Well that's really what I meant when I said that there might be truth in the ideas. The idea that stress makes you less productive is certainly something worth discussing, and I happen to agree with it. The statistic(s), however, is rather worthless.
The problem about anything that surveys the economic losses caused by productivity losses is that they're all vague measurements of approxiamate things that are then multiplied by a huge group of people. Really, what this means is that while there might be truth in the idea these statistics try to show, the numbers are almost completely bullshit. For example, let's suppose 100 million workers in the united states have air blowing hand dryers instead of paper towels in their restrooms. These dryers take longer than paper towels, let's say maybe a minute instead of 10 seconds. I would think it's fair to say that on average a worker makes 1.5 trips to the bathroom per day. So if the average hourly wage of these employees is something like 15 bucks, 10 seconds of paper towels is worth $0.0417, one minute of air drying is worth $0.25. That means that we're wasting ~$31 Million per day! That's billions per year! My God! Something has to be done!
In those statistics (and really any browser statistics like them) Opera's numbers are unfairly represented because Opera allows you to change what header it sends out allowing you to spoof other browsers such as IE or netscape. I, like many other Opera users, generally have my user-agent set to IE. This is useful in the case of sites that (stupidly) limit your ability to access a page based on what browser you're using. For example, when I go to staples.com in Opera with my user-agent header set to Opera, it tells me I don't have cookies enabled (yeah, WTF?) but if I change my user-agent to IE, I can browse the whole site perfectly.
What about Opera? I much prefer Opera, it's got a lot of features Mozilla/Firefox don't and like Mozilla it's cross-platform (Windows, MacOS, Linux, Solaris, FreeBSD, OS/2, QNX and BeOS!) and if you don't mind an ad banner (I don't at all), it's free.
Plus, since it's not open source, you can make Richard Stallman cry (I realize that among the general public this has less appeal). Firefox is great, certainly in comparison to IE, but I truly like Opera better.
While I agree with the article overall, their results are over-stated because, in my experience, the people foolish enough to do office work in a Starbucks while talking on their cellphones are also the type that have trouble walking and chewing gum at the same time as well.
In my not so humble opinion, people that don't know when it makes sense to use technology and when it doesn't aren't the type that are going to be the most productive anyways.
It makes a lot more sense for non open source operating systems because when you have the source, it means that there are going to be more people who compiled programs by themselves and thus are unable to use binary diffs. I'm sure the fact that FreeBSD has it is more because it's a neat hack than because a lot of people find it necessary (although I'm sure a few people do). So it's not really a necessity for linux distros to have this, but I bet that in the near future Debian and Redhat (maybe a few others) will setup functionality for binary diff patching just because.
On that topic, why does almost everybody distribute source code as gzipped tars instead of bzip2'ed tars (just about everybody that does use bzip2 also distributed gzips)? Sure, in the beginning gzip made more sense for people on slow machines, but nowadays the difference in the time it takes to decompress is trivial, whereas the compression benefits of bzip2 on text are phenomenal in my experience.
When's the Star Wars Holiday special coming out on DVD? I'm looking forward to the re-edits and deleted scenes (I hear the scene with a few minutes of untranslated wookie dialog was originally meant to be twice as long)!
Notice this DVD has no special features (commentary tracks, making of featurettes, inside the ewok villiage, etc.). Obviously they're planning on releasing a second "special edition" version after everybody buys this one (all 5 of you out there). So wait and don't buy it now!
The thing about the gimp is that photoshop is such a standard that it has a harder time making inroads than other open source design programs. I mean, with page layout and vector drawing there are a few different programs popular with designers (i.e. for vector drawing many people use Illustrator, but many people also use Freehand or CorelDraw, or other programs). With photo manipulation though, the huge majority of professionals use Photoshop.
I do quite a bit of graphic design (including text layout), and while I can definitely see myself using Scribus and I'm sure Inkscape or one of the other mature OSS vector drawing programs would be more than adequate once I got used to it, and a great solution if I weren't stealing Illustrator (i.e. if I were running a design shop and I needed to make sure all my licenses were legit), I just never got to like Gimp. It's significantly gotten better over the years but it still seems like a poor substitute for photoshop. Although, I would say that it's definitely gotten to the point where I could see it becoming a suitable all-around substitute for photoshop in the next few years.
This also reminds me of when the BSA tried to get a university to take down unlicensed copies of MS Office that were, in fact, copies of Open Office. Link here.
