Yeah! And it's called offering a lower class service to lower class people who want to pay lower amounts and only care to have the lower class service. Even business has to deal with this as T1 (lower class digit circuit) has less bandwidth and costs less than T3... duh!
The EVIL that you describe is something that infects most large, and many medium, and even some small, corporations. It's a combination of bureaucracy and authority concentrated (generally it has to be) in people who don't care to deal with reality (or the customers who provide such clues).
5% is enough to send a mailing for. 1% perhaps not. But that's subjective. Someone will be affected. What would be useful is for a signup list for such things to opt-in to get non-general announcements. Then they can justify sending them since they would only go to the people who want them. But they probably don't want to have their web developer(s) spending time (less than a day for a good developer, which I have doubts they have) putting something like that together.
If you'd like to have some fun with then, call them back and raise the original point, again, that got that 5% excuse. Then say "but you keep sending out those crappy email ads to get people to sign up for more services, and less than 1% of the people care about those, so why not just stop annoying people and cancelling that?":-)
The case is not about the DMCA. The DMCA is its foundation, but the case is about tort. The MPAA is suing, not trying to put him in jail. They are suing under terms of California law which a person not in California would not be expected to do.
Of course he was doing wrong things under terms of the DMCA, and surely there are laws in Indiana that provide for recovery of losses and damages. But the DMCA is federal law and this is crossing state boundaries. It should be in federal court. Alternatively the MPAA could sue him in Indiana.
The problem with having a California court conducting trial is that they will not be working with the laws that actually applied to the person they are suing. While the laws in Indiana may well be similar, the court will not be able to argue any details that may come up regarding what actually applied to a person in Indiana.
Courts are most definitely not doing their job if they are not in a position to interpret the laws as they apply (and Indiana and United States laws apply here).
So tell me why it is the MPAA cannot sue this guy in Indiana?
Most copyright/patent laws were originally created to protect the rights of the creator. Not to guarantee profit, or income, but to guarantee that the creator can control what they have created.
I disagree (but you are close). These laws were written to provide for the benefit of the nation the advantage of having people pursue the creation of those kinds of works that can be copyrighted, and those kinds of inventions that can be patented. By providing a mechanism of protection for the recognized owner of what we today call "intellectual property", this was supposed to encourage people to pursue these arts which can cost them in money and burdens to do. For example an inventor of a new machine may have to invest in research and development. An artist may have to create his works without spending time in employment and hence have no other source of income.
It is the nation that is supposed to benefit. If what is produced is worthless, we might not buy it. So there is no guarantee of income at all. If no one wants it, no one pays for it, and the inventors and artists of worthless junk get nothing. What the law provides for is protection that someone else will not steal that which is worth something, and this would supposedly encourage these pursuits and the nation would benefit. So you are right that there is no guarantee of profit. But the purpose is for the benefit of the nation, not the creator/inventor.
That is how it was supposed to work. Today things are changed somewhat. Patents are being issued for obvious ideas and concepts to any comer who has the filing fee. Copyright owners are now being given protections in law to allow them to exclude people of the nation from enjoying the benefits of the works even if they are willing to pay the demanded price while threatening these very people with jail for even trying to enjoy the works after they have paid the price.
Today, much of the technology and some of the art being created would be created anyway without any intellectual property protections to encourage it. Much of Open Source is that way (consider, if you will, that the lack of the laws would be somewhat equivalent to having the modified BSD license as your only choice). Even many technology companies are only patenting simple things they invent only to be sure someone else doesn't get the patent first and attempt to enforce them from using what they invented. Most patents go entirely unenforced, only protecting the owner from someone else getting the patent. For the government, this is just a filing fee cash cow.
The way the laws are working today is twisted, and headed in the direction of being outright evil. It needs to be changed (not discarded as some suggest, just fixed). Patent examiners need to be knowledgeable about their trades to properly recognized obvious claims. Copyright laws need to provide better protections for us to have and enjoy (which does include making sure the true creators are not shafted which would end up with less art for us all) what art we choose to buy.
Don't expect the Republicans to do this as this is the kind of thing big business and megacorporations like to have. Don't expect the Democrats to do this as this is the kind of thing that helps enhance big government and keep the ever increasing government payroll flowing.
