The value of most common interruption is practically never higher than the task you're currently working on. You already prioritized and scheduled everything correctly, so what you are working on right now is important.
You forget one thing - it isn't YOUR time. It's your employer's time; he's paying for it and it belongs to him. He or his designate (your boss) can use that time any way he damned well pleases, including interrupting the task he's given you a deadline on to talk about his child's school play, and there's nothing productive you can do about it short of selling your hours to someone else, or wasting even more of his time explaining to him how his annoying makes you less productive.
If you're being paid piecework than the above doesn't apply. If you are paid a salary or by the hour it does.
That's better said as "one car length for each ten miles per hour of speed." It's hard for the human brain to accurately judge how fast the vehicle can stop, but judging distance is hard-wired.
If you're doing 30 you should have three car lengths; that's analogous to the "two second rule". But most people use the two second rule and the math doesn't work because most people suck at math (me included) especially when they should be concentrating on something like, say, driving, so they wind up less than a car length away in the city and two or three on the highway.
There are six tenths of a mile in a km, so that would be roughly 1 car length for every 20 kph (actually a tad safer).
Basically, I dunno, I have no problem believing that some people _are_ born smarter.
Normal people think I'm pretty smart, and yeah, I have the ability to figure things out, I read really fast, I'm creative, but in a lot of things that most people take for granted I'm incredibly stupid (e.g. I have the hardest time getting laid).
"Multitasking may be detrimental to work and learning" says 18th Century man
Humans as a species don't change perceptably over that short a period. People have always multitasked - we just didn't need a word for it until computers. In fact, here's an old quite about multitasking that unlike yours actually was used before computers, and maybe in the 18th century or before:
"He's so stupid he can't walk and chew gum at the same time".
TFA's premise is too dumb to even read. You couldn't drive a car (or a horse-drawn wagon) without multitasking. You can't play a guitar, let alone a drum set, without multitasking. How many things did you have for dinner last night, were they all cooked one at a time? A cave man had to keep the fire burning, cook, and watch out for wolves all at the same time.
I just wrote something on the superiority of written matter over video because written matter has numerous advantages that relate to focus and reflection.
When I was young and stupid I'd read and watch TV at the same time. Somehow I wound up missing most of the show...
But I do have a problem with someone saying "Here's how we got rich..."
Amen to that! Tami's family has money (too bad her family will no longer have anyhing to do with her); she showed show horses as a teenager. "We were the poor ones" she said. Poor? Poor people can't afford horses! "The rich ones have carpets and chandeliers in the barns!"
Donald Trump's commercials hawking his "how to get rich" schemes alternately make me laugh and gag. The man was given a hundred million dollars when he turned 21, wtf would he know about how to get rich?
Bill Gates parents were both lawyers. Again, he was born into money and influence.
Someone much wiser than me once said (and I don't know who, perhaps someone could fill that part in) "it's impossible to turn ten dollars into twenty dollars, but it's inevitable to turn ten million dollars into twenty million dollars".
If Bill Gates wasn't the son of two lawyers, one of whom was "in" with IBM brass, your computer would not be running Windows right now and you would have never heard of Bill Gates.
OK, if you go through my comment history you'll see that I'm not just "not a Microsoft apologist" but that I hate their software and wish I wasn't forced to use it at work.
But Lotus is a really bad example. I'm forced to use it, too, because somebody in the Chicago office sends us Lotus spreadsheets that I have to use to generate reports with.
The default on install is to have have the suite auto-run fullscreen on machine startup. Google found the answer for that, and I managed to shut it off. But it loads up my system tray (the one on the right with the crap that's always running, what we used to call TSRs in the DOS days) with a ton of icons, and I haven't found out how to stop it from loading them but instead have to tell it "exit" every single day. This despite the fact that I only use Lotus four times a year.
When I do use it, the scroll wheel on my mouse doesn't work.
I hate Excel, but damn, I hate Lotus a whole lot more. That's an incredibly bad example; Microsoft writes some really, really bad software but it's nowhere near as bad as Lotus.