Seriously, you'd think these people would bother to at least give files a once over before sending out cease-and-desist letters.
Anytime there is an article talking about the power of your graphics card's GPU or the phenomenal processing power of DSPs, the discussion is always inundated with people asking "Hey why aren't we using these instead of our regular slow processors!", thinking they've come up with some sort of brilliant idea. For the thousandth time, people, things just don't work that way. DSPs achieve their high processing speeds by being very good at a few select things, but not really being general purpose devices. If you want to know more of the specific details, do a google search, there's a ton of information about DSPs on the web and I'm sure there are plenty of pages that explicitly address the difference between CPUS, GPUs and DSPs.
Maybe it's just because I've been using it forever, but I just can't see why any Windows user would prefer to use iTunes and particularly Windows Media Player as their music player rather than Winamp. You can't just ascribe it to ignorance of Winamp either, I know a few people who have winamp installed, but genuinely prefer playing their music in iTunes!
I don't really see how this plastic could ever really help make a better speaker, but knowing how many useless superstitious expensive bullshit many audiophiles will buy (i.e. cable that costs $300 per meter), I'm sure if you made such a product you'd have no trouble selling it.
Honestly, I don't even see how somebody could think that it ever could be. Sounds like marketing got carried away (and it worked, I guess, we're discussing them, aren't we?).
Just so you people know, Roland Piquepaille (the submitter of this story) has a growing repuation as a "blog spammer". That is, he sends in stories to slashdot compulsively (and I assume sometimes repetitively to get it on the front page) which always include a link to his blog at the end which provides him revenue from the ads on his site.
I'm not going to go as far as a lot of people who post about this and claim that this makes him an inherently evil force that must be stopped, it doesn't, but I'd just like people to be aware of this. I mean, his blog entry on the topic is usually just a rehashing of the articles submitted adding nothing. I really think the editors should edit out the compulsive blog link, but whatever, there's a lot of things we all think the editors should do that they don't.
Slashdot Mirror
Caught peeing in the coffee, eh?
Well that's really what I meant when I said that there might be truth in the ideas. The idea that stress makes you less productive is certainly something worth discussing, and I happen to agree with it. The statistic(s), however, is rather worthless.
The problem about anything that surveys the economic losses caused by productivity losses is that they're all vague measurements of approxiamate things that are then multiplied by a huge group of people. Really, what this means is that while there might be truth in the idea these statistics try to show, the numbers are almost completely bullshit. For example, let's suppose 100 million workers in the united states have air blowing hand dryers instead of paper towels in their restrooms. These dryers take longer than paper towels, let's say maybe a minute instead of 10 seconds. I would think it's fair to say that on average a worker makes 1.5 trips to the bathroom per day. So if the average hourly wage of these employees is something like 15 bucks, 10 seconds of paper towels is worth $0.0417, one minute of air drying is worth $0.25. That means that we're wasting ~$31 Million per day! That's billions per year! My God! Something has to be done!
In those statistics (and really any browser statistics like them) Opera's numbers are unfairly represented because Opera allows you to change what header it sends out allowing you to spoof other browsers such as IE or netscape. I, like many other Opera users, generally have my user-agent set to IE. This is useful in the case of sites that (stupidly) limit your ability to access a page based on what browser you're using. For example, when I go to staples.com in Opera with my user-agent header set to Opera, it tells me I don't have cookies enabled (yeah, WTF?) but if I change my user-agent to IE, I can browse the whole site perfectly.
What about Opera? I much prefer Opera, it's got a lot of features Mozilla/Firefox don't and like Mozilla it's cross-platform (Windows, MacOS, Linux, Solaris, FreeBSD, OS/2, QNX and BeOS!) and if you don't mind an ad banner (I don't at all), it's free.
Plus, since it's not open source, you can make Richard Stallman cry (I realize that among the general public this has less appeal).
Firefox is great, certainly in comparison to IE, but I truly like Opera better.
While I agree with the article overall, their results are over-stated because, in my experience, the people foolish enough to do office work in a Starbucks while talking on their cellphones are also the type that have trouble walking and chewing gum at the same time as well.
In my not so humble opinion, people that don't know when it makes sense to use technology and when it doesn't aren't the type that are going to be the most productive anyways.
Make a nice USB keychain drive suppository or two. If something happens to the data there, then your data will be the least of your concerns.
Remember, it isn't that the wind is blowing, it's what the wind is blowing.
