Their study says there is no evidence for the variability due to gender but their variance figures of "men/women" were above unity for most. The variance did not average out to 1.
The gap is certainly influenced by culture, but more boys and men will stubbornly persist in doing stuff despite people around them saying they shouldn't. That's why more men are in jail, more men do "Time Cube" stuff and more men are top in their fields. Of course you'd probably have to be insane/retarded to be in some of those fields in the first place, no surprise if some guy is number one in a field that has only one person doing it - that crazy idiot himself. Once in a while enough other crazy idiots do it and it becomes a sport or extreme sport or a new field of research.
That said, more women then men are doing rhythmic gymnastics (perhaps its cultural too but still more men than women seem to have managed to get their names linked to its beginnings).
The smart women in the US realized it's not a good career path for them in the USA? Might get outsourced or there are better paying jobs with better working conditions for them?
As for biological factors, It seems to me the distribution curve for men is flatter than for women in most things. You get more insane/evil/retarded men than women. You also get more "ultra genius" men than women.
And there are more men trying to excel in stuff that's at best a "peacock tail" when you look at it from an evolutionary perspective. Some of these "peacock tails" end up eventually being useful (indirectly - becomes popular, or directly - actual usefulness). But some may never be useful.
In many areas, just because the average woman is better than the average man doesn't matter much, because those areas are "star areas" where what's important is the top 100 or even top 10, not the average. Hardly anyone cares if you're the 1000th fastest runner in the world. Nor do they care if you're the 1000th person to discover the theory of relativity independently (unless you're a 5 year old, but then the 1000th 5 year old to do it may not get noticed either;) )... That's why in some sports they have men and women compete separately otherwise it'll mainly be men only (too few women may see the point of spending their life to excel in snooker/etc).
If you know you will be far from the best, you'd be better off picking a career where you don't have to be the top 100. But most men have more self-confidence than women ( even if they are wrong;) ) so more men will think they have a chance. Once in a while it turns out they are right;).
PHP may not be as fucked up, but at least the above languages were actually jokes. When a language has stuff like register_globals, "magic quotes", addslashes and mysql_real_escape_string, you should not use it for anything serious.
Yes they've deprecated some of the crap but they can't remove all the crap because lots of existing PHP crap apps depends on that crap. They were actually PHP-isms that made PHP PHP.
If you're starting something new, don't use PHP - if you want a PHP minus all the crap you might as well use some other language.
Heh I've written a DHCP server in perl, and a windows "hotkey" utility in python (amongst other stuff:) ).
That said, I dislike php. It makes doing really wrong things easier and right things hard. It's a bad sign when the PHP developers/creators actually released stuff like "magic quotes" and addslashes. Then there's the mysql_real_escape_string stuff. When you see stuff like this you should know how crappy PHP is.
Users who don't bother, and just stick to what's immediately apparent, I consider "newbie/novice" level.
Advanced users will also know how to configure the Desktop UI so that they are able to do many things with it faster than the newbie/novice users can (it may take some pre-setup time to configure dock/taskbar, start menu, etc, but that is just one-time). 3rd party utilities don't count for this (otherwise you could just install a new desktop environment;) ).
Some of that no longer works on Windows 7. So on windows 7 I take longer to do stuff that I used to be able to do in a split second. OS X feels even more crippling and primitive (if you ignore the looks factor).
As for winning side, on the contrary. I think everyone loses if they no longer are able to be augmented as much. From what I see you it is not impossible to have a Desktop UI that caters for novices, and still provides short-cuts for those who want further augmentation.
Well I can't work around OS X's deficiencies (except maybe with 3rd party utilities?). Being forced to take extra steps to do stuff, feels like I'm being crippled by the OS.
From what I see it sure seems the Desktop UI bunch aren't really improving things much for either of us.
I don't need to constantly switch between them. I just don't see the point of closing a window/app, only to have to reopen it later. As long as the computer has enough free memory, I can just leave it open, and click on it when I need to. If you don't keep opening and closing stuff, the windows are exactly where you left them, even days later and normally in good usable condition;).
I have my windows maximized, so the "clutter" is only on the double-height taskbar. And that doesn't bother me, any more than the rest of the office that appears around the screen, or the 100+ keys on the keyboard near the screen. Do you consider those clutter too?