You're right that most companies don't choose to engage in those ruthless tactics. However, the most powerful companies do
They didn't used to.
And we reward them.
We didn't used to. We used to break monopolies like ATT up. No longer. But then, we didn't used to have a global marketplace in most things; we didn't have the WTO, we didn't have jobs exported to other parts of the world, we didn't have Clinton and we didn't have Bush. It didn't seem that CEOs were psychopathic sociopaths like today's CEOs, and we didn't reward those CEOs for failure like we do now, and those CEOs didn't starve our lowest paid workers.
We didn't use to worship the almighty dollar. Rather, we saw and used it as a tool.
This is how powerful companies are built.
That's not how they used to be built.
You have to hate them both, and you have to hate them enough to set your own safety and comfort aside and put a stop to it by whatever means are necessary. They've always relied in you being too scared and or lazy to take the necessary steps, and they've always been right.
Hating the psychopaths and their games will change neither the psychopaths nor their games. Pray tell what are the necessary steps? I can see nothing whatever that I, a middle class drone, can do to change the way the rich people run their world.
And it IS theirs. There's nothing whatever I can do about it. I can't even shame them, because they have no shame.
My point was that the corporate media has a vested interest in ignoring alternate parties. They would have you believe that a vote for any candidate other than a Republican or a Democrat is a wasted vote. It isn't, or any losing vote would be wasted. There is no such thing as a wasted vote, especially for a candidate who is on the ballot in 49 states like Barr.
Slashdot shouldn't do this. Yeah, I can research Barr's opinions (Barr is really a Republican) and I can research the opinions of the Green candidates, but you'll see slashdot articles "What does Obama think about [tech issue]" and "What does McCain think about [tech issue]" as if they are the only candidates running.
We have alternatives to Tweddle Dum and Tweedle Dumer*. As a less brain dead site than most, slashdot should take the high road and not cowtow to the corporates' agenda, and if it's going to cover the American Presidential election it should cover ALL the candidates, and not just the two that the corporations have bought.
It's been a long time since I built a Heathkit, do they still make them? My two favorites were my sixty watt guitar amplifier and my ham radio reciever; this was in the last '60s when I was a teenager.
But you're not really going to learn about electronics by building stuff from kits. Read books; when you have the theory then you can get the kits and will understand what's going on with them.
The library is your friend. It's often better than Google and Wikipedia combined.
I believe you may already know but, because if you pay for it: then pimps step in and abuse girls to do it.
None of the hookers I know have pimps. They don't need them - they have enough regular customers that they don't even have to walk the streets. And if the practice were legal, there would be no need for pimps. In fact, like marijuana, if the practice were legal all the problemas associated with it would go away. Since they ended alcohol prohibition, although people still overdose and have accidents while under the influence, nobody dies from poisoned whiskey and there aren't gang wars over it.
Some other commenters already mentioned the 72 hour grace period after the warrant (which on the face of it seems unconstitutional to this layman, at least going against the spirit of the 4th amendment) but what they haven't mentioned yet is that a cop 200 years ago had the same problem - they needed to have a warrant. There may have been a conspiracy to burn down some government building and the cops needed to break down someone's door to get the letters an informant told them about to find out which building and when, but the terrorist only had to get wind of the government's interest and toss the incriminating papers in the fireplace.
Only the technology has changed; instead of paper we now have bits. And bits are a lot harder to destroy than paper.
Only Bush 2 could make Nixon look like a saintly statesman.
Nixon was evil, but he actually did some good things - signed various environmental bills, for instance (Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act; why don't Republicans give a shit about the environment these days?).
Carter was a good man, and very intelligent; he even held a physics degree. H'e probably feel right at home here. But I never thought I'd see a worse President (although when it comes to sucking at being President, he's apiker compared to Bush).
No, but it's a GREAT idea to base learning on. Not everything needs to be based on economics, unless of course you are a practitioner of America's State Religion (Mammon Worship).
I never thought I'd see the day when so-called "nerds" at slashdot would bash someone for hacking (old-school meaning of the word).