They don't need to enforce the patent to use it as a whip. The greatest harm would come from simply mentioning the patent and asserting "we may have to consider looking into possible violations, and if we find any, we may then have to consider looking into requiring the appropriate licenses from the users through our usual licensing methods".
They won't get much money from such a patent and I don't think they would expect to get any. The idea is not to actually license it for royalties, but rather to raise FUD regarding the use of Open Source... and not just Mono or the like, but any Open Source. It would be part of a campaign to discredit Open Source in the eyes of their major customers to try to head off major defections to Open Source based systems.
IMHO, you'll never see this patent argued in legal court; you'll see it argued in the press and you'll not see it argued in private negotiations with their major customers because you aren't there to see it when it does happen. This is not so much about controlling protocols as it is about controlling buying decisions on the part of major corporations and setting a ceiling on how far Open Source software can rise into corporate offices and server rooms. I don't think they would care to wipe out Samba; rather, they want to find a way to keep their biggest customers from going that route. Microsoft actually benefits from Samba as long as Samba use is limited to the "small" part of the market (e.g. Unix) that is not economically practical for them to control.
Yes indeed, the buying decisions usually are made by admin and even some by sales. That's why things do fuck up so much. Just a couple weeks ago I was helping some guy try to work around a major buying mistake (to the tune of half a million dollars) the accounting people made by buying a bunch of computers with the wrong specifications. That's why techies need to break out of their shells (figuratively) and start cluing the bosses in on what actually works to save the company money.
The original specification did not include the capability. While I might agree with you that animated images are abused way more often than used properly and make too many web pages overly cluttered, it is the case that this is part of what the non-geek world came to the internet for. If you don't want to provide what they want, then what you are providing is limited to just the geek community. And that is what PNG effectively did and it was the reason it just didn't catch on to take over GIF. Today it's available almost everywhere, but today GIF has just ingrained itself so much in the web, that PNG is simply not going to replace it. It had a chance to do that right when it came out, but they blew it.
Not much of a challenge to me. McAfee is simply added to my list of evil corporations which I universally recommend to clients and friends that they stay far far away from and never do any business with whatsoever. I might have used McAfee products in the near future. That won't happen now. I don't have any of their stock, but if I did I would be selling it today.
When PNG was initially developed, they forgot to include animation. I never got a real story as to why, but I heard it had been discussed, but was tabled. That was its biggest mistake, because it left GIF with an important advantange. Lots of graphics simply could not be converted from GIF because they were animations. When I looked at the PNG design, it was clear to me that including a primitive form of multi-frame motion and cycling would have been very easy (and primitive was all that GIF had, anyway). I'm guessing some graphical purists wanted something better more like MPEG. They could have had both (simple animation at release, sophistication motion eventually). Instead, at release time, PNG emerged with a defect that prevented it from getting the maximum momentum it could have had. The developers, unfortunately, apparently lacked a "marketing think".
The fact that the next generation of browsers to then come out lacked PNG support was killer number two. Some of that may have been due to the above problem. Certainly a lot of it was just the numbmindedness of the browser developers (I expected such from Microsoft, but not from Netscape, but Netscape ended up having more of it than Microsoft).
PNG is better. That didn't make it preferred. Today browsers have it and a few web sites use it. End users see no difference. Ask the average Joe what a GIF is. Then ask what a PNG (either spell it or say "ping") is.
The software author can choose NOT to use some GPL software just as much as they can choose NOT to use some GPL-like patent. I really don't see an issue with those kinds of patent terms.
What is an issue here is whether a broad and abstract concept like this is valid for a patent at all. We know the USPTO doesn't even try to evaluate things like this. There's a lot of prior art here, although that prior art may not cover every way of doing things so there is room for some non-prior art stuff. Still, the abstractness of this is a big concern I have. The GPL-like terms are not. As long as people have a choice to use or not use something GPL'd (which may not be the case here) then GPL is OK.
Windows 3.1 does not count as an OS. It ran on an OS called DOS. Now people might not want to call DOS an OS, but it fit that role even those not very well at it. Microsoft Windows up to 3.1 was just a program running in the operating system. So your RTOS was not running a general purpose OS if it was running Windows 3.1.