I know I'm in the minority, but what I said still applies to others too. There is no need to _force_ an additional click. You can _keep_ the additional click for newbies, but add shortcuts - like winkey+number and other stuff so that those who want shortcuts can have them. As I said, there's evidence that significant numbers of "normal" people can learn to go way beyond "newbieness", "normal competence" and into "skilled". Of course only a few become masters (I'm far from one of them).
So OS X definitely takes at least one extra step? I don't count that as an improvement. "Swipe, wait, move to click on icon", or "move to corner, wait, move to click icon" vs "move to click icon".
I doubleheight the taskbar at the bottom because as you said Windows 7 does not do vertical taskbars well if you have many taskbuttons.
By the way, maybe winkey+[number] might be helpful for you. It's not so helpful for me, since I often have multiple windows open for each app (emails, IM, browser, IDE, ssh etc). So it's either direct mouse clicking, or if I really want rapid access amongst a bunch of windows then I use a utility I wrote ( http://sourceforge.net/projects/linkkey/ ).
I find win-tab useless as well. It looks nice and works if you have only a few windows open. But if you only have a few windows open, you don't really need that much help from the GUI do you?
Car analogy: a Desktop UI that only works well for the case where you are only switching between two or three windows is as good as a car that only travels as fast and as far as an experienced and fit person can walk. That it looks cool while doing so, does not impress me from a technological or practical point of view. The reason why I want a car is so that I can reasonably quickly, comfortably and safely travel 30+ times the distance I can walk.
OS analogy: an OS that only manages 3 processes well is a crappy OS. With modern hardware, you'd want an OS that can handle hundreds or even thousands of processes well.
Anyone can design a UI that allows a user to manage 1-3 windows/items. But experienced users don't need much help to handle 1-3 windows.
Car analogy: a Desktop UI that only works well for the case where you are only switching between two or three windows is as good as a car that only travels as fast and as far as an experienced and fit person can walk. The feature that it looks cool while doing so, does not impress me from a technological or practical point of view. The reason why I want a car is so that for the 10% case, I can reasonably quickly, comfortably and safely travel 30+ times the distance I can walk.
I do run most apps full screen/maximized but I don't see how just a single swipe will quickly take me to any specific window out of 30+ windows. At work I often have 30+ task buttons on my task bar (I've already mentioned the reasons why I do that - it'll be rather stupid if a modern desktop computer can't handle more windows than I can).
80% of the time you will be using apps maximized, and 80% of the time you will only be switching between two of them, and 80% of the time you will only have one window from each app open.
On MS Windows most people can learn to quickly switch between two windows in one step. It's called alt-tab. If a more modern and recent Desktop GUI can't help more/better than that it's disappointing.
With Windows 7, you can actually do winkey+[number] and it will raise a window of application #[number]. So it can be fast with multiple apps, IF you only have one window per app...
But that's not always the case. Some time back, at a project, I had to switch amongst 4 or more windows. It was something like: compare two documents by bit, sometimes refer to one or more references, then update/add stuff to another document, then repeat.
Yes it would help if I had many big monitors. Unfortunately I only had a laptop with one screen. Fortunately I had written a program that allowed me to map alt+[number] to different windows ( http://sourceforge.net/projects/linkkey/ ). So I could do alt+1, alt+2, etc.
But I found it silly that modern Desktop GUIs didn't help me whereas there was already similar concept on stuff like GNU Screen and the linux/*BSD text consoles.
GUI designers focus on helping newbies which is good, but most newbies can learn to go beyond that. Most people can go beyond crawling and learn how to stand, walk, run, and drive a car.
Google may have the largest networks, but I doubt they have the most complex networks. Otherwise they wouldn't be able to "scale out" as easily and quickly. I suspect most Google data centers are very similar in network topology and technologies used.
Old large organizations are the ones with weird complex networks which are not self-similar and use different network technologies. x.25 over tcp/ip, frame relay, netbios over tcp/ip, SDLC, token ring, FDDI, stuff that's still using Novell 802.3 ethernet frames ( http://support.novell.com/techcenter/articles/ana19930905.html ). If you're unlucky you'd need network equipment that can handle both the old stuff and ipv6 properly. The networks may not be connected to each other, but what if the old expensive equipment handling the "legacy network stuff" are also handling some IPv4 stuff?
Unless forced to I wouldn't bother upgrading an old bank to IPv6. Users inside can't connect directly to the outside world, unless they go through a proxy? That's a feature not a bug;).
