Slashdot Mirror
Computers Top BBC List of Stress Producers
twitter writes "The BBC is reporting results of a poll by UK charity Developing Patient Partnerships that shows crashing computers to be one of the most common stresses and that it's actually killing people by driving them to drink and smoke. The quoted list has: 1. IT problems - 30%, 2. Change in financial status/personal injury - 24%, 3. Commuting - 20%. I've seen people take a smoke break when their computer pops a window and they lose an hour or two of work and admins taking their break straight from the bottle."
what is the frustration level of mac, linux, and microsoft users of all computer users.
And guess that the 27% of men and 23% of women who would "light up in such a situation" roughly coorelates to the percentage of smokers in England.
The ones that are high?
I remember reading that Windows users make up most of the Slashdot demographic anyway, and that the Linux-using majority is a myth.
Thoughts?
What did you possibly do to your Mac to get it to kernel panic?
... you should submit a bug report to the developer. That shouldn't be happening with production code.
I've been using OS X since the public beta, and I haven't had one do the old black-scrolling-text-screen-of-death in years now. And when it did happen back a while ago, it was mostly because I was using some (at the time) very shady drivers.
Whatever software you were running
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
The logic distilled:
When you're stressed, do you smoke or drink? [read: do you smoke or drink? This is an awful question for establishing a link. Possible alternate question: "do you like a massage when you're stressed?"]
What stresses you? Do crashing computers stress you? ["Yeah." Of course they do.]
Therefore, computers drive people to drink.
Nowhere have they established a causal link between the group that is stressed and the group that drinks, aside from what you'd expect from pretty random overlap. This has the smell of a bad study and results blown up to sound outrageous. The article reads like a bunch of observations about overlapping groups concluding with inflammatory statements about two of the groups which are only vaguely linked in the actual data.
Another analogy: IT problems lead to sex. Well, IT problems lead to stress, stressed people are more likely to get massages, and a nontrivial number of massage parlors offer sex services. IT problems lead to prostitution! Please give us more funding.
xkcd.com - a webcomic of mathematics, love, and language.
From one who works as a sys admin to one who evidently doesn't: every stupid fucking user under the fucking sun seems to work for MONTHS without making a backup of their files, and when one day their computer suddenly starts to "misbehave", they THEN want their data recovered. It's the same principle in both cases, the difference is like that between microevolution and macroevolution. This is why we take backups FOR you: because you're not going to do it for yourself until it's way too late.
How to use coral cache: http://slashdot.org.nyud.net:8090/~oscartheduck
Windows doesn't crash.
Applications crash. Drivers crash. Hardware crashes. Windows itself is quite stable. I had a 150-day uptime on the box I'm typing on right now (WinXP) until I had a power outage.
I've seen drivers crash, and I've seen flaky hardware cause problems, and I've seen combinations of the two become an issue. But Windows itself? Pretty damn near rock solid. It gets a nice reputation for instability because so many manufacturers put it on bottom-basement gimpy hardware, but I seriously doubt Linux would fare any better.
Linux might have better drivers, of course - as long as you don't ask it to do anything heavy in 3d.
Breaking Into the Industry - A development log about starting a game studio.
If you've ever had a 150 day uptime on a windows box, you're clearly not patching enough
What is with the fixation on trying to pin everything on MS? The things that stress average people out are not platform specific. Average people can barely SAVE A FILE or install a program. These are the stresses that would apply. No matter what platform you're on people will have a stressfull time doing anything.
Hey, I love Linux as much as the next guy. I've been using it on my desktop since 1996. Check out my Slashdot UID to see what I mean. Anyway, I just want to say that I've had ATI drivers - the proprietary closed source ones - crash my Linux box many times. The drivers can definitely lockup your PC no matter what OS you're running. You can even crash Linux with a simple one line bash script. I just want to say that the Windows crashing can't all be blamed on Windows. The drivers deserve some of the blame.
ayottesoftware.com
I also made my life a lot less stressful by switching from Windows to Mac.
and I had similar results by switching from a car to a motorbike.
this "computers cause stress" is the same inaccuracy as "computers affected by viruses" - it's not *computers*, it's just Windows.
Here is the real mac parody site.
http://www.happynowhere.net/mac_parody.php
Star Trek, there maybe hope.
ROFL. The parent is an excellent demonstration of the kind of **stress** that can result from posting to Slashdot whilst logged in.
;-)
Textbook. Another life destroyed.
The main problem here is that your wife is an idiot. She worked for a couple hours without saving her work... not even once during that time? Then she deserves to lose a couple hours' work. This is like complaining that your precious family heirlooms were stolen when you left them unattended in a busy location for a couple hours. I don't care if you're using Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, or even some high-availability OS that Never Crashes. Unless your apps were written by God Himself, they will fail on you. This is a fact that anyone who has used a computer for more than a few months should understand. And if you can't be bothered to press Ctrl-S or Command-S from time to time, I can't be bothered to feel sorry for you when you lose your work.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
Software crashes. A stable operating system doesn't mean that the applications that run on it will never crash. It does mean that, generally speaking, you can force-quit the application and reopen it without it hosing your entire system and forcing a computer restart.
