Doing something different every couple of hours, though, is not multitasking. Multitasking is when you have to switch gears every couple of minutes, or even several times per minute. This is incredibly inefficient and tires you out quickly. I don't know why businesses want you to do this. You are only one person. If it takes one person 8 hours to do job A, and it takes one person 8 hours to do job B, and you have one person work on them both, he will finish the job in 16 hours if he does them sequentially, or in probably 20 hours if he constantly switches back and forth between them. Mind you I am talking about jobs that normally require 100% attention. If part of that time is waiting for the computer to compile your code for a half hour, then there are efficiencies to be gained by doing another task, but that is usually a longer term switch, which doesn't really count as multitasking in the sense of the article.
Now if you talk of multitasking as programming on your computer while listening to talk radio, you will find that you cannot both remember the details of the radio conversation and program at your normal speed. Your brain really can only concentrate on one thinking job at a time, and one or the other tasks will suffer. Of course, you can make them each respectively suffer for short times while you switch your conversation back and forth, but at the end of the day, you will find that you still can't remember half the radio show, and your program will have taken you more than twice as long as usual to write.
Also don't understimate the DirectX 10 factor that Vista has to draw the PC gamers.
DirectX 10 certainly has my attention. But I don't know if the improvements of DirectX 10 will be enough to offset the inefficiencies of the operating system. I have not installed Vista because I enjoy MS Flight Simulator and I have heard from people who have compared XP and Vista that the frame rates are much lower on Vista.
Well, when I was in school, there were four food groups, now there are 6, um, bricks I guess, in the food pyramid. There for awhile there was some kind of food ring. I think the scientists just like to change things up to keep us from getting comfortable.
The company I USED to work for, and several of my associates STILL work for just recently recalled all its telecommuters. Not, not AT&T. My best friend enjoyed working from home usually 4 days a week. He is the only one on his team based out of the local office, and even his boss is out of another location. But now he is required to go in every single day, and they even set the hours, 8:30 to 4:30, in order to maximize commute time. I think they must be TRYING to get people to quit. The funny thing is, the companies clients are all over the U.S. and travel is about 80% for most staff. So they will be gone 3 weeks out of the month anyway (leaving on Sunday and coming back on Saturday), and on the remaining week they are expected to be in the office with a bunch of people not in their department.
Well, it's been worse. They used to have a travel policy that you could only come back in off the road every two weeks, so you actually had to schedule with your boss the weekends that you would like to have off. At least now you can count on having from sometime Saturday afternoon until early Sunday afternoon off most weeks.
"We have lots of phones with cameras and MP3 players. Do you want one of those?"
There is some annoying commercial on U.S. Tv right now with a similar setup to your story. A guy comes in to get a cell phone
and she asks him about his interests. He says something about liking to jog, to which she offers him a phone that has a built-in mp3 player. I don't know what jogging has to do with music, but I would assume if he likes music then he probably has a playback device with much better quality. Then he says he likes photography, to which she insults him by trying to sell him a cellphone with a camera in it. Cell phone cameras are worse quality than even the crappiest cheap digital camera. I forget what the third interest is that he tells her, but she has an equally inane suggestion for that. Something like he likes to keep track of stocks or something, and she tries to sell him a phone with e-mail.
All I am looking for in a phone is a large phonebook memory space and a free way to prevent people from text messaging me.
My company issues everyone a laptop, and everyone has to shut it down and take it home with them every night. After all, most nights, there is going to be at least an hour or two of bug fixes that need to happen, but you don't know about them for a couple of hours after you go home for the evening. It would suck to just sit around the office for another 8 hours until the second shift ends just to see if anything has to be fixed.
Why do people treat shit camera work as though it's something raw and edgy?
I witness the same thing happening in home construction. "Upscale" builders are charging more for cabinetry made out of old rotten pine and people love it. They also paint furniture three times (and charge three times as much) in order to make the furniture look "old fashioned". Then on the patios and sidewalks, they purposely do a bad job of screeding such that the walks have pockmarks in it. And the rich eat it up. It would be far cheaper just to get a cheap contractor to do a regular bad job of concrete and millwork, the result would be the same. But then they couldn't brag about how much money they paid for the crappy work.