You cannot do this in a star because the energies of the particles are too high so their random motion will rapidly destroy any information stored./quote.
1) Despite that there still appear to be patterns in stars 2) Does information have to be stored in particles? Why would information necessarily be destroyed?
Maybe in certain twin star configurations there would be greater stability in some parts, and the lifeforms there would be wondering "is our star system special?":).
As for OS X, say you have multiple windows open each in multiple different apps. How many steps does it take to switch from a window in one app to another specific window of another app? How do you do it in one step?
With Windows in "classic mode" and ungrouped taskbar buttons, it takes _one_ click and there doesn't have to be any animation at all, you're just waiting for as long as it takes for the computer to draw the newly raised window, nothing more than that. If you have a double-height taskbar, it still takes one click even if you have 30+ windows open (emails, IM, browser search results, references/documentation, ssh/remote sessions, editor/IDE, etc, it all adds up, I find it slower to keep closing and reopening regularly used windows/apps than to leave them open and just click on the window I want to raise).
I on the other hand can't do my job without computers - not so easy to VPN in to a remote server to do stuff without a computer. The tech has gone beyond manual "pulse dialling" by tapping the phone hook, and then whistling the modem tones:). Of course without computers, there wouldn't be servers at the other end to VPN to either...;)
Seriously though, a lot of manual work has been replaced by computers. So there are actually a lot fewer people doing those jobs. When the computers stop working, those few people might be able to do some stuff, but 1) they can't handle the same amount of transactions and 2) When the computer systems come back online, it's going to take yet more work to key everything in, and depending on how things work, you might have to wait till everything is keyed in, before you can proceed to handle new transactions with the computer system (this might be true for stuff like banks). So it's often just better for staff to wait till the computer system is back up.
Anyway, I wonder what sort of virus it was, or it was just someone's excuse for some SNAFU/FUBAR;).
In my opinion it doesn't have to be the same way people are used to, as long as it can be much faster.
I'm happy that Apple, Microsoft etc are taking care of the "newbie" users - that's actually a good idea.
BUT in my opinion they should also provide short-cuts so that skilled/trained users will be able to do things much faster.
Not everyone remains a "newbie". Being skilled at complex stuff is not beyond normal people. Many gamers can do many actions-per-second. And look at some of the experienced "old-school" supermarket cashiers (who can identify products and enter the correct product codes faster than low-end barcode readers can read a barcode) or those using those "dumb terminals" - using all the short cut keys to jump to various fields/pages to enter the data or search for stuff quickly.
But what I see nowadays are UIs where you have click/swipe, _WAIT_ for fancy animation, click again, _WAIT_ for fancy animation, then only finally get what you want. That gets old if you already know exactly what you want.
Any non-idiot can create a UI that allows a user to manage 1-3 windows/items. Give me a UI that allows a normal user to manage magnitudes more than 3 items/tasks easily. One that actually _augments_ humans, rather than gets in their way.
All those fancy animations and pauses are like those cut-scenes in a game. They are very nice the first few times round, but most skilled/experienced gamers skip them in order to get to the real stuff they want to do.
In most games, if a weapon/skill that has a long fancy animation before it actually does stuff, it's considered a disadvantage of the weapon/skill by experienced gamers. The same applies for Desktop GUIs.
A Desktop GUI is crap if even GNU Screen is faster at managing "windows" in the hands of users who are experienced+skilled in both.
FWIW I do have Win2K8R2 servers in production, and don't have a linux boot image on my USB key;) But I don't apply for Windows sysadmin jobs;).
There are some things where you just have to use Windows for (e.g. MS Exchange). Windows servers can stay up for quite a while. The biggest problem from what I see is Microsoft stuff typically has terrible logging - useless error messages. You often see stuff like "There is an error of type X" but nothing really useful.
Example: "Object reference not set to an instance of an object". You don't know "who" and "what". Contrast to perl's error messages: "Use of uninitialized value $var in string ne at del.pl line 10".
Whatever it is, the trouble is most current workplaces don't have chairs where you can recline to 135 degrees in an actual scientifically proven ergonomic position while working on your PC for hours. They recline but not that far back.
And even if your office chair goes that far back there's usually no proper leg support, and most cubicle designs may prevent you from getting close to your desk if your legs are supported and extended. So it's still crap.
