Yes, technology can improve things. But battery technology is fairly mature - we have been making batteries for a couple of hundred years. I haven't seen any suggestion of revolutionary improvements in battery technology recently. And the amount of energy stored per kilo is a miserable 1% of petrol/gasoline. While electric propulsion is considerably more efficient than internal combustion - maybe 6 times?, and the motors are small and light, we still really need about a 10-20x improvement in battery technology.
That's ever such a lot. Basically, we have a problem.
Energy densities (Watt hours per kilogram) Uranium 235 fission - 2.5x10**10 Wh/kn Liquid H2 39,000 Wh/kg Diesel 16,361 Wh/kg Petrol/gasoline 12,200 Wh/kg Ethanol 7,850 Wh/kg Lithium Ion battery 110 Wh/kg Lead acid battery 25 Wh/kg
Well. I have an Android phone - an HTC Legend, running Android 2.1 So - what's it like? Coverage issues aside (I am on Vodaphone in Australia and cannot get any reception at the desk where I work, it's infuriating. I actually have my number forward to another phone just for that problem), it's ok. Not fabulous, just ok. As a phone it is average - I previously had a Sony Ericsson K660i which I loved, it was surprisingly capable (I could get GMail and sync my contacts, but not calendar unfortunately) and the battery lasted ages. Great little thing. Keypad starting to wear out after 2 years of light use.
The HTC/Android software feels mostly average. Not brilliant. It feels a bit - well - clunky. I find myself with iPhone envy. Battery consumption - pretty high - if I actually use the phone, I need to recharge every 1-2 days. WiFi - reception is not great. In my front room I can use a laptop on wireless, but not the HTC. The main phone apps could be so much better. When I look someone up, I may want to phone them, or I may want to message them. This takes far, far too many clicks. The games are great - and I love the app store with a lot of useful things. Bit hard to find actual good ones, but such is life.
Am I satisfied - yes. Am I overjoyed - no. Am I looking forward to 2.2 - yes. Would I buy another Android - maybe. Hopefully it will improve a lot!
>> no bearing whatsoever on the original question.
You haven't been on/. long, have you...?
Actually, a little history and perspective is a wonderful thing. It's sobering to recognise that the world wide web, invented a mere couple of decades back (Tim Berners-Lee, 1990), is the source of most of our incomes (slashdotters, at any rate) and much of our entertainment.
In 1980 I went sailing. I had made heaps of money in - of all places - Belgium, where we wrote one of the first commercial packet switching networks in the world. It was cool. And no installed base, oh joy.
Anyway I bought a 30' Iroquois catamaran and set off. I sailed about 2 years, down to the Med, over the Atlantic, around the West Indies. Sometimes single-handed, mostly with 2-4 folk aboard. There may have been some drinking.
It was, without doubt, a high point of my life, despite the storms, loneliness, terrible food, sunburn. And did I mention the storms? No GPS then - we had to use a sextant. I wrote some nice sight reduction programs for it on my HP 41C calculator - you just can't kill off habits, can you?
Communication - we didn't have no stinking communication! A VHF radio, range about 20miles, and otherwise we could listen to shortwave radio sometimes. We could only send the odd postcard from ports, and look - without much hope nor any success - in the poste restante in the main post offices. Phone calls were very expensive and we did this rarely. We didn't have comms - there was no internet (we were just inventing networks - inter-networks lay in the future) HF radios would have weighed more than the boat. Food, water more important.
(And in case you cared... I ended up selling the boat in the Virgin Islands - it's still sailing in Florida apparently; moving to Australia, where I still am, happily in the sun, still writing the odd bit of code. And I still have the sextant in the garage - it's a lovely thing. The HP41c has not survived. Nor has HP, not really).
Pah - on-board communication, nah - listen to the waves. Enjoy the quiet. Watch the sky. See the moon rise, blood red, from the sea. Let your mind actually think, perchance dream.
