If you change the channel, your buffer is gone, because it is being filled with content from the new channel. That's why sometimes when I'm catching up to the front of the buffer, I'll tell Tivo to start recording the show so that if I accidently hit the channel-change button, Tivo gives me a chance to abort, instead of just changing the channel and nuking the buffer.
Exactly. How many people make a bug fuss out of using an ass-gasket in a public restroom, and then merrily touch the door handle on their way out, or... *gasp* go type on someone else's keyboard.
The whole ass-gasket thing is stupid. Toilet paper works just as well for the really unsavory toilet seats.
My wife could set up a Tivo, and she has no problems running it. She could not set up this linux-based solution.
This doesn't pass the "wife test", and will never displace Tivo or any other commercial solution until it can. There's more to systems engineering than just functionality.
I like RPGs on consoles too. There are some good ones. I tend to avoid the ones that involve proceeding from cut-scene to cut-scene. That's what I loved about the Kings Field games on PS1. I just got Kings Field IV the other day. Haven't tried it yet, but I'm excited about it.:-)
I wish game designers for RPGs would realize cut-scenes can augment a game, but by themselves don't "count" as a game. If I'm not racing a clock, calculating expending resources, etc... I'm not very entertained, because I'm not being mentally challanged.
Consequently, I tend to be very conservative about using the inventory items I pick up on my way through levels. Often times I'll will defeat a boss or clear a section using "conventional" or "standard" weapons instead of the special ones I've picked up along the way. When I got back to review a walkthrough to see what I missed, often times I'll notice I did things the "hard way." That doesn't bother me - the higher difficulty translates into "more fun" for me.
With respect to the article on MSNBC, I thought it was pretty whiny, and not thought through very well.
Great comments. The whole content management problem is a potential La Brae Tar Pit (SP?). I don't think you can emphasize enough that when people start using these, they should have a problem they are trying to solve, instead of applying them as a solution in search of a problem.
There is another application of content management frameworks. Specifically, "collaboration management frameworks," where the components are roles and workflows. Your description of "content management" touches on this, but I think collaboration management stands on its own.
The idea is that instead of publishing a document that describes a process that everyone must go find, read, understand, and follow, you publish the process instead. Then when you make changes to the process, instead of announcing the changes, and expecting those who miss the announcement to go look for changes in the published document (after finding it again) or discover process changes while talking to their buddies in the hallway, changes to the process are instantly visible to the affected parties. That is to say, you publish the change to the workflows between different roles, you don't publish a description of the change in workflows between roles.
There are a lot of ideas and concepts to explore in this area. Zope, as a Content management Framework, is a good framework for collaboration management frameworks.
Berlinski, author of "A Tour of the Calculus" (a damn good book), later wrote "The Advent of the Algorithm". It's on my to-read stack. I would think many slashdotters would be interested in reading it, and most slashdotters would be interested in reading the last comment on Amazon's review section.:-)
Re:An important algorithm I use everyday...
on
Deep Algorithms?
·
· Score: 1
Shouldn't that middle bit be:
ready, fire, aim? I know that's my mode of operation when the alarm is going off...
Research on putting nuclear fuel into space (and the sun) has been performed. It was my undestanding from a science show I saw on TV (Discovery channel or something) that we can't launch nuclear waste into space due to treaty obligations.
The technical problem of containing the waste safely in the event of a catastrophic (is there any other kind?) launch event was pretty much solved. Cannisters strong enough to withstand impact with the earth were engineered, built, and tested. They were tested by mounting them on cars, which were on rails, putting jet rockets on them to accelerate them to impact speeds, and slamming them into 64' cubes of reinforced concrete. The concrete blocks MOVED! The containers maintained their integrity.
The only counter-argument to the waste-in-space idea that I've seen that seems to have merit is the weight of the substance. Especially with respect to any container holding it. Still, I think it's a solvable problem. It could be expensive to get all of our waste in space, but what are the consequences of leaving it around for centuries upon centrues?
