Using Two Monitors Makes You More Productive? 602
Double Vision asks: "In my job, I work with several software applications at once. I find that constantly switching back and forth wastes a tremendous amount of time and causes me to lose focus. My video card supports two monitors, so I found a discarded monitor in my office and hooked it up. This has made it much easier to do my job. However, we are getting ready to go through an equipment audit, which means I will likely lose my additional monitor unless I can justify keeping it. How can I make this case? Is anyone aware of studies that support my claim that two monitors makes me more productive?"
Trivial ? (Score:5, Interesting)
If you merely spend five additional minutes on work each day that you would have had to spend on shuffling windows around, the investment in an additional monitor will pay for itself within weeks.
Re:Trivial ? (Score:5, Insightful)
Dirt cheap compared to the salaries
That really depends on where you work; there are a lot of shitbox companies around there that pay the minimum amount to put food on the programmer's table. A lot of managers don't think of "if we spend this we'll save twice that" they think "if we spend this we immediately reduce the bottom line by the same amount, fuck that!"
Re:Trivial ? (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, that's the bad thing about capitalism today - it's been replaced by blind greed and short-term thinking. The term "investment" (the basis of all capital) is pretty much forgotten. Instead, "investing" money is considered "spending" it.
Re:Trivial ? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Trivial ? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Trivial ? (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:Trivial ? (Score:4, Interesting)
Soviet propaganda: to each according to their needs.
Capitalist propaganda: to each according to their ability.
Reality: it's who you know.
See: http://linux.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/01/23
As we move away from an economy based on commodities towards one dominated by the service industries, market forces will mean less and less. Where's Patrick Swayze when you need him? http://imdb.com/title/tt0087985/ [imdb.com]
What's this have to do with using two monitors?
Corporatocracy (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes, that is exactly right, all things being equal and fair. That is hardly the case, often large companies maintain their market share not through capitalism but through good old fashion organized crime (Enron), or through good old fashion communism (state enforced monopolies, such as telcoms). What US is becoming is a Corporatocracy, which is just soviet style communism with a better marketing department.
Instead of Corporatocracy I think "Corporate Aristocracy", which Thomas Jefferson [thomhartmann.com] warned of, works better. He saw corporations as one of three threats to natural rights, the other two being government and organized religion.
FalconRe: (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Trivial ? (Score:5, Informative)
It's tempting to think of the government as being some monolithic entity, but it isn't.
Re:Trivial ? (Score:5, Insightful)
In the long term yes, at least in theory (and I'm sure others will point out problems with that theory, as they are ample). In the short term, anything goes, even in the theoretical.
It takes millions of years for evolution to find an "optimal" solution, and even then it isn't necessarily optimal, just "good enough for the environment". And if one species consumes all of the resources due to short term 'thinking' as it were, then another species in the same ecosystem that only consumes in moderation so as to maintain balance will still die.
Right now the environment rewards short-term thinkers. Companies have adapted to it. Long-term thinking requires an (indeterminate) long time to pay off and thus prove itself superior. If the short-term thinking of most companies destroys the economy, then the long-term thinkers may still die, and then who do you say was superior?
It's not like the Invisible Hand of Adam Smith reaches down from the sky and bitch-slaps any organization that performs an economically sub-optimal action. The theory says that in the limit an optimal balance will be reached, but in the meantime (as in what's happening "now" whenver "now" may be) could be wildly stupid and inefficient and still win.
Re:Trivial ? (Score:5, Insightful)
In the long run, yes. But in the short run huge corporations crash and burn, glutting the market with unemployed. In the long run they'll usually get new jobs, but in the meanwhile some people will run into problems like a medical emergency, drown in bills, lose their house, and be forced to declare bankruptcy. People who relied on a pension from their business will find what they were promised reduced or eliminated. Shareholders who had been mislead have part of their portfolio reduced to nothing. In the short run a business can boost profits by turning as many costs into externalities as possible: polluting, overfishing, and the like.
Meanwhile, the CEOs, presidents, and other upper management made lots of money in direct salary, bonuses for raising the stock price in the short term, and profit some selling their own stock while it was artificially boosted. And since they made out just fine, there is incentive for others to follow in their footsteps, making short-sighted decisions for short term gain that doom other companies in the long run.