It makes a lot more sense for non open source operating systems because when you have the source, it means that there are going to be more people who compiled programs by themselves and thus are unable to use binary diffs. I'm sure the fact that FreeBSD has it is more because it's a neat hack than because a lot of people find it necessary (although I'm sure a few people do). So it's not really a necessity for linux distros to have this, but I bet that in the near future Debian and Redhat (maybe a few others) will setup functionality for binary diff patching just because.
On that topic, why does almost everybody distribute source code as gzipped tars instead of bzip2'ed tars (just about everybody that does use bzip2 also distributed gzips)? Sure, in the beginning gzip made more sense for people on slow machines, but nowadays the difference in the time it takes to decompress is trivial, whereas the compression benefits of bzip2 on text are phenomenal in my experience.
Ah! A way to kill two birds with one stone. Announce that it will be released on DVD and he will have a heart attack.
Christmas special? Hardly. They were celebrating Life day, remember? Geez!
When's the Star Wars Holiday special coming out on DVD? I'm looking forward to the re-edits and deleted scenes (I hear the scene with a few minutes of untranslated wookie dialog was originally meant to be twice as long)!
Notice this DVD has no special features (commentary tracks, making of featurettes, inside the ewok villiage, etc.). Obviously they're planning on releasing a second "special edition" version after everybody buys this one (all 5 of you out there). So wait and don't buy it now!
The thing about the gimp is that photoshop is such a standard that it has a harder time making inroads than other open source design programs. I mean, with page layout and vector drawing there are a few different programs popular with designers (i.e. for vector drawing many people use Illustrator, but many people also use Freehand or CorelDraw, or other programs). With photo manipulation though, the huge majority of professionals use Photoshop.
I do quite a bit of graphic design (including text layout), and while I can definitely see myself using Scribus and I'm sure Inkscape or one of the other mature OSS vector drawing programs would be more than adequate once I got used to it, and a great solution if I weren't stealing Illustrator (i.e. if I were running a design shop and I needed to make sure all my licenses were legit), I just never got to like Gimp. It's significantly gotten better over the years but it still seems like a poor substitute for photoshop. Although, I would say that it's definitely gotten to the point where I could see it becoming a suitable all-around substitute for photoshop in the next few years.
This also reminds me of when the BSA tried to get a university to take down unlicensed copies of MS Office that were, in fact, copies of Open Office. Link here.
Seriously, you'd think these people would bother to at least give files a once over before sending out cease-and-desist letters.
Anytime there is an article talking about the power of your graphics card's GPU or the phenomenal processing power of DSPs, the discussion is always inundated with people asking "Hey why aren't we using these instead of our regular slow processors!", thinking they've come up with some sort of brilliant idea. For the thousandth time, people, things just don't work that way. DSPs achieve their high processing speeds by being very good at a few select things, but not really being general purpose devices. If you want to know more of the specific details, do a google search, there's a ton of information about DSPs on the web and I'm sure there are plenty of pages that explicitly address the difference between CPUS, GPUs and DSPs.
Because graphics cards (and other devices using DSP chips) are not really general purpose processors, they're very good at a few specific things.
Maybe it's just because I've been using it forever, but I just can't see why any Windows user would prefer to use iTunes and particularly Windows Media Player as their music player rather than Winamp. You can't just ascribe it to ignorance of Winamp either, I know a few people who have winamp installed, but genuinely prefer playing their music in iTunes!
Well, no privacy policy would seem to mean no privacy, am I right?
I don't really see how this plastic could ever really help make a better speaker, but knowing how many useless superstitious expensive bullshit many audiophiles will buy (i.e. cable that costs $300 per meter), I'm sure if you made such a product you'd have no trouble selling it.
Honestly, I don't even see how somebody could think that it ever could be. Sounds like marketing got carried away (and it worked, I guess, we're discussing them, aren't we?).
Just so you people know, Roland Piquepaille (the submitter of this story) has a growing repuation as a "blog spammer". That is, he sends in stories to slashdot compulsively (and I assume sometimes repetitively to get it on the front page) which always include a link to his blog at the end which provides him revenue from the ads on his site.
I'm not going to go as far as a lot of people who post about this and claim that this makes him an inherently evil force that must be stopped, it doesn't, but I'd just like people to be aware of this. I mean, his blog entry on the topic is usually just a rehashing of the articles submitted adding nothing. I really think the editors should edit out the compulsive blog link, but whatever, there's a lot of things we all think the editors should do that they don't.