Do you think a web site for only independent unknown artists and bands would succeed? I know I'd love to go there. Having separate web sites for each artist and band is not as good because it's so hard to find them in the noise. I have certain tastes in music, so of course I'd want to have it organized by genre and other themes. It needs to all be legal stuff (get written agreements by the songwriters, performers, recording producers, etc) so it can stay running. Use ads to support it as much as possible and if a fee has to be charged, keep it as small as possible. If it's well organized and low cost, I'd rather use that than mess with P2P swapping. The trouble with the big labels is they just plain don't know how to do that (so people go do P2P instead). The music needs to be in OGG, MP3, and RAW formats (and yes, I'd prefer downloading the raw format).
Actually, he needs to do it on Project even before he makes those promises. If his boss is demanding it in 1 month and Project says it takes 3, then he has to make the case better (using the Project data). Too often they tweak the numbers and make the boss happy for now (and circulate their resume). Of course tools like Microsoft Project can be abused, or simply misused.
Too often the kinds of multitasking demanded by managers is equivalent to one woman having sex 9 times so she can have 9 babies at the end of 9 months to achieve a baby-a-month long term rate.
I've also had cases where managers wanted a project done in 1 month, and when I came back with a 3 to 5 month estimate, they dropped the project. But then they keep bringing the project up every few months as if they expect someone to accidentally say "oh that will only take 1 month". I have to end up saying "That project would have been done 2 months ago if you had started it when I told you 6 months ago it would take about 4 months." Of course some other project would not have been done.
I can multitask reading books better while sitting on the ceramic throne than I can while watching TV or while replying to/. articles. So that's where those books stay most of the time.
Just how tiring that is depends on the task, and the person. Different tasks require different levels of concentration and impose different costs for a context change.
If the programming task is intensely related to the tools and environment, then multiple tasks that are related along those lines do have a reduced cost. But not all programming tasks are like that. If the section of code being designed and written is highly algorithmic, you may have to forget all about tools for now and get that algorithm implemented correctly. And pray you don't get interrupted during that chunk of concentration.
The part about learning several languages makes sense. But there are differences in tasks and in people. We need to adapt and adopt to make the best match between people and tasks. The only company that should decline to hire single taskers is the one with no work that is suited to single taskers. Smaller companies do tend to have difficulties doing this due to so much going on and so few people to do it. Larger companies can easily afford to have people concentrate on intense tasks (and should choose those who do it well).
Of course efficiency is lost in multitasking. But some things are "I/O bound", and wouldn't really benefit from intense concentration. One example is cooking. Do you stand there and watch the water come to a boil? Some men do. I've never seen a woman do that. There are other things that can be done while the water is boiling.
It comes down to what tasks have to completely STOP in order for another task to be worked on, and what tasks can still keep on working. You only need to be aware the water is boiling and can respond to it boiling over, to be able to multitask by giving the beans in another pot a quick stir, then going back to chopping the onions.
And this may explain why women are WORSE drivers. Driving on the road is a task that requires MORE concentration than it seems to. Men just inherintly do that more often than women (perhaps with some goals, like working their way to the front of the pack). Women will try to multitask more while driving (fixing their hair, putting on lipstick, chatting on the cell phone) and overcommit themselves as well (bringing the kids).
It sounds like your definition of top is being CTO or CEO. Those are indeed jobs for multitaskers. They involve lots and lots of concurrent tasks with lower levels of concentration than some other tasks like programming involves. Not everyone is suited to be CTO/CEO.
Some tasks are just huge. That take days, weeks, months, and in a few cases even years, of intense mental concentration. It sounds to me like you fit somewhere in between... which is actually where most people are. It is the high concentrators, the ones with a greater possibility of having something like Aspergers Syndrome, a form of high-functioning autism (search google), that multitask poorly, but concentrate effectively, and get single tasks done faster. And they are the gem holders you seek. Learn to work with them, not against them.
That PC company chick probably cannot single task very well. That is, she cannot concentrate on one single task and get the job done as quickly as possible. She probably isn't putting her mind into the work she is doing. What was her job? A programmer? I doubt it.