I am in charge of a group that is responsible for production work that has to be turned around in 24 hours. This takes between 75% to 150% of our work hours. We also get stuff tossed over the fence at us by the salespeople where we have to "prove our product works" despite the fact that we do this stuff in production all day long. The salespeople figure if we can turn around production in 24 hours, we ought to be able to do the same for their work, which is in some unknown format and is about the same seize as our normal production run. This happens two to three times a week.
Once in awhile we have one of those days where the production work only takes us 75% of the day to complete. So we have downtime. What do we do during the downtime? That is when we go and try to clear the bugs up in bugzilla. I have bugs that are 7 months old that haven't been opened yet. I know that sounds bad, but production has to come first, and unfortunately, the salespeople who are incapable of selling the product without showing test data come second. So fixing bugs, which might make both of the higher priority items take less time, are hardly ever addressed.
You can hammer in a nail with a crescent wrench too, but if you do so with a hammer sitting right there in the toolbox I'm gonna consider you an idiot.
Well, as long as we are on the subject, how about the overuse of SQL databases for non-relational information? MySQL is no beast, but in my company, there is a SQL Server on almost every box and many of them are storing stuff that is non-relational and could be accessed more quickly in a direct access file.
Oh, lucky you. You had a child that either listened to you or at least acted like they did so you could pat yourself on the back. I know there are some crappy parent out there and there are some good ones, but everyone is their own individual and whether their parenting was good or bad they can decide to be a good or bad person on their own. My sister and I had the same parents and were taught the same things, but I went to college, worked my way through and bought a house at the age of 23, while my sister got involved with a druggie and had a kid who hasn't seen his father since he was one year old.
I have tried to instill good values in my kids and I have talked to them about the dangers of the internet, but I found my stepson's myspace page and it had a picture of him with a vacuous look on his face and no shirt on, and his bio said he was interested in meeting people. Of course, I told him what type of people he would meet with a profile like that.
The point is, it is easy to throw around labels of "bad parent", and I am not claiming to be anything other than an average parent, but it is still up to the individual to take responsibility for what they are going to be in life.
As a parent, I sure would like the ability to say "I told you about the dangers on myspace, you chose to create a profile inviting those dangers. No more myspace." I can certainly do that in my house, but the widespread availability of internet access precludes me from effectively meting out appropriate punishment.
As a matter of fact, in SOME U.S. states, you would go to jail even if she had told you she was 19, had a license to prove it, you took her at her word that she was 19, she WAS in fact 19, but had done up her hair in pigtails and painted some freckles on her face to APPEAR to be underage.
I don't know how an any age verification would work.
Easy enough:
Investigator: Interested in myspace?
Person of Unknown age: Yup!
Investigator: And you are OUTTA here.
no one has addressed the actual problem of making the parents get involved in their kids life and...well..PARENT.
Well, parenting itself is composed of many, many problems. For one thing, it is absolutely impossible for you to know every single second of every single day what your child is doing. You can monitor them while they are on the computer at home, but you have no control over what they do on the libraries computers, or the computers at their friends house or at school. You can teach them right from wrong, bring them up right, what to avoid on the internet, but they are still a human being and will make their own choices, and as the parent, you WILL receive the blame if they screw up, because in modern society no one is EVER to blame for their own actions.
For another thing, every step that a parent takes to bring their child up correctly and to keep an eye on what their children are doing is considered a blow for children's rights, and is booed by many parts of society and especially booed by slashdot. slashdot thinks that every child should be allowed to experiment for itself with minimal parental supervision, but somehow, off course, full parental participation, and the child should essentially learn right and wrong for itself. I mean, why learn from other's mistakes when you can just make your own? If you make a mistake, you just blame it on your parents.
No, being a parent is no picnic, and the anonymity of the internet doesn't make it any easier, even for those of us parents who do know a thing or two about the internet. Fortunately for all those childless know-it-alls out there, it still is pretty easy to just say "If only parents would, well, PARENT".
