4K is for programmers
tiamat.tsotech.com
tiamat.tsotech.com
Yes, you can buy a wonderful, physically adjustable, mountable, color calibrated, blissful contrast, delightful brightness control monitor with a great matte finish like the Dell 3014... or you can buy an absolutely awful 30hz, locked in place, blue tinted, horrible uniformity, terrible brightness, awful contrast, with horrible black levels and really -- just horrific to work on 4K "tv". I speak from first hand experience, it is absolutely one of the worst panels I have ever had the misfortune to stare at vim on.
The colors are so awful that literally, some of my favorite themes (seoul256) where ENTIRELY unusable, just a greymush of nothingness. With bright spots and dark spots to make reading code even harder. So, I tried a black background theme... only to be horrified with the black level.
I agree with the author there is no comparison, obviously almost anything beats the Seiki. Hell, most review sites won't even recommend it as a TV, let alone a monitor.
Well, there's your problem right there...
(I own the 39" Seiki)
What equipment did you use? Can you post your pre/post scores? I have NEVER met anyone who has been able to actually calibrate it into even "average" ranges. I realize that X-Rite and Spyder are "consumer grade" calibration devices, but they are all I have access to.
And now I'm pretty sure I'm out of my league.
If you don't mind me asking, which version of Spyder did you try?
Edit/Disclaimer: (I work for the company that produces it)
I don't care for calibration at all, really. What I do care about is that all my monitors, when I have multiple monitors, have similar performance across the gamut. To the point that I lived with what in retrospect was an extremely out of whack 2407WFP for 6 years to match a cheap Acer until the Acer died. I only noticed how bad it was when the U2813HM that replaced the Acer was sitting alongside. Resetting to factory defaults pretty much fixed that.
I'm personally really looking forward to a proper UHD/4K over 30" that does 144hz with GSync, which I can use as my main desktop monitor. It'll finally be a reason to upgrade from my old Dell Ultrasharp.
The Asus PQ321Q is almost there, it's just limited to 60hz.
Sorry, had to say it.
Citing: http://amo.net/NT/02-21-01FPS.html and: http://www.100fps.com/how_many_frames_can_humans_see.htm
The human eye's ability to detect change exceeds 200 fps, though "fps" isn't really a good match for how the eyes process information, which is highly dependent upon the scene in question.
Again, this isn't like a "bad for picky art professionals" type of bad. Just awful, I wouldn't even sell it to anyone I knew personally because I knew it would come back to bite me.
You keep repeating this as if it is some magic mantra. You have not defined any what "better" really means in manner that can be quantified and compared without introducing subjective opinions of a user.
Also, care to link to these "better" monitors, including sellers that sell these for the $500 price, as well as non-subjective reviews?
"Better" monitors are easily found through a simple search, and how do you exactly determine a review to be "non-subjective"?
http://www.displaylag.com/display-database/ http://thewirecutter.com/leaderboard/tvs/ http://thewirecutter.com/reviews/a-great-27-inch-lcd-monitor...
Fix the issues, turn this thing into a monitor, and corner the market for big monitors.
http://www.amazon.com/Nixeus-27-Inch-Resolution-2560x1440-NX...
Adjustable (height and rotation) stand, pack in dual-link DVI cable, all 4 major inputs.
I am definitely an amateur when it comes to display calibration, but I'm pickier than your average bear and these have acceptable picture quality when dialed in
I'll wait for the Think Vision Pro 2840m for $799 in April though.
"It is, at first, disorientating to have the two monitors askew but once you get used to it, the reduction in strain from looking far left or right out weighs the strange look.
However, I have poor eyesight and very poor peripheral vision, so that might have something to do with it. If I'm trying to watch for movement out of the corner of my eye I frequently get false positives from visual aberrations.
I had tried to be fair-handed with my judgment of the Seiki but I admit that my desire for large form-factor displays coupled with Seiki delivering one that I can actually afford clouds my judgment some. I want high-quality large displays and the incumbent manufacturers have left me in the cold for a decade.
Not that it matters, but one area where I spoil myself is in monitors. I spend what I can afford (and then some, admittedly) on monitors in lieu of other luxuries. I own five 30" monitors, three of which are Dell U3011s. I love those monitors. As you point out, they ship from the factory with great color, a matte screen, and of course inputs that don't disappoint.
But on the flip-side, the 30" "professional" LCD monitor as exemplified by the Dell U3011 and U3014 has not decreased in price substantially since I picked up my first Dell 3007WFP, what was it, eight years ago?
Maybe it's telling that I have not yet replaced one of my home Dell monitors with a Seiki. But when my wife's Dell 30" died, we decided to give the Seiki a try. As I've said, the Seiki has several downsides. The 30Hz lag is foremost. It's noticeable and frustrating. But the screen size and delight of having so many pixels in a single display is so compelling. Also, after applying the Seiki firmware update, the backlight can be adjusted, allowing for better calibration.
It's not a perfect monitor. It's not even a great monitor. It's a good monitor and it does the thing I value most: give me pixels with which to see and interact with information quickly. As a programmer on a budget, it's my favorite monitor currently available. I really hope that competition heats up and better monitors are on the horizon. I will bite at opportunities to get large, high-DPI, high-quality, high-speed displays.
But for now, I personally would not buy the Dell 30" unless they severely cut the price. I'm keeping my eye on that because I am hopeful the new competition could start moving the higher-end prices downward, and that will make me happy.
(Incidentally, the U3014 is presently $1,600 at Newegg [1]. I could barely stomach the ~$1,000 price of 30-inch monitors eight years ago. In 2014, I can't bring myself to spend $1,600 for 2560x1600.)
[1] http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=9SIA25V0U169...
Secondly, the Seiki is not a "good" monitor. It isn't even a "good" TV. The only thing Seiki has is pixel density and cheapness, it is awful in every other measurable way, without a doubt one of the worst panels I have ever purchased. I can't fathom how you can justify calling it "good". Excluding resolution -- can you even name a single thing you like about it, that you think is a cut above?
You can get a number of wonderful 27" inch (2560x1440+) in that same price point. With good inputs, colors, refresh rates, adjustability, brightness, yada, yada. They go as cheap as $350 now, but you can get GREAT ones (really great, not just pixel density) for around $500.
Questions: (1) How many hours do you spend really working on the Seiki... not your wife, not on the phone, not at home on your wonderful Dell monitors, not walking around, not just in the office, how many legitimate hours to you spend USING the Seiki? (2) Why do choose for your developers, why not given them a budget of X to buy whatever they want?
