Beta driver turned heads in the hospital

These days I prefer multiple side-by-side portrait windows on a pair of landscape monitors.

Yep - I do a lot of editing of publications, and it is much easier when you can see a whole page at close to full size.

In the past I used a Dell monitor that could rotate to portrait mode, and my new one also does the same. However, the new one is much larger, and I now prefer working "two up" so I can seen recto and verso at the same time (with both zoomed to about 125%) and have space for toolbars and the like.

for documentation, I tend to have two or three portrait windows open on a 4k landscape format monitor, with loads of other windows (email, browsers, etc) around the edge!

4k monitors have saved me forests of print over the last few tears.

Rotating a laptop on end does make using the keyboard rather problematic...

It depends entirely on what you're using. Plain vi - maybe portrait is OK providing it doesn't sacrifice line length. IDE's I've seen tend to have various panels, toolboxes or whatever lined up side-by-side for which landscape is ideal, otherwise you might end up with a line length of about 30 chars for your code. But even it you're just using plain vi you may well want some sort of reference material in view so that's either a second monitor or two portrait windows side-by-side on a landscape display.

For almost anything I do landscape works out best to cope with several windows open at any one time.

Many windows on a landscape screen, with 5 virtual desktops to spread them out on - this on Xubuntu. Of course us hard cases have multiple terminal windows on different virtual laptops too. Then you can resize windows to whatever aspect ratio you desire.

When I used software that worked better in portrait mode I wanted to have one of my monitors in portrait mode and the other in landscape for other things. Sadly the powers that be had decided to lock all the computers down and whilst you rotate the monitors you couldn’t rotate the desktop output to match. I had to go and argue my case with the head of IT who had instituted the policies. It was surprisingly made a lot easier when I found out that the deputy head of IT support used the same software. Even easier when I found out he also had his setup like I wanted mine and he was very sympathetic.

Display Orientation

Yes, portrait mode for doc editing, landscape mode for spreadsheets, videos, etc.

I had a large-format, rotatable flat panel made by HP. Under MS-Windows, I was able to simply rotate the monitor 90 degrees, and the display would update. Rather than muck with MS-Windows drivers in Linux (via WINE), I just wrote a couple of custom xrandr lines and put them into my pdmenu menu definition file.

It's worse than that, landscape displays are getting wider and wider and wider and wider, and Teh Webs are obsessed with it. With command tabs at the top and status info at the bottom, you end up looking through a one-inch high letterbox.

If you want to stretch as wide as possible, put your bloody control functions along the damn side, so the valuable uppy-downy real estate is usable! Dammit this paragraph in this posting occupies a SINGLE LINE!

Re: ctrl-alt-arrow and ... cats

> Whoever at MS who was accomplice to this should burn forever in hell.

You meow at the wrong dog. That keyboard shortcut is part of the driver. Most well known Intel, until they removed that shortcut a few years ago. Not M$ to blame here!

Re: Only 2.5 years in the NHS ....

"because they had to be bought when the budget was available"

That's standard public sector accounting and maybe some private sector places as well. If only they'd let you spend the budget on gold bars until it's really needed....

Re: Only 2.5 years in the NHS ....

Except instead of using the eject button/switch/slidey thing, he used a set of forceps!!!!

Good job he didn't try a caesarian.

Re: Only 2.5 years in the NHS ....

"...tech who visited to fit the new drive discovering that the original twin speed drive wasn't even connected to the PSU in that PC!!!!"

Hopefully the tech

1) connected the power cable on the existing drive.

2) put a "4X" sticker on the existing drive.

3) installed the actual quad speed drive on his own pc for "testing and calibration"

Re: Only 2.5 years in the NHS ....

"wasn't even connected to the PSU in that PC!!!!"

Yep. A university where "a Very Important Person" needed the floppy drive fixed ASAP because it was vital to carry out his job. Except the "faulty" one had never even been connected internally

"stacked in the office for two years because they had to be bought when the budget was available"

A local council bought 2500 PC and stacked them up in a warehouse unit and allocated a small number of people to build and deploy them while the economy was good and the prices were low. It took 5 years to get any where near the end of the deployment, and DOAs were long past the "replace it" stage and even starting to go past the 5 year warranty when a financial downturn happened, the one before the current one, or maybe the one before that, the council started making people redundant/not filling leavers posts and they had 100's of PCs "spare" and not enough people to deploy them to.

Re: Only 2.5 years in the NHS ....