Also, don't forget space isn't the only option. Breeder reactors can refine most if not all radioactive waste from fission reactors and reduce their radiactivity back to normal ground levels, thus allowing them to simply be buried. Some waste can be refined and re-enriched enough to be re-used via a breeder reactor as well.
How relevant is this? I found the inability to fork subprocesses, and the general "anti-command-line" tendencies of applications on the Mac OS, to make Mac Perl's usefullness much diminished compared to traditional unix environments. In many respects, I think AppleScript is the more effective scripting language for the classic Mac OS, although certainly it's not as fun or easy to work with as Perl (speaking from experience someone who's worked with both.)
Does anyone out there actually use Mac Perl for major development?
Intel had $26 billion in revenues while the music industry had $40 billion. Add in Microsoft,which took in $13 billion in the six months ending Dec 2001. Call it a $26 billion dollar a year company for purposes of discussion. You're looking at two companies taking in around $52 billion a year and also looking for new ways and means to move product. Quite frankly, the music business is a huge "value add" for the Wintel duoply. I think the two $52 billion dollar companies should buy the $40 billion dollar industry, add the content on with very limited copy protection hassels, and tell their customers "Rip Away."
For me, the most interesting use a PC has to me is to manage my music collection. To extract the content from the large stack of 5-1/4" piecies of plastic, which are unwieldy to lug around in large quantities, and to put that content on my laptop. Then take that with me, and play anywhere. Or, for a smaller package, dump them to a MP3 portable player. I'm also interested in sharing music with my friends, and more importantly, TRYING new music before I buy it. Nothing new there - many napster-philes purchased CDs of bands they liked after finding them through napster. CDs are too "high risk" to gamble on, in my opinion. I don't want to buy a CD until I know I'm going to like it.
So, make it easy for me to manipulate content, and reward the creater of the content, not the distributors who have a lock on access to the market.
If manipulating content was hassel-free with respect to the law, those two companies would have combined revenues of $100 billion I bet.
In this context, the Intel exec's comment "[Your legislation] will substantially retard innovation... and will reduce the usefulness of our products to consumers." sounds like a warning shot.
I left the Bay Area (Silicon Vally, specifically)in 1997 and never looked back. The only thing I miss are my friends.
Goodbye insane cost of living. Goodbye nasty traffic. Goodbye techo-yuppies. Goodbye high real estate. Goodbye psycho work mentalities.
The place I live now has everything the Bay Area had, and none of the things that completely sucked. Skiing, wineries, good restaurants, theater - the Bay Area doesn't have a monopoly on those things.
Nice weather - that's another thing. But truth be told, the Bay Area seasons (more specifically, the lack thereof) really messed with my sense of time. So I don't miss that either.
This is a "what if" question. But basically, it should be noted many of the problems/diseases we screen for are considered weaknesses in the context of our society. What if part of the overall strength as a species is the good and the bad put together?
To word it differently, what if we mistakenly classifly a positive as a negative based on our perception of it, and then breed that out of ourselves (long term, given a gattica-like future)? And what if our environment changed such that a former weakness is now a strength?
That being said, I'm all for screening for some of those nasty problems out there. I just hope someone is looking at the "big picture."
These are all attributes I have now. I didn't have these when I started at my current position. I earned them. I earned them by proving I could be trusted. I earned them by managing my manager when he was out of line. I earned them making commitments and meeting them. I earned them by being disciplined and generating tangible results. I earned them by being an effective communicator and persuasive when necessary, both on a 1:1 basis and through delivering presentations.
I find the "I want my boss to leave me alone and let me work and not make bad decisions" whining to be a bit trite. Well, guess who is responsible for that as much as your manager?
This is the coolest Mod I've seen. Quite frankly I'm amazed that this mod is getting trashed by the majority of posters thus far. This is COOL! This is stepping outside the lines of where people tell you you're supposed to be, and thinking outside the box! This is the type of stuff slashdot readers are supposed to embrace and love! It comes down to risk management - obviously, you don't do this to a drive with data you care about. The only risk in this operation should be the money you're out if the device fails after the mod. I was very impressed by the picture of the dual drives visible through the plexi-glass case.