I suppose you and I just disagree on what is good and what is not. I've personally used the Seiki for the past few days. We just got them this week. I value the quantity of pixels and price a little more than color accuracy, balance, and uniformity. I want even better specs. I want 60Hz most of all. But given the balance of priorities, I personally think the scale tips toward size and resolution to maximize my own productivity. 60 Hz though, I'll take it in a heartbeat.
The blog entry is just my opinion and I understand your opinion is strongly opposed. That's fine.
Answers: (1) A total of about 6 hours a day for the past few days. They just arrived. Key quality of life improvements have been using the firmware patch to allow the backlight to be dimmed and using dark color schemes. Most of us were using dark color schemes already since we prefer those at any resolution. (2) I'm not going to bother answering this in detail. From the reactions I've seen, we're very happy with the upgrade.
Seiki has a lot of room for improvement. I take it your opinion is that they have a huge amount of improving to do. I really want the whole desktop display market to improve dramatically. It has been stagnant for so long that I really treasure these recent developments. As much as I acknowledge this display's weaknesses, I see it as a harbinger of some long overdue innovation. For that alone I am very happy.
I'm really happy with 1080p on 27" IPS (LG). People would probably think I'm mad. Just as I would consider myself mad looking at a blueish display all day long.
Detail? This answer has cost you more words than the obvious two picks: "We made a vote","I made a gamble"
?
Where can I find these?
Are there any for $500 that are better than the $300 ones?
Do you have an ax to grind, or is this just typical HN pedantry?
The reviews on Amazon for this display is a solid 4.0 from 200+ reviews -- hardly the shite quality you seem to be suggesting. Given that the thesis of the article is that this would be great for programmers (i.e. not designers or the color obsessed), the fervor to which you're arguing the point seems misplaced.
To get it working you need to fool the OS into thinking that it's a monitor again: http://embdev.net/topic/284710#3027030
The brightness is great (only terrible if you like it really low), the 112 pixel density is higher than on 2x23 inch monitors, for example;
The colors can be calibrated from within the OS so it's not as much of an issue;
And as the black levels - if you found them horrible, it may be because you were using an nVidia card on Windows - the drivers are set to limited RGB range (because it thinks it's connected to a TV), giving you horrible black levels (and colors).
I spent a month wondering why my brand new monitors look like crap when every review said they were the best bang for the buck :-D.
Or maybe you just got a bad panel and/or the new revisions were improved...
The calibration you can do in the OS is limited, as I said, I have two different sets of hardware equipment for calibration and I still couldn't make it less than horrible. The display is just ick (as expected at that price point) -- every color is signifigantly off out of the box, and trying to fix it even with physical calibration devices is a lost cause. You can't get it anywhere near "normal".
I tried the TV against multiple forms of input -- from Windows to OS-X to Ubuntu to QNX(I used to build command center software, which ran on TVs on top of QNX, so I have my own stack that is tested against TVs). From nVidia, to ATI, to Intel. I also tried it as a simple TV (my fallback so I didn't have to sell it) -- it even looked like crap as a TV... even with external upscaling to 4k.
I purchased mine (and used it for about a month before I was able to sell it on Craigslist) just about as soon as you could get one in the US. I doubt any radical changes have taken place since then, I have read of none outside of the price dropping. It is still generally reviewed as a poor TV and worse monitor.
Dells 4k 28" should be available in just a few weeks -- wait for that, don't purchase this lemon.
Manufacturers do have frequent revisions on the panels - for example LG's e-IPS panels had 6 revisions (or more), each pretty different, initially with backlight bleed and ghosting problems, then AFRC and brightness changes (it varies a lot between revisions) and the bad reviews went to Dell, Asus, Acer and other display manufacturers...
I can't prove without access to a modern panel that they didn't get exponentially and magically better. But, I find that unlikely. They are fighting for cheapest slot.
But who knows, maybe it is the best panel in the universe now! Maybe the extra $3000 people are dropping on Sharp and Dell 4k panels is all markup! But, I suspect not.
What I'd like to know is if the viewing angles are so bad that you see different colors, inverted colors etc. just while sitting at a desk with it (since it is so large you are at pretty big angles from pixels on the edges).
The Lenovo Thinkvision Pro 2840m and Asus PB287Q have both been announced (60Hz @ 4k, US$799), but you might have to wait a couple of months for release.
Just the productivity decrease alone makes this monitor extremely expensive in the end, despite its price.
I just tried:
- Dragging windows - not an issue, but maybe I am used to it from times when having window contents displayed during dragging lagged much more due to cpu/gpu power.
- Scrolling - it is slower, but with clickless scroll wheel and smooth scrolling it was not too noticeable.
But, oh god, the mouse cursor movement... It was like working through a high latency VNC.
Didn't the article mention something about a firmware patch to fix the backlight brightness?
(I appreciate your calibrated review/opinions btw)
Isn't that an oxymoron? Why would you want an intentionally blurry screen?
The Apple was glossy and the Dell was matte. If you peer at the Dell, you can see the matte coating -- but everything was nevertheless much more readable for most of the day due to the glare from the glossy screen (it was an office with a lot of natural light). Only at twilight did the Apple provide superior visibility.
So matte finishes are extremely helpful in some circumstances (depending on the lighting and type of room), and some matte finishes are a lot better than others.
But I figured it would be easier to just use a display with a good matte coating.
Then again, I am one of the people who used to always pay the extra $50 for the matte screen option on my MacBook Pros, back when Apple offered that option.
And while we're at it, I want a unicorn as well! Seriously, speakers, a remote and a TV tuner are like, $5 in parts max whereas everything he just listed involves upgrading silicon fabrication processes and designing new ASICs.
I'm not a monitor manufacturer, just an opinionated blogger. But are you telling me that a matte surface would cost more to manufacture than a glossy surface? DPMI support costs a lot? Of my wishlist items, DisplayPort seems the toughest to this layperson, but even that doesn't seem unreasonable.
In my earlier blog entry about the same monitor, I said I'd also be willing to pay a tiny bit more. If I could get the "professional" version with the attributes I listed above for $600, I'd do it in a heartbeat.
[1] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DPMI
I'd need to dig a bit to know for sure, but I'd probably they're using off the shelf parts for HDMI that may or may not support DPMS, and either way it'll probably be some hardware changes. If they've already tooled up, yes, it will take some coin to make the transition.