In the past - and possibly still today - there was a levy charged on cassette tapes (remember them?) which was paid to some copyright group - the Performing Artists or something. This wasn't terribly high, so was barely noticeable.
You could argue this would be a reasonable way to pay for content. It probably would not cost all that much.
Because somehow, someone, somewhere has to pay for making the content (movies cost a lot to make, no matter what technology they use). There needs to be a functioning business model somehow. Currently it's all rather nasty - buy my movies on DVD or I'll chase you, frighten you, and sue you. No fun (and watching "legit" movies is less pleasant because of all the "Don't pirate this movie" stuff at the beginning). It's no good yelling "data wants to be free" - someone has to put the data together in the first place. And that someone, whether they be Madonna, Brad Pitt, Bill Gates - or me, deserves to be paid for their labour in doing that.
So where am I going with this? Well, the Internet has broken the business model of music, movies, and tv programs. Software and books are still hanging in there, surprisingly. You can argue they were bad business models, but they did work, and gave us some great works of entertainment (art?). At the moment we seem to have the pirates on one side, yelling "We can copy anything and we won't pay you a cent", and the RIAA on the other yelling "We'll sue, we'll sue". In the middle is the great majority who are prepared to pay reasonable prices for decent content, but don't know how.
We need to pay for content in some way. A tax (scream, yell) on Internet traffic might be ok - it already gets charged for, so it's relatively easy to add a fee. Business would moan a lot.
But really, does anyone have a better suggestion? The world is waiting.
(And in case anyone cases, yes, I'd be happy to see a lot of the middlemen die out, especially in the exceptionally rapacious music industry. I'd be happy to see the actual content makers, the music writers, artists, producers all get paid a decent - even extraordinary, income. Sony, EMI, etc I am less interested in - they've done very well. Move on).
So we have a slightly more expensive, rather fragile-looking, patented way to make it possible for people to put batteries in the wrong way.
Ok, so this might - possibly - be used in some devices. Probably expensive ones. And they'll have big signs saying "Put the battery in any way" and this will go well until a) the battery gets a bit of corrosion and they try to clean the contacts, at which point they will short things out and the device will melt, or b) they use another device where they put the batteries in the wrong way - and the device won't work.
So we now have a situation where you have to examine a battery connection in every device even more closely to see which way the battery goes. It might be + or a - or either will do.
Actually, I don't think this is an improvement. It LOOKS like an improvement - but it's not. It add a further level of complexity.
So Microsoft have taken a standard system that has existed for a very long time, and modified it to make it a) fragile, b) patentable, and c) more expensive (more contacts, more wiring), not to mention d) less reliable (and battery contacts are already unreliable - oh for the days of PP9s - now THOSE were good properly gendered contacts).
Great. I don't want one. I can tell a spring from a contact. It's not too hard even with my eyesight. But a funny hermaphrodite thing as a third option? Now that's confusing. (Anyone remember those weird hermaphrodite connection used by IBM token ring? No? - I thought not).
It is truly difficult to conquer a technology that has been refined for 200 years. Electric cars have been all-but-abandoned for most of that time (British milk floats a fairly honourable exception). The amount of money and infrastructure behind petrol cars is staggering - consider the investment in roads, garages, cars themselves, mechanic training, vehicle design, the odd political manipulation (we won't mention any bribery to get "trolleys" off the road, now will we?)
So it will be tough. Petrol is a magnificently concentrated form of fuel. That's hard to beat. Can we get anything like that density of energy into anything else at the moment - er, no. But really, can we continue pumping oil out of the ground (or into the gulf of Mexico, not to mention much of Africa) and burning it, generating CO2. Er, no.
So things have to be done. Changing over to using electricity generated in very efficient plants, using 1/10 the energy and possibly allowing CO2 capture (yes I know it's hard, but not as hard as on the tailpipes of a billion cars). It's possible it will not be as convenient as petrol cars. It's possible we will have to go without the vroom, vroom of big V8s, It's possible people might even have to ride bicycles a bit. Oh dear. Maybe they'll get thinner and healthier - that'd be a bonus.
