"it seems more like some independant robot story (which followed the standard Frankenstein plot) on which the marketing department decided to bolt the Asimov name because it sells better"
That being precisely what it was - a script called "Hardwired" which they then painted a thin gloss of Asimov over.
Their letter starts with "The Associacao Brasileira de Normas Tecnicas (ABNT), as a P member of ISO/IEC/JTC1/SC34, would like to present, to ISO/IEC/JTC1 and ISO/IEC/JTC1/SC34, this appeal for reconsideration of the ISO/IEC DIS 29500 final result." That would appear to be an... appeal.
Not that damn expensive - about £5 a bulb. Cheap enough that my house is entirely fitted with daylight-spectrum bulbs, just because they're so much nicer. (We have a few of the crappy-spectrum CFLs around, for the toilet and laundry and stuff where it matters less, just because they give them away now.)
Yeah. Personally I think they should stick with energy efficiency, taking the whole manufacturing and disposal cycle into account, and not mandate anything else about the technology.
(Until they come up with a bulb that runs on the tears of widows, orphans and kittens killed by Nazis with plutonium or something. Then they might want to narrow it down.)
Fluorescents work on a gas being turned into a plasma, so wouldn't qualify. LEDs are solid-state, but are presently very expensive as lightbulbs. Incandescents are fragile, but might be "solid state", but fail on the power requirement.
SAN FRANCISCO, Redmond, Friday (UnGadget) - With Vista(tm) just out the door, Microsoft is drawing up plans to deliver its followup, codenamed Windows 7, by the end of 2009^W2010. That would be a much faster turn-around than Vista, which shipped more than five years after Windows XP.
Vista's uptake has been stupendous, with copies flying off the shelves and midnight queues on release day turning into major street riots, police deploying water cannons and rubber bullets, to rival the release scenes for the PlayStation 3 and the Zune. It is expected to give a significant boost to the computer hardware industry, per the Mended Windows Theory of economics. But Windows 7 aims even higher.
"We have a radical vision for Windows 7," says Steve Sinofsky, corporate vice-marketer for development. "It's definitely the one to wait for. You should avoid buying any other operating system or even looking at them until you see Windows 7... Except Vista, of course. That's pretty good. But Windows 7 is just so amazing. Wow(tm)! It's the most fantastic thing ever. Incredible. Mac OS 10.4 can't possibly hold a candle to it."
So what will be the coolest new feature in Windows 7? According to Sinofsky, that's still being worked out. "We're going to look at a fundamental piece of enabling technology. Maybe it's hypervisors, or a new user interface paradigm for consumers, or rotating cubes like in Ubuntu, or WinFS, which is definitely due to ship with Windows NT 4 in 1994. Or whatever Apple puts in Mac OS 10.6, really. Hell, I dunno. What's really shiny?"
The much-derided Digital Rights Management system in Vista will be worked over. "We'll be including user-downloadable 'tilt bits,' which you can configure to your own liking. It'll require every user to supply a blood sample for DNA analysis, but of course that's only if you want to play *premium* content."
Independent bloggers Wiki Jelliffe, Patrick Durusau and Alex Brown were incontinent in their praise. "I am so excited about $NEXT_VERSION of Windows. It will surely go beyond just solving all of the problems with $CURRENT_VERSION, it will be an entirely new paradigm. Forget about security problems, that will be all fixed with $NEXT_VERSION. And they?ll finally be ridding themselves of $ANCIENT_LEGACY_STUFF. Also there will be $DATABASE_FILESYSTEM. It?ll be awesome! I wonder how $NEXT_VERSION will compare to $NEXT_NEXT_VERSION."
"It's too early for me to talk about it," added Sinofsky. "But over the next few months I think you're going to start hearing more and more."
It doesn't play Weebl and Bob videos properly yet, so I can't put it into place until it does or my kid's too old for Weebl and Bob (probably around sixty).