There's something about watching machines in motion, like harddrives, and steam engines, that has a mesmorizing effect on me. I'd love to see a raid array of drives like this, where one user was commenting on how you could see the drives seeking synchronously. COOL!:-)
And couldn't this be another way to verify your machine has crashed hard? Machine locks up - look at the hard drive. Is the head just sitting in one spot? Definitely the system is wedged.... You could also possibly visually verify the sync commands flush out buffers before a reboot.
Okay.. Not necessary, but still cool.
Anyway, Bravo! This is a great MOD. DANGEROUS - yes.:) But that's part of what makes it sweet.
My first thougt was to ask if the original poster was from Purdue as well. When I lived in Cary Quad, I had the valve cranked to off, so hot steam/water was only coming into the room in the little pipe that comes up through the floor and to the valve. That little 9" section of pipe would heat my room so well I had to crack the windows in the winter. The valve handle would get so hot I couldn't touch it.
"On top of that, get ready to be "Moore's law'd'" out of most other programming jobs you might be thinking of taking - by 2015 computers will be fast enough that point-and-drool paint-by-numbers tools will be available to rapidly and idiotically autogenerate most of the code you write today with no discernable performance loss."
I seriously doubt it, and so does Brooks, the author of the Mythical Man Month, a book recommend you spend some time with, and a very famous essay "No Silver Bullet."
Brooks asserted in 1985 in NSB that there would be no silver bullet improvments in technology or process for software engineering that would yield an order of magnitude improvement in the time it takes to develop software products (or software systems, or software systems products..)
Brooks addresses the issue of automatic code generation in NSB, and it is noted that when people discuss automatic code generation, they are really talking about progrmaming in a higher level language than what is currently available. The biggest pay-off for transitioning to a higher level language only happens when you first migrate to it, as that's when you are dropping what brooks calls the accidental (read: incidental) problems associated with software development.
The problem is truly not speed. The problem with programming large software constructs is their complexity, along with other factors like "invisibility", "conformity", and "chageability."
We are seven-eight years past Brook's followup paper "Silver Bullet Refired" where he addressed critiques of his analysis, and restated his prediction looked to be safe as he still had one year left on his 10-year window, and no order of magnitude improvements have been found.
Note, Brooks doesn't maintain orders of magnitude improvements could not be attained. He said there was "no silver bullet." The idea of code generation has been presented as a potential bullet and refuted fairly effectively.
Along the lines of "visual programming," Brooks has also fairly well refuted this as a truly breakthrough methodology, for programs, in their completness, do not yield graphical representations that yield easily discernable patterns. That is, if you overlay graphs of flow of control, data flow, data lifetime, etc... you get a picture that is hard to read. The mind visualizes this complexity better than a picture.
Or, as Brooks wrote, "a chip design is a layered two-dimensional object whose geometry reflects its essence. A software system is not."
One of the best sources of information is the O'Reilly book on Linux Device Drivers. It contains a lot of good information to get a kernel hacker up and running.
And I know a guy who wrote most of a program for a class, wasn't able to get it running (partly due to some life circumstances taking some time, although that's still not quite an excuse), who did the same thing. All programs, according to "code guidelines" had to start with comments. So he just ended his header comment in the middle of his big (multi-page program), exec'd the sample program, and started his comment again.
Worked like a charm. I was impressed. While I never would have had the guts to do it, I still wish I'd at least THOUGHT of that!
What I mean in my subject of "It's not CTS" is that her symptoms do not sound like the result of Carpal Tunnel Syndrome. CTS is overused and misused as a diagnosis of RSI - repetitive stress injury. CTS is when the passage way letting the nerve through the wrist is too tight. Usually, a bone in the rist that has a spur on it that holds the nerve in place impinges on the nerve in certain sections of a range of motions.