I hope they won't make you buy only HP gas cartridges
Of course they do. They come in heavily reinforced 20 gallon tanks containing 5 gallons of gasoline and 15 gallons of styrofoam. Of course, they also come with the fuel injection system attached, which just bumps up the price ever so slightly. The initial fuel tank delivered with the car only contains 2 gallons of fuel, and the replacement tank is expected to cost $1000. Third party tanks will be available for less money, but the car is configured to randomly reject any non HP tanks, even if they are simply rebuilt and rebadged used HP tanks. Tanks which are retrofitted to allow you to add your own gasoline will suffer similar rejection.
You can drop the old tank off at the recycle bin at the post office, which may help you feel like you are doing your share for the environment.
That's true, but the simulated beings don't care. They still see things as one second per second, regardless of long it takes the VM to calculate the next state of being. As I see it, time would merely be one of the parameters of the simulation and would not necessarily have any meaning outside of the simulation.
Then, it must by definition exist inside another universe.If WE created a simulated universe, then that simulations creator would exist in a universe. But if we are a created simulation it does not require that the creator exists in a universe.
If you paint a painting, should that painting expect that someone painted you?
Assuming we were created by some being that exists outside our universe, it does not necessarily follow that the fact that we were created implies that the being was also created.
If you write a computer program with certain restraints, that certainly does not mean that those restraints apply to you outside of that program.
Happens all the time in academia. Nonprofit dollars go toward professors research, which they later turn around and start a business capitalizing on the results of said research.
You can already buy video from the iTunes store so why not an over priced cup of coffee?
Since you are doing all the work of placing the order and paying for it online, how much of a discount do you get?
I still don't understand why people pay $6 for a cup of coffee. Coffee is supposed to be $0.50 and unlimited refills.
Of course, the fine article mentions that the lighting controller was one that his company uses in one of the many clubs in the area. Better to have that lighting controller running that stuff for a few weeks out of the year, then year round in one of the clubs. Oh, and have you seen Las Vegas? Maybe we should shut them down too.
It's one thing to believe something that's erroneous. It's another to cast it in a hundred thousand lights and broadcast your ignorance to the entire neighborhood.
Yes, much better to cast it on slashdot and send it all over the internet. Did you ask the guy to make sure that he wasn't aware of the fact that Christ was more probably born in springtime? I as a Christian am more than well aware, as I am sure, are most other Christians, that we don't know the exact birthdate of Jesus, and that the date we choose to celebrate was chosen on purpose in order to overshadow the existing pagan celebration.
And I like the "energy savings" that they advertise. With all of the bulbs I have replaced with CFLs, if I add up the alleged annual savings, it is greater than the amount I actually spent on electricity last year on ALL of my electrical appliances. I will let you know when the electric company starts sending me checks.
As a retailer in another arena, I can tell you that I have run up against threats from the manufacturers to cut me off simply because I was selling products on the internet, even if it is the same cost as selling in the stores. They claimed that selling on the internet was unfair competition. I see it differently. I have the tools and knowledge to know how to sell on the internet, therefore I have an advantage over other retailers that don't know how to do this. The manufacturers claimed that I was horning in on other people's territory. I figure that most people would not be that interested in spending the shipping dollars to buy a product that they could actually buy if it was available elsewhere nearby. The thing that pissed me off the most was that they threatened to cut me off for selling on the internet while Amazon and several other big name online e-tailers were selling the exact same products with apparent impunity.
All that to say that Nintendo may have already promised to give exclusive rights to internet sale (aka unfair competition) to Wal-mart, Amazon and other online retailers and the little guy is not allowed to compete on the same terms.
It's the retarded youth paying for it so it continues.
No it's not. It's poor Daddy who knows that ringtones are a bad deal that has to pay for it. I'd bet most of the ringtones sold are the "free" ones that cost $6.99 a week if you read the unreadable fine print that flashes for half a second at the bottom of the screen.