Not at all when people aren't buying. Hence the Eee, which Asus literally can't make fast enough.
Until there's a compelling new app that takes up stupid amounts of CPU, something that runs Firefox and a few other net apps is largely sufficient - see gOS and Splashtop.
In practical use, Wine is already a better Windows than Vista. Main app compatibility problem IME at present is.NET 2.0 (which now installs, but doesn't run very well if at all). Older crapware tends to work almost flawlessly.
STOCKHOLM, Sweden, Friday (UNN) - Russian hackers have accepted EUR800,000 in donations from customers of Nordea, Sweden's largest bank, after a sophisticated "phishing" campaign recruited customers into downloading a Trojan horse program that recorded their account login details.
The Russians had looked up the definition of "hacker" in the Jargon File and been inspired to leverage the creative power of open source Free Software. The first campaign took place in August 2006 and was detected a month later, having affected around 250 Nordea customers.
The emails claimed to be from the Nordea Open Trojan Foundation, telling recipients to install an anti-spam and donation tool. Their computers were then infected by the Trojan HaxDoor.RMS.w32, which installs itself in C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM32 and sends your passwords to its creators, but only after you have read through and accepted the GNU General Public License and checked the README file for known problems. The email also included full source code.
Swedish police traced the attacks to Russia by looking at the contact details, including address and phone number, included in the README. They have filed over 100 bugs on the creators' SourceForge project and joined the mailing lists on the grass-roots marketing and publicity site SpreadHaxDoor.com.
A Nordea spokesman said the attacks have "quietened down" after the initial influx last Autumn. "We are constantly looking at the security of our online banking and many different measures are taken. We are updating our systems behind the scenes. Many already run on enterprise Linux distributions, but we will be moving desktops to Linux as well for more efficient funds transfer with less reverse engineering required, and may recommend that our customers do the same."
The Trojan only affects computers running Windows. "For unsupported platforms, we have an 'honor system' which gives our details so you can send some money in," said a spokesman for the hacker group. "We hope this will help and encourage contributors interested in porting the Trojan to other operating environments."
The only worthwhile upgrade on most PCs is to max out the memory, absolutely as soon as you can afford to. PCs are still sold with excessive CPU and far too little RAM. Put in as absolutely much as the motherboard can take and the OS can use.
Might be a useful idea, might not. The SOS Children DVD of Wikipedia comes in two versions, one with just thumbnails and one with full images. One to suggest to them, and to the Wikipedia 1.0 crew - the main two groups working in terms of physical distributions.
The most important thing is not the technology - Ubuntu is just a Debian variant in technology. The important difference is that when a newbie finds something difficult, Debian says "RTFM" but Ubuntu regards that as a reportable bug.
Oh yeah. Note that I'm speaking as someone who works as a Solaris admin for a living. I'm very pleased that with Solaris 10, they realised the competition was Linux. Competition is good.
And the trouble is that it crippled Solaris performance on systems with less than four CPUs. Debian SPARC was famously much faster than Solaris 8 on single-processor machines running the exact same software.
REDMOND, Seattle, Wednesday (UNN Technoporn) -- Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer today announced a new era at the Seattle software company, announcing their entry six^Wnine^Wtwelve months hence into the cell phone market with the exciting new Zune Z-Phone, to finally get the company properly into the rapidly changing digital media landscape.
Ballmer, speaking to a group of trained-monkey analysts and cynical bloggers at the company headquarters today, unveiled mockups^Wprototypes of the Z-Phone, which combines the Zune music player (with wifi for "squirting" songs), a CDMA cell phone, a PDA, an eight gigabyte hard disk, a camera, a laser pointer and a bottle opener into one semi-portable device. It will also allow you to "squirt" music to and from your Windows Vista Service Pack 1^W2 Media Center computer.
The product underscores the shift the company has attempted to make in recent years from an office supply company to a consumer electronics darling as it aims not to become utterly obsolete in the digital future. "And even Linux fanboys admit our hardware is pretty nice," Ballmer said before the somewhat sullen and cynical crowd. "It's definitely the best music player we've ever made."