1. The Attorney General of Bush's administration can grant them immunity from prosecution 2. If you think the Democrats are any less under the sway of the corporatti you are a bit naive. Our plutocracy has the best legislators, judges, Presidents, and policemen that money can buy. In fact there's nothing at all that money won't do in our plutocracy, provided you have enough of it.
A challenge for you: make a change to wikipedia that is blatantly wrong and have it stay for 24 hours.
That is also one of wikipedia's weaknesses. Make a change to wikipedia that is correct and it, too is likely to be changed in 24 hours.
To wikipedia's credit, however, things usually sort themselves out. I made a change to its entry on cataracts after having my CrystaLens IOL implanted in '06, mentioning this medical breakthrough, and it was excised in far less than 24 hours. Someone else managed to undo the undoing months later and it has the info I added, only written more clearly.
In MAJOR articles like those on neuroscience, biology, core computer science, mathematics, etc, Wikipedia tends to contain fewer inaccuracies per text unit than Britannica
And in some articles, like those on Klingons, Thiotimoline, Flux Capacitors, Pink Floyd Discographies, etc. Britannica doesn't even have an entry at all!
If you're arguing about the meaning or the spelling of a word, what else would you cite?
I went to public school; I think there's an Illinois state law that says you can't be a teacher unless you rode the short bus when you went to school. My mon's dictionary was invaluable when a teacher thought I made up the word Hierarchy" and it wasn't in her abridged dictionary. It changed an F to a B+.
A science teacher gave me an A on a paper I wrote on physics because he couldn't understand it. No way he would have understood anything cited by wikipedia, he probably would have had trouble with an encyclopedia.
The link to "Hierarchy" is there on the off chance that the old bitch is not only still alive but reading slashdot as well.
Yes, which would affect the size of the source without bloating the code. That's why I asked. If 5 megs of the 6.3 megs of source is comments, that's a GOOD thing. Little or no bloat and the code is decipherable.
Slashdot Mirror
The value of most common interruption is practically never higher than the task you're currently working on. You already prioritized and scheduled everything correctly, so what you are working on right now is important.
You forget one thing - it isn't YOUR time. It's your employer's time; he's paying for it and it belongs to him. He or his designate (your boss) can use that time any way he damned well pleases, including interrupting the task he's given you a deadline on to talk about his child's school play, and there's nothing productive you can do about it short of selling your hours to someone else, or wasting even more of his time explaining to him how his annoying makes you less productive.
If you're being paid piecework than the above doesn't apply. If you are paid a salary or by the hour it does.
Consider the "2 second following distance" rule
That's better said as "one car length for each ten miles per hour of speed." It's hard for the human brain to accurately judge how fast the vehicle can stop, but judging distance is hard-wired.
If you're doing 30 you should have three car lengths; that's analogous to the "two second rule". But most people use the two second rule and the math doesn't work because most people suck at math (me included) especially when they should be concentrating on something like, say, driving, so they wind up less than a car length away in the city and two or three on the highway.
There are six tenths of a mile in a km, so that would be roughly 1 car length for every 20 kph (actually a tad safer).
Most of those girls in those tshirt ADDs are really flat chested. What were you saying about only being able to think about one thing?
Cubicles and open offices are default nowadays, so people can constantly drop by and ask things.
Never believe a single word anyone wearing a necktie says. Cubiclas are because walls and doors are expensive, or the CEO would be in a cubicle too.
We have connected computers - we have email. There's no need to drop by and interrupt your train of thought to ask you a question.
Because "God" doesn't seem to believe in neat, orthogonal, cohesive coding.
In other words, God writes spagetti code?
Basically, I dunno, I have no problem believing that some people _are_ born smarter.
Normal people think I'm pretty smart, and yeah, I have the ability to figure things out, I read really fast, I'm creative, but in a lot of things that most people take for granted I'm incredibly stupid (e.g. I have the hardest time getting laid).
"Multitasking may be detrimental to work and learning" says 18th Century man
Humans as a species don't change perceptably over that short a period. People have always multitasked - we just didn't need a word for it until computers. In fact, here's an old quite about multitasking that unlike yours actually was used before computers, and maybe in the 18th century or before:
"He's so stupid he can't walk and chew gum at the same time".
