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4K Is For Programmers
An anonymous reader writes "The 4K television revolution is upon us, and nobody is impressed. Most users seem content to wait until there's actually something to watch on these ultra-high-res displays, and also for the price to come down. However, Brian Hauer has written an article promoting a non-standard use for these displays. His office just got a 39", 3840x2160 display for each of their programmers' workstations. He now confidently declares, 'For the time being, there is no single higher-productivity display for a programmer.' Hauer explains: 'Four editors side-by-side each with over a hundred lines of code, and enough room to spare for a project navigator, console, and debugger. Enough room to visualize the back-end service code, the HTML template, the style-sheet, the client-side script, and the finished result in a web browser — all at once without one press of Alt-tab.'"
Must... reopen... Dell financing account.
Personally, While 1 large monitor could have some advantages, I feel that many smaller monitors actually work better. Most window managers don't really handle a single large monitor as well as many small ones. For instance, I can just maximize a bunch of different applications, each on different monitor. Only takes a few clicks. To do something similar with multiple monitors, I'd have to do a lot of manual movement and resizing of windows to get things to line up right. I have 3 17 inch (4:3) monitors on my desk right now. 17 inch monitors are fine for a single window. I could see how having them slightly larger would be nice, but I'd much rather have 3, 17 inch monitors than a single 40 inch monitor, no matter the resolution.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
If you were an investor you'd be upset at a company spending $500 a head replacing programmer's monitors? Sorry, but that's idiotic.
Almost any non-negligible productivity improvement is going to recoup $500 over the lifespan of an LED monitor.
SHUT UP and take my money!
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
If you RTFA you'd find that these are Seiki 4K unit that marked down to $500 each after Xmas, making them more cost effective than a multiple monitor setup
Yeah, because spending $500 on a monitor is just outrageous. That's an insane amount of money to spend on equipment for someone paid several times that amount every week.
So let me get this straight:
You'd be angry that the company was spending some tiny fraction of the programmer's total annual cost (salary + taxes +pension + health insurance + building overheads + support overheads)--even smaller when you amortize it over the life of the monitor--to make the expensive programmers more productive.
You're nuts.
Are you also angry that they've got decent computers rather than underspecced, second hand $100 shitboxes?
If it costs you $10k per year to make the programmer 10% productive, that's going to be a substantial win unless you have very cheap programmers.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
you're kidding right? a monitor will last you easily 6-7 years (my monitor at work is nearly 8 and it's still running just fine) and a large/high-res monitor will give you a noticeable increase in productivity, and you are angry about a $100/head/year expenditure? maybe you'd want his programmers not to have desks but just a sheet of plywood on some sawhorses since that'd be cheaper? stools instead of ergonomic chairs?
If anything, if I was an investor I'd be more angry about him cheaping out on a repurposed tv and not spending $2-3k for a 'proper' 60Hz 4k monitor (mouse lag would drive me nuts) but that's just me.
-- the cake is a lie
Pretty much the same as on 19" fullHD display.
It's the same PPI, you insensible clod!
Well, to be fair, at 40 inches, 4k actually starts to make sense. It's basically the same as 4, 1080p monitors, each being 20 inches. So, you could basically get a similar layout by purchasing 4 smaller monitors, and then arranging them in big rectangle. Plus, as I said in another post, arranging windows is easier on multiple monitors.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
You can currently buy a 2560x1440 27" display for around $350. The Seiki display they refer to is actually two 1920x2160 panels stitched together and limited to a painful 30hz. Second, the monitor is not 4k, it's 3840x2160 which is only UHD. 4k is 4096x2160.
Finally, this is a nearly 40 inch display. They look ridiculous as a computer monitor and the ergonomics suck.
Just give us 4k in a 27-30" form factor for people that aren't blind. I'm amazed that phones can have higher pixel densities than computer monitors.
So what sort of video card do I need to drive a few (2 to 4) of these at one time?