Ballmer called the Z-Phone a revolutionary device that will leapfrog current technology. He said the company expects to sell about 100 million of them next year. "Maybe two hundred million. This is so the coolest music player ever." Unlike the MP3 player market, which the iPod has dominated even with the entrance of Microsoft's Zune two months ago, the cell phone market is much more fragmented. "There is not one device that everyone buys," said completely independent analyst Rob Enderle, "but this fabulous device should trounce all comers. I've ordered three already in anticipation."
Weighing in at only 15 ounces (425 grams), with a 5-inch 640-by-480 pixel screen, the $498 (with three-year $80/month contract) Z-Phone, a rebadged version of the LG Smart Display from 2003 with new firmware, looks like a Classic Brown Zune (to come in mission, chocolate, corduroy and meconium) with a phone touchpad in place of its imitation scroll wheel. It runs Windows Mobile, Pocket Internet Explorer, Pocket Microsoft Office, Pocket Solitaire and Pocket Pool. MSN will supply e-mail, mapping, search and other Internet services to the Z-Phone. It also features an amazing 1.3 megapixel (300,000 pixels interpolated) black and white camera. Battery life is estimated at up to four hours in Microsoft tests.
To better work with its content partners and ensure that you, the user, can rest safe in the knowledge that the artists and their representatives have been paid properly for all their hard work, Microsoft has limited "squirtable" songs to encrypted WMA files purchased from the Zune Music Store, which can be listened to three times or within three days before automatically being deleted from both the Z-Phone and the Media Center computer. Songs may also be "squirted" between two Z-Phones (though not the original Zune) if both are registered with Microsoft as being linked to that installation of Media Center. Users are advised to purchase Microsoft Zune Secure Headphones ($129), which encrypt the signal between the Z-Phone and your ears, as playback quality is degraded on conventional "analog hole" earphones or when playing back unencrypted MP3 files. Phone calls may be made to or received from any number on the network carrier you bought the Z-Phone from, with only a 99-cent charge for humming a song to someone you call or are called by on the phone or ten cents per use of the camera, laser pointer or bottle opener. Microsoft will also pay $20 from each Z-Phone sold to Universal Music. In addition to the ability to "squirt" songs, the user may "squirt" his calls, which are stored on Microsoft Zune Live servers and cost $40 per month to access.
In other news, Ballmer said that Microsoft had reached over 600 music downloads since introducing its Zune Music Store, selling over 70 songs a month. To keep those numbers rising, Ba
Heh. My work laptop is a HP Compaq 6710b - 2.2GHz Core 2 Duo, 1GB memory. It dual-boots XP and Linux. Running the same software (Minefield for the most part), Ubuntu 8.04 (with Linux kernel 2.6.24) gets three hours, XPsp2 gets two. It's got a "Vista Basic" sticker on it... I shudder to think what the battery life would be like.
And by the way: PowerTop is fantastic stuff. It even suggests stuff to stop running to save battery.
Linux support for x86 servers is pretty much universal. Selling an x86 server without good Linux drivers for everything is commercial suicide. The big news here is the hardware manufacturers getting onto their suppliers for desktop parts to have Linux drivers.
YOUR DESK, Your office (Work) -- The chances of you finishing writing this article without getting interrupted or distracted are slim.
U.S. office workers get interrupted on the job as often as eleven times per hour, costing as much as $588 billion in paid time lost to open content production each year. The digital communications that were supposed to make working lives run smoothly - cc'ed email jokes, Internet porn and chatting up that hottie in the next office by IM - are actually preventing people from getting critical tasks like writing Uncyclopedia or Wikipedia accomplished.