Most people experience wrist pain as a result of RSI injuries. It's mistaken as CTS often because 'That's where it hurts.' Often RSI sufferrers are hard working people who turn to help only when they can push on. And when they do turn to help they are often met with a hostile reaction, accusations of being lazy, and a lack of understanding about what the hell is going on with them. Many RSI victims have fluid buildup in the wrist as part of muscle inflammation, and THAT is what causes their CTS-like symptoms. CTS surgery for these people usualy results in a relief of symptoms for a short period of time, and then fluid build up, nerve aggravation, and muscle injuries catch up again and the symptoms recurr.
RSI victims complaining about pain in a certain area are often unknowingly complaining about the area that hurts most, and at the moment. The area of intense pain often moves around because most people compensate for the pain and muscle fatigue, thus overstressing a new area and causing a new injury.
RSI injury is not a "Oops I pushed it today" injury. It's a "Oops, I pushed it too hard for many years" type injury. Variables unique to an individual, and unique to the job at hand all make the impacts of certain activities different for everyone. But, there are some constants. Holding your arms out in front of you for years will fatigue your back and upper extremities. It can take years before your muscles reach such a point of fatigue and spasm, and your nervers suffer a certain threshhold of damage.
Without a doubt, the workplace is the most dangerous place for these activities. Be it typing, or working on an assembly line, when you put your body through millions of repetions, and it involves using your arms, you are in danger.
From the comments I read on this article, most slashdot readers would do well to read "It's not Carpal Tunnel Syndrome: RSI Theory and Therapy for Computing Professionals." -- Suparna Damany, et al; Paperback
I think the person in this case is not just a CTS sufferrer. Rather, she is more likely an RSI victim.
For those of you who sneer at the woman in this case, and pompously preach about preventative measures, my response to you is "You're right. At the same time, I hope you never suffer the way she seems to have."
Slashdot Mirror
If you change the channel, your buffer is gone, because it is being filled with content from the new channel. That's why sometimes when I'm catching up to the front of the buffer, I'll tell Tivo to start recording the show so that if I accidently hit the channel-change button, Tivo gives me a chance to abort, instead of just changing the channel and nuking the buffer.
Exactly. How many people make a bug fuss out of using an ass-gasket in a public restroom, and then merrily touch the door handle on their way out, or... *gasp* go type on someone else's keyboard.
The whole ass-gasket thing is stupid. Toilet paper works just as well for the really unsavory toilet seats.
My wife could set up a Tivo, and she has no problems running it. She could not set up this linux-based solution.
This doesn't pass the "wife test", and will never displace Tivo or any other commercial solution until it can. There's more to systems engineering than just functionality.
That.... was funny. :-)
I'm wondering if leaving the WTC buildings in the spiderman movie would have actually boosted attendance?
I like RPGs on consoles too. There are some good ones. I tend to avoid the ones that involve proceeding from cut-scene to cut-scene. That's what I loved about the Kings Field games on PS1. I just got Kings Field IV the other day. Haven't tried it yet, but I'm excited about it. :-)
I wish game designers for RPGs would realize cut-scenes can augment a game, but by themselves don't "count" as a game. If I'm not racing a clock, calculating expending resources, etc... I'm not very entertained, because I'm not being mentally challanged.
Consequently, I tend to be very conservative about using the inventory items I pick up on my way through levels. Often times I'll will defeat a boss or clear a section using "conventional" or "standard" weapons instead of the special ones I've picked up along the way. When I got back to review a walkthrough to see what I missed, often times I'll notice I did things the "hard way." That doesn't bother me - the higher difficulty translates into "more fun" for me.
With respect to the article on MSNBC, I thought it was pretty whiny, and not thought through very well.
Great comments. The whole content management problem is a potential La Brae Tar Pit (SP?). I don't think you can emphasize enough that when people start using these, they should have a problem they are trying to solve, instead of applying them as a solution in search of a problem.
There is another application of content management frameworks. Specifically, "collaboration management frameworks," where the components are roles and workflows. Your description of "content management" touches on this, but I think collaboration management stands on its own.
