> So, I would pay $10/mo for a fully supported Linux that is truly not owned by a big site (Not a Ubuntu, Fedora, IBM or Oracle, as examples, but perhaps a Mint, or Mandriva, or Debian).
I work in an environment where we have fully supported Linux of two types, and you can have it, seriously. I can find the solution online much faster than I can get a callback from a real administrator. The first level people don't really know anything technical, and trying to get them to understand the problem, and that I'm talking to them as a real, experienced administrator who has already tried all of those things on their checklist, is very challenging. Sometimes, insurmountably so.
Often, even when I finally get to someone purporting to be a third level admin (who's out of sorts because he had to get up in the middle of the night (his time zone) to talk to me), still, the most effective way to get the problem solved is to send him the command string so he can cut/paste it into a root session. It's really sad, what vendors expect us to pay for these days.
Official support may work for some, and I agree that you shouldn't have to be an admin to get work done on a computer, but I don't think that the kind of support they want you to pay for is very effective. But that's my opinion, of course.
Microsoft Office 2000 works fine on Win7. Moreover, the 32 bit version works fine on Win7 64 bit. Does it work on Win8? Don't know, don't care -- 8 is shaping up to be the Vista of this decade, for perhaps different reasons than the last one. I'll maybe worry about Office 2000 compatibility with Windows 9 (or whatever they call it). Or maybe I'll explore OpenOffice when the time comes.
This should be repeated more often: There is no law that says you have to upgrade to whatever new product Microsoft craps out, just because it's there. If what you have does the job, stick with it. If and when it doesn't, that's the time to look for replacements.
Yes... well,,,,, yes... The reason I'm hesitating to provide complete agreement, is that I'm thinking reflexes are not serial. Otherwise you couldn't do something atheletic that had multiple simultaneous components.
I think it's safe to say that the cognitive things we do are serial, but the body... the reflexes... the lizard brain, whatever you want to call it, can very definitely be trained to do more than one thing at a time.
In the case of pinball, I would argue that you *can* manage multiple balls, if you've played long enough to adequately train reflexes instead of relying on the inherently slower forebrain.
But in general, you're right on target. What we call "multitasking" (with the cognitive part of the brain) isn't really doing more than one thing at a time. It's done by context switches, as you say.
Office 2000 still works. It'll even open docx files with this.
I'm happy to use the more recent versions of Office, but it has to be on someone else's dime. (Like, my place of employment.) I bought 2000, it works, and they're gonna havta pry it from my cold dead hands (at least until I switch to something open source).
Why would a home user waste valuable income on a new version of Office? Are ribbons all that important for that letter to Aunt Edna?
Agreed. So a way must be found to cut funding of things that have been proven over long periods of time to not work, and start funding promising new lines of research. Good luck with that. Another part of the catch 22 is that the longer something has been funded (and not worked) the more inertia the project has.
Multitasking reduces the time you are waiting for a task to complete, and in many environments, despite the acknowledged penalty due to context switching, you'll come out ahead.
That's executing sequentially and not "multitasking" - you're only ever doing one thing at a time.
At a fine enough granularity, everything is sequential. If executing part of a task before going on to the next part of a different task is still doing tasks sequentially, then there is no such thing as multitasking, at least for reasonable definitions of the word.
I had a drive-by manager incident today, while I was sharing my screen with what is laughably called IT in India while also dealing with a customer issue in a communicator window. Realistically, you can only do one thing at a time, although with fast enough context switching it *seems* like you're doing multiple things at once. (Just exactly like the old monolithic time sharing systems -- remember those?) This in my experience only works for things you know cold. Stuff that requires deep thought isn't effective until you shoo everyone out of the cube.
Drive by management and phones ringing are a distraction from whatever task you're currently trying to complete. Everyone knows this -- why did we need to study it?
Serial batch is not multi-tasking. Try doing those tasks while dealing with an asynchronous interrupt such as the phone or a drive-by manager.
Everything you do is serial batch, if you adjust the granularity appropriately. If you're talking about excessively interrupt driven, I'd argue that's a special case of multitasking, and a singularly ineffective one.
> Hi, No, see as you approach feasibility, your likelihood of being bough by a competing producer to be extinguished (see gasoline) becomes multitudes greater.
I've seen this twice now. I'm not aware of any oil company buying out promising fusion research and killing it, but I'm always willing to entertain evidence. Do you have any?
Yeah, ok, but it depends on what you mean by "multi". I have three PCs at work, and am typically working four or five jobs. But much of what I do is batch -- I set something up, let it run for awhile, and when its done it will sit there happily until I'm ready to look at it. The level of distraction is very low, but effectiveness would suffer greatly if I did all tasks sequentially.
You can arrange the experiment to prove almost anything, if you ignore that the way multitasking is managed is important.
Not only that, but I seem to recall that it combusts in a fairly narrow oxygen to hydrogen ratio.
But in any case, mere combustion may be enthusiastic, but is nowhere near (by orders of magnitude) the energy of fusion. dgatwood says that fission reactors don't spectacularly detonate, and that is true. Fusion is much harder to achieve than fission, which makes it correspondingly more difficult to achieve a chain of events that would allow a reactor to detonate in the manner portrayed in bad fiction.