Also, I will concede that it wouldn't be cheap to add the features I want, but I'd nevertheless pay a small premium to see them happen.
Ex TV Product Planner here - yes matte costs more than glossy. If nothing else there is the volume but I think the production techniques for glossy are intrinsically cheaper too.
I for one be willing to pay a modest premium for matte.
Unless you are saying one pixel smears into another, doesn't scattering light in all directions end up giving better viewing angles with good brightness uniformity?
I always thought the reason a matte screen hurt contrast was because of scattered light from the room raising the black level.
Seiki just dropped their price to $500 which is attractive, but I think the Dell's build quality and internals will be worth the $200 premium.
It'll happen - it's just a matter of time (less than 18 months if Moore's law is anything to go by)
I think the lack of 60-120Hz has more to do with keeping costs down. Low production costs translate to lower prices for the consumer. By selling these TVs at absolute rock bottom prices, they can sell them by the truck loads and, more importantly, make a name for themselves. These last couple weeks I've seen Seiki's name brought up dozens of times all over the internet whereas a month ago, I don't think I've ever heard their name before.
If this is part of their marketing plan, it's working beautifully.
That's exactly what I meant - there have been displays for years that can do really high refresh rates at 4K, they have just been quite expensive.
Due to Moore's law, image processing ASICs with that kind of processing power should be as cheap as what's in the Seiki in a year or two.
While I'm sure it's great to have such massive screen real estate (I wanna get a 4K in 2014 too), I can't but help think this is the programmer equivalent of consumers buying needlessly large TVs.
I work on a 24" desktop monitor and a 14" laptop one. How is 50" the "ideal size"? Even 39"? At what point does the law of diminishing returns kick in? Sure, it's great to gave 7 windows side-by-side, but is it that much of a productivity jump from, say, 4 windows or 5 windows?
Personally and subjectively, I'd draw the line somewhere around the 28-32" screen size.
To sum up, the core argument here seems to be that upgrading to a 39" or 50" monitor is great because (a) it's cheap, and (b) more is always and infinitely better.
aka Assuming monitors last ~3 years and cost below 2,000$ it takes a tiny difference to be worth it because your not just comparing productivity delta's but also cost delta's. In other words a 2,000$ monitor that improves productivity by 1/20th of 1% than a 1,000$ monitor is clearly worth it over 3 years even if the difference is simply eye strain. 3x (salary + benefits + overhead) * .0005 > 1000$.
PS: Another way to look at it is spending an extra 1-2k per year on salary over industry standard rarely tempts programmers but an extra 1-2k per year on hardware might.
That said, I agree. The benefit doesn't have to be big to justify it.
I think that ideally the same 24s would deliver a 2560x1600 resolution, however I'm still quite happy with the setup as it is. 3x 27"s might be nice, but I fear it could become too much. Well, at least for my wallet, that is!
An issue with the 4k displays is that if you're going to have 3x of them, you're going to hit GPU walls very, very quickly.
That being said programmer happiness is elemental and a 42inch 4K screen would add to that for me :)
alt + {Left,Down,Up,Right,h,j,k,l}
bspc window --focus {left,down,up,right,left,down,up,right}
{alt,super} + Tab
bspc {window,monitor} --focus next
alt + super + {Left,Down,Up,Right}
bspc window --swap {left,down,up,right}
super + {Left,Down,Up,Right}
bspc window --edge {left,down,up,right} push
super + shift + {Left,Down,Up,Right}
bspc window --edge {right,up,down,left} pull
super + q
bspc window --kill
I've no idea whether it works on OSX though. 2bwm seems to be popular among OSX users, but I've not tried it.
I do this and it gives an incredibly tactile feel to desktop management.
Screen resolution is important though, otherwise everything just feels cramped. I'm perfectly happy with a nice 23-30" monitor. Anywhere within that size range is fine, but it needs to be a quality panel. I work with a lot of very subtle colors, and light gray tones. With a TN panel they're invisible half the time, or I'm constantly shifting up and down in my seat trying to find the sweet spot for more accurate colors.
If I had to pick my dream setup, it would be a single 30" monitor. If Dell gets those 4K 30" displays rolling out, I'm sure they'll be great. For now, I don't feel like my productivity is suffering in any way with a 24" monitor.
Personally, I find I'm most productive when I have a nice clean workspace, natural light, and a good chair. For example, I just grabbed a photo off Google...
http://articlesofton.files.wordpress.com/2011/12/01-04_home_...
Replace the chair, and it's ideal for me. Bright light, and minimal clutter.
You might (maybe, just saying what I like) want to try one 'main' monitor and one subsidiary. Can be the same size or smaller. Main monitor is for the work you're focussed on, the other monitor is where you have documentation or other reference material you need while working. I quite like this pattern rather than just throwing programs all over the two screens.
That convinced me that, unless you're going to make a circular desk with a keyboard that moves along with your chair, the perfect setup is a 30" display with two 20"-ers next to it in portrait mode.
I am not sure where this process ends, but 50" sounds very nice indeed. :)
When I replaced my TV about 4-5 years ago, I bought a 500€ beamer and a 100€ retractable canvas. Sure, that beamer only has 1024x768, but today you'll certainly be able to buy something significantly better in a similar price range.
With my living room PC connected to the beamer, my "screen" is 1.7 meters wide, I can watch movies, television, play games, have internet, linux (rsync!, ssh!) and all of that significantly cheaper than any "decent" television set.
Why do people (given they have the space) still buy televisions?
Also, televisons often offer more features like usb, networking, sound and cec. I'm not entirely sure about most beamers, but I don't believe they offer the same integration with a chromecast or raspbmc that my current 500 euro sharp aquos does.
I use the TV for BBC iPlayer, Netflix, and Viki (I'm into asian soap operas) I use the Apple TV for Youtube, The PS4 is for Battlefield 4, I use Airplay for anything else
People like to have their TV on all day long: with a projector you can't, because it won't be very visible in daylight and it will burn through lamps like it's popcorn.
Second point, modern TVs usually have a tuner in, you plug them in and they work. Also you don't need to adjust the image until it's rectangular.
You don't need to have a line of sight for a TV, chairs and people are not an issue.
Before I first set it up, I expected the configuration to be a lot more tedious than it actually was. If you have the computer, some sort of sound system and your TV receiver lying around, all you need is a switch for the different audio sources and you can basically plug it all together. (In my setup, TV does not go through the computer. We don't have Hulu, HBO or Netflix over here.)
