ChaCha CEO Has Pretty Damn Sweet 8-Monitor Computer | Hacker News Reader

ChaCha CEO Has Pretty Damn Sweet 8-Monitor Computer

techcrunch.com

28 pointsgaz26 comments

MTV Teen Cribs aside, this guy's house is really, really sweet. Ridiculously over-the-top, but sweet. There's a whole site dedicated to the house at http://www.scottajones.com/index.php?q=residence .

How can he afford all this? Scott Jones is better known as the inventor of voicemail. (!) His company built one of the earliest voicemail systems (1986) and he holds a bunch of patents related to it. So he can afford an extravagant house, especially since it's in Indiana.

For example: His master bathroom has a "waterfall shower" that streams 300 gallon per minute. Normal home showers are restricted to 2.5 GPM. But "because this is a high-tech home, not an ounce of water is wasted. It is sanitized by an ultraviolet-light disinfecting system, stored in a holding tank in the basement and then recycled." (http://www.forbes.com/2002/05/17/0517home.html)

That slide is bad-ass.

And somehow I suspect the house is no longer connected to the 'net by just a single "T1 line, which allows connection to the Internet at lightning speed."

Can't see the video outside the US :| Wonder what the application for this is? I can imagine maybe for trading and dashboard scenarios?

At an old workplace we did some unscientific usability testing on big screen and multimonitor setups.

One thing I found was that 30" was too big. For me, flicking the mouse required you to track your eyes/head too much. 27" was borderline, but I found 2x24" was the best setup for coding - one primary screen and one secondary screen.

3x24" was quite good if you had a tertiary task - e.g. having chat/email/etc open. For me though, this was just distracting. It was better as a task that I switched in and out from.

Any more and the redundancy of screen real-estate started to be distracting rather than useful.

If you follow the MTV Cribs link below the embedded video, you can see it. It's a bit over the top, but there are some nice areas there!

Proof that success (at least in whatever past-life he came from) and wealth do not equate to good taste. I like the library though.

I've seen a lot of comments - particularly on TechCrunch - relating to wealth and how much this would cost.

In terms of cost, this sort of setup would not be expensive at all. I bet my Mac Pro and 30" cost more and that wouldn't be considered outrageous. You can buy 19" monitors for $200 a piece now, and the computer the guy has is really low specced (only a P4 and 2GB of RAM) - if it cost more than $4500 I'd be surprised. There are plenty of us with setups that cost more than that.

I'd say this setup is remarkable more because of the time it'd have taken to set up and how original it is.. how many people have an exercise bike built into their setup! :)

Eight monitors, but only a single-core CPU?

and only two gig of ram? what does a gig of standard issue dram cost these days? $89 perhaps? :-)

It's down to $20 a Gig: http://www.frys-electronics-ads.com/ads/2009/01/16/40166/Kin...

Heck, I got 4G for $60 from Amazon last year.

I have a similar setup (well, same goal, completely different components):

  * 37" lcd 1080p (1920x1080) - less than $1000 a year ago, now $500
  * mac mini, apple wireless keyboard, microsoft bluetooth mouse
  * a schwin recumbant bike

I can roll the bike in front of the screen, grab the keyboard and exercise while doing my non-coding activities: Google reader, checking social network buzz, watching videos (such as TED), ...

Then when I'm done, I move the bike away and I connect the 1080p display to my laptop (x60 running ubuntu) and I can hack with a large screen and my laptop's screen being for irc/im/social apps.

I had a 30" high res LCD (apple/dell), but found them frustrating due to mouse movement. Having a medium resolution screen (1080p is just about right for the mouse), with not many dots per inch (so you don't squint) for emacs/firefox, and a smaller auxiliary lcd for everything else.

At work I have 2 24" LCDs (rotated so they are taller than wider - 1920x1200 each), which works great as well, but wouldn't work for as well for the biking setup.

The bike is a pretty cool idea. I could see myself pedaling to burn off extra steam rather than just tapping my knee up and down.

Hook that thing up to a light or a series of LEDs and you've got enough whiz-bangery to set off my OCD and force a continual state of working out.

Personally, I prefer double vertical monitors (better for coding). But, when you've got 8, I think it's safe to say you can pretty much set them up however the hell you want.

What do you use to get sub-pixel anti-aliasing (aka ClearType) in portrait mode?

The higher-res anti-aliasing is the only thing that got me to switch from CRTs. I've tried portrait mode for similar reasons, but the loss of quality leaves me looking at pixels instead of characters or words.

Additionally, while LCDs are same-color horizontally, it changes faintly vertically. But since your eyes are also horizontal, there is no difference noted. When you turn the monitor vertically, though, there is a bit of color/differential/refraction to the different eyes. This drives me nuts.

Is that a Zenview monitor? They have an 8 monitor version.

http://www.digitaltigers.com/zenview.asp

aside from being really cool i've always wondered how useful this would be. i'd lose whatever window i was flipping through and unless he's using some kvm switch, minimally he's running at least 2 boxes. again, cool to look at... but otherwise what good is it if you can't utilize all of it.

i can only speak to having 3.

https://dl.getdropbox.com/u/163594/IMG_0077.png

I like it quite a bit...it helps especially when you have 3, 4,5 IDEs open and don't feel like constantly resizing/maximizing them.

The problem that I notice on two monitors already is that I really need focus-follows-mind. I too often forget which monitor / app has the input focus and start typing away in the other.

I love to see people jealous of other people stuff, it shows they are still human. Way to go TC!

the recumbent bike thing seems a little douchey. doubly so given the guy's gut. Medical imaging workstations seem much more humane- put everyting on a hydraulic table so you can work comfortably sitting, standing or in a low crouch waiting to strike

how much money did ChaCha pay Techcrunch to get all this coverage?

You have to pay money to get TC to call you "fail"?

I would

Did you actually read the article? It seems highly unlikely that there is anything shady going on.

Besides, that is a pretty swanky setup.

Did you notice the part where TC is unable to get an answer for an extended period of time and they begin to call ChaCha "fail"? Did you read the article? No.

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