The idea is that instead of publishing a document that describes a process that everyone must go find, read, understand, and follow, you publish the process instead. Then when you make changes to the process, instead of announcing the changes, and expecting those who miss the announcement to go look for changes in the published document (after finding it again) or discover process changes while talking to their buddies in the hallway, changes to the process are instantly visible to the affected parties. That is to say, you publish the change to the workflows between different roles, you don't publish a description of the change in workflows between roles.
There are a lot of ideas and concepts to explore in this area. Zope, as a Content management Framework, is a good framework for collaboration management frameworks.
Berlinski, author of "A Tour of the Calculus" (a damn good book), later wrote "The Advent of the Algorithm". It's on my to-read stack. I would think many slashdotters would be interested in reading it, and most slashdotters would be interested in reading the last comment on Amazon's review section. :-)
Shouldn't that middle bit be:
ready, fire, aim? I know that's my mode of operation when the alarm is going off...
Research on putting nuclear fuel into space (and the sun) has been performed. It was my undestanding from a science show I saw on TV (Discovery channel or something) that we can't launch nuclear waste into space due to treaty obligations.
The technical problem of containing the waste safely in the event of a catastrophic (is there any other kind?) launch event was pretty much solved. Cannisters strong enough to withstand impact with the earth were engineered, built, and tested. They were tested by mounting them on cars, which were on rails, putting jet rockets on them to accelerate them to impact speeds, and slamming them into 64' cubes of reinforced concrete. The concrete blocks MOVED! The containers maintained their integrity.
The only counter-argument to the waste-in-space idea that I've seen that seems to have merit is the weight of the substance. Especially with respect to any container holding it. Still, I think it's a solvable problem. It could be expensive to get all of our waste in space, but what are the consequences of leaving it around for centuries upon centrues?
Also, don't forget space isn't the only option. Breeder reactors can refine most if not all radioactive waste from fission reactors and reduce their radiactivity back to normal ground levels, thus allowing them to simply be buried. Some waste can be refined and re-enriched enough to be re-used via a breeder reactor as well.
How relevant is this? I found the inability to fork subprocesses, and the general "anti-command-line" tendencies of applications on the Mac OS, to make Mac Perl's usefullness much diminished compared to traditional unix environments. In many respects, I think AppleScript is the more effective scripting language for the classic Mac OS, although certainly it's not as fun or easy to work with as Perl (speaking from experience someone who's worked with both.)
Does anyone out there actually use Mac Perl for major development?
Compare the revenues of Intel to the entertainment industry.
... and will reduce the usefulness of our products to consumers." sounds like a warning shot.
Intel had $26 billion in revenues while the music industry had $40 billion. Add in Microsoft,which took in $13 billion in the six months ending Dec 2001. Call it a $26 billion dollar a year company for purposes of discussion. You're looking at two companies taking in around $52 billion a year and also looking for new ways and means to move product. Quite frankly, the music business is a huge "value add" for the Wintel duoply. I think the two $52 billion dollar companies should buy the $40 billion dollar industry, add the content on with very limited copy protection hassels, and tell their customers "Rip Away."
For me, the most interesting use a PC has to me is to manage my music collection. To extract the content from the large stack of 5-1/4" piecies of plastic, which are unwieldy to lug around in large quantities, and to put that content on my laptop. Then take that with me, and play anywhere. Or, for a smaller package, dump them to a MP3 portable player. I'm also interested in sharing music with my friends, and more importantly, TRYING new music before I buy it. Nothing new there - many napster-philes purchased CDs of bands they liked after finding them through napster. CDs are too "high risk" to gamble on, in my opinion. I don't want to buy a CD until I know I'm going to like it.
So, make it easy for me to manipulate content, and reward the creater of the content, not the distributors who have a lock on access to the market.
If manipulating content was hassel-free with respect to the law, those two companies would have combined revenues of $100 billion I bet.