Multitasking abilities not only depend on who the person is (it varies from person to person) but also what the work is. Some work lends itself well to multitasking in more people, and other work does not.
Answering the phone is NOT a mentally challenging task. Your mind does not need to concentrate on it. Have you ever started daydreaming while talking to someone boring on the phone (and if it isn't another geek talking geek stuff, it probably is boring for us geeks)? That's a sure sign you have CPU cycles leftover during the task. You're I/O bound.
For some people there isn't enough CPU speed available to do the daydreaming (I'm not saying these people are dumb). These are the people that multitask well. And the reason they are able to do so is because the work they end up doing is the kind of work that fits them, and does multitask well. Keeping files organized, typing notes into a report, answering phone calls, etc, do require one to think about what they are doing, and better people do them better. But these tasks are NOT the intense concentration type of task.
If I were hiring programmers, the people that say NO to the "can you multitask well" question are the people I would want to hire because they are the ones that can concentrate on the job and get it done sooner. They are the ones with the larger cache upstairs, which is needed for complex programming.
The ones that say YES to multitasking are still useful and can still be as smart. But the tasks they are best suited to are different, like testing, tech support, sales, etc (depending on their interests).
And there are people that fall into every level in between, as well as tasks.
Beware, however, that there are some managers that expect multitasking to actually not slow down other work. I've had a manager give me a programming task on Monday asking me how when I could get it done. I said Thursday or Friday at the latest. We agreed the commitment was Friday (how nice of him). On Tuesday he had another task that was more urgent. But it could get done by Thursday for sure (it was a smaller task). But then when I mentioned that the first task would now be delayed to next Tuesday, that manager said "but we agreed it would be done on Friday". I had to respond "No, I agreed that I would have it done in 4 days and that works out to Friday if I have every day this week to work on it, which I no longer have". His next response was "Well, I already committed to (name of other team that needed first task) that it would be delivered Friday". I sure wanted to say something like "Have you lined these 2 tasks up on your copy of Microsoft Project, yet?" (actually the real reason I wanted to say that was because he refused to buy Microsoft Project for anyone in the department, including himself). In the end I had him convinced that programming tasks could only be done one at a time. But he completely forget that concept just a few days later.
Too bad/. doesn't have a "funny but yet serious at the same time" rating. You'd get it. Indeed, such a device could well be used for that. And there are a couple SBCs out there that might meet the need.
And of course, if you happen to know someone on the inside within the right department of your favorite law enforcement agency, they might know where they get theirs.
For my own needs, I'm building something somewhat larger, intended to be a little more obvious. It will have a web cache proxy (probably squid) and a mail server or proxy. My intent is to make this function with NO direct data paths between the internet and the protected LAN whatsoever (not even originated from inside). This is clearly not a box for geeks to play with (at least not with this configuration), but it can be for geeks who are making a business to provide security consulting to small businesses that barely know enough to know they need someone to protect their network for them. And heaven knows we need to have more geeks controlling businesses than being controlled by businesses.
My project requires a standard IDE hard drive. That then requires a fan. And I don't want to be the builder of it; I want to get these from a company that will build them. Also, the purchase will be incremental as opposed to bulk; i.e. instead of buying 100 all at once, I only need them to gradually flow in at the pace I deploy them, which will start slow and ramp up.
Right now the design is built on a microATX motherboard and a small microATX style mini-tower case. The design of the case is poor for cooling purposes, and larger than I want. A rackmount would be fine (1U preferred, 2U absolute max) as long as the depth does not go beyond 16 inches (that will require something smaller than microATX to fit the drive and power supply at the same time).
If that was real IDE it might be interesting. I'm basically looking for what will essentially be a very small system. But I do want dual ethernet (it has) and IDE (maybe not), all in a nice (this isn't) case with space for a regular IDE drive (doubtful) and well ventilationed (doesn't look like it).
The design of the internet was intended to be a network that would resist control and failure caused by an enemy. Interesting how what was perceived as an enemy in the 1970's and early 1980's (the other side's military) is quite different from what is considered the enemy in the late 1990's and 2000's (ubergreedy capitalists intent on controlling information for profit purposes).