I'm sure there were people who knew what are good positions - many hospital beds certainly allow reclining in all sorts of angles, but my point is the furniture industry is crap when compared to the hard drive industry. And yet they often can charge kilobux for their crap.
You can run firefox using different user accounts, and set up the user account privileges accordingly. You can have one for banking, one for slashdot and one for youtube or whatever. That way the main desktop user and its data doesn't easily get pwned just because the browser does. You can't do the same thing easily for Chrome or IE anymore.
Where multiprocess really helps is with memory use. Right now if some page or plugin or add-on leaks, with firefox you have to close the entire browser - all tabs, all pages everything, in order to return the memory to the operating system.
With chrome, you just close the offending tab, or at most the browser window, and the memory is freed. You don't even lose the session info - you can actually reopen the page again without having to re-login.
So even though firefox may actually use less memory and leak less, in practice because of its architecture the leaks cause more problems.
Slashdot Mirror
Their study says there is no evidence for the variability due to gender but their variance figures of "men/women" were above unity for most. The variance did not average out to 1.
The gap is certainly influenced by culture, but more boys and men will stubbornly persist in doing stuff despite people around them saying they shouldn't. That's why more men are in jail, more men do "Time Cube" stuff and more men are top in their fields. Of course you'd probably have to be insane/retarded to be in some of those fields in the first place, no surprise if some guy is number one in a field that has only one person doing it - that crazy idiot himself. Once in a while enough other crazy idiots do it and it becomes a sport or extreme sport or a new field of research.
That said, more women then men are doing rhythmic gymnastics (perhaps its cultural too but still more men than women seem to have managed to get their names linked to its beginnings).
BTW one of the women who was competitive with the top men snooker players moved to something more profitable: http://www.guardian.co.uk/sport/2009/nov/08/allison-fisher-pool-interview
Go figure ;).
The smart women in the US realized it's not a good career path for them in the USA? Might get outsourced or there are better paying jobs with better working conditions for them?
;) )... That's why in some sports they have men and women compete separately otherwise it'll mainly be men only (too few women may see the point of spending their life to excel in snooker/etc).
;) ) so more men will think they have a chance. Once in a while it turns out they are right ;).
As for biological factors, It seems to me the distribution curve for men is flatter than for women in most things. You get more insane/evil/retarded men than women. You also get more "ultra genius" men than women.
And there are more men trying to excel in stuff that's at best a "peacock tail" when you look at it from an evolutionary perspective. Some of these "peacock tails" end up eventually being useful (indirectly - becomes popular, or directly - actual usefulness). But some may never be useful.
In many areas, just because the average woman is better than the average man doesn't matter much, because those areas are "star areas" where what's important is the top 100 or even top 10, not the average. Hardly anyone cares if you're the 1000th fastest runner in the world. Nor do they care if you're the 1000th person to discover the theory of relativity independently (unless you're a 5 year old, but then the 1000th 5 year old to do it may not get noticed either
If you know you will be far from the best, you'd be better off picking a career where you don't have to be the top 100. But most men have more self-confidence than women ( even if they are wrong
Programming languages don't create programming messes. People do.
People can create programming languages that make programming messes easier.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/INTERCAL
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malbolge
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Befunge
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brainfuck
PHP may not be as fucked up, but at least the above languages were actually jokes. When a language has stuff like register_globals, "magic quotes", addslashes and mysql_real_escape_string, you should not use it for anything serious.
Yes they've deprecated some of the crap but they can't remove all the crap because lots of existing PHP crap apps depends on that crap. They were actually PHP-isms that made PHP PHP.
If you're starting something new, don't use PHP - if you want a PHP minus all the crap you might as well use some other language.
Heh I've written a DHCP server in perl, and a windows "hotkey" utility in python (amongst other stuff :) ).
That said, I dislike php. It makes doing really wrong things easier and right things hard. It's a bad sign when the PHP developers/creators actually released stuff like "magic quotes" and addslashes. Then there's the mysql_real_escape_string stuff. When you see stuff like this you should know how crappy PHP is.
I'm sure there are key commands in most shells, it's just that they're not apparent and nobody takes the time to learn them
Further, I still think your framing of the argument as "newbie" vs "advanced user", while well-intentioned, is misguided and inadvertently divisive.
As far as I'm concerned "advanced users" are those who look stuff like this up in order to figure out how the OS can best _augment_ them:
http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows7/Keyboard-shortcuts
http://support.apple.com/kb/ht1343
http://www.apple.com/macosx/whats-new/gestures.html
Users who don't bother, and just stick to what's immediately apparent, I consider "newbie/novice" level.