Let's try this. You have four tasks. Each task has some dead time involved as you're waiting for something to happen. Subject 1 does each task sequentially. Subject 2 interleaves the tasks, doing work on the next task during the dead time in the previous task. Who finishes first?
Multitasking reduces the time you are waiting for a task to complete, and in many environments, despite the acknowledged penalty due to context switching, you'll come out ahead.
It seems like all they proved is that distraction is not good. (Well done, Captain Obvious.) That's not testing effectiveness of multitasking.
Right, but like any long lasting memes, there is a kernel of truth, which, one might say, could be attributed to a number of factors, like, at first not understanding the difficulty, and later underestimating the pace of research.
Also right, we're a lot further along now. We now have knowledge of many techniques that don't work, and a few techniques that *almost* work.
I'd counter with, all major appliances these days are compatible with Exchange (it's pretty much a requirement these days) and manipulate Office documents just fine. So.... next argument please.
The next argument is usually "you want the exact same interface on all of your devices". Which in Microsoft world used to mean a "start" button on a phone, and when that didn't sell well, was changed to a phone interface on a PC. Which no other manufacturer has been.... um um um... searching for the word... inspired enough to do. Yeah, that's the ticket.
or, because Microsoft Windows 8 has such spectacular hardware requirements, the Asus slate is a white hot piece of glass and molten plastic with a huge battery to stay powered up more than a half hour?
> Sadly, I think you're perfectly right about some of that. Windows 8's UI is built for a tablet, so it can look and function the same everywhere (ideally).
....except, Microsoft has been trying since at least 2000 to create a viable touch interface, and has thus far failed spectacularly. So, now they've suddenly got it right?
I learned on a manual typewriter also, and one bit of collateral damage is that forever after, I need a decent keyboard with a reasonably long stroke and positive feedback to type well. (But on a good keyboard I can easily hit 75 words a minute.) Chiclet keyboards and those rubber mat things require slow, careful plunking.
Slashdot Mirror
Two words: John Carter.
Exemplifying everything that's wrong with old school film producing, and why we need a different way. Check out the L5 project, or ... Troll Bridge.
> At Slashdot we have a love/hate relationship with Hollywood.
What he said, but mostly hate.
> As an (apparent) outsider to that who also wants to make films, how do you view Hollywood? Inspiration? Repressive? Hostile? A future paycheck?
Or, the oldest, creakiest, most inbred empire in the world, about to collapse under it's own fetid weight?
Just sayin....
> So, I would pay $10/mo for a fully supported Linux that is truly not owned by a big site (Not a Ubuntu, Fedora, IBM or Oracle, as examples, but perhaps a Mint, or Mandriva, or Debian).
I work in an environment where we have fully supported Linux of two types, and you can have it, seriously. I can find the solution online much faster than I can get a callback from a real administrator. The first level people don't really know anything technical, and trying to get them to understand the problem, and that I'm talking to them as a real, experienced administrator who has already tried all of those things on their checklist, is very challenging. Sometimes, insurmountably so.
Often, even when I finally get to someone purporting to be a third level admin (who's out of sorts because he had to get up in the middle of the night (his time zone) to talk to me), still, the most effective way to get the problem solved is to send him the command string so he can cut/paste it into a root session. It's really sad, what vendors expect us to pay for these days.
Official support may work for some, and I agree that you shouldn't have to be an admin to get work done on a computer, but I don't think that the kind of support they want you to pay for is very effective. But that's my opinion, of course.
Microsoft Office 2000 works fine on Win7. Moreover, the 32 bit version works fine on Win7 64 bit. Does it work on Win8? Don't know, don't care -- 8 is shaping up to be the Vista of this decade, for perhaps different reasons than the last one. I'll maybe worry about Office 2000 compatibility with Windows 9 (or whatever they call it). Or maybe I'll explore OpenOffice when the time comes.
This should be repeated more often: There is no law that says you have to upgrade to whatever new product Microsoft craps out, just because it's there. If what you have does the job, stick with it. If and when it doesn't, that's the time to look for replacements.
Right, we are asymptotically approaching practicality.
Yes... well,,,,, yes... The reason I'm hesitating to provide complete agreement, is that I'm thinking reflexes are not serial. Otherwise you couldn't do something atheletic that had multiple simultaneous components.
I think it's safe to say that the cognitive things we do are serial, but the body... the reflexes... the lizard brain, whatever you want to call it, can very definitely be trained to do more than one thing at a time.
In the case of pinball, I would argue that you *can* manage multiple balls, if you've played long enough to adequately train reflexes instead of relying on the inherently slower forebrain.
But in general, you're right on target. What we call "multitasking" (with the cognitive part of the brain) isn't really doing more than one thing at a time. It's done by context switches, as you say.
Office 2000 still works. It'll even open docx files with this.
I'm happy to use the more recent versions of Office, but it has to be on someone else's dime. (Like, my place of employment.) I bought 2000, it works, and they're gonna havta pry it from my cold dead hands (at least until I switch to something open source).