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Yeah! And it's called offering a lower class service to lower class people who want to pay lower amounts and only care to have the lower class service. Even business has to deal with this as T1 (lower class digit circuit) has less bandwidth and costs less than T3 ... duh!
The EVIL that you describe is something that infects most large, and many medium, and even some small, corporations. It's a combination of bureaucracy and authority concentrated (generally it has to be) in people who don't care to deal with reality (or the customers who provide such clues).
5% is enough to send a mailing for. 1% perhaps not. But that's subjective. Someone will be affected. What would be useful is for a signup list for such things to opt-in to get non-general announcements. Then they can justify sending them since they would only go to the people who want them. But they probably don't want to have their web developer(s) spending time (less than a day for a good developer, which I have doubts they have) putting something like that together.
If you'd like to have some fun with then, call them back and raise the original point, again, that got that 5% excuse. Then say "but you keep sending out those crappy email ads to get people to sign up for more services, and less than 1% of the people care about those, so why not just stop annoying people and cancelling that?" :-)
The case is not about the DMCA. The DMCA is its foundation, but the case is about tort. The MPAA is suing, not trying to put him in jail. They are suing under terms of California law which a person not in California would not be expected to do.
Of course he was doing wrong things under terms of the DMCA, and surely there are laws in Indiana that provide for recovery of losses and damages. But the DMCA is federal law and this is crossing state boundaries. It should be in federal court. Alternatively the MPAA could sue him in Indiana.
The problem with having a California court conducting trial is that they will not be working with the laws that actually applied to the person they are suing. While the laws in Indiana may well be similar, the court will not be able to argue any details that may come up regarding what actually applied to a person in Indiana.
Courts are most definitely not doing their job if they are not in a position to interpret the laws as they apply (and Indiana and United States laws apply here).
So tell me why it is the MPAA cannot sue this guy in Indiana?
I disagree (but you are close). These laws were written to provide for the benefit of the nation the advantage of having people pursue the creation of those kinds of works that can be copyrighted, and those kinds of inventions that can be patented. By providing a mechanism of protection for the recognized owner of what we today call "intellectual property", this was supposed to encourage people to pursue these arts which can cost them in money and burdens to do. For example an inventor of a new machine may have to invest in research and development. An artist may have to create his works without spending time in employment and hence have no other source of income.
It is the nation that is supposed to benefit. If what is produced is worthless, we might not buy it. So there is no guarantee of income at all. If no one wants it, no one pays for it, and the inventors and artists of worthless junk get nothing. What the law provides for is protection that someone else will not steal that which is worth something, and this would supposedly encourage these pursuits and the nation would benefit. So you are right that there is no guarantee of profit. But the purpose is for the benefit of the nation, not the creator/inventor.
That is how it was supposed to work. Today things are changed somewhat. Patents are being issued for obvious ideas and concepts to any comer who has the filing fee. Copyright owners are now being given protections in law to allow them to exclude people of the nation from enjoying the benefits of the works even if they are willing to pay the demanded price while threatening these very people with jail for even trying to enjoy the works after they have paid the price.
Today, much of the technology and some of the art being created would be created anyway without any intellectual property protections to encourage it. Much of Open Source is that way (consider, if you will, that the lack of the laws would be somewhat equivalent to having the modified BSD license as your only choice). Even many technology companies are only patenting simple things they invent only to be sure someone else doesn't get the patent first and attempt to enforce them from using what they invented. Most patents go entirely unenforced, only protecting the owner from someone else getting the patent. For the government, this is just a filing fee cash cow.
The way the laws are working today is twisted, and headed in the direction of being outright evil. It needs to be changed (not discarded as some suggest, just fixed). Patent examiners need to be knowledgeable about their trades to properly recognized obvious claims. Copyright laws need to provide better protections for us to have and enjoy (which does include making sure the true creators are not shafted which would end up with less art for us all) what art we choose to buy.
Don't expect the Republicans to do this as this is the kind of thing big business and megacorporations like to have. Don't expect the Democrats to do this as this is the kind of thing that helps enhance big government and keep the ever increasing government payroll flowing.