For those companies that do have long term thinking, they're penalized by the stock market and other potential investors because they don't look as successful in the short term. If a potential investor waits to see a company's long term work, it could easily be thirty years later and the entire management team has changed, so it's still not a reliable indicator. (The fall of once reliable Hewlett-Packard comes to mine.)
The invisible hand isn't full of magical pixie dust that just makes everything work. Primarily because participants in capitalism have deeply imperfect information, there are large windows of opportunity for abuse. In the long run capitalism tends to sort things out; but in the meanwhile new abusers have arisen and created new problems.
Capitalism sucks. But like a cockroach you can't eliminate it. And no matter how much it sucks, the other options suck more.
Deeply imperfect information (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Trivial ? (Score:5, Insightful)
And lets not disregard the fact that the effectiveness of a competitive marketplace is tied to the capacity of the public to make informed decisions.
Re:Trivial ? (Score:5, Insightful)
We've all worked for "those" people at some point.
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Re:Trivial ? (Score:4, Interesting)
My home server services one person, me. It's not all that high end, but it blows the equipment we use at work out of the water and that stuff is servicing millions. The Sun workstation they expect me to use goes for $20 on eBay (sans/monitor), but they still want new applications delivered in a week. I've given up expecting any of this to change. I'm just so tired of making these arguments and seeing people shrug their shoulders. I wish that guy good luck in his quest for a second monitor. For me, if I want a decent working environment, I have to pay for it myself.
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A lot of managers don't think of "if we spend this we'll save twice that" they think "if we spend this we immediately reduce the bottom line by the same amount, fuck that!"
Well, that's the bad thing about capitalism today - it's been replaced by blind greed and short-term thinking.
Um that is a problem with humanity, not capitalism. I am entirely confident that greed affects other economic forms as well. For example, before taking greed (and a general desire to have more than others) into account, socialism seems like the nirvana of economic systems.
I think the real problem there is greed caused by flaws in the management structure of these companies. Being out of touch with your employees and lacking the foresight to understand how to increase productivity are marks of POOR MANAGE
Re:Trivial ? (Score:5, Interesting)
Cost per standard week: $400
5% performance increase savings
Time needed to pay for additional monitor: 10-20 weeks.
More realistic:
DCP $30/hour (remember taxes!)
CpSW: $1200
5% increase: $60/week
Payback: 3-5 weeks.
easy justification.
Re:Trivial ? (Score:5, Insightful)
An old french playwritter, Molière, has one of its characters say it is better to die according to the medecine than to live against it. You can also check todays post about outsourcing for more examples.
Hidden ? Obvious. (Score:5, Insightful)
If your salary is $50 an hour, then every second you spend on unproductive things becomes a very visible cost, especially if those seconds add up.
If the bean-counters at the company don't see that, they're effectively incompetent. Which usually points to bad prospects for the future of the company.
Re:Hidden ? Obvious. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Hidden ? Obvious. (Score:5, Funny)
So how much money has Slashdot cost your company?
Re:Hidden ? Obvious. (Score:5, Funny)
Not much, I got two monitors!
Re:Hidden ? Obvious. (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm not about to quantify that - I have neither the expertise, nor the time to produce hard numbers supporting this idea. But if you read Stephen Covey's "7 habits of highly successful people" - you read about a habit called "sharpening the saw". 30 minutes to an hour a day, SURFING THE WEB, has exposed me to ideas and information I would never have been exposed to any other way. Every day I deal with "engineers" who are completely clueless to entire areas of knowledge - anything outside their little niche of expertise, may as well not exist.
Of course, you have to be judicious about where you spend your time. 30 minutes a day on the boss's clock, looking at porn and webcomics is not likely to make you a better, or more innovative worker. But sites like Groklaw, Slashdot, Sourceforge, Wikipedia, etc. can really broaden your horizons.
As a tech lead, I encourage my workers to do a little bit of online saw-sharpening.
But I have not been caught by my boss yet.
Salary per hour? Not really! (Score:5, Insightful)
My guess is that you've simply conflated two issues. You've forgotten that any employee on a salary will simply be expected to put in overtime to compensate for any inefficiencies. It costs the company exactly $0.00 for a salaried employee to simply "waste" those precious extra seconds that you claim will add up. They add up to nothing but more "free" hours put in by our protagonist for the company served.
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There's really no such thing as "free productivity". Even if it's "standard practice" to squeeze 10 hour
Cheap employers have higher turnover costs (Score:3, Insightful)
Skimping on tools or environment spending does have a measurable impact on the bottom line, if it increases the turnover rate. Replacing a knowledge worker costs one to two times their salary (look at some of these [google.com] search results).