In this context, the Intel exec's comment "[Your legislation] will substantially retard innovation
I left the Bay Area (Silicon Vally, specifically)in 1997 and never looked back. The only thing I miss are my friends.
Goodbye insane cost of living. Goodbye nasty traffic. Goodbye techo-yuppies. Goodbye high real estate. Goodbye psycho work mentalities.
The place I live now has everything the Bay Area had, and none of the things that completely sucked. Skiing, wineries, good restaurants, theater - the Bay Area doesn't have a monopoly on those things.
Nice weather - that's another thing. But truth be told, the Bay Area seasons (more specifically, the lack thereof) really messed with my sense of time. So I don't miss that either.
This is a "what if" question. But basically, it should be noted many of the problems/diseases we screen for are considered weaknesses in the context of our society. What if part of the overall strength as a species is the good and the bad put together?
To word it differently, what if we mistakenly classifly a positive as a negative based on our perception of it, and then breed that out of ourselves (long term, given a gattica-like future)? And what if our environment changed such that a former weakness is now a strength?
That being said, I'm all for screening for some of those nasty problems out there. I just hope someone is looking at the "big picture."
Instead, you'll see cheap reality TV crap and other things that can be done on a shoe-string budget.
;-)
Porn. Lots of Porn.
These are all attributes I have now. I didn't have these when I started at my current position. I earned them. I earned them by proving I could be trusted. I earned them by managing my manager when he was out of line. I earned them making commitments and meeting them. I earned them by being disciplined and generating tangible results. I earned them by being an effective communicator and persuasive when necessary, both on a 1:1 basis and through delivering presentations.
I find the "I want my boss to leave me alone and let me work and not make bad decisions" whining to be a bit trite. Well, guess who is responsible for that as much as your manager?
This is the coolest Mod I've seen. Quite frankly I'm amazed that this mod is getting trashed by the majority of posters thus far. This is COOL! This is stepping outside the lines of where people tell you you're supposed to be, and thinking outside the box! This is the type of stuff slashdot readers are supposed to embrace and love! It comes down to risk management - obviously, you don't do this to a drive with data you care about. The only risk in this operation should be the money you're out if the device fails after the mod. I was very impressed by the picture of the dual drives visible through the plexi-glass case.
:-)
:) But that's part of what makes it sweet.
There's something about watching machines in motion, like harddrives, and steam engines, that has a mesmorizing effect on me. I'd love to see a raid array of drives like this, where one user was commenting on how you could see the drives seeking synchronously. COOL!
And couldn't this be another way to verify your machine has crashed hard? Machine locks up - look at the hard drive. Is the head just sitting in one spot? Definitely the system is wedged.... You could also possibly visually verify the sync commands flush out buffers before a reboot.
Okay.. Not necessary, but still cool.
Anyway, Bravo! This is a great MOD. DANGEROUS - yes.
My first thougt was to ask if the original poster was from Purdue as well. When I lived in Cary Quad, I had the valve cranked to off, so hot steam/water was only coming into the room in the little pipe that comes up through the floor and to the valve. That little 9" section of pipe would heat my room so well I had to crack the windows in the winter. The valve handle would get so hot I couldn't touch it.
No, I didn't. thank you for that. :-)
"On top of that, get ready to be "Moore's law'd'" out of most other programming jobs you might be thinking of taking - by 2015 computers will be fast enough that point-and-drool paint-by-numbers tools will be available to rapidly and idiotically autogenerate most of the code you write today with no discernable performance loss."
I seriously doubt it, and so does Brooks, the author of the Mythical Man Month, a book recommend you spend some time with, and a very famous essay "No Silver Bullet."
Brooks asserted in 1985 in NSB that there would be no silver bullet improvments in technology or process for software engineering that would yield an order of magnitude improvement in the time it takes to develop software products (or software systems, or software systems products..)
Brooks addresses the issue of automatic code generation in NSB, and it is noted that when people discuss automatic code generation, they are really talking about progrmaming in a higher level language than what is currently available. The biggest pay-off for transitioning to a higher level language only happens when you first migrate to it, as that's when you are dropping what brooks calls the accidental (read: incidental) problems associated with software development.