They don't need to enforce the patent to use it as a whip. The greatest harm would come from simply mentioning the patent and asserting "we may have to consider looking into possible violations, and if we find any, we may then have to consider looking into requiring the appropriate licenses from the users through our usual licensing methods".
They won't get much money from such a patent and I don't think they would expect to get any. The idea is not to actually license it for royalties, but rather to raise FUD regarding the use of Open Source ... and not just Mono or the like, but any Open Source. It would be part of a campaign to discredit Open Source in the eyes of their major customers to try to head off major defections to Open Source based systems.
IMHO, you'll never see this patent argued in legal court; you'll see it argued in the press and you'll not see it argued in private negotiations with their major customers because you aren't there to see it when it does happen. This is not so much about controlling protocols as it is about controlling buying decisions on the part of major corporations and setting a ceiling on how far Open Source software can rise into corporate offices and server rooms. I don't think they would care to wipe out Samba; rather, they want to find a way to keep their biggest customers from going that route. Microsoft actually benefits from Samba as long as Samba use is limited to the "small" part of the market (e.g. Unix) that is not economically practical for them to control.
Yes indeed, the buying decisions usually are made by admin and even some by sales. That's why things do fuck up so much. Just a couple weeks ago I was helping some guy try to work around a major buying mistake (to the tune of half a million dollars) the accounting people made by buying a bunch of computers with the wrong specifications. That's why techies need to break out of their shells (figuratively) and start cluing the bosses in on what actually works to save the company money.
The original specification did not include the capability. While I might agree with you that animated images are abused way more often than used properly and make too many web pages overly cluttered, it is the case that this is part of what the non-geek world came to the internet for. If you don't want to provide what they want, then what you are providing is limited to just the geek community. And that is what PNG effectively did and it was the reason it just didn't catch on to take over GIF. Today it's available almost everywhere, but today GIF has just ingrained itself so much in the web, that PNG is simply not going to replace it. It had a chance to do that right when it came out, but they blew it.
Not much of a challenge to me. McAfee is simply added to my list of evil corporations which I universally recommend to clients and friends that they stay far far away from and never do any business with whatsoever. I might have used McAfee products in the near future. That won't happen now. I don't have any of their stock, but if I did I would be selling it today.
When PNG was initially developed, they forgot to include animation. I never got a real story as to why, but I heard it had been discussed, but was tabled. That was its biggest mistake, because it left GIF with an important advantange. Lots of graphics simply could not be converted from GIF because they were animations. When I looked at the PNG design, it was clear to me that including a primitive form of multi-frame motion and cycling would have been very easy (and primitive was all that GIF had, anyway). I'm guessing some graphical purists wanted something better more like MPEG. They could have had both (simple animation at release, sophistication motion eventually). Instead, at release time, PNG emerged with a defect that prevented it from getting the maximum momentum it could have had. The developers, unfortunately, apparently lacked a "marketing think".
The fact that the next generation of browsers to then come out lacked PNG support was killer number two. Some of that may have been due to the above problem. Certainly a lot of it was just the numbmindedness of the browser developers (I expected such from Microsoft, but not from Netscape, but Netscape ended up having more of it than Microsoft).
PNG is better. That didn't make it preferred. Today browsers have it and a few web sites use it. End users see no difference. Ask the average Joe what a GIF is. Then ask what a PNG (either spell it or say "ping") is.
The software author can choose NOT to use some GPL software just as much as they can choose NOT to use some GPL-like patent. I really don't see an issue with those kinds of patent terms.
What is an issue here is whether a broad and abstract concept like this is valid for a patent at all. We know the USPTO doesn't even try to evaluate things like this. There's a lot of prior art here, although that prior art may not cover every way of doing things so there is room for some non-prior art stuff. Still, the abstractness of this is a big concern I have. The GPL-like terms are not. As long as people have a choice to use or not use something GPL'd (which may not be the case here) then GPL is OK.
Windows 3.1 does not count as an OS. It ran on an OS called DOS. Now people might not want to call DOS an OS, but it fit that role even those not very well at it. Microsoft Windows up to 3.1 was just a program running in the operating system. So your RTOS was not running a general purpose OS if it was running Windows 3.1.
It looks closed to me. I did "view source" and verified it was there.