Before praising the bean counters, ask them if they know what the company's turnover rate is for those jobs, and how that compares to the average for their competition
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Before praising the bean counters, ask them if they know what the company's turnover rate is for those jobs, and how that compares to the average for their competition. If they don't know those numbers, they aren't counting all the relevant beans.
I'm hardly "praising" the bean counters. Apparently many of you have mistaken "understanding" for "advocacy" in my post. I don't agree at all that this is the best (or even a good) way to count what is "cost" and to increase productivity. I only noted that a bean-counter will, in fact, see the world in that way.
The real problem is at the executive levels, who base decisions purely on the bean-counter approach. Executives (who, incidentally, I believe are far too highly compensated these days) should t
Re:Salary per hour? Not really! (Score:5, Insightful)
Now that's quite a broad generalization.
I'm an IT contractor, and I make it a point to draw my customer's attention to inefficiencies in my work environment. Why? Because it's in my best interests to maximize my productivity.
First of all, I truly enjoy my work, and working efficiently increases my personal satisfaction with the job at hand. It also allows me to proceed to the next interesting challenge that much sooner.
More importantly though, the more productive I am, the happier my customer is. In a business where my personal reputation is what gets me the next contract and supports my hourly rate, a happy customer becomes an asset I can take directly to the bank.
Re:Hidden ? Obvious. Irrelevent. (Score:5, Insightful)
My response was this: "If we can't fire someone or cut someone's pay, it doesn't save any money". It made me furious, how could the reject the logic behind my math? Only later did I come to understand their reasoning: All the work that needed to be done was being done for what they are paying the employees. Taking away work to be done, without taking away pay going to the employees would not save money.
So to justify your second monitor you either have to show a real money reduction of cost, or a real money increase in revenue. Your efficiency is your responsibility, not the company's responsibility. After all, why should they pay more tomorrow get you to do the same job you did yesterday? Its often easer to replace you with someone more efficient at the same cost, than to increase your cost to make you more efficient.
As an aside, whenever I make proposals for automating processes now, I don't calculate how much work I reduce, or how much more efficient I can make it, I calculate how much revenue they are missing out on because their processes can't handle the extra work, then show them how automation would let them handle it, and therefore gain the extra revenue.
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And if they still won't let you have it, just pick one up off
Re:Trivial ? (Score:5, Funny)
And when you get bored of all that, you have the wonderful idea of configuring
your dual monitor in Linux, using of course XGL and all the mambo-jumbo effects from the latest build of Beryl. So you're set for a lifetime of great productivity at the cost of a lousy second monitor.
PS. Gadgets are toys for big boys (read geeks). They have nothing to do with productivity, you lame Blackberry junkies.
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Re:Trivial ? (Score:5, Insightful)
Don't make it a hidden benefit. Quantify how much time it saves, you don't need big numbers. Can you demonstrate a 5 minute per day benefit? (10 seconds a windows switch, thats just 30 switches a day). Thats 100 minutes a month. In 6 months, thats 600 minutes, or 10 hours. Now your company almost certainly has an internal billing rate they use when considering your time (even better if they have an external rate), its likely at least 2x your current salary (it costs to hire you, house you, train you, etc. You are an expensive asset). Lets say you are a young average programmer, thats still a $50/hour internal billing rate. So long as your second monitor costs less than $500, it pays for itself in 6 months.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
In theory, he shouldn't need to spend an hour justiying the second monitor. The auditing staff should understand how additional computer equipment changes productivity, or at least be competent enough to comprehend even a basic justification for the additional equipment.
The fact that the question was raised indicates that the questioner fears that the auditors are incompetent. There are two obvious reasons to explain this
Re:Trivial ? (Score:5, Interesting)
The way things are nowadays in terms of hardware I don't see why any developer should be expected to work on less than a dual or quad core workstation, with two 24"/30" lcd monitors, 4 gigs of ram, plenty of sata disk space in raid and ergonomic keyboard, mouse, chair etc. etc. etc. heck, even if they were given a fully loaded dual-quad-core workstation for 10 grand, it'd still be only a fraction of their yearly salary, and would very much positively impact productivity.