I'd say about 80% of the work was mounting the beamer to the ceiling and getting the upper hand on the cable mess.
Me: "Do you mind if I nail these cables to the walls in our living room?"
Her: "Whatever. Just be done by tonight so we can watch something."
This time, I worked with well-hidden cable conduits and it is not that noticeable any more.
At the time, we were living with an unfortunate flat layout which placed the bedroom directly next to the living room. So in order to avoid waking up the child, we started using headphones (and have never stopped doing so since).
Since I had checked before buying the beamer that it wasn't too loud, using (good) headphones had the side-effect that beamer noise is now an absolute non-issue for us.
I find it enlightening how all these responses show that my setup really isn't the right thing for everybody. In retrospect, I was also not consciously aware of all the quirks that my wife and I were willing to accept (headphones, cable conduits, TV only in the evening).
Nonetheless, as beamers become brighter and less noisy (LED?), they will probably become attractive to a wider range of people.
TV is still king in these situations.
See http://www.nngroup.com/articles/how-much-bandwidth-is-enough...
His 2012 recommendation was 30" or larger screens for knowledge workers (http://www.nngroup.com/articles/computer-screens-getting-big...).
But anyway, quite nice that there are articles that take a little bit of a human point of view and not just the usual "existing technology, just 20% better is good enough for everyone"
i use 4x2 24" in the office. some days it feels like i could use more screen space. but it has also reached a point i need to roll back and forth on my desk to read all ends. coding work is concentrated in 3.5 screens. spreadsheets, browsers, email, front ends, other software occupy the rest. and yet it still hasn't released me from alt-tab hell. there will always be that bunch of information that you must have in front of you no matter the cost, and the cost is that you still have to alt tab the less important windows -email, excel, hacker news.
You won't know until you try. I hesitated a lot about switching my CRT from 14" to 17". After half an hour of work going back felt like staring at ATM bulb shaped display.
I'd like to try very large monitors but it's pointless without higher resolution so I'll wait until I can buy 4K as a toy.
Now my Apple Cinema Display feels cramped and I'll probably add another...
I have been using this for 3+ years now, and while people always look at me like I'm crazy when setting up 6-7 monitors on my desk (I freelance so I usually lug them around or just buy a used set of monitors for a few bucks), I could never go back. Not switching windows, and using your peripheral vision for things like database load, or just plain having 2 editor monitors and 2 reference browsers open at the same time is invaluable.
While I can work on a single monitor, even a huge one (I love the 3k x 2k notebook resolutions), I feel cramped because I don't have the physical separation that comes from the multiple monitors.
Do you use virtual desktops as well?
For about half a year now, I've been using a 3-display setup centered around a large iMac. While the iMac display is nice, I kind of miss my old work flow. The iMac resolution is quite awkward, actually, because it's too small to split in two or four separate work areas, but at the same time it's way too big for just one window. There is really no good way to use that screen efficiently. So I often end up splitting it into two overlapping halves with a code window and some other window, but on the whole the setup is not as satisfying as the 6-screen.
I've now got my 2011 22" iMac sitting next to two 22" Dell UltraSharps, and it's amazing for my workflow :)
That said, I also do a heap of work on my 11" (1366x768) HP notebook, so I'm crazy, and use so very many virtual desktops its not even funny.
On the road with 2 LG 23" monitors (6.5 lbs each) and a Dell M4700 laptop. i3 WM provides the tiling needs. Love the setup, not too much context switching (i.e. changing virtual desktops) and sufficient screen real estate to do my work.
If you are so keen on the 'physical separation' then perhaps a WM that includes some synthetic black bars to give defined visual separation of tiles?
You didn't specify what resolutions your monitors are running. Out of curiosity, what are they?
Well, diminishing returns have already begun by the time you get to the sunlit uplands of about 1024 × 768 (non-interlaced! in 16-bit colour!). Every further step up feels somewhat incremental in comparison. But are further steps worthwhile? Yes. There's a reason why people use maps and papers printed in 600dpi and above, then spread several of them out at the same time on a big table. Can you display this chart http://xkcd.com/657/large/ so that all of the text is clearly legible, and without having to scroll or zoom? Can you display this chart and two long excerpts from LOTR side-by-side so that all of the text is clearly legible and you can move between all three just by moving your eyes, without scrolling or zooming inside any window or moving, resizing or tabbing between windows? If not, then your monitor isn't as high-detail as it should be and/or doesn't cover as much of your visual field as it should. And that test doesn't come all that close to testing the upper limits of what you can usefully do with progressively-better displays.
"4k isn't for couch potatoes", "you should buy a $500 monitor", "if you are programming on something so old, [you suck]", etc...
I am fairly surprised to see this style of wording upvoted to the top of HN, actually.
But yes, it's opinionated. I'm quite strongly of the opinion that in general larger desktop displays increase productivity. They are finally arriving, and at prices that are almost affordable. With several important caveats and weaknesses that cannot be ignored, the market is finally moving in a direction that I applaud. So this blog entry/rant is a form of celebration.
There is a time and place for everything.
I am not criticizing your writing style. I just found it odd to find one like it at the top of HN is all.
I actually like it. It reminds me of kenrockwell.com
Maybe it's just me, but I'm most productive on a 13" laptop. I can change my work place and position as I want, plus only one app fitting on the screen actually helps me focus. Emacs/tmux/IDE users can do most programming work in a single application anyway.
I've used a 27" monitor and before that two 20" monitors for years. It was great for other activities, but when it comes to programming, it only distracted me.
While reading the article I was thinking "wow, these guys are using 39" monitors, while I'm perfectly happy with a single 17" monitor or a 13" laptop. There must be something wrong with me."
Emacs is my screen space saviour. Every file or shell is 3 key presses away, I just don't need extra monitors.
That said, I almost exclusively work on a 15" retina MBP and don't find myself annoyed, so I guess you're right. :)
1. My database design for reference
2. A web browser for when I google how to do a particular thing
3. Specifications for the project I'm working on
4. Example code from other things I have written in the past
These things make me a more productive programmer. I don't see a legitimate reason as to why multiple monitors wouldn't make someone more productive but let me know what I'm missing!
> 12" 1440x900 (X200s)
> 14.1" 1440x900 (T400)
Resolution is big enough, mobile, keyboard is normal sized and you can see your coworker while talking to him.