>The doctor (surgeon) who trashed a PCMCIA card (and messed up the slot on the laptop) because he wanted to take it out and look at it. Except instead of using the eject button/switch/slidey thing, he used a set of forceps!!!!

Could have been even messier if he'd have been a gynaecologist...

Re: 45 degrees for a jolly jape

I remember there being a Windows thing, decades ago, that would do the same. Screen saver or virus or lock thing, been too long now, but it would make everything on the screen fall off and hit the bottom of the screen.

Re: Monitors need monitoring

"Monitors need monitoring"! But who monitors the monitors of the monitors?!? Or is it monitors all the way down?

Re: Landscape/portrait

> Afterwards the managed thanked me and said it was very useful talking to a real user, rather than someone just testing the application.

I'm a one-man band (write, test, sell the software, which is used by -- among others -- observers at telescopes looking for asteroids.) I talk a lot with users and sometimes _think_ I've gotten things right.

But I remember the first time I actually went up on the mountain for a night of observing and saw my software in use and how they actually did what they do, and realized just how many stupid things I'd done. Many weren't things anybody had complained about; I just hadn't realized that people were doing X because they didn't see superior option Y. Or in other cases, that adding an option Z would be a truly excellent idea.

i wholeheartedly concur with your point about the utility of talking with real users. I'd add to that that it's amazingly helpful to _watch_ real users in action.

Re: Landscape/portrait

"Do not just truncate the screen - use scroll bars."

I just installed a backup "solution" for my BiL, who is a Windows user with no chance of saving. It got wiped off the system as soon as I realised the main GUI windows was not resizable and you had to be constantly hitting the scroll bars to see what was going on. Why would anyone choose a fixed size window for anything other than an error message "click ok to acknowledge" thing? Always let the user resize the window because you don't know what screen size, what resolution and what magnification settings they are using. Having a minimum size may be almost acceptable if making it too small will hide the important info. And NEVER have a status windows that sits right in the middle of the screen with "always on top" set when your program claims there is an error that takes 2 hours to fix!. Yeah, that backup program which BiL had installed himself went in the bin as soon as I saw it. (Samsung Autobackup if you are interested, came "free" with his 2TB USB Samsung drive)

Re: Landscape/portrait

We were contracted to automate new machinery into a fairly complex system at a utility. Several old machines of differing age, era and method of operation were to be replaced by a common series. The old method of operation involved a lot of staff, 24 hour manning and was expensive. The staff were ageing and would take their knowledge of the system with them as they retired.

The new all-singing and dancing auto-operating plant was installed, set-up, commissioned and handed over to the new customer and his much-reduced number of operators.

I was called back within a week because the customer complained that it was grossly unstable causing excessive manual intervention. On arrival, it was true. It was a complete wave of machines starting, stopping and clearly in distress. The operators explained what was happening and how they needed someone on each machine to handle the system; it was hard work. A quick re-set of the software, selecting 'Auto' on the panel for all machines, re-start and voila: everything settled down and hummed like happy machinery ought. I had to intervene to stop the operator from 'taking over' as 'that is what we always do'..... It took a few days to convince everyone that things were working correctly and all was well.

After that, we always made a special effort to include 'Operator Training' in our tenders. This proved a bonus as our guys got to know the operators and would visit if in the area; taking biscuits always ensured entry to the most secure installations.

Re: delivering an early release driver.

It sounds more like an act of revenge against a nuisance customer.

Re: delivering an early release driver.

I dunno. I briefly worked as a "customer loyalty" rep, and one person was bitching because the BIOS didn't expose the AES-IN functions on the CPU. Didn't take much effort to get an updated BIOS image that had a function for that. And this was at a racist as fuck company where I was one of the token non-master race employees. Half the time I couldn't even get people to respond to a simple email or IM message, but I got an updated BIOS image.

Re: Rebooting for 5 of every 25 minutes, mind you

Ah yes.. the Michael Spindler era. I guess you had a PowerBook 5300 - a dog of a machine in every way possible. Most of them literally fell apart before Apple put out a rework programme to fix the many issues with case hinges and charging sockets falling off the logic board. But at least Apple’s marketing people could say it had a PowerPC processor.

Re: I worked at a hospital group

Phase the new system in gradually, so that while the phase three people are using the Lenovo stylus tablets that they demanded, the phase two-ers have been given the Surface instead, after the phase one group handed those back and accepted laptops?