Instead you still see companies giving their employees pentium 4s at 2.5GHz with maybe 1 gig of ram and 80gigs of ide disk, a single 19" (if not 17") 1280x1024 crt and the absolute cheapest keyboards/mice/chair possible (often the mouse doesn't even have a scroll wheel and the chair is the local staples $100 special). Same deal with managers more often than not getting laptops, ergonomic chairs, big monitors,
If hospitals were run the same way as computer companies surgeons would operate with box cutters and duct tape, and diagnose with an old x-ray machine, while the hospital managers would have MRI machines in their offices and clip their cigars with surgical grade scalpels...
Regarding the OP's problem the solution is simple: they should pony up $200 of their own money and buy their own secondary monitor, when the audit comes either they can show the second monitor is theirs or take it home that day and bring it back once the audit is done.
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I brought my own ergo keyboard, trackball, and scanner/printer (the shop buys the ink cartridges and paper). My comfort can convenience are well worth it. All are well-marked as personal property.
Auto mechanics customarily supply most of the
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Here's a study (Score:5, Informative)
Two Screens Are Better Than One [microsoft.com]
The best part is that it was done by Slashdot's nemesis.
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Re:Here's a study (Score:5, Insightful)
2) The aspect ratio of a single 16:9 screen doesn't fit two 4:3 screens well. While for editing Word documents this is not a bad thing (and could be good in fact), for editing PowerPoint documents, images, and Excel spreadsheets, dual 4:3 is better.
3) Moderate sized 4:3 flat panel displays cost a fraction of the price of an Apple 30" display. The Apple 30" display is $1500-2000, 19" 4:3 displays are $200-250 each.
4) Most workers already have their first monitor. Adding a second is cheaper than chucking it and buying a large widescreen, even if that large widescreen were remotely competitive for these purposes with dual 19s in price.
I have a second monitor in my cube, but it's an old beat-up CRT and I don't have the desk space to use it.
Re:Here's a study (Score:5, Insightful)
1. 30" monitors cost a *lot* more than two 17" monitors. Like, £1000 more.
2. 2560x1600 isn't as good as 3200x1200, IMO. The 30" monitor is too tall, I prefer something wider and flatter.
3. My monitors are arranged to surround me, rather than forming a flat panel. This means I'm looking at them close to straight whether I'm looking in the middle or either edge. With a single big monitor, I'd have to have them flat, and would be viewing them significantly off-straight at the edges.
4. With multiple monitors, software can be manipulated easily to take up exactly half of the display (using the maximize buttons), which is useful when you are using exactly 2 applications -- something I do regularly (e.g. IDE for development and web browser for reference). I don't believe achieving this is easy with a single large display.
At my work we got a choice (Score:3, Informative)
When doing layout design,
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Always (Score:5, Insightful)
Long story short, I ditched the second CRT and they wouldn't replace it. My productivity dropped enormously. I actually found it most beneficial to have email, a browser or some documentation for the toolkits I was using open in fullscreen on the second display. It made finding a reference a simply matter of glancing across rather than bringing up another window, losing the context of what I was doing then having to do the shuffle back and forward.
Not only that, but I save on printing because I can keep things open on the second screen for reference like the output of a program working on. The same applies to anyone who is expected to multi-task at work though. Two screens are better than one unless the one screen is a 30" high resolution panel.
I don't know how anyone wrote software back in the days before dual high resolution screens. It's a time consuming chore, requiring a number of dead tree tomes open on one's desk and constant shuffling about.
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"I don't know how anyone wrote software back in the days before dual high resolution screens."
Simple - we had both a vga and a monochrome monitor hooked up to the same computer (vga video + hercules mono). Borlands' compilers, dbase, etc. all supported the /dual command-line switch. Also, you could switch monitors manually "mode co80" "mode mono" . Use ansi.sys to assign each string to a function key, and switching monitors was a 1-keystroke operation.
It was nice to be able to step through your source
Re: (Score:2)
Answer: MultiEdit [multiedit.com].
Seriously, what the heck is wrong with using a text editor to program? Ok, maybe I'm biased because I'm so old I am genetically incapable of learning OOP but shouldn't 100 files open at once be enough for anyone?
Did the same thing.. (Score:5, Insightful)
I of course told my supervisor about this, who after hearing the explanation of it thought it was actually a good idea. All I needed to do was write up a justification on why I needed a second monitor, and they let me have it. Justification isn't really that hard, especially if you're a programmer. The ability to have your IDE or editor or whatnot on one screen while viewing the output, documentation, or APIs on another is incredibly useful, and can speed up your work significantly. I'd go and say something like that to whatever supervisor or person in charge of equipment before they got to looking at the equipment at your desk.