Advanced users will also know how to configure the Desktop UI so that they are able to do many things with it faster than the newbie/novice users can (it may take some pre-setup time to configure dock/taskbar, start menu, etc, but that is just one-time). 3rd party utilities don't count for this (otherwise you could just install a new desktop environment ;) ).
For example, in 9x/2K/XP(classic mode) I do stuff like this: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=175866&cid=14627608
Some of that no longer works on Windows 7. So on windows 7 I take longer to do stuff that I used to be able to do in a split second. OS X feels even more crippling and primitive (if you ignore the looks factor).
As for winning side, on the contrary. I think everyone loses if they no longer are able to be augmented as much. From what I see you it is not impossible to have a Desktop UI that caters for novices, and still provides short-cuts for those who want further augmentation.
Well I can't work around OS X's deficiencies (except maybe with 3rd party utilities?). Being forced to take extra steps to do stuff, feels like I'm being crippled by the OS.
From what I see it sure seems the Desktop UI bunch aren't really improving things much for either of us.
Many babies cry a lot, sleep for a while, wake up, cry a lot. Repeat...
;).
So the OP might sleep like those babies
I think you'll agree that the Win7 default of grouping tasks is also a 2-step operation
Yes, but you still have the option to ungroup so it behaves like Windows 95/2000. How can you speed it up if you're using OS X?
After more than a decade, it's quite disappointing to see so few improvements for "experienced users", despite the billions Microsoft has spent.
The smart ones go work in the fancy financial industry.
That's the way to legally cheat, consistently make a profit, and not have your bones broken.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/24/business/24trading.html?_r=1
http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2009/07/24/business/0724-webBIZ-trading.ready.html
And the betting limits are really high.
I don't need to constantly switch between them. I just don't see the point of closing a window/app, only to have to reopen it later. As long as the computer has enough free memory, I can just leave it open, and click on it when I need to. If you don't keep opening and closing stuff, the windows are exactly where you left them, even days later and normally in good usable condition ;).
I have my windows maximized, so the "clutter" is only on the double-height taskbar. And that doesn't bother me, any more than the rest of the office that appears around the screen, or the 100+ keys on the keyboard near the screen. Do you consider those clutter too?
I know I'm in the minority, but what I said still applies to others too. There is no need to _force_ an additional click. You can _keep_ the additional click for newbies, but add shortcuts - like winkey+number and other stuff so that those who want shortcuts can have them. As I said, there's evidence that significant numbers of "normal" people can learn to go way beyond "newbieness", "normal competence" and into "skilled". Of course only a few become masters (I'm far from one of them).
Build a suitable desktop UI and we might see some really impressive desktop UI mastery. Just like we see in games:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jwC544Z37qo#t=3m00s
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=htkTn8QsjwU#t=2m31s
So OS X definitely takes at least one extra step? I don't count that as an improvement. "Swipe, wait, move to click on icon", or "move to corner, wait, move to click icon" vs "move to click icon".
I doubleheight the taskbar at the bottom because as you said Windows 7 does not do vertical taskbars well if you have many taskbuttons.
By the way, maybe winkey+[number] might be helpful for you. It's not so helpful for me, since I often have multiple windows open for each app (emails, IM, browser, IDE, ssh etc). So it's either direct mouse clicking, or if I really want rapid access amongst a bunch of windows then I use a utility I wrote ( http://sourceforge.net/projects/linkkey/ ).
I find win-tab useless as well. It looks nice and works if you have only a few windows open. But if you only have a few windows open, you don't really need that much help from the GUI do you?
Car analogy: a Desktop UI that only works well for the case where you are only switching between two or three windows is as good as a car that only travels as fast and as far as an experienced and fit person can walk. That it looks cool while doing so, does not impress me from a technological or practical point of view. The reason why I want a car is so that I can reasonably quickly, comfortably and safely travel 30+ times the distance I can walk.
OS analogy: an OS that only manages 3 processes well is a crappy OS. With modern hardware, you'd want an OS that can handle hundreds or even thousands of processes well.
Anyone can design a UI that allows a user to manage 1-3 windows/items. But experienced users don't need much help to handle 1-3 windows.
