Filed under: Hardware, Flickr Find
What you're looking at is actually nine computers: five Macs, three PCs and one Linux machine. (Check out the Flickr page, to see what's what.) According to its owner, it's all driven with one keyboard and mouse, and switches seamlessly between machines. Incredible.
Thinking about the cable management for this thing makes my head hurt.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 2)
Craig L said 9:08AM on 5-15-2008
Would this rig REALLY be productive.....
Imagine the daily maintenance - and the HEAT!
Reply
Antonio said 9:38AM on 5-15-2008
Productivity be damned! I want one!
Costa Walcott said 10:39AM on 5-15-2008
Exactly - Once you're above 3 monitors I can't imagine that adding more really brings up your productivity. It is neat to look at though :)
Blaktornado said 11:03AM on 5-15-2008
If anything it's counter-productive because you have to keep turning around to look at the screens and everything :P
Unless you have a lot of apps that can maintain themselves and do their thing (say, lots of video apps that are constantly rendering) then it could be marginally productive but I don't see the point :P
One, two or three is enough. lol.
Tristan said 7:46PM on 5-15-2008
I run 4 monitors (dual 24 and dual 17) and find it works EXTREMELY well. 1 x 17" runs mail, 1 x 17" has Adium and iTunes, 1 x 24 usually runs a browser and the last 24" runs whatever work I am doing at the time...
For what I do, the setup works perfectly, I have thought about going to a single 30", but being able to view all the apps I need to at once is priceless and I don't think the 30" could allow for this!
larry said 2:31AM on 5-16-2008
@Tristan - are you able to run a full screen movie? I have an 8 monitor setup (4xGeForce 7300) and was never able to run a movie even on two of them.
Steven Ledbetter said 9:19AM on 5-15-2008
From what I can tell, the set-up looks really clean. Very nice. I'm sure the eye strain could be killer after a while though.
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Allan said 9:33AM on 5-15-2008
If it's all run by 1 kb and mouse.... what's with the set on the left? If you go to the Flickr page, the kb on the right is labeled as the one he uses.
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chris said 9:50AM on 5-15-2008
My guess is he's using Synergy, a server-client setup that allows you to do this without KVMs...you can literally drag your mouse from one end of the setup to another, seamlessly. Very slick. I use it at work to drive a Mac mini, 2 linux boxes, and 2 W2k3 servers. Relatively easy to set up, but the traffic (keystrokes and mouse movement) is unencrypted by default - though you can set up an SSH tunnel to encrypt the traffic. My guess is the keyboard and mouse on the left is hooked to a KVM to all of them - Synergy can sometimes break on a restart, as not all of the clients have service-level runtime.
http://synergy2.sourceforge.net/
The clients all work well, but the Mac client SynergyKM ( http://sourceforge.net/projects/synergykm ) runs as a prefpane and is very slick.
Reply
Jonathan Wise said 9:57AM on 5-15-2008
AOL on Synergy. I was going to mention this, but you beat me to the punch.
Anyone using multiple computers (of any modern OS) on one desk, should check out Synergy. Its fantastic.
Robert Debowski said 9:52AM on 5-15-2008
I can have 16 of them. It's called Spaces™. And is greener btw.
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Ryan said 1:53PM on 5-15-2008
and the purpose of this rig? Is he homeland security or is he running the Matrix?
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Aron T said 10:34AM on 5-15-2008
TUAW seriously needs to a write-up on setting this up using Synergy2 on Windows and SynergyKM on OS X.
I have never even heard of this application but now that I've figured out how to set it up I'm going to be using it at work constantly!
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RJ said 11:15AM on 5-15-2008
Synergy is pretty slick...but has one bug (maybe a bug, maybe that's how it should be):
If your synergy server is a windoze box, everytime one of the applications hang - roughly every 10 mins if you're running more than 2 apps like outlook or internet explorer, then the synergy clients start erroring out. The trick in a total Windoze setup is to run it on a machine you'll run light apps. In this case, it's likely the synergy server is a mac (one app hang does not crap out every app for a bit) or a linux box.
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ultrasur1 said 12:16PM on 5-15-2008
"hey everybody look at me!"
see you in ten years when your radiation levels are peaking...
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Ryan Trevisol said 12:25PM on 5-15-2008
I'm thinking you could do this with one or two maxed-out mac pros and VMWare. It'd be sexier. :-p
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Codey H. said 1:21PM on 5-15-2008
Farming Gold on WoW probably...
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Matt said 3:32PM on 5-15-2008
I'm gonna guess he drives six Hummers all with one gas pedal as well. Way to go, overcompensating individual.
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Travis Isaacs said 5:47PM on 5-15-2008
...and not a girl to be found. Girls love dudes with setups like this.
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robogobo said 8:02PM on 5-15-2008
wow. I don't know what to say. That's about the most wasteful thing I can imagine in a single room.
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