The typical office worker is interrupted every three minutes by a phone call, e-mail, instant message or other distraction. These take up 2.1 hours of the average day - 28 percent - with workers taking an average of five minutes to recover from each interruption and return to their original gag-writing or witty picture editing, or querulous talk page arguments and arbitration cases about the correct format for subheadings on articles about disused former US highways. The problem is that it takes about eight uninterrupted minutes for our brains to get into a really creative state.
From online shopping at work to planning the office holiday party, workers are bombarded with distractions. "It's certainly a recipe for even less writing getting done," said a typically bone-idle and parasitical Uncyclopedia timewaster. "It's 'There's my BlackBerry. What time is it in Kittenhoeffer right now? How many phone calls did I get? Can I win the sales office spider solitaire competition?' It's a lot of productive timewasting turned to useless 'productivity.' People like the convenience and possibilities that this technology affords them when they want to use it, but that doesn't increase the average quality of Wikipedia or pump up teh funneh on Uncyc!"
Still another study found a group of workers interrupted by e-mail and telephones scored lower on an IQ test than a test group that had smoked marijuana. Unfortunately, EPA regulations still forbid bong hits at one's desk, even when trying to fix one's makefile.
There is a mini rebellion under way, however. Desperate for some quiet time to think, people are coming up with low-tech strategies to get away from all their technology. "If you don't have that sort of free time to dream and muse and mull, then you are not being creative, by definition. I find hiding in the server room with my laptop is a good place to work on witty tales of Britney Spears flashing her lunch at paparazzi."
The problem appears to be getting worse. A study by Wikia earlier this year found that 62 percent of British Uncyclopedians are addicted to their e-mail â" checking messages during meetings, after working hours and on vacation, hoping to get their funny take onto UnNews first.
"If I wanted to work," said the user, "hell. I'd get a job."
Slashdot Mirror
"it seems more like some independant robot story (which followed the standard Frankenstein plot) on which the marketing department decided to bolt the Asimov name because it sells better"
That being precisely what it was - a script called "Hardwired" which they then painted a thin gloss of Asimov over.
Their letter starts with "The Associacao Brasileira de Normas Tecnicas (ABNT), as a P member of ISO/IEC/JTC1/SC34, would like to present, to ISO/IEC/JTC1 and ISO/IEC/JTC1/SC34, this appeal for reconsideration of the ISO/IEC DIS 29500 final result." That would appear to be an ... appeal.
Not that damn expensive - about £5 a bulb. Cheap enough that my house is entirely fitted with daylight-spectrum bulbs, just because they're so much nicer. (We have a few of the crappy-spectrum CFLs around, for the toilet and laundry and stuff where it matters less, just because they give them away now.)
Yeah. Personally I think they should stick with energy efficiency, taking the whole manufacturing and disposal cycle into account, and not mandate anything else about the technology.
(Until they come up with a bulb that runs on the tears of widows, orphans and kittens killed by Nazis with plutonium or something. Then they might want to narrow it down.)
In progress.
Fluorescents work on a gas being turned into a plasma, so wouldn't qualify. LEDs are solid-state, but are presently very expensive as lightbulbs. Incandescents are fragile, but might be "solid state", but fail on the power requirement.
:-)
I originally wrote it for Uncyclopedia over a year ago. It's somewhat disappointing that every dot still applies.
SAN FRANCISCO, Redmond, Friday (UnGadget) - With Vista(tm) just out the door, Microsoft is drawing up plans to deliver its followup, codenamed Windows 7, by the end of 2009^W2010. That would be a much faster turn-around than Vista, which shipped more than five years after Windows XP.
... Except Vista, of course. That's pretty good. But Windows 7 is just so amazing. Wow(tm)! It's the most fantastic thing ever. Incredible. Mac OS 10.4 can't possibly hold a candle to it."
Vista's uptake has been stupendous, with copies flying off the shelves and midnight queues on release day turning into major street riots, police deploying water cannons and rubber bullets, to rival the release scenes for the PlayStation 3 and the Zune. It is expected to give a significant boost to the computer hardware industry, per the Mended Windows Theory of economics. But Windows 7 aims even higher.
