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."
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?
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.
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.
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.
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