I used to have a three monitor setup, but at some point realized that all that real estate was preventing me to focus. Now i only want one window on screen at a time. Alt+tab is my extra screen real estate. My usual screen is 22 inches and that's about the maximum size for putting windows fullscreen.
I use a logitech m500 with the inertial scrollwheel, so scrolling through long documents is easy. Also, word's navigation pane makes it easy to jump from point to point. The 22 inch screen is just large enough to see the full page width and the nav pane side by side.
When implementing long spec documents, i print them out and mark off the parts i've completed. There would be no added value from having a second screen where i do that digitally for me personally. (I did try it once.)
Maybe I just need to get my eyes checked again, but for some reason my code just doesn't perform any better or write itself any faster with more screen real estate and I'm as productive on my laptop as I am on my big screen.
4K is not for programmers, code is for programmers.
Doing web development in VS2010+ feels very cramped on anything less than 2 1080p monitors for me.
Waddya got?
When I do web dev, I prefer a fullscreen terminal for editing and a virtual desktop with a fullscreen browser for proofing.
The screen size absolutely makes a difference when you are working on a large project with lots of disparate pieces. When you jump between project-wide search, debugging, showing git diffs, and so on.
This is especially true if you do graphics work and code. When you need to move graphics assets around your filesystem and into your IDE it's nice to have the room (i.e., not so many overlapping windows) so you don't spend time digging for assets, resizing assets, running scripts over assets.
I consider myself very productive on just my laptop screen, but sometimes I postpone large architectural changes or heavy instruments based debugging sessions until I get home. There's less back-and-forth and a considerable speedup under certain workloads.
Jumping between symbols in your IDE is not going to happen faster on the command line because it's a spatial operation. You've located the symbol visually, clicking it to jump to definition is far faster than keyboard-navigating to it, or even typing it.
Merging is better with a dedicated merge tool than a command line merge. I have to resolve conflicts one to three times per day and I couldn't imagine a non-visual merge interface for complex files where manual edits from both sides are necessary. Being able to see it all at once helps.
There is nothing quite as good as Xcode's instruments on the command line — providing easy to navigate visual representations of your performance and memory use, graphs and other metrics. Having the instruments panel on a second screen is incredibly useful, the extra screen real estate is of real value here. Having to keep switching on a single laptop display is a pain in the ass.
Obviously there are many tasks that cannot be easily sped up on the terminal, saving slices out from Photoshop (when your designer hasn't done it properly). And then getting the resulting assets into your pipeline. This stuff is benefited by extra screen space.
But the main benefit is being able to see more code at once. And it is especially helpful in large re-factoring operations or with extensive debugging / performance profiling. As I said, it depends on the type of work. I can code just fine on my laptop but I tend to prefer coding focused features, or fixing isolated bugs.
I find the previously mentioned profiling and architectural changes are better suited to large screens where more code / graphs / visual assets can be seen at once.
You simply can't do "all these things" in a terminal. You can do a hell of a lot, but sometimes you need visuals and sometimes you need space. When you can see more code you don't have to hold as much in your working memory, your eyes can flick back and forth over your code and it makes it easier to see the dependencies and realise what you need to change.
When the lab I worked in moved between buildings, we each broke down our work stations and set them up in the new spot. I went through a good week of getting work done before I noticed that I hadn't plugged in my mouse - I just never reached for it, because virtually everything happens with a thought when my hands are on the keyboard.
It may depend on what you use to position the cursor as well — I haven't used anything but a trackpad in the last five years, and even on that mostly I use gestures to navigate UI. Since the trackpad is almost part of the keyboard it feels very seamless to scroll/tap and type.
Of course, I also bump the trackpad accidentally sometimes, but that's a separate issue...
Being able to see it all at once absolutely helps, but on a big enough console you can see it all just fine. Vimdiff is great. A large monitor definitely adds value there, GUI or TUI.
1. Unable to edit text on the left side, only the right. >.<
2. Related to 1, unable to simply paste two pieces of text into two views and compare them, the way you could on www.quickdiff.com. You have to manually create 2 files each time.
So sad, because it is so good in all other ways! And it's not open source, so I can't step up and contribute. :(
But your environment and my environment are likely completely different and YMMV.
If you are viewing more code at once (which a larger screen allows you to do) then you can be more productive at certain tasks. I find that large architectural changes, performance profiling, and complex debugging are particular scenarios that lend themselves well to a large screen. This is the point I was making to which you replied with your preference for the command line on a small screen.
I am fully aware of how to manipulate image assets on the command line. Most computer vision and computer graphics tools I have written are executed via the command line so they can be pushed into my build phase. But I deal regularly with many formats from many tools, and not all of them can be dealt with easily on the command line.
The command line is not immediately better than everything — most visual oriented tools use keyboard shortcuts. You may not realise this, but committing those shortcuts to muscle memory makes using graphical applications just as fast, if not faster, than many tasks on the command line.
Do you also do all your performance profiling on the command line? Because that is a situation where visual data is very helpful, and a visual interface is in general more efficient and faster to navigate than the same on a command line.
As I said elsewhere, I do not use a mouse at all, so I do not have a mouse-centric workflow. I use the trackpad centimetres from my keyboard for gestures. This only requires slightly more physical motion than pressing a key, and ties itself just as strongly to muscle memory. I also use a graphics tablet for design, painting, and 3D modelling.
And to repeat, my initial point relating to large screens still stands. If you can see more code at once (whether on the command line or not, who cares?) then you do not need to commit as much to your working memory, and you can more productively make large scale changes that effect a lot of dependent code.
Same goes for performance profiling and debugging. The more info you can have up at once, the more you can dedicate your mind to reasoning about the problems at hand and the less you switch back-and-forth between views.
Looking back on the nightmare project almost makes me cry until I manage to suppress its memory. The difference between this project and my operating system is that my operating system is written by people who need to maintain software for a long time and, at some random point in the future, will need to rely on the maintainability of the code they wrote a lifetime ago. My nightmare project was not written with the project in mind, let alone the future of the project. Its problems were far removed from screen resolution. Its problem was the programmer. The programmer made it as painful as possible for me to understand what ze had written.
There was no abstraction and the code's entry point invoked every procedure the project directly in various loops. There was no difference represented between the software's big wheels and tiny gears. This made large scale changes difficult because dependent code had no typed contract, just access to buffers and primitives passed around in what was essentially a big main().