Do you think a web site for only independent unknown artists and bands would succeed? I know I'd love to go there. Having separate web sites for each artist and band is not as good because it's so hard to find them in the noise. I have certain tastes in music, so of course I'd want to have it organized by genre and other themes. It needs to all be legal stuff (get written agreements by the songwriters, performers, recording producers, etc) so it can stay running. Use ads to support it as much as possible and if a fee has to be charged, keep it as small as possible. If it's well organized and low cost, I'd rather use that than mess with P2P swapping. The trouble with the big labels is they just plain don't know how to do that (so people go do P2P instead). The music needs to be in OGG, MP3, and RAW formats (and yes, I'd prefer downloading the raw format).
Actually, he needs to do it on Project even before he makes those promises. If his boss is demanding it in 1 month and Project says it takes 3, then he has to make the case better (using the Project data). Too often they tweak the numbers and make the boss happy for now (and circulate their resume). Of course tools like Microsoft Project can be abused, or simply misused.
Too often the kinds of multitasking demanded by managers is equivalent to one woman having sex 9 times so she can have 9 babies at the end of 9 months to achieve a baby-a-month long term rate.
I've also had cases where managers wanted a project done in 1 month, and when I came back with a 3 to 5 month estimate, they dropped the project. But then they keep bringing the project up every few months as if they expect someone to accidentally say "oh that will only take 1 month". I have to end up saying "That project would have been done 2 months ago if you had started it when I told you 6 months ago it would take about 4 months." Of course some other project would not have been done.
I can multitask reading books better while sitting on the ceramic throne than I can while watching TV or while replying to /. articles. So that's where those books stay most of the time.
Just how tiring that is depends on the task, and the person. Different tasks require different levels of concentration and impose different costs for a context change.
If the programming task is intensely related to the tools and environment, then multiple tasks that are related along those lines do have a reduced cost. But not all programming tasks are like that. If the section of code being designed and written is highly algorithmic, you may have to forget all about tools for now and get that algorithm implemented correctly. And pray you don't get interrupted during that chunk of concentration.
The part about learning several languages makes sense. But there are differences in tasks and in people. We need to adapt and adopt to make the best match between people and tasks. The only company that should decline to hire single taskers is the one with no work that is suited to single taskers. Smaller companies do tend to have difficulties doing this due to so much going on and so few people to do it. Larger companies can easily afford to have people concentrate on intense tasks (and should choose those who do it well).
Of course efficiency is lost in multitasking. But some things are "I/O bound", and wouldn't really benefit from intense concentration. One example is cooking. Do you stand there and watch the water come to a boil? Some men do. I've never seen a woman do that. There are other things that can be done while the water is boiling.
It comes down to what tasks have to completely STOP in order for another task to be worked on, and what tasks can still keep on working. You only need to be aware the water is boiling and can respond to it boiling over, to be able to multitask by giving the beans in another pot a quick stir, then going back to chopping the onions.
And this may explain why women are WORSE drivers. Driving on the road is a task that requires MORE concentration than it seems to. Men just inherintly do that more often than women (perhaps with some goals, like working their way to the front of the pack). Women will try to multitask more while driving (fixing their hair, putting on lipstick, chatting on the cell phone) and overcommit themselves as well (bringing the kids).
It sounds like your definition of top is being CTO or CEO. Those are indeed jobs for multitaskers. They involve lots and lots of concurrent tasks with lower levels of concentration than some other tasks like programming involves. Not everyone is suited to be CTO/CEO.
Some tasks are just huge. That take days, weeks, months, and in a few cases even years, of intense mental concentration. It sounds to me like you fit somewhere in between ... which is actually where most people are. It is the high concentrators, the ones with a greater possibility of having something like Aspergers Syndrome, a form of high-functioning autism (search google), that multitask poorly, but concentrate effectively, and get single tasks done faster. And they are the gem holders you seek. Learn to work with them, not against them.
That PC company chick probably cannot single task very well. That is, she cannot concentrate on one single task and get the job done as quickly as possible. She probably isn't putting her mind into the work she is doing. What was her job? A programmer? I doubt it.
Multitasking abilities not only depend on who the person is (it varies from person to person) but also what the work is. Some work lends itself well to multitasking in more people, and other work does not.