Slashdot Mirror
Doing something different every couple of hours, though, is not multitasking. Multitasking is when you have to switch gears every couple of minutes, or even several times per minute. This is incredibly inefficient and tires you out quickly. I don't know why businesses want you to do this. You are only one person. If it takes one person 8 hours to do job A, and it takes one person 8 hours to do job B, and you have one person work on them both, he will finish the job in 16 hours if he does them sequentially, or in probably 20 hours if he constantly switches back and forth between them. Mind you I am talking about jobs that normally require 100% attention. If part of that time is waiting for the computer to compile your code for a half hour, then there are efficiencies to be gained by doing another task, but that is usually a longer term switch, which doesn't really count as multitasking in the sense of the article.
Now if you talk of multitasking as programming on your computer while listening to talk radio, you will find that you cannot both remember the details of the radio conversation and program at your normal speed. Your brain really can only concentrate on one thinking job at a time, and one or the other tasks will suffer. Of course, you can make them each respectively suffer for short times while you switch your conversation back and forth, but at the end of the day, you will find that you still can't remember half the radio show, and your program will have taken you more than twice as long as usual to write.
Also don't understimate the DirectX 10 factor that Vista has to draw the PC gamers.
DirectX 10 certainly has my attention. But I don't know if the improvements of DirectX 10 will be enough to offset the inefficiencies of the operating system. I have not installed Vista because I enjoy MS Flight Simulator and I have heard from people who have compared XP and Vista that the frame rates are much lower on Vista.
Not my problem that their business model doesn't work unless their employees work a certain percentage of the time for free.
Well, when I was in school, there were four food groups, now there are 6, um, bricks I guess, in the food pyramid. There for awhile there was some kind of food ring. I think the scientists just like to change things up to keep us from getting comfortable.
The company I USED to work for, and several of my associates STILL work for just recently recalled all its telecommuters. Not, not AT&T. My best friend enjoyed working from home usually 4 days a week. He is the only one on his team based out of the local office, and even his boss is out of another location. But now he is required to go in every single day, and they even set the hours, 8:30 to 4:30, in order to maximize commute time. I think they must be TRYING to get people to quit. The funny thing is, the companies clients are all over the U.S. and travel is about 80% for most staff. So they will be gone 3 weeks out of the month anyway (leaving on Sunday and coming back on Saturday), and on the remaining week they are expected to be in the office with a bunch of people not in their department.
Well, it's been worse. They used to have a travel policy that you could only come back in off the road every two weeks, so you actually had to schedule with your boss the weekends that you would like to have off. At least now you can count on having from sometime Saturday afternoon until early Sunday afternoon off most weeks.
"We have lots of phones with cameras and MP3 players. Do you want one of those?"
There is some annoying commercial on U.S. Tv right now with a similar setup to your story. A guy comes in to get a cell phone and she asks him about his interests. He says something about liking to jog, to which she offers him a phone that has a built-in mp3 player. I don't know what jogging has to do with music, but I would assume if he likes music then he probably has a playback device with much better quality. Then he says he likes photography, to which she insults him by trying to sell him a cellphone with a camera in it. Cell phone cameras are worse quality than even the crappiest cheap digital camera. I forget what the third interest is that he tells her, but she has an equally inane suggestion for that. Something like he likes to keep track of stocks or something, and she tries to sell him a phone with e-mail.
All I am looking for in a phone is a large phonebook memory space and a free way to prevent people from text messaging me.
My company issues everyone a laptop, and everyone has to shut it down and take it home with them every night. After all, most nights, there is going to be at least an hour or two of bug fixes that need to happen, but you don't know about them for a couple of hours after you go home for the evening. It would suck to just sit around the office for another 8 hours until the second shift ends just to see if anything has to be fixed.
Why do people treat shit camera work as though it's something raw and edgy?
I witness the same thing happening in home construction. "Upscale" builders are charging more for cabinetry made out of old rotten pine and people love it. They also paint furniture three times (and charge three times as much) in order to make the furniture look "old fashioned". Then on the patios and sidewalks, they purposely do a bad job of screeding such that the walks have pockmarks in it. And the rich eat it up. It would be far cheaper just to get a cheap contractor to do a regular bad job of concrete and millwork, the result would be the same. But then they couldn't brag about how much money they paid for the crappy work.