Interestingly, after I got my second monitor, a coworker friend of mine came to my desk from the building across the street and saw the setup and was extremely jealous. He ended up finding a spare monitor near his desk for his own setup. After that, all of the people near his desk saw his setup and wanted it to. We actually ended up having some ITS meetings where enough people brought up the idea of dual-monitors that it's now a standard request for people to get with minimal justification. So who knows, maybe you'll start a trend like what happened for me.
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Anyone with a laptop now seems to have an additional display hanging off it now too.
It is definitely catching on.
Re:Did the same thing.. (Score:5, Interesting)
It's nice to work in an environment where people recognize potential productivity increase when they see it. 17" LCDs are cheap now. Easily $150 or less. A spare video card or a dual vid card can be cheap, I spent $35 on the one I use at work.
If you job complains about spending $150 on a long term investment in your productivity, then you should start looking for a new job. Of course, people are giving away CRTs all the time, you could always offer to bring one in. Check freecycle.
In my experience... (Score:5, Interesting)
At my current job I only have 1 monitor and it took me a while to get used to it again. I would ask for a second screen but I already know the answer... "No, because otherwise everyone would want a second screen."
While on my departement, everyone would be better of with having a second screen, the average amount of windows open at the same time is at least 10. It would definitely increase productivity but explaining this to management who at most have their e-mail and text processor open is a lost cause I fear. Well, at least at home I have 2 screens to enjoy.
Also, on a related note, I found synergy [sourceforge.net] to be an amazing tool when using multiple computers at the same time. It allows you to share the same mouse and keyboard between multiple computers by sending the signal over the network and it behaves just as if you had multiple screens on 1 computer (move between screens by going to the side of the screen). I haven't used it for a while though because I didn't have to work on multiple computers at the same time. But if you are, definitely check it out!
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The Windows box is a laptop, and the Linux box is a desktop. I have a second monitor hooked up to the laptop, so I effectively have 3 displays (laptop builtin display, extra monitor for laptop, and monitor for desktop). This way, I have plen
Dupe? (Score:2)
Works for me (Score:3, Interesting)
So I would connect, log in, then wait for a a minute or two for the screen to draw (remember, I am normally connecting in to solve a problem, so performance is often much worse than normal!) then slowly try and figure out what is going on.
What made it horribly sucky was that I couldn't minimize the RDP window while it did it's thing, otherwise it would just start to redraw again. With a second screen I could just put the RDP session there and let it do its thing!
Just recently I have been porting an older C++ application to C#. I have the source code for each application on each screen, way faster than trying to flip between them on a single screen.
The nice thing is, this works so well _because_ they are two separate screens. Having one screen that was twice as wide just wouldn't be the same (unless it functioned as two screens of course
My setup is my 15" laptop display and a 17" CRT, both running 1024x768 resolution. I'm almost thinking I should track down a USB VGA adapter and run a 3rd screen. Performance might suck (being USB instead of PCI) but i wouldn't be doing anything on that display where that was an issue.
Hmmm... here's a more interesting question. At what number of screens does productivity start to drop? I guess the answer will depend on what tasks you are doing but it would sure make an interesting study... I'm imagining 3 screens across and 2 screens high as a starting point
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If you really think it helps that much (Score:2)
Don't do that. (Score:3, Insightful)
It's not the employees job to throw money at the company he works for. Unless doing something like that has benefits for you (like not getting carpal tunnel syndrome by using your own mouse), don't do it.
If the bean-counters are too stupid to invest in good working equipment, don't bail them out.
How many already have it, but aren't using it? (Score:2)
Yes (Score:2)
There's a reason stock traders have so many screens....
Very useful indeed (Score:2, Insightful)
I'd neve go back to a single (Score:2)
Already standard in many environments (Score:2)
Overlapping windows (Score:2)
Ion3 ftw.
