The Minority Report

I’m pretty sure that rig doesn’t come with Halle Berry but it’s still pretty sweet. Price tag is $3600 which is really nothing compared to my first rig 15 years ago at $5000.
I’m also pretty sure that you are going to have to supply your own hydra worm to hack the Department of Defense though.

I recently took the opportunity to reboot several pieces of my technology stack. The coolest perhaps is my new 6-monitor machine running Ubuntu Karmic. It is nontrivial to be comfortable that everything (CPU, GPUs, monitors, OS) will play nice together so I’ll detail exactly what I did so that others can repeat it if they want. One caveat: I don’t have visual effects working yet, but I don’t find them especially useful so that was not a big issue for me.

My motivation for doing this come from a couple of observations. First of all, there has been some research that shows that having more screen space increases productivity. This is partly due to the cost of context switching–if you bring up one application on top of another and go back, it can take a few seconds to reorient yourself. Physical context switching is easier–if you look a different way to see different information, and it is always in the same place, it is easier on your primitive mammalian brain. Moreover having more screen real estate reduces the need for storing the contents of the other windows in working memory. For example, I often work with emacs for latex, evince output, and evince and browser references. If I can have them all visible at once I can refer between them without having to context-switch and remember information. This frees working memory for harder stuff like math. My philosophy is that if I have overlapping windows, I’m paying some context-switching price.
Data geometry : 14 Megapixel, Six Monitor Ubuntu Karmic Setup