"We have a radical vision for Windows 7," says Steve Sinofsky, corporate vice-marketer for development. "It's definitely the one to wait for. You should avoid buying any other operating system or even looking at them until you see Windows 7
So what will be the coolest new feature in Windows 7? According to Sinofsky, that's still being worked out. "We're going to look at a fundamental piece of enabling technology. Maybe it's hypervisors, or a new user interface paradigm for consumers, or rotating cubes like in Ubuntu, or WinFS, which is definitely due to ship with Windows NT 4 in 1994. Or whatever Apple puts in Mac OS 10.6, really. Hell, I dunno. What's really shiny?"
The much-derided Digital Rights Management system in Vista will be worked over. "We'll be including user-downloadable 'tilt bits,' which you can configure to your own liking. It'll require every user to supply a blood sample for DNA analysis, but of course that's only if you want to play *premium* content."
Independent bloggers Wiki Jelliffe, Patrick Durusau and Alex Brown were incontinent in their praise. "I am so excited about $NEXT_VERSION of Windows. It will surely go beyond just solving all of the problems with $CURRENT_VERSION, it will be an entirely new paradigm. Forget about security problems, that will be all fixed with $NEXT_VERSION. And they?ll finally be ridding themselves of $ANCIENT_LEGACY_STUFF. Also there will be $DATABASE_FILESYSTEM. It?ll be awesome! I wonder how $NEXT_VERSION will compare to $NEXT_NEXT_VERSION."
"It's too early for me to talk about it," added Sinofsky. "But over the next few months I think you're going to start hearing more and more."
It doesn't play Weebl and Bob videos properly yet, so I can't put it into place until it does or my kid's too old for Weebl and Bob (probably around sixty).
Not at all when people aren't buying. Hence the Eee, which Asus literally can't make fast enough.
Until there's a compelling new app that takes up stupid amounts of CPU, something that runs Firefox and a few other net apps is largely sufficient - see gOS and Splashtop.
In practical use, Wine is already a better Windows than Vista. Main app compatibility problem IME at present is .NET 2.0 (which now installs, but doesn't run very well if at all). Older crapware tends to work almost flawlessly.
STOCKHOLM, Sweden, Friday (UNN) - Russian hackers have accepted EUR800,000 in donations from customers of Nordea, Sweden's largest bank, after a sophisticated "phishing" campaign recruited customers into downloading a Trojan horse program that recorded their account login details.
The Russians had looked up the definition of "hacker" in the Jargon File and been inspired to leverage the creative power of open source Free Software. The first campaign took place in August 2006 and was detected a month later, having affected around 250 Nordea customers.
The emails claimed to be from the Nordea Open Trojan Foundation, telling recipients to install an anti-spam and donation tool. Their computers were then infected by the Trojan HaxDoor.RMS.w32, which installs itself in C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM32 and sends your passwords to its creators, but only after you have read through and accepted the GNU General Public License and checked the README file for known problems. The email also included full source code.
Swedish police traced the attacks to Russia by looking at the contact details, including address and phone number, included in the README. They have filed over 100 bugs on the creators' SourceForge project and joined the mailing lists on the grass-roots marketing and publicity site SpreadHaxDoor.com.
A Nordea spokesman said the attacks have "quietened down" after the initial influx last Autumn. "We are constantly looking at the security of our online banking and many different measures are taken. We are updating our systems behind the scenes. Many already run on enterprise Linux distributions, but we will be moving desktops to Linux as well for more efficient funds transfer with less reverse engineering required, and may recommend that our customers do the same."
The Trojan only affects computers running Windows. "For unsupported platforms, we have an 'honor system' which gives our details so you can send some money in," said a spokesman for the hacker group. "We hope this will help and encourage contributors interested in porting the Trojan to other operating environments."