Two! (Score:2)
Just two? (Score:2)
four (Score:2)
We just did this one! (Score:4, Funny)
Feels More Productive At Least... (Score:2)
I find that the wide screens on my Appl
hell yes, I'll never go back (Score:2)
\
one pc at home has a 24wide, landscape, and a 19inchwide portrait just to the left (only place I could mount the arm)
the others- at home (main pc#1) and on my desk at work, 24 dell wide main, landscape.. 20in wide portrait mode (turned 90 degrees)
this means my main screen has 1920 wide X 1200 deep, and the side has 1050 wide, and 1680 deep.
my start/task bar is horizontal on the right smaller portrait oriented screen, runs from the top to the bottom on the left side of that monitor
and
It works wonders (Score:2, Informative)
Personally, I've got a widescreen laptop, and the added screen real state made me start wondering if I should switch to two monito
Virtual desktops work well, when done right (Score:2)
So, no, two monitors would not make me more productive. Two is not enough by far!
THREE Monitors (Score:5, Insightful)
I would imagine that for any kind of development, two is better than one. For some, three may or may not be as useful, but as I said above, I like three.
Just hide the damn thing (Score:3, Funny)
Come audit time, stuff the extra monitor under the desk or pile some binders on top of it.
If anyone gets too close to it, smack them on the back of the skull with a lead pipe and put the body in the cubicle of someone you don't like.
This advice brought to you free of charge by /. and Sponge Bath.
No, but two monitors on two computers does (Score:2)
Having said all that, I think we are not far away from the "Your desk
Uh... Google, anyone? (Score:3, Informative)
it's a no brainer. (Score:5, Informative)
I actually started using a dual head setup years ago (think pre-AGP days) when I had two PCI cards pushing monitors and Windows 2000 had just finally gotten a semi-automatic way to span them. And I've never gone back.
You'd think "ALT-tab" wouldn't be such an effort... until you don't have to do it.
My wife made fun of it, until I upgraded my CRTs to 19" LCD. Giving me a spare CRT to hook up to the second video port on her nVidia card. Then she found the ability to have research and documentation up on one screen, and whatever she was working on on the other. She's also never gone back.
At my work they have been moving us to Thinkpads for almost all of our production network boxes (test racks are a different matter). They got us docking stations with monitors for when we were in the office. Then I realized instead of that I could use the laptops screen as primary and the docking station screen as a second monitor. On top of that the LCD's they got for us were some nice Dell model that you can rotate to portrait mode. You don't want to know how much faster and easier is it to scan a dual column diff when you have portrait mode...
From a money perspective, if a second LCD monitor costs your company $150, and you make $40 an hour all it has to do to pay for itself in a year is save you 3 hours and 45 minutes. Over a 200 day work year.... Meaning about 1 minute and 12 seconds a day and it pays for itself.
Hack the system (Score:5, Funny)
Bean counters will be bean counters. Use ignorance to battle ignorance.
Put a label on the monitor saying "Do Not Inventory". And sign the note illegibly.
The bean counters will either ignore the monitor, which you want. Or they will count the monitor. If they count the monitor, then put the monitor in an empty cube, and make it look like it is connected to a computer. If there is no name on the empty cube, make a name plate for the cube. The name on the plate must be "M T Box", and explain to your cow-orkers that the cube is being held for the new Chinese intern. If there is no empty cube, get a keyboard, and make it look like there are two people working in your cube. Explain that you have to share your cube with the new Mexican intern named No-Say Yama...
try virtual/multi desktop instead of 2 monitors (Score:3, Informative)
Again, unless you absolutely must simultaneously see a ton of data which can only be efficiently done with 2 or more monitors, you'll probably have to snowball your IT department into thinking you need the extra monitors. One thing you might try is to tell them you have epilepsy and a quickly changing/flashing display window could trigger an episode.
2+ displays are easier but saying it's required is gonna take some work. IMO.
LoB
Two monitors against a larger screen (Score:3, Insightful)
* better organization and looking at different (two) applications at the same time: dual monitors
* GUI development: wide screen monitor
* side bars, additional content: wide screen monitor (and a window manager app)
* 100 programs open at the same time: dual monitors (and multiple desktops)
* multimedia (video/games): wide screen monitor
* internet browsing: dual monitors
* email: dual monitors
At work I have significant speedups for dual monitors. But then I am creating applications where I have to debug both the client and the server at the same time. Also, when programming it is really good to have documentation next to the code. With a good IDE it is also possible to have the debug and code perspectives on different screens (e.g. Eclipse handles this *really* well). I would always go for dual monitors at work if I had the choice. Using two 17" monitors is not that expensive, with 19" you get bigger letters, but most of them are 1280x1024, just like the 17" - so only go for 19" if the price difference is neglectible.