But it beats the heck out of everyone dying. So let's get on with it.
Electric cars don't need to compete with every petrol car in existence - they don't have to be faster than a Ferrari, go further than a.. um, diesel Golf. Covering basic commuting would be fine - and that's 90% of what people do (lacking better public transport). You want to go skiing - rent an appropriate vehicle.
A good start would seem to be delivery vehicles - predictable loads, distances, always park at the same place. Sounds ideal. And indeed this is being done - I reckon they will be a huge success (there are some excellent hybrid diesel vans starting to appear already).
I'd be surprised if a great deal of people would not be pleased at the possibility of a small simple vehicle for commuting - quiet, quite fast, fairly small, easy to park, amazingly cheap to run. And very low polluting. What's not to like?
So let's get on with it. (Hang on, didn't I say that before?)
"None can love freedom heartily but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license." --John Milton.
It seems states behave the same way.
Actually the USA is precisely the same - they constantly preach free trade, but will they let Australia sell them farm produce... er, no. (Mind you, Australia's a bit reluctant to accept foreign farm produce - the claim that we are free of many of the world's crop diseases (no Dutch Elm disease, for example) and would like to stay that is terribly convenient [true, but remarkably convenient])
This sounds like a great idea. But if the name STILL doesn't stick, you feel like a complete idiot by the third time. Or maybe the fourth. Or the fifth.
And if you cannot remember if you've asked before...
If you say "Sorry, I'm really bad with names", most people will say "me too" and smile brightly. But they have no idea what they are talking about. What THEY mean is sometimes they forget a name. What I mean is I very nearly always forget names. Not the same.
I sometimes say "you know that bit of brain where people store names - I do geometry in that bit". Perhaps it's true
I though the article was about the inability of programmer to remember names and recognise people, Maybe I should have read the article.
It's a real problem though - is it just me? I often know things about people (ah yes, plays squash, good at making cakes, father of that kid who rides a unicycle), but their actual name - no. It's a miracle if I recognise them at all. Mind you, it means if anyone says "Hello" to me, I am obliged to be polite to them as I might actually know them quite well, but haven't recognised them yet - and certainly don't know their name.
It's a right pain. Anybody else suffer from this - and what the heck do they do about it? (I'd like a camera attachment what would whisper in my ear "that's Mrs Jones, her daughter, Kira is in the same class at school as your daughter. Likes chess and is obsessed with kayaking" - something tiny that could clip on my glasses, maybe).
At least you can walk along the pavement (sidewalk for Americans, trottoir for Francophones) [keep right or you will be glared at and possibly verbally accosted], occasionally buying gorgeous baguettes from real shops, unlike the US where you can only buy nasty baguette shaped bread from horrible, soulless shopping malls.
And now that France has given up smoking, and keeps the pavements clear of dog droppings, I confess I find Paris an absolute joy. Ah, those shops, those smells. Wonderful. The odd narrow pavement adds a little character. Put your baby in a backpack - or if it's older, maybe you should get it to walk - think of that! My kids adored Paris - I'm not sure how they'd get on with Chicago.
Basically this is a problem with corporations. They have no morals. The law treats them as pseudo-humans, but they are not.
In fact, by most definitions, they are psychotic.
They are incredibly paranoid (with trained attack lawyers), delusional (almost any management meeting), appalling bullies (Microsoft et al), manipulative (marketing, more lawyers), small-minded (the next quarter is the only thing).
Do I need to go on? And yes, drug companies are among the worst - but think of tobacco companies, oil companies...
Company law needs to change in some way to make incorporated entities be more responsible. But how?