There was no cohesion of modules in the project and procedures just appeared together grouped seemingly at random and given names project1.x, project2.x, etc. Even if I had enough screen real estate to have the whole project's source open simultaneously, I would have been just as lost as when I was trying to wrap my head around a single file.
There was never a consideration for inversion of control and all the flow parameters were hard coded paths in giant conditional nests all throughout the project. That made simply guessing which code paths to analyze for a given input difficult.
Seeing more bad code doesn't make fixing it any easier and seeing more good code doesn't help me understand it any faster. When it comes to code, there are many factors influencing how productive I will be at working on it and screen resolution should be down there on the list, hopefully near the bottom.
"You may not realise this, but"
Was that necessary?
"committing those shortcuts to muscle memory makes using graphical applications just as fast, if not faster, than many tasks on the command line."
What's even better about the command line is that you can pipe input and output between applications. Chaining commands and remaining on the cli is faster for me than switching between applications and opening files. Most UIs have no way to define macros for commonly used procedures, whereas you can script anything cli-based.
"Do you also do all your performance profiling on the command line? Because that is a situation where visual data is very helpful, and a visual interface is in general more efficient and faster to navigate than the same on a command line."
I do. I lack the sensory to monitor more than a couple metrics at once. I prefer profiling data that can be captured and analyzed later.
Here is the example I am dealing with right now. I have spent the last few months designing and implementing a complex system. It consists of hundreds of components and tens of thousands of lines of code. This project is reasonably small and I can keep most of the mental model "in my head" at once. So it's appropriate to edit on my laptop screen — or any screen. I can usually think of which symbol I need to jump to and within seconds I can be positioned in the editor, at that symbol.
Today I have had to take that component and push it into the rest of the system, which is hundreds of thousands of lines of code and it is a codebase that I have created over three years. I can't keep this all in my head, and this is where having a large screen produces noticeable productivity improvements and speed improvements to problem solving.
It is not a matter of not being able to jump around the code instantly from my keyboard — I can do that easily. It is knowing and remembering where to go and what I'm supposed to be working on. It is trying to maintain context while handling the many hundreds of errors that come about due to the necessary integration, API and architectural changes.
When I have a large screen I can afford to maintain a long list of files in a column on the left, I can see more large files at once. This allows me to constantly refresh my memory. I can glance at the data in front of me to determine what symbol I need to jump to next. I often mentally blank out when dealing with this level of scale — that "what was I about to edit?" feeling. When I am only on my laptop screen I have to start pulling up code, tracing a path back through it to redevelop context. When I have a large screen I can (usually) rebuild this context by glancing at the existing information.
(Note that this is not a messy project, I have spent a long time and given very careful thought to its design. It is just large and necessarily complex because of what it has to do. A bigger screen makes it faster to develop large scale interactions in such a project.)
> Was that necessary?
I'm sorry about that. It wasn't.
> What's even better about the command line is that you can pipe input and output between applications.
I have nothing against the command line — I use it all the time. I just like to take the most efficient path when working and sometimes that is not the command line. But that is tangential to the large screen point above.
> I do. I lack the sensory to monitor more than a couple metrics at once. I prefer profiling data that can be captured and analyzed later.
I had meant to ask if you analyse your profiling data on the command line. Do you?
This paradigm persists in many components themselves, from the bootloader to the end-user. When I want to update something in user space, it involves, from my perspective, no interaction with the operating system (even though it is really the one doing everything). Conversely if I want to do something as advanced as completely rewrite my filesystem implementation (something my operating system is very dependent on), I can, and without ever needing to touch my operating system's source. I could come up with any ridiculous way for a filesystem to work, and my operating system would be cool with it, and would operate the same way because if its modularized and abstracted design.
I would say these are incredibly good design features and that you would have to be extremely hard pressed to find a system that inherently cannot be designed in such a way as to mitigate maintainability and trivialize extensibility. Is your top-level project inherently so complex that adding smaller pieces requires that much screen real estate? If so, you have my sympathies.
> I had meant to ask if you analyse your profiling data on the command line. Do you?
Yes, my command-line editor has some powerful cvs support and manipulation features that make slicing the data up very easy.
In particular when navigating a large codebase, rewriting or refactoring an existing design, and other similar tasks. Your argument sounds to me like "If I write perfect code, I will never need to touch old code again and thus do not need a large screen."
It doesn't matter how big or well designed something is. There are going to be cases where you need to revisit, redesign, or rewrite. Your suggestion that you should just write code perfectly the first time assumes you know the perfect design for the problem at hand — the perfect design is not obvious in many cases, not until your code is used in production and many features have been added on top of it do you begin to think that you can revisit it.
In my case, I am writing a graphics engine, code editor, parser/AST builder, documentation viewer, and project management system. As well as managing documentation and strings localised in 20 different languages.
I have re-written the code editor three times now, each time I have carefully considered the design and how I could proceed with a multi-threaded, efficient editor free from rendering bugs and able to handle large amounts of data. At this point I think I have a great design and implementation, but it is far from perfect. Much of it was developed on my plain old small laptop screen.
Recently I pulled all old networking code from the system and re-wrote it using newer and better high-level APIs that have since become available. This task was benefited by a larger screen because I could look at old and new implementation, while looking at a second new implementation from a different area of the code base as reference — while also still having room for API documentation and related files. It just made things faster, it would still be possible on a small screen.
When I profile the OpenGL graphics engine being able to correlate performance graphs with locations in the code, while displaying GPU buffer contents is something that would feel quite clunky on the command line. It's also faster to be able to glance at this data with my eyes without having to flip between windows / contexts.
So my top level project is complex, but I never claimed it required much screen real estate. It can be more comfortable and faster to perform certain tasks with a large screen — which reduces the need for mental context switching. That's what I'm arguing and I find it hard to understand why you are arguing against this point.
> If so, you have my sympathies.
Your attitude seems quite condescending. As if my code is poorly designed and unmaintainable. This is not the case.
As I said: coding does not require extra screen real estate. It can just be more comfortable and more efficient when you have it.
I dedicate one entire monitor just to a full-screen terminal with tmux running inside. It's trivial this way for me to edit and view and compare multiple files at once. I typically dedicate half of the second monitor to a browser, for testing, and the other half to administrative applications, like email, Jabber, and IRC.
The result is that the cost of context-switching is drastically reduced. I'm able to maintain focus for much longer stretches of time because I don't really have to ever completely switch contexts.