The only worthwhile upgrade on most PCs is to max out the memory, absolutely as soon as you can afford to. PCs are still sold with excessive CPU and far too little RAM. Put in as absolutely much as the motherboard can take and the OS can use.
MS goes on and on about how many licenses they've sold.
But the question is: How many of these are actually in use?
The thing is, MS knows this number - it's the number of copies pinging the Windows Update servers.
Could journalists please start asking them this question? And keep asking until they answer.
"Chance favours the prepared mind" - Louis Pasteur.
Might be a useful idea, might not. The SOS Children DVD of Wikipedia comes in two versions, one with just thumbnails and one with full images. One to suggest to them, and to the Wikipedia 1.0 crew - the main two groups working in terms of physical distributions.
The most important thing is not the technology - Ubuntu is just a Debian variant in technology. The important difference is that when a newbie finds something difficult, Debian says "RTFM" but Ubuntu regards that as a reportable bug.
It'll be text, no pictures. The Wikipedia image dump is several hundred gig.
Oh yeah. Note that I'm speaking as someone who works as a Solaris admin for a living. I'm very pleased that with Solaris 10, they realised the competition was Linux. Competition is good.
And the trouble is that it crippled Solaris performance on systems with less than four CPUs. Debian SPARC was famously much faster than Solaris 8 on single-processor machines running the exact same software.
REDMOND, Seattle, Wednesday (UNN Technoporn) -- Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer today announced a new era at the Seattle software company, announcing their entry six^Wnine^Wtwelve months hence into the cell phone market with the exciting new Zune Z-Phone, to finally get the company properly into the rapidly changing digital media landscape.
Ballmer, speaking to a group of trained-monkey analysts and cynical bloggers at the company headquarters today, unveiled mockups^Wprototypes of the Z-Phone, which combines the Zune music player (with wifi for "squirting" songs), a CDMA cell phone, a PDA, an eight gigabyte hard disk, a camera, a laser pointer and a bottle opener into one semi-portable device. It will also allow you to "squirt" music to and from your Windows Vista Service Pack 1^W2 Media Center computer.
The product underscores the shift the company has attempted to make in recent years from an office supply company to a consumer electronics darling as it aims not to become utterly obsolete in the digital future. "And even Linux fanboys admit our hardware is pretty nice," Ballmer said before the somewhat sullen and cynical crowd. "It's definitely the best music player we've ever made."
Ballmer called the Z-Phone a revolutionary device that will leapfrog current technology. He said the company expects to sell about 100 million of them next year. "Maybe two hundred million. This is so the coolest music player ever." Unlike the MP3 player market, which the iPod has dominated even with the entrance of Microsoft's Zune two months ago, the cell phone market is much more fragmented. "There is not one device that everyone buys," said completely independent analyst Rob Enderle, "but this fabulous device should trounce all comers. I've ordered three already in anticipation."
Weighing in at only 15 ounces (425 grams), with a 5-inch 640-by-480 pixel screen, the $498 (with three-year $80/month contract) Z-Phone, a rebadged version of the LG Smart Display from 2003 with new firmware, looks like a Classic Brown Zune (to come in mission, chocolate, corduroy and meconium) with a phone touchpad in place of its imitation scroll wheel. It runs Windows Mobile, Pocket Internet Explorer, Pocket Microsoft Office, Pocket Solitaire and Pocket Pool. MSN will supply e-mail, mapping, search and other Internet services to the Z-Phone. It also features an amazing 1.3 megapixel (300,000 pixels interpolated) black and white camera. Battery life is estimated at up to four hours in Microsoft tests.