I feel that my speedup is between 5-10% easily. So the company started saving money in about, oh, two weeks time, tops.
If you have a choice in choosing the flat screens for work:
* 4:3 aspect ratio (two flat screens does not work well, too big a turning angle for your head/eyes)
* anti-glare
* 170 degrees looking angle (if you have a rotating screen, this becomes *really* important)
* DVI is nice (better colors, less chance of syncing problems, needs a - passive - video card with dual DVI output)
* height adjustable, tiltable (forget about rotation and pivoting the screen - you won't use it)
* USB hubs are nice (but don't work well in combination with a rotating screen)
* refresh rate is not important anymore
At home I am used to watch video and play games, so I went for the wide screen. Some websites do look a bit weird on 1680 pixels wide though.
And three are even better (Score:3, Interesting)
Contrary to what many others have said, I find that one of the major benefits of Matrox's triplehead implementation is that as far as Windows is concerned it's one screen. This not only provides maximum compatibility with software not properly written to cope with multihead, but it means I can easily grab the entire three screens for, say, a wide Excel spreadsheet, Photoshop, or some complicated bit of code. Matrox do provide software to make the single desktop behave like three screens for the purposes of maximising windows, but I have that turned off.
Re:Forget extra monitors (Score:5, Insightful)
I supposed you don't need to look at data sheets while you program. Sure, you don't need to see the IDE and the datasheet at the same time, but just switching between the two fullscreen apps on a single monitor costs you more than enough time, since you lose track of what was in the old window and need to orient yourself in the new window.
Re:Forget extra monitors (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Forget extra monitors (Score:5, Insightful)
But what about those of us whose work does involve seeing more things at the same time?
At work, a lot of us have been picking up older screens to use as second monitors over the past year or so. This was mostly luck, rather than a management decision: someone noticed that the standard-issue graphics cards in one generation of PCs we had included two output ports, and tried it out with an old 17" CRT that was otherwise sitting idle.
Among other times this is useful for us in our everyday work:
I could list many more, but those are fairly typical examples of things we do a lot during the course of our development jobs. It's not hard to imagine applications either: anything involving applications with lots of toolbars and such (graphics, CAD) must be a good candidate.
I don't have any quantitative data, but having made the switch myself a few months ago, I definitely spend a lot less time messing around changing windows and arranging desktops than I used to. The only annoyance is that I sometimes switch to look at the other screen without making the application there active, and then start typing. :-/
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Well, for now, anyway. Give programmers a couple of years of working with two monitors at 1600x1200 resolution apiece, and they'll just start sticking 5000 characters to a line. You'll need four monitors to see the diffs side-by-side.
Programming typography (Score:3, Interesting)
I actually had your post down as interesting rather than funny, but in any case, I doubt it will ever happen.
As anyone involved with typography and graphic design can tell you, the length of text lines that humans can read comfortably is pretty short. Guidelines vary, some based around numbers of alphabets set at a typical reading size, some more formally expressed in terms of angles through which the eyes move. The end results are fairly consistent, though: on a modern 19" monitor, with a full-screen win
Re:Forget extra monitors (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Forget extra monitors (Score:4, Insightful)
An advantage of 2 physical displays is that instead of printing a design spec or whatever to a printer, you can just open it up in the second display and start coding. I'm not sure how many pages you'd have to not print to offset the manufacture and running costs of a second monitor though...
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
It sounds like you have never actually used two monitors at once. It's only about 10,000,000% better than virtual desktops.
New card? not neccassarily (Score:2)
my main pc theortically, could drive 6 monitors with one card (a quadrofx4500 admittedly)
But then you can't maximize (Score:2)
We could fix this by having something like "half maximize"
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
You can also; (Score:4, Funny)
Set back and smile.
Re:Just tell them (Score:5, Informative)
The best thing he can do is set the manager up with a second monitor so he can see the difference. I am an avid multi monitor user. Friends and family that use my machines have gone to the same set up on there machines. At work, I did the same as this guy and eventual converted the entire department. All but one person (the new guy) now have 2 monitors.
now im up to 4 monitors. I wanted 3, but it was just as easy to do 4 as it was 3. If I had to make a cut, i would drop one. But nobody else is willing to give up there set ups.
If you can't convert others, at the very least mention the advantages now before the audit gets to your monitor. Be proactive at telling your supervisor that its needed before the auditor tells him its not needed.