Pair coding can be surprisingly effective - it sounds a ridiculous idea, have one person code, and another just sit there and watch. But it works pretty well - the second person acts a check on the first, and the error rate drops. There will be interaction, humans are like that, and it's all to the good. Also, you will have two people familiar with the code, not just one, so some pressure is reduced - holidays become easier to organise, for example.
I have worked in an office (now), a cube farm, a shared room, and from home. Each has advantages and disadvantages. (I like the sound of the laptop and the beach, but I'd definitely miss my second screen).
One thing that does definitely work is to have a "quiet room". You have a limited number of desks/computers there. If you choose to work there for a bit there are no phones, emails, nor conversation. Can be great for a good straightforward bit of code bashing. But not all the time.
Oh yes, and a second screen is a proven, cheap, productivity improver. Big screens are pretty cheap. Do it!
Simon (yeah, I've been doing this a long time. First line of code must have been, oh, 1970 in Fortran IV I think, and I'm still at it. Damn, where's my Ferrari?)
Careful - we wrote all the code that your systems call... have you noticed how people don't actually write new stuff anymore? They just connect existing stuff together?
In the bank where I currently work, there is a palimpset of systems, and if you dig far enough, there is the old COBOL stuff, still bashing out the bytes.
Eventually, all the old COBOL programmers are going to retire and/or die and then all the banking systems in the world will be running on code written and support by - who, exactly?
Slashdot Mirror
If your name actually IS Jane Doe, can you counter sue?
>> I think It's pretty safe to assume if your on slashdot you probably haven't had experience with 10 one night stands in a single week.
You just don't get invited to the right parties, do you? Trust me, it's possible to do that. ... sorry
Oh - you mean one partner for the WHOLE night
"Pushing up the average since - oh, ages ago" - and yes, I own an Android (phone, not sex partner .. mind you ...). 10 - pah ...
Yes, technology can improve things. But battery technology is fairly mature - we have been making batteries for a couple of hundred years.
I haven't seen any suggestion of revolutionary improvements in battery technology recently. And the amount of energy stored per kilo is a miserable 1% of petrol/gasoline. While electric propulsion is considerably more efficient than internal combustion - maybe 6 times?, and the motors are small and light, we still really need about a 10-20x improvement in battery technology.
That's ever such a lot. Basically, we have a problem.
Energy densities (Watt hours per kilogram)
Uranium 235 fission - 2.5x10**10 Wh/kn
Liquid H2 39,000 Wh/kg
Diesel 16,361 Wh/kg
Petrol/gasoline 12,200 Wh/kg
Ethanol 7,850 Wh/kg
Lithium Ion battery 110 Wh/kg
Lead acid battery 25 Wh/kg
Obvious nuclear is the way to go.
Well.
I have an Android phone - an HTC Legend, running Android 2.1
So - what's it like?
Coverage issues aside (I am on Vodaphone in Australia and cannot get any reception at the desk where I work, it's infuriating. I actually have my number forward to another phone just for that problem), it's ok.
Not fabulous, just ok. As a phone it is average - I previously had a Sony Ericsson K660i which I loved, it was surprisingly capable (I could get GMail and sync my contacts, but not calendar unfortunately) and the battery lasted ages. Great little thing. Keypad starting to wear out after 2 years of light use.
The HTC/Android software feels mostly average. Not brilliant. It feels a bit - well - clunky. I find myself with iPhone envy.
Battery consumption - pretty high - if I actually use the phone, I need to recharge every 1-2 days.
WiFi - reception is not great. In my front room I can use a laptop on wireless, but not the HTC.
The main phone apps could be so much better. When I look someone up, I may want to phone them, or I may want to message them. This takes far, far too many clicks.
The games are great - and I love the app store with a lot of useful things. Bit hard to find actual good ones, but such is life.
Am I satisfied - yes. Am I overjoyed - no. Am I looking forward to 2.2 - yes. Would I buy another Android - maybe. Hopefully it will improve a lot!
Let's hope China does no evil.
>> no bearing whatsoever on the original question.