Car analogy: a Desktop UI that only works well for the case where you are only switching between two or three windows is as good as a car that only travels as fast and as far as an experienced and fit person can walk. The feature that it looks cool while doing so, does not impress me from a technological or practical point of view. The reason why I want a car is so that for the 10% case, I can reasonably quickly, comfortably and safely travel 30+ times the distance I can walk.
I do run most apps full screen/maximized but I don't see how just a single swipe will quickly take me to any specific window out of 30+ windows. At work I often have 30+ task buttons on my task bar (I've already mentioned the reasons why I do that - it'll be rather stupid if a modern desktop computer can't handle more windows than I can).
80% of the time you will be using apps maximized, and 80% of the time you will only be switching between two of them, and 80% of the time you will only have one window from each app open.
On MS Windows most people can learn to quickly switch between two windows in one step. It's called alt-tab. If a more modern and recent Desktop GUI can't help more/better than that it's disappointing.
With Windows 7, you can actually do winkey+[number] and it will raise a window of application #[number]. So it can be fast with multiple apps, IF you only have one window per app...
But that's not always the case. Some time back, at a project, I had to switch amongst 4 or more windows. It was something like: compare two documents by bit, sometimes refer to one or more references, then update/add stuff to another document, then repeat.
Yes it would help if I had many big monitors. Unfortunately I only had a laptop with one screen. Fortunately I had written a program that allowed me to map alt+[number] to different windows ( http://sourceforge.net/projects/linkkey/ ). So I could do alt+1, alt+2, etc.
But I found it silly that modern Desktop GUIs didn't help me whereas there was already similar concept on stuff like GNU Screen and the linux/*BSD text consoles.
GUI designers focus on helping newbies which is good, but most newbies can learn to go beyond that. Most people can go beyond crawling and learn how to stand, walk, run, and drive a car.
Google may have the largest networks, but I doubt they have the most complex networks. Otherwise they wouldn't be able to "scale out" as easily and quickly. I suspect most Google data centers are very similar in network topology and technologies used.
Old large organizations are the ones with weird complex networks which are not self-similar and use different network technologies. x.25 over tcp/ip, frame relay, netbios over tcp/ip, SDLC, token ring, FDDI, stuff that's still using Novell 802.3 ethernet frames ( http://support.novell.com/techcenter/articles/ana19930905.html ). If you're unlucky you'd need network equipment that can handle both the old stuff and ipv6 properly. The networks may not be connected to each other, but what if the old expensive equipment handling the "legacy network stuff" are also handling some IPv4 stuff?
Unless forced to I wouldn't bother upgrading an old bank to IPv6. Users inside can't connect directly to the outside world, unless they go through a proxy? That's a feature not a bug ;).
You cannot do this in a star because the energies of the particles are too high so their random motion will rapidly destroy any information stored./quote.
1) Despite that there still appear to be patterns in stars
2) Does information have to be stored in particles? Why would information necessarily be destroyed?
Maybe in certain twin star configurations there would be greater stability in some parts, and the lifeforms there would be wondering "is our star system special?" :).
Because the core of a star is where matter is broken down into bits
That's why I said:
even if it is some sort of self-organizing pattern of plasma and electromagnetic fields?
Assassin's Creed is the game which is infamous for taking 1 minute to quit (other than alt-f4 or taskmgr kill) :
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gwOvuY0UbFM
As for OS X, say you have multiple windows open each in multiple different apps. How many steps does it take to switch from a window in one app to another specific window of another app? How do you do it in one step?
With Windows in "classic mode" and ungrouped taskbar buttons, it takes _one_ click and there doesn't have to be any animation at all, you're just waiting for as long as it takes for the computer to draw the newly raised window, nothing more than that. If you have a double-height taskbar, it still takes one click even if you have 30+ windows open (emails, IM, browser search results, references/documentation, ssh/remote sessions, editor/IDE, etc, it all adds up, I find it slower to keep closing and reopening regularly used windows/apps than to leave them open and just click on the window I want to raise).
I on the other hand can't do my job without computers - not so easy to VPN in to a remote server to do stuff without a computer. The tech has gone beyond manual "pulse dialling" by tapping the phone hook, and then whistling the modem tones :). Of course without computers, there wouldn't be servers at the other end to VPN to either... ;)
;).