TFA's premise is too dumb to even read. You couldn't drive a car (or a horse-drawn wagon) without multitasking. You can't play a guitar, let alone a drum set, without multitasking. How many things did you have for dinner last night, were they all cooked one at a time? A cave man had to keep the fire burning, cook, and watch out for wolves all at the same time.
I just wrote something on the superiority of written matter over video because written matter has numerous advantages that relate to focus and reflection.
When I was young and stupid I'd read and watch TV at the same time. Somehow I wound up missing most of the show...
But I do have a problem with someone saying "Here's how we got rich..."
Amen to that! Tami's family has money (too bad her family will no longer have anyhing to do with her); she showed show horses as a teenager. "We were the poor ones" she said. Poor? Poor people can't afford horses! "The rich ones have carpets and chandeliers in the barns!"
Donald Trump's commercials hawking his "how to get rich" schemes alternately make me laugh and gag. The man was given a hundred million dollars when he turned 21, wtf would he know about how to get rich?
Bill Gates parents were both lawyers. Again, he was born into money and influence.
Someone much wiser than me once said (and I don't know who, perhaps someone could fill that part in) "it's impossible to turn ten dollars into twenty dollars, but it's inevitable to turn ten million dollars into twenty million dollars".
If Bill Gates wasn't the son of two lawyers, one of whom was "in" with IBM brass, your computer would not be running Windows right now and you would have never heard of Bill Gates.
OK, if you go through my comment history you'll see that I'm not just "not a Microsoft apologist" but that I hate their software and wish I wasn't forced to use it at work.
But Lotus is a really bad example. I'm forced to use it, too, because somebody in the Chicago office sends us Lotus spreadsheets that I have to use to generate reports with.
The default on install is to have have the suite auto-run fullscreen on machine startup. Google found the answer for that, and I managed to shut it off. But it loads up my system tray (the one on the right with the crap that's always running, what we used to call TSRs in the DOS days) with a ton of icons, and I haven't found out how to stop it from loading them but instead have to tell it "exit" every single day. This despite the fact that I only use Lotus four times a year.
When I do use it, the scroll wheel on my mouse doesn't work.
I hate Excel, but damn, I hate Lotus a whole lot more. That's an incredibly bad example; Microsoft writes some really, really bad software but it's nowhere near as bad as Lotus.
You're right that most companies don't choose to engage in those ruthless tactics. However, the most powerful companies do
They didn't used to.
And we reward them.
We didn't used to. We used to break monopolies like ATT up. No longer. But then, we didn't used to have a global marketplace in most things; we didn't have the WTO, we didn't have jobs exported to other parts of the world, we didn't have Clinton and we didn't have Bush. It didn't seem that CEOs were psychopathic sociopaths like today's CEOs, and we didn't reward those CEOs for failure like we do now, and those CEOs didn't starve our lowest paid workers.
We didn't use to worship the almighty dollar. Rather, we saw and used it as a tool.
This is how powerful companies are built.
That's not how they used to be built.
You have to hate them both, and you have to hate them enough to set your own safety and comfort aside and put a stop to it by whatever means are necessary. They've always relied in you being too scared and or lazy to take the necessary steps, and they've always been right.
Hating the psychopaths and their games will change neither the psychopaths nor their games. Pray tell what are the necessary steps? I can see nothing whatever that I, a middle class drone, can do to change the way the rich people run their world.
And it IS theirs. There's nothing whatever I can do about it. I can't even shame them, because they have no shame.
My point was that the corporate media has a vested interest in ignoring alternate parties. They would have you believe that a vote for any candidate other than a Republican or a Democrat is a wasted vote. It isn't, or any losing vote would be wasted. There is no such thing as a wasted vote, especially for a candidate who is on the ballot in 49 states like Barr.
Slashdot shouldn't do this. Yeah, I can research Barr's opinions (Barr is really a Republican) and I can research the opinions of the Green candidates, but you'll see slashdot articles "What does Obama think about [tech issue]" and "What does McCain think about [tech issue]" as if they are the only candidates running.