I use i3: http://i3wm.org/
My vim-like config: https://github.com/SirCmpwn/dotfiles/blob/master/i3/config
I agree it's not an automatic improvement, but I'll take that bet every time.
For many of us that have in the past (or still do) work for less-than-very-nice employers, or ones without as much money available to spend on hardware for their team, there was/is always hope in improving your own practices. I have spent a lot of time investment improving my own practices and I wouldn't give up CLI, workspaces or dvorak for enough 4K monitors to line a conference room with.
I mean, I just never need to be looking at more than one window at once. And when I need to interact with multiple windows (editor, browser, e-mail, docs, whatever), then I need to shift the focus to each of them anyways to reload the browser, change the code, highlight a new email, etc. -- so I always have to cmd+tab to the window no matter what.
After all, you can only look at a single window at a time, and I never need to keep things open for constant monitoring or anything.
(I do a little 'trick' with OSX, however, which is to always resize every application to use the full screen area, and keep it on its own desktop, so I never have to deal with the clutter and confusion of overlapping windows. And remember, dragging and dropping files etc. works between desktops just fine!)
* Code editor * Terminal with the logs of my app * Web browser where I see my app running
It's really one task, and focus is on doing this one thing (coding). But having these windows visible at the same time really saves my short time memory.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4AClZklhqeA
Edit: Looks like crossflashing, may fix it. Testing now...
http://www.avsforum.com/t/1482611/review-of-the-seiki-39-4k-...
ASIC designers. Analogue electronics engineers. Traders. Quantitative analysts. Anyone whose work involves big complicated things that it's difficult to hold all of in one's head: a large piece of software, the design of a power station, the results of a finite element analysis.
For almost any sort of heavy brain-work, having more pixels makes for more productivity. So for almost any sort of well-paid heavy brain-work, employers should be falling over themselves to provide lots of pixels. It is a longstanding mystery to me why so many aren't.
Soon I will upgrade to 3x Dell P2815Q with 6480x3840 resolution.
After getting used to the high-DPI displays in tablets and phones I have to admit, desktop text rendering has become very notably lacking.
Also decent window manager with hotkeys and scripting helps (KWin on Linux)
I practically never use alt tab :-)
That's a big benefit for when you want to keep an eye on some debug output but not work on it directly, or quickly parse big sections of text.
My secondary screens are slightly damaged (dead pixels, scratches...) so they cost peanuts. The real limit is electricity bill.
Also with such large setup you need good light balance. I always use inverse color scheme (light on dark background). For example I even filter web page colors.
I am upgrading because my laptop and phone has retina display and I love it. Also LED displays should have lower energy consumption compared to my ancient displays.
I don't think we're anywhere close to the limit where something like Eagle Mode won't still benefit by adding more pixels (provided you can also supply the memory and processing capabilities for it to work responsively). The same kind of thing could apply to many tree structures, or graphs of complex relationships - being able to visualize large collections at once without the context-switch of scrolling is useful. Being able to view the whole source code of an application at once would be incredibly useful.
Another example might be reading or writing some research paper. Frequently you end up scrolling back and forth through a paper to cite or connect the bits together, which is pretty cumbersome, particularly when "back" buttons don't always have the expected or desired behavior (e.g, many viewers are missing a "push my current scroll position onto a stack before navigating" feature). Being able to view a whole document at once would ease some of that.
It'd be interesting to see some studies on the difference between the efficiency of using spatial layouts compared with sequential actions. It seems to me that spatial layouts quickly become rote actions that don't require much thought, but having to execute a set of commands is repetitive and error prone. (e.g, how many times have you clicked the wrong application in a task bar accidentally when you have a brain fart?).
It seems the industry is obsessed with heading in the opposite direction. I find mobile platforms a pain to use and I generally avoid them. Things like Gnome Shell's task switcher are also a regression from task bars, as the sequence to switch an application now has extra steps.
[1] http://www.forbes.com/sites/jasonevangelho/2014/01/07/dell-w...
Personally I only care about viewing angles, so cheaper technology such as e-IPS would be just fine.
So we end up with 200 character long lines on our 24" monitors. Can't imagine the horror they'd produce with 39" monitors.
Click the Apple icon in the top left of the menu bar, choose "About This Mac", click "More Info", click "System Report", and on the first screen ("Hardware Overview"), the Model Identifier will be displayed. Mine is "MacBookPro10,1".
I would love to verify that it is capable of driving these 4k displays, if you wouldn't mind checking.
For example, every macbook pro in the last 5 or 6 years that had replaceable RAM had an actual RAM limit that was double what Apple said was its RAM limit. I wouldn't be surprised if 4K works, albeit perhaps a little sluggishly.
If you give them the option for 4Gb, 8Gb, 16Gb and 32Gb instead of limiting to 16Gb lots of people will freeze and never make a choice or get frustrated when they see the markup for 32Gb and avoid buying altogether because of that.
In limiting the amount of upgradable RAM on their sales page they show you choices that are most likely going to be easy to sell.
"Supported" is not the same thing as "it works".
I don't think the HDMI hardware is new enough in the 2012 for HDMI, though in theory display port might work if the drivers get enabled for it.
You need to be running Mavericks to use its native HDMI port. I am running the default version it came with (10.7.x) so it only works on the HDMI port under linux (which I primarily use on it) and Windows. That being said I use an Accel Active DP 1.1 -> HDMI 1.4 adapter which makes it work just fine even on older version of mac os X. Actually with that adapter you can use a lot of even much older macs to drive the seiki or any other 4k 30hz display.
The adapter: http://www.amazon.com/Accell-B086B-008B-UltraAV-DisplayPort-...
The other thing, with any article like this where Windows is not used for testing makes me skeptical. Most programmers do not work in offices developing on Macs or Linux machines by a very large margin. Working on a mac for iOS and OS X development is something we grudgingly do because Apple enforce it... in fact you could say that all programmers use Windows and be very close to being accurate.
I've never used multiple monitors on a mac to comment though - I can imagine the support being just as good as in Windows or Linux.