Seriously though, a lot of manual work has been replaced by computers. So there are actually a lot fewer people doing those jobs. When the computers stop working, those few people might be able to do some stuff, but 1) they can't handle the same amount of transactions and 2) When the computer systems come back online, it's going to take yet more work to key everything in, and depending on how things work, you might have to wait till everything is keyed in, before you can proceed to handle new transactions with the computer system (this might be true for stuff like banks). So it's often just better for staff to wait till the computer system is back up.
Anyway, I wonder what sort of virus it was, or it was just someone's excuse for some SNAFU/FUBAR
In my opinion it doesn't have to be the same way people are used to, as long as it can be much faster.
I'm happy that Apple, Microsoft etc are taking care of the "newbie" users - that's actually a good idea.
BUT in my opinion they should also provide short-cuts so that skilled/trained users will be able to do things much faster.
Not everyone remains a "newbie". Being skilled at complex stuff is not beyond normal people. Many gamers can do many actions-per-second. And look at some of the experienced "old-school" supermarket cashiers (who can identify products and enter the correct product codes faster than low-end barcode readers can read a barcode) or those using those "dumb terminals" - using all the short cut keys to jump to various fields/pages to enter the data or search for stuff quickly.
But what I see nowadays are UIs where you have click/swipe, _WAIT_ for fancy animation, click again, _WAIT_ for fancy animation, then only finally get what you want. That gets old if you already know exactly what you want.
Any non-idiot can create a UI that allows a user to manage 1-3 windows/items. Give me a UI that allows a normal user to manage magnitudes more than 3 items/tasks easily. One that actually _augments_ humans, rather than gets in their way.
All those fancy animations and pauses are like those cut-scenes in a game. They are very nice the first few times round, but most skilled/experienced gamers skip them in order to get to the real stuff they want to do.
In most games, if a weapon/skill that has a long fancy animation before it actually does stuff, it's considered a disadvantage of the weapon/skill by experienced gamers. The same applies for Desktop GUIs.
A Desktop GUI is crap if even GNU Screen is faster at managing "windows" in the hands of users who are experienced+skilled in both.
The last I checked on Windows some years ago, chrome gets confused, so stuff doesn't work properly.
:).
Maybe they've changed things already. I might try again one day. Meanwhile you can give it a shot if you want and let me know
FWIW I do have Win2K8R2 servers in production, and don't have a linux boot image on my USB key ;) But I don't apply for Windows sysadmin jobs ;).
There are some things where you just have to use Windows for (e.g. MS Exchange). Windows servers can stay up for quite a while. The biggest problem from what I see is Microsoft stuff typically has terrible logging - useless error messages. You often see stuff like "There is an error of type X" but nothing really useful.
Example: "Object reference not set to an instance of an object". You don't know "who" and "what". Contrast to perl's error messages: "Use of uninitialized value $var in string ne at del.pl line 10".
Reclining slightly isn't the same as 135 degrees.I also remember in the 90s there were "ergonomic" stools (something like: http://www.office-furnitures.net/2011/05/16/ergonomic-stools/ ), and other ridiculous furniture ideas.
Whatever it is, the trouble is most current workplaces don't have chairs where you can recline to 135 degrees in an actual scientifically proven ergonomic position while working on your PC for hours. They recline but not that far back.
And even if your office chair goes that far back there's usually no proper leg support, and most cubicle designs may prevent you from getting close to your desk if your legs are supported and extended. So it's still crap.
I'm sure there were people who knew what are good positions - many hospital beds certainly allow reclining in all sorts of angles, but my point is the furniture industry is crap when compared to the hard drive industry. And yet they often can charge kilobux for their crap.
You can run firefox using different user accounts, and set up the user account privileges accordingly. You can have one for banking, one for slashdot and one for youtube or whatever. That way the main desktop user and its data doesn't easily get pwned just because the browser does. You can't do the same thing easily for Chrome or IE anymore.
Where multiprocess really helps is with memory use. Right now if some page or plugin or add-on leaks, with firefox you have to close the entire browser - all tabs, all pages everything, in order to return the memory to the operating system.
With chrome, you just close the offending tab, or at most the browser window, and the memory is freed. You don't even lose the session info - you can actually reopen the page again without having to re-login.
So even though firefox may actually use less memory and leak less, in practice because of its architecture the leaks cause more problems.
If nullification is used, then the defendant goes free and nothing is changed.
At the very least the defendant would disagree with you ;).
A computer can store and replicate information without involving chemical processes.