You haven't been on /. long, have you ...?
Actually, a little history and perspective is a wonderful thing. It's sobering to recognise that the world wide web, invented a mere couple of decades back (Tim Berners-Lee, 1990), is the source of most of our incomes (slashdotters, at any rate) and much of our entertainment.
In 1980 I went sailing. I had made heaps of money in - of all places - Belgium, where we wrote one of the first commercial packet switching networks in the world. It was cool. And no installed base, oh joy.
Anyway I bought a 30' Iroquois catamaran and set off. I sailed about 2 years, down to the Med, over the Atlantic, around the West Indies. Sometimes single-handed, mostly with 2-4 folk aboard. There may have been some drinking.
It was, without doubt, a high point of my life, despite the storms, loneliness, terrible food, sunburn. And did I mention the storms?
No GPS then - we had to use a sextant. I wrote some nice sight reduction programs for it on my HP 41C calculator - you just can't kill off habits, can you?
Communication - we didn't have no stinking communication! A VHF radio, range about 20miles, and otherwise we could listen to shortwave radio sometimes.
We could only send the odd postcard from ports, and look - without much hope nor any success - in the poste restante in the main post offices. Phone calls were very expensive and we did this rarely.
We didn't have comms - there was no internet (we were just inventing networks - inter-networks lay in the future) HF radios would have weighed more than the boat. Food, water more important.
(And in case you cared ... I ended up selling the boat in the Virgin Islands - it's still sailing in Florida apparently; moving to Australia, where I still am, happily in the sun, still writing the odd bit of code. And I still have the sextant in the garage - it's a lovely thing. The HP41c has not survived. Nor has HP, not really).
Pah - on-board communication, nah - listen to the waves. Enjoy the quiet. Watch the sky. See the moon rise, blood red, from the sea. Let your mind actually think, perchance dream.
In the past - and possibly still today - there was a levy charged on cassette tapes (remember them?) which was paid to some copyright group - the Performing Artists or something.
This wasn't terribly high, so was barely noticeable.
You could argue this would be a reasonable way to pay for content. It probably would not cost all that much.
Because somehow, someone, somewhere has to pay for making the content (movies cost a lot to make, no matter what technology they use). There needs to be a functioning business model somehow. Currently it's all rather nasty - buy my movies on DVD or I'll chase you, frighten you, and sue you. No fun (and watching "legit" movies is less pleasant because of all the "Don't pirate this movie" stuff at the beginning).
It's no good yelling "data wants to be free" - someone has to put the data together in the first place. And that someone, whether they be Madonna, Brad Pitt, Bill Gates - or me, deserves to be paid for their labour in doing that.
So where am I going with this? Well, the Internet has broken the business model of music, movies, and tv programs. Software and books are still hanging in there, surprisingly. You can argue they were bad business models, but they did work, and gave us some great works of entertainment (art?).
At the moment we seem to have the pirates on one side, yelling "We can copy anything and we won't pay you a cent", and the RIAA on the other yelling "We'll sue, we'll sue". In the middle is the great majority who are prepared to pay reasonable prices for decent content, but don't know how.
We need to pay for content in some way. A tax (scream, yell) on Internet traffic might be ok - it already gets charged for, so it's relatively easy to add a fee. Business would moan a lot.
But really, does anyone have a better suggestion? The world is waiting.
(And in case anyone cases, yes, I'd be happy to see a lot of the middlemen die out, especially in the exceptionally rapacious music industry. I'd be happy to see the actual content makers, the music writers, artists, producers all get paid a decent - even extraordinary, income. Sony, EMI, etc I am less interested in - they've done very well. Move on).
So we have a slightly more expensive, rather fragile-looking, patented way to make it possible for people to put batteries in the wrong way.
Ok, so this might - possibly - be used in some devices. Probably expensive ones. And they'll have big signs saying "Put the battery in any way" and this will go well until a) the battery gets a bit of corrosion and they try to clean the contacts, at which point they will short things out and the device will melt, or b) they use another device where they put the batteries in the wrong way - and the device won't work.