MS-Word crashes on my mac nearly as often as it does on my PC, but the difference is that I can generally open it right back up and keep working on my Mac, whereas it takes a huge dump in memory on my PC and slows everything else down.
I would say that the people I support get stressed by their lack of understanding of typical software flow. Want to change a default behavior 90% of the time thats in Tools->Options. Though recent trends are leaning into Edit->Preferences. Hell just mouseover all the things at the top and look for something that says Options or Preferences under it. Just as long as (true story) they dont set both the font and background colors to white and masterfully save this as normal.dot How they figured out this feat of ingorance is beyond me. First, that is STUPID. Second, how the hell with that level of brain seepage did they manage to replace their normal.dot? Its almost like they knew what they were doing and just wanted some attention from someone...anyone...IT will do.
There's something to be said about MS lock-in due to vendor lock-in and the vendors are writing their apps...or I should say bought the company that wrote their apps.. and adding features that break 10 others. I shit you not, the latest version of one application we must use and pay gobs of cash / year for runs on a 16 bit subsystem and is a VB App as far as I can tell. It meshes a combination of Access 97 databases and a homebrew TCP widget that's about 5% reliable with a butt ugly UI. If the access databases haven't soiled themselves due to a lockup of the VB...likely related to an indefinate wait on the TCP widget...then the GD license file LIKE ANYONE WOULD STEAL THIS SHIT is corrupted and their data goes to who knows where without the slightest notice to users or admins. Atomicity for these guys has something to do with Hiroshima as far as they know. Something else thats cute? That server has reissued over 50 times the number of seats we have, not because we're thieves, because it doesn't even keep track and every crash and burn requires a reinstall. THAT CAUSES STRESS.
So don't shove this off on Windows, sure it's not the best OS, but without all of the applications and hack drivers it's really a good OS. I bet the above poster's wife forgot to mention the sudden boot of the system roughly coincided with her trying to print it on that brand new laser printer she plugged into the UPS.
Oh by the way--you're an asshole.
A huge reason linux doesn't crash as much as windows is its users are far more knowledgable about computing. Another huge reason is not 1% of the malware that exists for windows is on linux, if linux had to endure all of what windows does it would be just as faulty if not moreso. I have used a windows 2000 server for webserver/filesharing/printing and it hasn't crashed once in the last 4 years, my average uptime between reboots for patches is probably 2-6 weeks i'm guessing. Once windows doesn't have to reboot for patches (maybe with vista) uptime will be just as good.
Before I go to the detail of pointing out what a complete bastard you are, you need to get somebody to help you (because you're too fucking stupid to do this yourself) run the Emacs text editor on any Linux system. Have them create a file (with Ctrl-X Ctrl-F), name it, and begin typing away in it as fast as they possibly can without saving at all. While they are doing this, go around to the back of the machine and UNPLUG IT WITHOUT WARNING. Wait a few and plug it back in. When the machine has it's wits back and has auto-fscked the hard disk, go look for the file. You will find it by it's name with a '~' after it, showing the file as of the last auto-save. Open it up and look at it. You should have it up to within 100 characters or less of what was typed.
I know this works because I've had a power outage due to the house being hit by lightning in the middle of my work. An act of that God whom you say couldn't himself make a foolproof app (and whom was doubtless aiming at you), severe enough to weld two electrical cords into the sockets, fry my surge protector, blow up a transformer on my street and keep the neighborhood dark for half the day was not sufficient, when I brought my file back up, to cause one single character of my work to disappear.
Emacs was written in 1975. Doubtless, it's technology is still too cutting-edge to expect everywhere, right?
Nonsence. You cannot build an application and expect the user to do an administrative task that can be easily done by the program. The whole point of a computer for most people is to take over stupid tasks, and in my book, regular saving is one of them. The whole saving thing is a ridiculous leftover from the days when disk-access was much slower, floppies needed to be swapped, memory was too low for decent undo, and building an application was just wrapping some sort of interface around system calls. The lady you were calling an idiot because she did not use ctrl-s all the time was probably working with MSWord, a program that has had almost no interface improvements (except macros) since its first version for the macintosh, and that program is a great excemple of bad interface design. Sometimes it uses an autosave function every few minutes, but you cannot rely on that and you never know where these will be saved. I know there are settings for all those things and that you can find them in Options, Extra, Settings, Tools, Advanced and/or Miscellaneous, but the ordinary people who expect an "user-friendly" product might not be able to find them. Please do not call people you do not know idiots, just because they have not developed some habit that is a workaround for a bug in the software they use.
Lookit the name on the post of the guy you replied to the first time. Now lookit my name. I think we have found the root of your problem: you are unable to focus on any particular thing for a length of time, and hence this make you the ideal Ctrl-S presser...in fact, that's ALL you press! Yes, this explains a lot...