admin tools for the network).
home
First off: why not try an LCD monitor? I'm pretty sure they use noticeably less energy (they certainly give off noticeably less as heat...)
Second: I do know people who its actually productive to watch movies on at the second time. I had an architecture prof who was amazed when he bought a G4 and a big Apple display, cause he could watch a movie in the background while plotting stuff. He thought it was great. He had background noise, and if he got stumped for an idea, something might just pop up in the background that he could build off of.
No trespassing. Violators will be shot. Survivors will be shot again.
Why VNC? X supports remote control features natively through such things as the XTEST extension (look for a tool called xremote)
You can always do it the other way round, and use rdesktop to connect to a windows machine....
As for vmware on freebsd, i think only version 3 (old) works, but there was a similar tool made available for freebsd and posted to slashdot recently, but i forget the name..
I personally run linux at work, with a vmware image of windows which i haven't booted for months and only ever ran one or two tools.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
After that, no, you don't need to have programs that understand multimonitor setups. Of course, you can't multitask in DOS, which limits the use, but the next best thing, TSRs, would run on one monitor while your app ran on the other.
You can't side windows back and forth between monitors... but then, you can't slide windows back and forth on the same monitor. :)
Basically, given the limitations inherent to DOS (things like one app at a time, plus TSRs), it is functionally the same. Apps that take over the video card (just like in windows) would run on just on one monitor (just like in windows - old RTS games run on one monitor no matter how many you have).
Obviously there are things you can't do in DOS on CGA-MDA setups (like slide windows back and forth)... because you can't do that at *all* on that platform, regardless of monitor count. What you *can* do with DOS, you can do on two monitors. FWIW, MDA is text only, no color - no graphics at all.
--
Evan
"$30 for the One True Ring. $10 each additional ring!" -- JRR "Bob" Tolkien
Well...
I have 11 virtual desktops, and:
#1 is for local security
#2 is for feeding in my split-screen analog security monitor
#3 feeds my web cam
#4 feeds another web cam of myself from the front
#5 feeds another cam view of myself from the rear, since I adore my haircut
#6 feeds a view of the stock tickers
#7 feeds my music players
#8 feeds a camera shot of my LCD so everthing is in one place
#9 shows a view of my hairdo from the top
#10 shows my front yard
#11 shows my camera watching the front yard (for redundancy)
Oh, wait, I must be dreaming....
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
Boy, I bet YOU stay warm n' toasty in the winter, unless those windows are single-paned. If you have two of them running windoze, I guess you are double-paigned/pained...hehehe
/ ww w.geocities.com/Heartland/5960/manatee.html&e=8238
/ ww w.manateeworld.net/&e=8238
FreeBSD, ehhh. How about adorning your wall some Trek or something? Or, maybe better yet...
with a picture of Tux riding the dolphin? Or, put Tux on one side of the wall, representing Linux, and Mr. (hu)Manatee on the other, representing ms?
http://www.google.com/url?sa=U&start=1&q=http:/
or,
http://www.google.com/url?sa=U&start=1&q=http:/
(Nahh, clippy is not a decent mascot...)
Maybe Tux will even ride Mr. Manatee (or ride him into the ground, heheh)
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
Cool price. Where do you live?
This coward lives in Florida sucking down 50 kWh per day from air conditioning over the summer, and I also pay ~18 cents per kiloWatthour (cpkWh?).
You've used tabbed browsing right? After doing so would you ever really want to go back to a browser that didn't support it and you had to open a new instance of a browser if you wanted to stray from one page but keep it up at the same time? (keep your page up and stray from it at the same time like a cheap little whore.. viagra for your browsing habits www.mozilla.org ) For instance you'll be replying to one /. article in one tab and still reading replies and other topics on another. Very useful, especially if your taskbar is already cluttered with other applications. Now apply the same principal to your desktop. Yes, it takes some getting used to, like when you first encountered a browser with tabbed browsing, but once you get used to it you won't trade it for the world. By the same token, using multiple monitors makes multi-tasking easier, everyone has their own way of using them, but when there's more real-estate for the things you're using it's easier to keep track of them. For instance if you're a network administrator, and keeping an eye on your users aswell as the network itself is part of your duty, it's most advantagous to have oh say, your user monitoring software (anything from radmin to terminal services and back) on one screen, network anylizers, sniffers, and the like on another, so that if say bill has been using a lot of bandwith lately which is severely slowing down your remote-bakups, you can keep an eye on say your backup while he stays late in his office and you can simultaneously check up on him and see that he's got 50 torrents running and watching like 20 porno flicks. yeah.. that's why your bandwith seems low. of course knowing this you could then implement qos to restrict his downloads to oh say 4kbps and let him know that he shouldn't be doing such things at work.
Are there any 3-D games yet exploiting panoramic views?
It would be nice to have a FlightGear or CS/HL configurable with situational displays to simulate a cockpit or helmet display system.
This could impart a sense of "being there", but what would REALLY be cool is for there to be hookups for projectors. Imagine projecting the environs in a darkened bedroom or gaming den, having the LCDs and input devices coordinated with the projections, and letting the player have more in-depth fun.
This might not do much for FPS on ground areas, but for those in cockpits, this could feel awesome to have the projector change the horizon with each bank, roll, or pitch, and having the terrain shift when a yaw is commanded.
Of course, this might suck a LOT of juice, having the necessary projectors. Maybe a reflective tarp of kind could assist.
Even better, a ceiling, floor, and wall grid with a bunch of 'collaborative' projectors and cells/receptors could make a room seem like "being there".
If this is NOT yet patented, reserve the right to pursue this, REGARDLESS of US or International Law. I just don't have the money, yet, and someone else having the money SHALL NOT PRECLUDE me. I here and now share with others the access to this idea, gridding a bedroom or small space with consumer-game-oriented projectors and receptors, coupled with a photo-interactive tarp to make an otherwise expensive simulator quite affordable to those with small budgets.
David Syes
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
http://jedihawk.com/me/
My gameing machine is an LCD (single), but I'll eventually upgrade it to a dual.
Why VNC?
Because we've standardized on Windows at work, and my main machine is a Windows laptop. I haven't got VNC running on the FreeBSD machine and want something decent while I have to use this laptop.
But I will try xremote when I can run FreeBSD as my main machine, it looks very good, but it will have to play nice with synergy as well because I still need at least one Windows machine for my work.
I did see that only version 3 of VMWare was available in the ports, but my needs for it are pretty simple, so it should suffice.
home
Apple has excellent multiple display support - they've only been doing it since 1987. You plug it in. It just works.
If you want to change configuration, you can select a monitor for your menubar, and you can rearrange the monitors' relationships with each other. You can also set to a mirror mode. You can color calibrate the screens separately.
I think the most displays I've personally used on a Mac was 4 - but more are possible.
Multi monitor setups are only for people who are 'monitoring' stuff (like stockbrokers etc.) and for certain professionals (e.g. video editors etc.).. Besides that it's just another fad.
It's a fad that's been going on for 17 years now...
I used it more frequently with my PowerBook 160 than I do now - but it made life so much easier back then. I could have an 832x624 external screen for whatever I was working on, and use the internal 640x400 greyscale screen for the tools pallettes. But that was 10 years ago.
I don't feel so cramped at 1280x1024 - but I still occasionally hook up a second screen. Most of the time these days, the extra screens are used for the other computers on my desk. And I can always kick my old 19" CRT up to 1600x1200 - but it's a bit small for me.