Sidebar: Virtual
Desktops Get Bigger
Drew Robb, ComputerWorld,
January 12, 2004
The paperless office has
been a favorite vendor mantra for years, but
printers remain a lucrative business. The
problem with moving off paper, however, is
not the ability to create and share documents
electronically, but the size of the human/machine
interface -- the monitor.
"Computers are getting
faster, but they haven't completely exploited
human abilities," says Jock Mackinlay,
a user interface research scientist at the
Palo Alto Research Center's Information Sciences
and Technologies Laboratory. He thinks that
because of hardware constraints and costs,
users will go for multiple-monitor arrangements
before migrating to a single large, high-resolution
monitor. His own desk contains an array of
six 1,200-by-1,6000 pixel LCD screens that
connect Windows XP workstation with two graphics
cards. The cost of the displays is about $5,000.
"Technically it was
easy to do," Mackinlay says. But while
the basic set up works, he says it's buggy.
For example, a window containing text may
split across two screens, making it unreadable,
and dialog boxes don't necessarily pop up
where a user would expect them to. Such issues
will be resolved in the new graphical user
interface Mackinlay is designing. But even
the current off-the-shelf technology makes
life simpler, he says.
|
