BeepWHERE THE FUCK IS THE CURSOR?
Sylvartas
KraidenI have a friend who works for Transpower (company in charge of NZ electric grid) and occasionally goes into their control rooms. Apparently they have set ups like this. It gets worse, because there are several computers hooked up to the different monitors, so not only do they have a wall of monitors, they have a bunch of different keyboards and mice (mouses?) that they have to hunt through if they want to actually interact with something
They need to invest in some KVM switches. Just leave the monitors connected directly to the towers but route the input devices through the switch. There’s no good reason for a single person to face more than one keyboard and mouse at the same desk.
There’s plenty of good reasons. Redundancy, simplicity, speed, physical context switching…
Redundancy for a keyboard and mouse? Keep an extra set in the drawer or something. No need to have them all out and connected. Simplicity? How is it simpler to have multiple input devices littered about than once set? Speed? Speed of what? Of input? The latency on a KVM is negligible, particularly for an IO device? Speed of swapping? With multiple keyboards and mice, you have up manually move around devices and/or your body. With a KVM, you press a button. How is that slower?
Physical context switching is the only thing I’ll grant you, but I don’t see how that’s such a benefit compared to the hassle, clutter, and hectic work flow when you can just use a KVM.
One of the operator pulpits at my work can be run by one pulpit operator, but commonly has multiple people in it - someone is almost always being trained, floor operators hang out on break or when maintenance has to take the machine for a while, lead operators and supervisors and quality personnel stop in to monitor. They have I think five computers, all with their own keyboard and mouse. The operator mainly interacts with just one, and the others are set up for reference spread all around the edges of this room that comfortably holds five people. It works pretty well because the auxiliary people can look stuff up on the reference computers without having to take away keyboard or mouse control from the operator, and with how physically distant some of the machines are from each other, a switched keyboard would have to get carried around the room which would be annoying.
Sure but that is entirely different than having all of those monitors at the same single desk with multiple input devices only accessible by the one person at that desk.