So we now have a situation where you have to examine a battery connection in every device even more closely to see which way the battery goes. It might be + or a - or either will do.
Actually, I don't think this is an improvement.
It LOOKS like an improvement - but it's not. It add a further level of complexity.
So Microsoft have taken a standard system that has existed for a very long time, and modified it to make it a) fragile, b) patentable, and c) more expensive (more contacts, more wiring), not to mention d) less reliable (and battery contacts are already unreliable - oh for the days of PP9s - now THOSE were good properly gendered contacts).
Great.
I don't want one. I can tell a spring from a contact. It's not too hard even with my eyesight. But a funny hermaphrodite thing as a third option? Now that's confusing. (Anyone remember those weird hermaphrodite connection used by IBM token ring? No? - I thought not).
It is truly difficult to conquer a technology that has been refined for 200 years. Electric cars have been all-but-abandoned for most of that time (British milk floats a fairly honourable exception). The amount of money and infrastructure behind petrol cars is staggering - consider the investment in roads, garages, cars themselves, mechanic training, vehicle design, the odd political manipulation (we won't mention any bribery to get "trolleys" off the road, now will we?)
So it will be tough. Petrol is a magnificently concentrated form of fuel. That's hard to beat. Can we get anything like that density of energy into anything else at the moment - er, no.
But really, can we continue pumping oil out of the ground (or into the gulf of Mexico, not to mention much of Africa) and burning it, generating CO2. Er, no.
So things have to be done. Changing over to using electricity generated in very efficient plants, using 1/10 the energy and possibly allowing CO2 capture (yes I know it's hard, but not as hard as on the tailpipes of a billion cars).
It's possible it will not be as convenient as petrol cars. It's possible we will have to go without the vroom, vroom of big V8s, It's possible people might even have to ride bicycles a bit. Oh dear. Maybe they'll get thinner and healthier - that'd be a bonus.
But it beats the heck out of everyone dying.
So let's get on with it.
Electric cars don't need to compete with every petrol car in existence - they don't have to be faster than a Ferrari, go further than a .. um, diesel Golf. Covering basic commuting would be fine - and that's 90% of what people do (lacking better public transport). You want to go skiing - rent an appropriate vehicle.
A good start would seem to be delivery vehicles - predictable loads, distances, always park at the same place. Sounds ideal. And indeed this is being done - I reckon they will be a huge success (there are some excellent hybrid diesel vans starting to appear already).
I'd be surprised if a great deal of people would not be pleased at the possibility of a small simple vehicle for commuting - quiet, quite fast, fairly small, easy to park, amazingly cheap to run. And very low polluting. What's not to like?
So let's get on with it. (Hang on, didn't I say that before?)
"None can love freedom heartily but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license." --John Milton.
It seems states behave the same way.
Actually the USA is precisely the same - they constantly preach free trade, but will they let Australia sell them farm produce ... er, no. (Mind you, Australia's a bit reluctant to accept foreign farm produce - the claim that we are free of many of the world's crop diseases (no Dutch Elm disease, for example) and would like to stay that is terribly convenient [true, but remarkably convenient])
I seem to recall "Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance" was very down on the idea of tests in school.
Wonderful book. And no computers at all.
>> Try asking.
This sounds like a great idea. But if the name STILL doesn't stick, you feel like a complete idiot by the third time. Or maybe the fourth. Or the fifth.
And if you cannot remember if you've asked before ...
If you say "Sorry, I'm really bad with names", most people will say "me too" and smile brightly. But they have no idea what they are talking about. What THEY mean is sometimes they forget a name. What I mean is I very nearly always forget names. Not the same.
I sometimes say "you know that bit of brain where people store names - I do geometry in that bit". Perhaps it's true
I though the article was about the inability of programmer to remember names and recognise people, Maybe I should have read the article.
