Re: Name change

Whiskers <catwheezel@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Rowland McDonnell <real-address-in-sig@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Whiskers <catwheezel@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Rowland McDonnell <real-address-in-sig@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
[snip]
Rowland.
(wondering why he's writing this with the editing window spread over two
monitors[1], which is making typing really freaky)

[1] Four processors, two monitors, gigabit Ethernet, and nearly 900GB
disc space. Overkill? Nah, just about right - and I've got addicted to
the two monitors.

Do you see lines starting on one screen and ending on the other?

Only if I'm daft enough to move a window so that it straddles both
monitors - which is what I did that once, so `yes'.

I'd hate that.

So did I - I tried working with it like that, just to find out what it
was like, and it was every bit as awkward as you'd expect.

It wouldn't have been so bad if the two screens were the same height and
size - but I've got a 17" CRT screen that's about 2.5" higher than the
15" LCD to its right, both running at 1024x768. So scales are a bit
different on each (not as much as you'd think, mind - 17" CRT does not
mean 17" viewable screen, while 15" CRT does mean pretty much 15"
viewable screen), and there's a jump down as you move to the righthand
screen.

17" CRT could be less than 16" visible, in my experience.

Yeah. Back in the good old days, Apple used to specify actual visible
area on its monitors, but that meant Apple monitors looked expensive
size-for-size 'cos everyone else advertised the `full glass diagonal
size'. So they switched to doing it everyone else's way and anyway it's
a Formac monitor I've got (don't buy one, the firm suffers from awful
quality control - three year return to base warranty we had, and in
those three years, we got three monitors: the first two broke within 12
months. The replacement we've got now is - as far as I can figure out -
a faulty monitor that was returned to Formac for reconditioning but
wasn't reconditioned. However, the fault is nothing more serious than
an iffy on/off switch, so I decided to accept it on the grounds that a
duff power switch is something you can work around without trouble).

You might be
able to 'shrink' the CRT display to get an even closer size-match.

<heh> Maybe, but it'd be tricky, bloody tricky, and I'm inclined to
just leave it. After all, I don't have any desire at all to work
`across two screens' - just to be able to work on both, if you see what
I mean.

(That's one of the things CRTs can do which flat-screen displays can't;
the other significant thing is that CRTs can manage a greater brightness
range, although LEDs are getting closer - not that that's necessarily a
good thing).

I like CRTs.

Multi-header displays are possible in Linux too, of course, if you have
the hardware.

One would expect so. It's been a standard part of the MacOS since
System 7 came out in 1991 - that's when Apple got round to providing a
proper 24 bit colour API and so on and so forth.

'Xinerama' allows a single 'desktop' to use two or more
diplays at once - or of course each display can be used separately.

How do you mean, `separately'?

That'd
drive me mad (if it wasn't already a bit late for that).

It was very freaky, let's put it like that.

I prefer to have several 'virtual desktops' on one monitor, and flip
between them.

I've never got on well with that way of doing things. I first tried it
on Unix boxes around 1990, and didn't like it then - but since the
machines concerned also had 21" monitors, I didn't really feel the need.
I then tried it on my Macs back in the mid 1990s, and *still* didn't
like it.

Different strokes for different folks.

Exactly - having the flexibility is what we need. One size does not fit
all.

I've tried the latest "3D" enhancements of the Linux
'graphical desktop' (effectively, a multi-faceted hyper-solid floating in
the monitor "space" and rotating and morphing to present different
dimensions within which the application "windows" appear) but that too was
maddening so I reverted to the old "2D" paradigm.

Probably best. Most of this `3D' stuff is just gratuitous flashiness.
I mean, it's a bloody 2D screen I'm looking at, so why try to pretend
that it's not, eh?

Quite. I can see that "3D" could have some uses for games or visualising
solid objects in the design stage (buildings, stage sets, sculptures and
models, machines, etc) but not for reading text or viewing flat images.

Yup.

The only actual 3D effect I recall with the current Mac GUI is the
`rotating cube' effect when you switch between logged in users - that's
actually quite nice. The `desktop being switched away from' and the
`desktop being switched to' appear on adjacent faces of the cube, which
rotates. Umm. That sounds a lot clumsier than it is. The rest of it
is resolutely 2D, thankfully.

