Besides, that is a pretty swanky setup.
The higher-res anti-aliasing is the only thing that got me to switch from CRTs. I've tried portrait mode for similar reasons, but the loss of quality leaves me looking at pixels instead of characters or words.
https://dl.getdropbox.com/u/163594/IMG_0077.png
I like it quite a bit...it helps especially when you have 3, 4,5 IDEs open and don't feel like constantly resizing/maximizing them.
How can he afford all this? Scott Jones is better known as the inventor of voicemail. (!) His company built one of the earliest voicemail systems (1986) and he holds a bunch of patents related to it. So he can afford an extravagant house, especially since it's in Indiana.
For example: His master bathroom has a "waterfall shower" that streams 300 gallon per minute. Normal home showers are restricted to 2.5 GPM. But "because this is a high-tech home, not an ounce of water is wasted. It is sanitized by an ultraviolet-light disinfecting system, stored in a holding tank in the basement and then recycled." (http://www.forbes.com/2002/05/17/0517home.html)
And somehow I suspect the house is no longer connected to the 'net by just a single "T1 line, which allows connection to the Internet at lightning speed."
At an old workplace we did some unscientific usability testing on big screen and multimonitor setups.
One thing I found was that 30" was too big. For me, flicking the mouse required you to track your eyes/head too much. 27" was borderline, but I found 2x24" was the best setup for coding - one primary screen and one secondary screen.
3x24" was quite good if you had a tertiary task - e.g. having chat/email/etc open. For me though, this was just distracting. It was better as a task that I switched in and out from.
Any more and the redundancy of screen real-estate started to be distracting rather than useful.
In terms of cost, this sort of setup would not be expensive at all. I bet my Mac Pro and 30" cost more and that wouldn't be considered outrageous. You can buy 19" monitors for $200 a piece now, and the computer the guy has is really low specced (only a P4 and 2GB of RAM) - if it cost more than $4500 I'd be surprised. There are plenty of us with setups that cost more than that.
I'd say this setup is remarkable more because of the time it'd have taken to set up and how original it is.. how many people have an exercise bike built into their setup! :)
* 37" lcd 1080p (1920x1080) - less than $1000 a year ago, now $500
* mac mini, apple wireless keyboard, microsoft bluetooth mouse
* a schwin recumbant bike
Then when I'm done, I move the bike away and I connect the 1080p display to my laptop (x60 running ubuntu) and I can hack with a large screen and my laptop's screen being for irc/im/social apps.
I had a 30" high res LCD (apple/dell), but found them frustrating due to mouse movement. Having a medium resolution screen (1080p is just about right for the mouse), with not many dots per inch (so you don't squint) for emacs/firefox, and a smaller auxiliary lcd for everything else.
At work I have 2 24" LCDs (rotated so they are taller than wider - 1920x1200 each), which works great as well, but wouldn't work for as well for the biking setup.
Hook that thing up to a light or a series of LEDs and you've got enough whiz-bangery to set off my OCD and force a continual state of working out.