It's a real problem though - is it just me? I often know things about people (ah yes, plays squash, good at making cakes, father of that kid who rides a unicycle), but their actual name - no. It's a miracle if I recognise them at all.
Mind you, it means if anyone says "Hello" to me, I am obliged to be polite to them as I might actually know them quite well, but haven't recognised them yet - and certainly don't know their name.
It's a right pain. Anybody else suffer from this - and what the heck do they do about it? (I'd like a camera attachment what would whisper in my ear "that's Mrs Jones, her daughter, Kira is in the same class at school as your daughter. Likes chess and is obsessed with kayaking" - something tiny that could clip on my glasses, maybe).
>> Officially at war would mean a deceleration of war.
Slowing down of war - I like the sound of that.
You are American, right?
At least you can walk along the pavement (sidewalk for Americans, trottoir for Francophones) [keep right or you will be glared at and possibly verbally accosted], occasionally buying gorgeous baguettes from real shops, unlike the US where you can only buy nasty baguette shaped bread from horrible, soulless shopping malls.
And now that France has given up smoking, and keeps the pavements clear of dog droppings, I confess I find Paris an absolute joy. Ah, those shops, those smells. Wonderful.
The odd narrow pavement adds a little character. Put your baby in a backpack - or if it's older, maybe you should get it to walk - think of that! My kids adored Paris - I'm not sure how they'd get on with Chicago.
I guess it's the non-metric units they use.
Basically this is a problem with corporations. They have no morals. The law treats them as pseudo-humans, but they are not.
In fact, by most definitions, they are psychotic.
They are incredibly paranoid (with trained attack lawyers), delusional (almost any management meeting), appalling bullies (Microsoft et al), manipulative (marketing, more lawyers), small-minded (the next quarter is the only thing).
Do I need to go on? And yes, drug companies are among the worst - but think of tobacco companies, oil companies ...
Company law needs to change in some way to make incorporated entities be more responsible.
But how?
I read that as a 4.6m cube of gold/platinum alloy and was thinking that was just the sort of thing Lex Luthor would want to steal.
Now come on, it'd make a great show ...
Ah - a Microsoft Sharepoint programmer
I always thought old guys were wankers.
Now I know why.
Pair coding can be surprisingly effective - it sounds a ridiculous idea, have one person code, and another just sit there and watch. But it works pretty well - the second person acts a check on the first, and the error rate drops. There will be interaction, humans are like that, and it's all to the good.
Also, you will have two people familiar with the code, not just one, so some pressure is reduced - holidays become easier to organise, for example.
I have worked in an office (now), a cube farm, a shared room, and from home. Each has advantages and disadvantages. (I like the sound of the laptop and the beach, but I'd definitely miss my second screen).
One thing that does definitely work is to have a "quiet room". You have a limited number of desks/computers there. If you choose to work there for a bit there are no phones, emails, nor conversation. Can be great for a good straightforward bit of code bashing. But not all the time.
Oh yes, and a second screen is a proven, cheap, productivity improver. Big screens are pretty cheap. Do it!
Simon (yeah, I've been doing this a long time. First line of code must have been, oh, 1970 in Fortran IV I think, and I'm still at it. Damn, where's my Ferrari?)
Careful - we wrote all the code that your systems call ... have you noticed how people don't actually write new stuff anymore? They just connect existing stuff together?
In the bank where I currently work, there is a palimpset of systems, and if you dig far enough, there is the old COBOL stuff, still bashing out the bytes.
Eventually, all the old COBOL programmers are going to retire and/or die and then all the banking systems in the world will be running on code written and support by - who, exactly?
Now get off my lawn! Old geeks indeed. Pah.
Hey - this is Slashdot - we don't have no girlfriends here ....
Mind you, the concept of knowing a girlfriends password is appealing.
girlfriend> sudo .....
See http://xkcd.com/149/