Answering the phone is NOT a mentally challenging task. Your mind does not need to concentrate on it. Have you ever started daydreaming while talking to someone boring on the phone (and if it isn't another geek talking geek stuff, it probably is boring for us geeks)? That's a sure sign you have CPU cycles leftover during the task. You're I/O bound.
For some people there isn't enough CPU speed available to do the daydreaming (I'm not saying these people are dumb). These are the people that multitask well. And the reason they are able to do so is because the work they end up doing is the kind of work that fits them, and does multitask well. Keeping files organized, typing notes into a report, answering phone calls, etc, do require one to think about what they are doing, and better people do them better. But these tasks are NOT the intense concentration type of task.
If I were hiring programmers, the people that say NO to the "can you multitask well" question are the people I would want to hire because they are the ones that can concentrate on the job and get it done sooner. They are the ones with the larger cache upstairs, which is needed for complex programming.
The ones that say YES to multitasking are still useful and can still be as smart. But the tasks they are best suited to are different, like testing, tech support, sales, etc (depending on their interests).
And there are people that fall into every level in between, as well as tasks.
Beware, however, that there are some managers that expect multitasking to actually not slow down other work. I've had a manager give me a programming task on Monday asking me how when I could get it done. I said Thursday or Friday at the latest. We agreed the commitment was Friday (how nice of him). On Tuesday he had another task that was more urgent. But it could get done by Thursday for sure (it was a smaller task). But then when I mentioned that the first task would now be delayed to next Tuesday, that manager said "but we agreed it would be done on Friday". I had to respond "No, I agreed that I would have it done in 4 days and that works out to Friday if I have every day this week to work on it, which I no longer have". His next response was "Well, I already committed to (name of other team that needed first task) that it would be delivered Friday". I sure wanted to say something like "Have you lined these 2 tasks up on your copy of Microsoft Project, yet?" (actually the real reason I wanted to say that was because he refused to buy Microsoft Project for anyone in the department, including himself). In the end I had him convinced that programming tasks could only be done one at a time. But he completely forget that concept just a few days later.
Too bad /. doesn't have a "funny but yet serious at the same time" rating. You'd get it. Indeed, such a device could well be used for that. And there are a couple SBCs out there that might meet the need.
And of course, if you happen to know someone on the inside within the right department of your favorite law enforcement agency, they might know where they get theirs.
For my own needs, I'm building something somewhat larger, intended to be a little more obvious. It will have a web cache proxy (probably squid) and a mail server or proxy. My intent is to make this function with NO direct data paths between the internet and the protected LAN whatsoever (not even originated from inside). This is clearly not a box for geeks to play with (at least not with this configuration), but it can be for geeks who are making a business to provide security consulting to small businesses that barely know enough to know they need someone to protect their network for them. And heaven knows we need to have more geeks controlling businesses than being controlled by businesses.
Triple ethernet that one. But then it fails on another requirement: standard IDE interface.
Basically I need:
My project requires a standard IDE hard drive. That then requires a fan. And I don't want to be the builder of it; I want to get these from a company that will build them. Also, the purchase will be incremental as opposed to bulk; i.e. instead of buying 100 all at once, I only need them to gradually flow in at the pace I deploy them, which will start slow and ramp up.
Right now the design is built on a microATX motherboard and a small microATX style mini-tower case. The design of the case is poor for cooling purposes, and larger than I want. A rackmount would be fine (1U preferred, 2U absolute max) as long as the depth does not go beyond 16 inches (that will require something smaller than microATX to fit the drive and power supply at the same time).
If that was real IDE it might be interesting. I'm basically looking for what will essentially be a very small system. But I do want dual ethernet (it has) and IDE (maybe not), all in a nice (this isn't) case with space for a regular IDE drive (doubtful) and well ventilationed (doesn't look like it).
No dual ethernet models?
The design of the internet was intended to be a network that would resist control and failure caused by an enemy. Interesting how what was perceived as an enemy in the 1970's and early 1980's (the other side's military) is quite different from what is considered the enemy in the late 1990's and 2000's (ubergreedy capitalists intent on controlling information for profit purposes).