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You've just bought a fast new server, but it's not very impressive - beige instead of midnight blue, and not very large or noisy. What to do? Get yourself a Switch-A-Screen!
A Switch-A-Screen is essentially one of those switches that connects one screen & keyboard to multiple servers, but REVERSED
so that you can connect multiple monitors to your server and switch between them.
At appropriately dramatic moments you can announce, "I can't see it properly, go to Screen Two!" or "There's only the two of us, let's view this on Screen Five. Much more intimate, yes?"
The key to this concept is its extravagance - even if you have a wall of monitors, all of them are blank except the one that's currently selected.
The experience is significantly enhanced if the switch has a very loud clunking pushbutton.
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Annotation:
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I'm not 100% sure but I think oscil8 may be asking for shared virtual desktops, but that's just inferred from the dialogue at the end of the idea. Could just be random witterings, though. |
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oscil8: Any chance of clarifying your idea? |
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Clarified for your voting pleasure. |
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I would like some of those big half-inch reel-to-reel mag tape drives, a wall of flashing neons, and a side order of 110 Baud teleprinters. Oooh, and some front-panel switches for inputting the bootloader. Something like the computer room in "Billion Dollar Brain". |
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Computers just aren't that impressive any more .... I remember the good old days ...<wistful sigh> |
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While we're on bells-and-whistles to impress visitors/potential investors: how about fake appliances, with suitable blinkenlichts, noisy fans, and knots of cabling, to make those equipment racks look fully-loaded instead of simply optimistic? |
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(I think I saw this baked, with real but massively underused hardware, in some of the server rooms I've visited in the past few years...) |
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Would you add somethng to the switch so that all of the unselected screens showed some generic "screen" image? Do that and you can have a roll. |
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All Unix systems should have a mechanical /dev/null which prints out information and then elaborately destroys it by shredders, whirring blades and fire. |
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And Windows systems that can shut themselves down should do it via a robot arm pressing the off-switch. |
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