The problem is truly not speed. The problem with programming large software constructs is their complexity, along with other factors like "invisibility", "conformity", and "chageability."
We are seven-eight years past Brook's followup paper "Silver Bullet Refired" where he addressed critiques of his analysis, and restated his prediction looked to be safe as he still had one year left on his 10-year window, and no order of magnitude improvements have been found.
Note, Brooks doesn't maintain orders of magnitude improvements could not be attained. He said there was "no silver bullet." The idea of code generation has been presented as a potential bullet and refuted fairly effectively.
Along the lines of "visual programming," Brooks has also fairly well refuted this as a truly breakthrough methodology, for programs, in their completness, do not yield graphical representations that yield easily discernable patterns. That is, if you overlay graphs of flow of control, data flow, data lifetime, etc... you get a picture that is hard to read. The mind visualizes this complexity better than a picture.
Or, as Brooks wrote, "a chip design is a layered two-dimensional object whose geometry reflects its essence. A software system is not."
One of the best sources of information is the O'Reilly book on Linux Device Drivers. It contains a lot of good information to get a kernel hacker up and running.
And I know a guy who wrote most of a program for a class, wasn't able to get it running (partly due to some life circumstances taking some time, although that's still not quite an excuse), who did the same thing. All programs, according to "code guidelines" had to start with comments. So he just ended his header comment in the middle of his big (multi-page program), exec'd the sample program, and started his comment again.
Worked like a charm. I was impressed. While I never would have had the guts to do it, I still wish I'd at least THOUGHT of that!
What I mean in my subject of "It's not CTS" is that her symptoms do not sound like the result of Carpal Tunnel Syndrome. CTS is overused and misused as a diagnosis of RSI - repetitive stress injury. CTS is when the passage way letting the nerve through the wrist is too tight. Usually, a bone in the rist that has a spur on it that holds the nerve in place impinges on the nerve in certain sections of a range of motions.
Most people experience wrist pain as a result of RSI injuries. It's mistaken as CTS often because 'That's where it hurts.' Often RSI sufferrers are hard working people who turn to help only when they can push on. And when they do turn to help they are often met with a hostile reaction, accusations of being lazy, and a lack of understanding about what the hell is going on with them. Many RSI victims have fluid buildup in the wrist as part of muscle inflammation, and THAT is what causes their CTS-like symptoms. CTS surgery for these people usualy results in a relief of symptoms for a short period of time, and then fluid build up, nerve aggravation, and muscle injuries catch up again and the symptoms recurr.
RSI victims complaining about pain in a certain area are often unknowingly complaining about the area that hurts most, and at the moment. The area of intense pain often moves around because most people compensate for the pain and muscle fatigue, thus overstressing a new area and causing a new injury.
RSI injury is not a "Oops I pushed it today" injury. It's a "Oops, I pushed it too hard for many years" type injury. Variables unique to an individual, and unique to the job at hand all make the impacts of certain activities different for everyone. But, there are some constants. Holding your arms out in front of you for years will fatigue your back and upper extremities. It can take years before your muscles reach such a point of fatigue and spasm, and your nervers suffer a certain threshhold of damage.
Without a doubt, the workplace is the most dangerous place for these activities. Be it typing, or working on an assembly line, when you put your body through millions of repetions, and it involves using your arms, you are in danger.
From the comments I read on this article, most slashdot readers would do well to read "It's not Carpal Tunnel Syndrome: RSI Theory and Therapy for Computing Professionals." -- Suparna Damany, et al; Paperback
I think the person in this case is not just a CTS sufferrer. Rather, she is more likely an RSI victim.
For those of you who sneer at the woman in this case, and pompously preach about preventative measures, my response to you is "You're right. At the same time, I hope you never suffer the way she seems to have."
Perhaps we should "acquire" some 18-wheelers loaded up with blank audio CD-Rs, drive to Boston Harbor, and toss them in?