Why would a home user waste valuable income on a new version of Office? Are ribbons all that important for that letter to Aunt Edna?
> What we do know is that Tokamaks don't work.
Agreed. So a way must be found to cut funding of things that have been proven over long periods of time to not work, and start funding promising new lines of research. Good luck with that. Another part of the catch 22 is that the longer something has been funded (and not worked) the more inertia the project has.
Multitasking reduces the time you are waiting for a task to complete, and in many environments, despite the acknowledged penalty due to context switching, you'll come out ahead.
That's executing sequentially and not "multitasking" - you're only ever doing one thing at a time.
At a fine enough granularity, everything is sequential. If executing part of a task before going on to the next part of a different task is still doing tasks sequentially, then there is no such thing as multitasking, at least for reasonable definitions of the word.
I had a drive-by manager incident today, while I was sharing my screen with what is laughably called IT in India while also dealing with a customer issue in a communicator window. Realistically, you can only do one thing at a time, although with fast enough context switching it *seems* like you're doing multiple things at once. (Just exactly like the old monolithic time sharing systems -- remember those?) This in my experience only works for things you know cold. Stuff that requires deep thought isn't effective until you shoo everyone out of the cube.
Drive by management and phones ringing are a distraction from whatever task you're currently trying to complete. Everyone knows this -- why did we need to study it?
Serial batch is not multi-tasking. Try doing those tasks while dealing with an asynchronous interrupt such as the phone or a drive-by manager.
Everything you do is serial batch, if you adjust the granularity appropriately. If you're talking about excessively interrupt driven, I'd argue that's a special case of multitasking, and a singularly ineffective one.
> Hi, No, see as you approach feasibility, your likelihood of being bough by a competing producer to be extinguished (see gasoline) becomes multitudes greater.
I've seen this twice now. I'm not aware of any oil company buying out promising fusion research and killing it, but I'm always willing to entertain evidence. Do you have any?
As I said in another post, the way multitasking is *managed* is important. This test doesn't appear to take that into account.
Yeah, ok, but it depends on what you mean by "multi". I have three PCs at work, and am typically working four or five jobs. But much of what I do is batch -- I set something up, let it run for awhile, and when its done it will sit there happily until I'm ready to look at it. The level of distraction is very low, but effectiveness would suffer greatly if I did all tasks sequentially.
You can arrange the experiment to prove almost anything, if you ignore that the way multitasking is managed is important.
Not only that, but I seem to recall that it combusts in a fairly narrow oxygen to hydrogen ratio.
But in any case, mere combustion may be enthusiastic, but is nowhere near (by orders of magnitude) the energy of fusion. dgatwood says that fission reactors don't spectacularly detonate, and that is true. Fusion is much harder to achieve than fission, which makes it correspondingly more difficult to achieve a chain of events that would allow a reactor to detonate in the manner portrayed in bad fiction.
Let's try this. You have four tasks. Each task has some dead time involved as you're waiting for something to happen. Subject 1 does each task sequentially. Subject 2 interleaves the tasks, doing work on the next task during the dead time in the previous task. Who finishes first?
Multitasking reduces the time you are waiting for a task to complete, and in many environments, despite the acknowledged penalty due to context switching, you'll come out ahead.
It seems like all they proved is that distraction is not good. (Well done, Captain Obvious.) That's not testing effectiveness of multitasking.
Right, but like any long lasting memes, there is a kernel of truth, which, one might say, could be attributed to a number of factors, like, at first not understanding the difficulty, and later underestimating the pace of research.
Also right, we're a lot further along now. We now have knowledge of many techniques that don't work, and a few techniques that *almost* work.
I don' care who you are, that's funny there.
I'd counter with, all major appliances these days are compatible with Exchange (it's pretty much a requirement these days) and manipulate Office documents just fine. So.... next argument please.
The next argument is usually "you want the exact same interface on all of your devices". Which in Microsoft world used to mean a "start" button on a phone, and when that didn't sell well, was changed to a phone interface on a PC. Which no other manufacturer has been.... um um um... searching for the word... inspired enough to do. Yeah, that's the ticket.
or, because Microsoft Windows 8 has such spectacular hardware requirements, the Asus slate is a white hot piece of glass and molten plastic with a huge battery to stay powered up more than a half hour?
> That is Windows 8. It runs on tables that start at about $800.
Or stated differently, "This is Windows. From Microsoft. It won't run worth a stale crap on affordable hardware. You should know better."
> Sadly, I think you're perfectly right about some of that. Windows 8's UI is built for a tablet, so it can look and function the same everywhere (ideally).
I learned on a manual typewriter also, and one bit of collateral damage is that forever after, I need a decent keyboard with a reasonably long stroke and positive feedback to type well. (But on a good keyboard I can easily hit 75 words a minute.) Chiclet keyboards and those rubber mat things require slow, careful plunking.
"Why is there a watermelon there?"
"I'll tell you later"
Irwin Allen notwithstanding, fusion reactors don't spectacularly detonate.