I once saw an entire team of 10 decent programmers turned into door stops because spending 10 dollars more for each one was 'too much for the budget'. Yeah so is losing 3 weeks of work out of them while we RMA monitors and buy the right ones ANYWAY. Out of the computers that were bought 5 for DOA. One actually had screws loose in the case. I picked it up and heard ratle ratle ratle. "let me get you a different one you do not want this one". I was able to build 1 working out of those 5. Instead of doing my real job of writing code.
You dont have to buy people 10k rigs. But dont buy the 200 dollar special at sears and hope it works.
But 40" won't be enough to view her ass.
Have gnu, will travel.
Was I the only one who thought about the 4K demo coding contests when reading the headline?
Coder's Stone: The programming language quick ref for iPad
Response from management:
Eh, accounting says we don't have that kind of money and down in the basement we have some old green screen apple ][ monitors. Programmers just look at text anyway right?
I have a business meeting in cancun, and will be out of the office for three weeks...
No. They are $500. It's right in the article.
Here. Buy one.
http://www.amazon.com/Seiki-Digital-SE39UY04-39-Inch-Ultra/dp/B00DOPGO2G
At $500 a piece
we had been using antiquated pairs of 19-inch monitors. An upgrade was needed
It's amazing how irrelevant many comments become after you RTFA.
Almost any non-negligible productivity improvement is going to recoup $500 over the lifespan of an LED monitor.
Agreed. Obligatory XKCD.
For a programmer earning $80,000/year if you can shave off 1.5 seconds 50 times per day you'll recoup the investment in 5 years. Shave off 6 seconds 50 times per day and you recoup the investment in 1.25 years. I use a multi-monitor setup and have recouped the cost many times over and I'm not even a programmer.
If you really like large workspaces, you may like future generations of the Oculus Rift displays.
Once they get the latencies really low, fix the image quality issues (and maybe reduce the weight - no one's complained yet but maybe for hours of work they might), you'd have as big a "screen" as you can manage.
Check this out: http://gizmodo.com/i-wore-the-new-oculus-rift-and-i-never-want-to-look-at-1496569598
Then imagine you are looking at huge virtual workspaces as large and as many as you can handle. Even better if there's tech to fade in and out of virtual/actual reality without removing the goggles - so you can do augmented reality, switch to full virtual or full "real world".
So I'm not really that excited by these large high res physical screens. To me we should already have had high res screens a decade ago, but we were stuck on or even regressed to crappy resolutions for too long.
Yes I'm impatient- I'm not getting any younger and it's disappointing to know that so many things should already be possible but aren't implemented yet.
My "workstation" is a seven year old laptop that I can buy on eBay for $50. I make more than that per hour. I've offered to bring in my own hardware, but - no unapproved hardware on the network. And no admin rights, because, you know, I might break my $50 PC, so if I need to change an environment variable it's a week wait for a helpdesk maggot to show up.
It's just a side effect of senior management not having a clue as to what we do and seeing developers as nothing more than a cost.
:wq
I had the same problem until I went for 0% PWM. I never get headaches and eye strain anymore. Try it out.
A PWM should never reach 100% since that means it has run out of headroom to adjust to input voltage fluctuations and therefore cannot regulate output anymore. A plain backlight PWM will be firing at well over 1kHz, far beyond anything the human eye could possibly detect and with LED-based backlights, the PWM's output may very well be filtered to DC current. On a display with Lightboost enabled though, the strobe rate is proportional to vsync and could yield perceivable flicker.
With my camera on 1/800s shutter speed, I'm not managing to capture any signs of flicker on my LED-lit LCD set at 20% brightness, which tells me either the pulse rate is much higher than that (otherwise I would have wild fluctuations in brightness between shots depending on the -1/0/+1 pulses in a given exposure) or the backlight LEDs are receiving filtered output from the PWM. (Most likely both since it is much easier and cheaper to filter higher frequency PWM output and it eliminates the need to shield the LED array for EMI compliance.)
you don't need a beefy PSU just because you are doing 2d, modern graphic cards are very energy efficient and if you are not playing games they are not going to suck 300W. You also don't need a top of the line graphics card if you're not playing games, as far as I know you can drive 4k off a GT 640 which is only $100.
The article is about text editing / web development it seems, if it was about 3d or video then I would agree.
-- the cake is a lie