To better work with its content partners and ensure that you, the user, can rest safe in the knowledge that the artists and their representatives have been paid properly for all their hard work, Microsoft has limited "squirtable" songs to encrypted WMA files purchased from the Zune Music Store, which can be listened to three times or within three days before automatically being deleted from both the Z-Phone and the Media Center computer. Songs may also be "squirted" between two Z-Phones (though not the original Zune) if both are registered with Microsoft as being linked to that installation of Media Center. Users are advised to purchase Microsoft Zune Secure Headphones ($129), which encrypt the signal between the Z-Phone and your ears, as playback quality is degraded on conventional "analog hole" earphones or when playing back unencrypted MP3 files. Phone calls may be made to or received from any number on the network carrier you bought the Z-Phone from, with only a 99-cent charge for humming a song to someone you call or are called by on the phone or ten cents per use of the camera, laser pointer or bottle opener. Microsoft will also pay $20 from each Z-Phone sold to Universal Music. In addition to the ability to "squirt" songs, the user may "squirt" his calls, which are stored on Microsoft Zune Live servers and cost $40 per month to access.
In other news, Ballmer said that Microsoft had reached over 600 music downloads since introducing its Zune Music Store, selling over 70 songs a month. To keep those numbers rising, Ba
Heh. My work laptop is a HP Compaq 6710b - 2.2GHz Core 2 Duo, 1GB memory. It dual-boots XP and Linux. Running the same software (Minefield for the most part), Ubuntu 8.04 (with Linux kernel 2.6.24) gets three hours, XPsp2 gets two. It's got a "Vista Basic" sticker on it ... I shudder to think what the battery life would be like.
And by the way: PowerTop is fantastic stuff. It even suggests stuff to stop running to save battery.
Valleywag are fundamentally ad-banner trolls who will blatantly lie to draw in hits. Well done Slashdot!
Linux support for x86 servers is pretty much universal. Selling an x86 server without good Linux drivers for everything is commercial suicide. The big news here is the hardware manufacturers getting onto their suppliers for desktop parts to have Linux drivers.
YOUR DESK, Your office (Work) -- The chances of you finishing writing this article without getting interrupted or distracted are slim.
U.S. office workers get interrupted on the job as often as eleven times per hour, costing as much as $588 billion in paid time lost to open content production each year. The digital communications that were supposed to make working lives run smoothly - cc'ed email jokes, Internet porn and chatting up that hottie in the next office by IM - are actually preventing people from getting critical tasks like writing Uncyclopedia or Wikipedia accomplished.
The typical office worker is interrupted every three minutes by a phone call, e-mail, instant message or other distraction. These take up 2.1 hours of the average day - 28 percent - with workers taking an average of five minutes to recover from each interruption and return to their original gag-writing or witty picture editing, or querulous talk page arguments and arbitration cases about the correct format for subheadings on articles about disused former US highways. The problem is that it takes about eight uninterrupted minutes for our brains to get into a really creative state.
From online shopping at work to planning the office holiday party, workers are bombarded with distractions. "It's certainly a recipe for even less writing getting done," said a typically bone-idle and parasitical Uncyclopedia timewaster. "It's 'There's my BlackBerry. What time is it in Kittenhoeffer right now? How many phone calls did I get? Can I win the sales office spider solitaire competition?' It's a lot of productive timewasting turned to useless 'productivity.' People like the convenience and possibilities that this technology affords them when they want to use it, but that doesn't increase the average quality of Wikipedia or pump up teh funneh on Uncyc!"
Still another study found a group of workers interrupted by e-mail and telephones scored lower on an IQ test than a test group that had smoked marijuana. Unfortunately, EPA regulations still forbid bong hits at one's desk, even when trying to fix one's makefile.
There is a mini rebellion under way, however. Desperate for some quiet time to think, people are coming up with low-tech strategies to get away from all their technology. "If you don't have that sort of free time to dream and muse and mull, then you are not being creative, by definition. I find hiding in the server room with my laptop is a good place to work on witty tales of Britney Spears flashing her lunch at paparazzi."
The problem appears to be getting worse. A study by Wikia earlier this year found that 62 percent of British Uncyclopedians are addicted to their e-mail â" checking messages during meetings, after working hours and on vacation, hoping to get their funny take onto UnNews first.
"If I wanted to work," said the user, "hell. I'd get a job."