I am in charge of a group that is responsible for production work that has to be turned around in 24 hours. This takes between 75% to 150% of our work hours. We also get stuff tossed over the fence at us by the salespeople where we have to "prove our product works" despite the fact that we do this stuff in production all day long. The salespeople figure if we can turn around production in 24 hours, we ought to be able to do the same for their work, which is in some unknown format and is about the same seize as our normal production run. This happens two to three times a week.
Once in awhile we have one of those days where the production work only takes us 75% of the day to complete. So we have downtime. What do we do during the downtime? That is when we go and try to clear the bugs up in bugzilla. I have bugs that are 7 months old that haven't been opened yet. I know that sounds bad, but production has to come first, and unfortunately, the salespeople who are incapable of selling the product without showing test data come second. So fixing bugs, which might make both of the higher priority items take less time, are hardly ever addressed.
You can hammer in a nail with a crescent wrench too, but if you do so with a hammer sitting right there in the toolbox I'm gonna consider you an idiot.
Well, as long as we are on the subject, how about the overuse of SQL databases for non-relational information? MySQL is no beast, but in my company, there is a SQL Server on almost every box and many of them are storing stuff that is non-relational and could be accessed more quickly in a direct access file.
Oh, lucky you. You had a child that either listened to you or at least acted like they did so you could pat yourself on the back. I know there are some crappy parent out there and there are some good ones, but everyone is their own individual and whether their parenting was good or bad they can decide to be a good or bad person on their own. My sister and I had the same parents and were taught the same things, but I went to college, worked my way through and bought a house at the age of 23, while my sister got involved with a druggie and had a kid who hasn't seen his father since he was one year old.
I have tried to instill good values in my kids and I have talked to them about the dangers of the internet, but I found my stepson's myspace page and it had a picture of him with a vacuous look on his face and no shirt on, and his bio said he was interested in meeting people. Of course, I told him what type of people he would meet with a profile like that.
The point is, it is easy to throw around labels of "bad parent", and I am not claiming to be anything other than an average parent, but it is still up to the individual to take responsibility for what they are going to be in life.
As a parent, I sure would like the ability to say "I told you about the dangers on myspace, you chose to create a profile inviting those dangers. No more myspace." I can certainly do that in my house, but the widespread availability of internet access precludes me from effectively meting out appropriate punishment.
As a matter of fact, in SOME U.S. states, you would go to jail even if she had told you she was 19, had a license to prove it, you took her at her word that she was 19, she WAS in fact 19, but had done up her hair in pigtails and painted some freckles on her face to APPEAR to be underage.
I don't know how an any age verification would work.
Easy enough:
Investigator: Interested in myspace?
Person of Unknown age: Yup!
Investigator: And you are OUTTA here.
no one has addressed the actual problem of making the parents get involved in their kids life and...well..PARENT.
Well, parenting itself is composed of many, many problems. For one thing, it is absolutely impossible for you to know every single second of every single day what your child is doing. You can monitor them while they are on the computer at home, but you have no control over what they do on the libraries computers, or the computers at their friends house or at school. You can teach them right from wrong, bring them up right, what to avoid on the internet, but they are still a human being and will make their own choices, and as the parent, you WILL receive the blame if they screw up, because in modern society no one is EVER to blame for their own actions.
For another thing, every step that a parent takes to bring their child up correctly and to keep an eye on what their children are doing is considered a blow for children's rights, and is booed by many parts of society and especially booed by slashdot. slashdot thinks that every child should be allowed to experiment for itself with minimal parental supervision, but somehow, off course, full parental participation, and the child should essentially learn right and wrong for itself. I mean, why learn from other's mistakes when you can just make your own? If you make a mistake, you just blame it on your parents.
