Microsoft Invents Split Screen PC

An anonymous reader writes "New technology from Microsoft Research India in Bangalore could end the waiting game in offices with limited computers. Researchers are developing software that splits a computer screen in two halves, each side with its own operating system, desktop, applications, cursor and keyboard." Mom! Timmy is on my side of the screen again!

Comments

Crash!

[gcostanzo]

Can the two OS's crash into eachother?

Microsoft just needs to innovate

[rolfwind]

how to split the mouse and keyboard effectively (ergonomic split keyboard?).

Otherwise, why not just use dumb terminals? Because sharing a computer jostling the person next to you is going to be a nightmare.

Not to mention the suckage of having your side of the monitor always in ultra-narrow landscape mode when most programs and OSes aren't made for that. Vertical scrolling is okay, horizontal is just plain tedious.

Re:Too late for April fools!

[Threni]

Sharing a screen using a high refresh rate and lcd glasses that shows each user alternate frames?

Re:Fixed

[timeOday]

if you can have each OS copy on a separate monitor (most cards today handle 2 monitors at least by standard), it's a really really good thing to have.

Putting several terminals on a computer is a fine idea which has been done since long before the invention of the PC. But this is different; they are actually splitting a single screen in two. What a horrendous setup that is. And since the price of a display is superlinear in relation to its size, it wouldn't even be cheaper!

Targeting tech support?

[ushering05401]

It doesn't mention this in TFA, but tech support management apps that I have seen could easily fit on 1/2 a screen w/a tabbed interface. Your main tasks are to lookup the customers, record billable time, notate key points of the problem, read some stepped hep files, and pass it on if the fix is not simple.

And considering this was developed in India there just might be something to this.

Regards.

Re:Fixed

[Locutus]

An application window essentially splits the screen and could easily be sized to equally split a single screen in two parts. So, considering that the application is something like VNC and VNC is connecting to a virtual machine running on your computer then you already have two computers running on one computer with split screen support. The only thing they did was implement something like the dual-head/multi-user stuff being done with Linux for that past 4 or 5 years so that the host computer has multiple input I/O channels.

go see http://www.userful.com/ and/or Google for "hp 441 linux multiuser multi-head"

We're talking about some really basic 'remixing' here and it's not THAT wiz-bang IMO. Heck, VMware and VirtualBox already use VNC for their remote GUI display of VM's. But hey, glad to see Microsoft ReSearch catching on to stuff that's been around for quite some time on other platforms.

LoB