The 'rotating cube' sounds similar to the effect when changing from one
virtual desktop to another in Linux "3D". 'We' can have 'wobbly'
Dali-esque windows too (fetch a bucket, quick).

<grin> They don't wobble on the Mac, FWIW - although there are `wobbly'
effects. If you happen to get near a MacOS X box, try holding down
`shift' and clicking on a yellow window control button.

(shift-F9 gives a nice effect too - but it's not a wobbly one)

(why `shift'? That slows things down so you can see what happens very
clearly - just so that people can gawp and say `Coo!')

I'm just not ready for
a multi-dimensional desktop; I'm still a bit confused by having windows in
my desktop, not to mention moveable and re-sizable and over-lapping
windows ... who started this crazy nomenclature?

Xerox?

Probably.

AIUI, it was Xerox which first implemented overlapping windows.
Re-sizable windows might well have come from somewhere else. I did see
a pretty good family tree for the modern GUI/OS arrangement we've got
and it's *incredibly* tangled.

In the days of Windows 3.x, I preferred Quaterdeck's display with
non-overlapping 'Windows', or the 'filing-cabinet and ring-book' model
that came with my ICL sub-notebook;

Righto. I've always preferred having my windows overlapping because
I've never had enough screen space, y'know?

I think Compaq had something similar.
On a 640x480 9" display with a mind-boggling 16 shades of grey, you don't
want to leave any space unused.

Ye gods. 9 inches, eh? Well, well, well. That's `original Mac size',
that is - and they didn't have greyscale at all in standard trim, just
black and white. That's when I found out about the joys of overlapping
windows - you just don't have the room for anything else if you ask me.

And of course, Windows in those days
wasn't quite 'multi-tasking' anyway.

Before System 7 in 1991, Macs weren't multitasking either, although
there were things that could be done to have two applications `active'
at once (if not simultaneously running), and there were also `Desk
Accessories' which were small programs (much like modern widgets) for
doing handy `drop in' things - like a calculator, a simple text editor
(not from Apple, mind), and so on.

There are window-managers for Linux that still don't have overlapping
windows, although I don't actually use one of them.

Righto. One of the nice things about Linux is that pretty much
everything is catered for. Good stuff - we need that large `gene pool',
don't we?

(There are even some
that aren't really designed for mouse users; one is called 'Ratpoison').

<chuckle>

Using more than one computer at a time, now that I can cope with; I was
doing that over sneakernet years ago.

Ah well - overlapping windows were a liberation when I discovered 'em.
I'm not really happy unless I've got a few dozen windows open all at
once forming a huge unmanageable heap of untidiness that would drive me
up the bloody wall if it weren't for the fact that I've got any number
of very very obvious and easy-to-use bolt-on goodies[1] to help me
navigate the mess.

Rowland.

I can cope with three or four windows per desktop, if I can keep them
minimised when not in use; that's why I like multiple virtual desktops - I
can have a multitude of 'things' going on, without getting confused.

Hmm! I see - yes. Sort of like the way I do it, but with better
organisation. (that might not make sense to you, but it does to me).

I get it now - I think. Yes. <heh> I can't work your way because I
just can't keep track of things well enough - it's why I like to have
`everything all piled up in the one place' (at least on a computer -
real life, that's different).

[1] I don't like fiddling about. If it ain't straightforward when it
comes to UI `enhancements', I don't want to know.

Yup; clean and simple is the way to go
<http://i11.tinypic.com/2wohk50.png>.

Coo!

Now, if I had some Web space sorted out, I could reciprocate. But I've
not, so I can't. Tell you what, see that email? That's what it looks
like here. One pair of pics is `Each monitor is its natural state'; the
other pair of pics is `Each monitor after I've hit F9 to fire up Exposé
so I can see all the windows'.

(I spy a real geek's OS at your end, mind - what's that down the right
hand side of your monitor? System stats, eh? Who really needs that
sort of info when using a computer normally? Okay, in my case, I can
tell if I'm thrashing the CPUs for some reason 'cos the fans get faster
and a lot louder - but...)

Rowland.


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