No, being a parent is no picnic, and the anonymity of the internet doesn't make it any easier, even for those of us parents who do know a thing or two about the internet. Fortunately for all those childless know-it-alls out there, it still is pretty easy to just say "If only parents would, well, PARENT".
I hope they won't make you buy only HP gas cartridges
Of course they do. They come in heavily reinforced 20 gallon tanks containing 5 gallons of gasoline and 15 gallons of styrofoam. Of course, they also come with the fuel injection system attached, which just bumps up the price ever so slightly. The initial fuel tank delivered with the car only contains 2 gallons of fuel, and the replacement tank is expected to cost $1000. Third party tanks will be available for less money, but the car is configured to randomly reject any non HP tanks, even if they are simply rebuilt and rebadged used HP tanks. Tanks which are retrofitted to allow you to add your own gasoline will suffer similar rejection.
You can drop the old tank off at the recycle bin at the post office, which may help you feel like you are doing your share for the environment.
That's true, but the simulated beings don't care. They still see things as one second per second, regardless of long it takes the VM to calculate the next state of being. As I see it, time would merely be one of the parameters of the simulation and would not necessarily have any meaning outside of the simulation.
Then, it must by definition exist inside another universe.If WE created a simulated universe, then that simulations creator would exist in a universe. But if we are a created simulation it does not require that the creator exists in a universe.
If you paint a painting, should that painting expect that someone painted you? Assuming we were created by some being that exists outside our universe, it does not necessarily follow that the fact that we were created implies that the being was also created.
If you write a computer program with certain restraints, that certainly does not mean that those restraints apply to you outside of that program.
Happens all the time in academia. Nonprofit dollars go toward professors research, which they later turn around and start a business capitalizing on the results of said research.
You can already buy video from the iTunes store so why not an over priced cup of coffee?
Since you are doing all the work of placing the order and paying for it online, how much of a discount do you get?
I still don't understand why people pay $6 for a cup of coffee. Coffee is supposed to be $0.50 and unlimited refills.
Of course, the fine article mentions that the lighting controller was one that his company uses in one of the many clubs in the area. Better to have that lighting controller running that stuff for a few weeks out of the year, then year round in one of the clubs. Oh, and have you seen Las Vegas? Maybe we should shut them down too.
It's one thing to believe something that's erroneous. It's another to cast it in a hundred thousand lights and broadcast your ignorance to the entire neighborhood.
Yes, much better to cast it on slashdot and send it all over the internet. Did you ask the guy to make sure that he wasn't aware of the fact that Christ was more probably born in springtime? I as a Christian am more than well aware, as I am sure, are most other Christians, that we don't know the exact birthdate of Jesus, and that the date we choose to celebrate was chosen on purpose in order to overshadow the existing pagan celebration.
And I like the "energy savings" that they advertise. With all of the bulbs I have replaced with CFLs, if I add up the alleged annual savings, it is greater than the amount I actually spent on electricity last year on ALL of my electrical appliances. I will let you know when the electric company starts sending me checks.
As a retailer in another arena, I can tell you that I have run up against threats from the manufacturers to cut me off simply because I was selling products on the internet, even if it is the same cost as selling in the stores. They claimed that selling on the internet was unfair competition. I see it differently. I have the tools and knowledge to know how to sell on the internet, therefore I have an advantage over other retailers that don't know how to do this. The manufacturers claimed that I was horning in on other people's territory. I figure that most people would not be that interested in spending the shipping dollars to buy a product that they could actually buy if it was available elsewhere nearby. The thing that pissed me off the most was that they threatened to cut me off for selling on the internet while Amazon and several other big name online e-tailers were selling the exact same products with apparent impunity.
All that to say that Nintendo may have already promised to give exclusive rights to internet sale (aka unfair competition) to Wal-mart, Amazon and other online retailers and the little guy is not allowed to compete on the same terms.
It's the retarded youth paying for it so it continues.
No it's not. It's poor Daddy who knows that ringtones are a bad deal that has to pay for it. I'd bet most of the ringtones sold are the "free" ones that cost $6.99 a week if you read the unreadable fine print that flashes for half a second at the bottom of the screen.