Personally, when I'm not using a unix-y environment, it's because I've been forced. Using windows as a programmer feels like having one of my hands chopped off.
every programmer i know works in a windows dominated environment. this is a small sample though.
i believe that in back-end only environments linux has some serious popularity but i can't comment on how many studios use it as their development platform because i have no great experience there (actually i work in office where they develop such things, but they use windows exclusively).
for desktop software, games and web front-end development windows is king. its the platform that all of your target audience are using to an excellent approximation. for AAA games there is an extra restriction that its the only practical choice (there are zero tools for working on any other platform). sure for iOS/OS X there is the same restriction to a mac and iOS development has become extremely popular - even so there is quite some resistance to using OS X and XCode as anything more than a test configuration on cross platform projects - I've seen a lot of macs dual booting to windows in this context. For android Linux can give you a small edge, but its not much...
Linux is obviously meant for programmers, but that doesn't mean they use it either - until quite recently even the best flavours were horrible user experiences. I think ubuntu is great and really takes steps to get away from the 'you download source and build your app with archaic and buggy tools at the command line' approach which has always dominated... in terms of doing your job though - unless you work on the backend of some web service you can't do any useful builds under Linux, unless you are targetting Linux desktop which is exceptionally rare.
Indeed, every programmer I know works in a Linux or Mac dominated environment!
Anecdotally (I work at a large corp), slightly under half our devs use Linux. You only need to look at the array of software-for-programmers that's available under Linux to see that it's an extremely popular choice - the availability of programming software and libraries is generally better under Linux than it is under Windows.
While linux is certainly a bit more hassle to maintain than windows (I use a mac when given the choice, which i find gives me the best of both worlds), it's still a clearly superior environment for highly technical users. It's only recently with the introduction of Powershell that Windows has stopped being a substantial handicap for developers, imo.
- Requiring JS for text. Okay, I'll turn it on this once since you claim "nothing dodgy."
- Disabling my control click to open in background tab, especially after claiming "nothing dodgy"? You shouldn't be on the front page.
For comparison, my Retina 13″ MacBook Pro has 2560x1440, 2.5K (or really ⅔ 4K) but at 227 ppi.
Of course, moving the monitor farther away also makes the perceived monitor size smaller. since PPI and distance can be traded one for the other, what ends up mattering is the total resolution. 4k is a lot of pixels.
For other stuff, sure, more pixels won't hurt. Reading PDF at high ppi devices is a joy.
But getting back to programming, I wonder how I'd cope with a 39" display. At the same position where my monitors are now, I could probably replace two with just the one. With two monitors my viewing angle is too wide anyway, so again I'd mostly use either one half of the screen for lots of stuff while paused videos and web pages occupy the rest, or just push everything to the sides and focus on the center. Maybe TekWar had it right...
In 2007 I had the idea to use my 28" flatscreen TV as a monitor, took me three days before I had terrible eye strain/migraines/light sensitivity.
I really don't care about 4K, I want a monitor that's got a wide range of brightness levels with the same integration with my Ubuntu workstation that that netbook has with its integrated screen. (I plug it in and the OS immediately knows how to communicate with the monitor to adjust the brightness based on a keystroke. )
It'd be interesting to see if any increase lasts.
Just recently I went through the same issue, had to buy a new monitor for my work station, finally decided to go with a 2k Apple TB monitor, also considered Samsung alternative, but it doesn't have some of the features Apple added such as automatic brightness control and additional ports.
My decision was based on taking care of my vision, tvs simply aren't built to be viewed from a desktop distance, they are just too bright… they where thought to be used from a distance.
This site is my hero. Write a "no javascript detected" message as if blocking javascript is perfectly understandable (even if you secretly believe we're all hatted in tin). You know your audience with these, what does it hurt to throw them a bone.
I run iTerm2 in full screen with Vim split alongside 2 or 3 console panes; I find the separation from the rest of my OS a blessing. The second screen I use for Chrome, HipChat, Flint, Sparrow etc; I still notice chat notifications, and to keep a eye on my dock (which displays all notification counts across my multiple programs) is a simple key combination if I'm in 'the zone' and don't wish to break out of my programming environment (iTerm2).
I've tried larger screens in the past, and found myself physically looking around the screen a lot more, simply due to having all my content splatted together.
Combine this with a keyboard-based window manager and the 1/2 - 1/4 screen segmenting and I feel much more organised and efficient than trying to manage a 30"+ monster of a screen.
The intentions are good. But seriously, why not just wait a few weeks for the Dell 4K monitor that's price well under $1000.
A programmer's monitor should have not only a fairly decent contrast, but also the darkest black possible. This thing, even at the lowest brightness/contrast/colours settings, outputs a lot of light (and its black is just a gray), making it unsuitable for programming with any color scheme.
I switched back to the old 19" 1440x900 Samsung monitor bought some seven years ago, which has a true black. I'll pop in a mediacenter box and throw the 27" in the dining room.
Before buying a monitor, you should check for its "blackest black" in a low light condition and use full-screen.
And -yes- that tsotech article just sucks.
It's just a blog entry. I'm not a journalist.
But thanks for the criticism. It's clear you and I just disagree about displays.
You should increase the DPI count in your OS.
I'm wondering if a 4k 36" monitor would have a better 40mhz limit or something?
Also, my laptop is a few years old with Intel HD integrated graphics. Any idea if it would have enough power to run one of these?
What about a ChromeBook?
I'm trying to get an idea of just how much power these things need?
I do think a single large monitor would be nice. I'm using dual 24's with a 13" retina display centered below and find it difficult to make smart use of the screen space because I have to turn my head constantly.
I want a 50-inch desktop display with north of 10,000 horizontal pixels.
Big whoop. I want an interactive holodesk and bidirectional wireless neural interface too. I also want dynamically-generated domain specific function graphing so I don't want have to shoehorn my ideas into a one-dimensional text stream.
At work I have an old 75Hz 1024 x 1280 panel (portrait) beside a newer 60Hz 1200p panel. If you look closely, you can tell the old panel is smoother. But its just that.. you have to look closely. It definitely isn't a jarring difference. IMO I wouldn't get much more out of a 120Hz panel just for programming and daily use.
As for gaming, wI know the extra framerate definitely smooths out the experience in FPS games. I'd take a 1440p IPS panel over a 1080p TN (120hz) any day, but I know others who say the exact opposite. Its totally subjective.
There are a couple of things as a developer. 1. You end up developing really long lines of code that might upset other developers 2. I'm on my second Seiki, my first one died and it took 1 mo. to receive a replacement.
Synergy + 17" Laptop as server + Desktop with 2x 24" screens on desk arms...
Some one explain why a single large screen is better for a programmer, when synergy is dead easy to setup.