Slashdot Mirror
Information Overload Overblown, Says Gates
Aarthi writes "Microsoft's annual CEO meet-and-greet kicked off on Thursday with the company's Chairman, Bill Gates, countering the notion that the workers today are not overloaded with information.'We still want a lot of information.' He also outlined plans for Office 12, the next version of its desktop software, which is due to arrive in the second half of next year." From the article: "There is a real temptation that the thing that comes in the latest is the one you shift your attention to, even though that may be the least important...That turns you into a filing clerk."
If office doesn't cause information overload, then why does M$ have to hide all the extranious menu options by default. I tire of telling users to click on such and such a menu and they come back with "I don't have that."
-TheDawgLives suckitdown
...if I have a serious problem. I spend my whole day filtering information, code, tech manuals, slashdot etc. and only taking in the bits that I think are useful/interesting/funny. If I miss something I figure I can always go back and read it again.
The problem is I can't switch it off. I skim everything, and now the problem is spreading: it's affecting my listening too! I have to really focus on someone to take in everything they tell me, especially people I listen too a lot, like my girlfriend. If she is talking to me about something 'really important', like shopping, holidays, TV or hair and my brain doesn't agree how important it is I simply don't hear what she's saying. What worse is that she has a typical female ability to multiplex two or more streams of information, one of which might actually be important. This has lead to all sorts of arguments.
Does this affect anyone else?
Scared of flying, pointy things snce 1979!
The reason for an Iraq invasion is actually quite clever. It was not really about Iraqi oil. The reason the terrorists used mainly Saudis in 9/11, was an attempt to turn America against its closest ally in the Middle East, that fat oil tit, Saudi Arabia. The fundamentalist Islamic movement in the Middle East really wanted the region in chaos in an attempt to gain hold. Attacking the US in a spectacular way guaranteed our play on the field. We have no intention of carrying on a conflict on our own soil. Instead of making the move they hoped to provoke, we attacked Afghanistan. They wanted war in the Middle East, we gave it to them. The Taliban weren't making many friends in the international community at the time. Had we left it alone as only an invasion of Afghanistan we would have likely incurred another attack on US soil, in further attempt to provoke an attack on Saudi Arabia. In order to keep the war in the Middle East and not destroy our alliance with Saudi Arabia, we invaded Iraq. This allowed for some exercise of back pocket agenda to oust Saddam, but really directed all attention of the terrorists off US soil and into the Middle East. The fact that Iraq has oil, is really just gravy in the whole scheme of things. If war in the middle east was only about taking oil for the US, Kuwait would be the 51st state in the union.