We have alternatives to Tweddle Dum and Tweedle Dumer*. As a less brain dead site than most, slashdot should take the high road and not cowtow to the corporates' agenda, and if it's going to cover the American Presidential election it should cover ALL the candidates, and not just the two that the corporations have bought.
*Stolen from Walt Kelly's Pogo
Can you get arrested for stealing my marijuana?
It's been a long time since I built a Heathkit, do they still make them? My two favorites were my sixty watt guitar amplifier and my ham radio reciever; this was in the last '60s when I was a teenager.
But you're not really going to learn about electronics by building stuff from kits. Read books; when you have the theory then you can get the kits and will understand what's going on with them.
The library is your friend. It's often better than Google and Wikipedia combined.
I believe you may already know but, because if you pay for it: then pimps step in and abuse girls to do it.
None of the hookers I know have pimps. They don't need them - they have enough regular customers that they don't even have to walk the streets. And if the practice were legal, there would be no need for pimps. In fact, like marijuana, if the practice were legal all the problemas associated with it would go away. Since they ended alcohol prohibition, although people still overdose and have accidents while under the influence, nobody dies from poisoned whiskey and there aren't gang wars over it.
Some other commenters already mentioned the 72 hour grace period after the warrant (which on the face of it seems unconstitutional to this layman, at least going against the spirit of the 4th amendment) but what they haven't mentioned yet is that a cop 200 years ago had the same problem - they needed to have a warrant. There may have been a conspiracy to burn down some government building and the cops needed to break down someone's door to get the letters an informant told them about to find out which building and when, but the terrorist only had to get wind of the government's interest and toss the incriminating papers in the fireplace.
Only the technology has changed; instead of paper we now have bits. And bits are a lot harder to destroy than paper.
Only Bush 2 could make Nixon look like a saintly statesman.
Nixon was evil, but he actually did some good things - signed various environmental bills, for instance (Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act; why don't Republicans give a shit about the environment these days?).
Carter was a good man, and very intelligent; he even held a physics degree. H'e probably feel right at home here. But I never thought I'd see a worse President (although when it comes to sucking at being President, he's apiker compared to Bush).
Now I FEAR I may see a worse President than Bush.
Maybe it has more to do with the skill of the developers than anything else
OS A has ten programmers working on it.
OS B has two hundred programmers working on it.
OS C has fibe hundred thousand programmers working on it.
Which OS is most likely to have the programmer with the most skill?
No, but it's a GREAT idea to base learning on. Not everything needs to be based on economics, unless of course you are a practitioner of America's State Religion (Mammon Worship).
I never thought I'd see the day when so-called "nerds" at slashdot would bash someone for hacking (old-school meaning of the word).
1. The Attorney General of Bush's administration can grant them immunity from prosecution
2. If you think the Democrats are any less under the sway of the corporatti you are a bit naive. Our plutocracy has the best legislators, judges, Presidents, and policemen that money can buy. In fact there's nothing at all that money won't do in our plutocracy, provided you have enough of it.
...calling WP (or anything) less biased is basically unfalsifiable. How could we be sure? How could we even measure something like that?
Personally, I have some faith in the "marketplace of ideas",
Move over, Spagetti Monster, we gots us a new religion!
A challenge for you: make a change to wikipedia that is blatantly wrong and have it stay for 24 hours.
That is also one of wikipedia's weaknesses. Make a change to wikipedia that is correct and it, too is likely to be changed in 24 hours.
To wikipedia's credit, however, things usually sort themselves out. I made a change to its entry on cataracts after having my CrystaLens IOL implanted in '06, mentioning this medical breakthrough, and it was excised in far less than 24 hours. Someone else managed to undo the undoing months later and it has the info I added, only written more clearly.
In MAJOR articles like those on neuroscience, biology, core computer science, mathematics, etc, Wikipedia tends to contain fewer inaccuracies per text unit than Britannica
And in some articles, like those on Klingons, Thiotimoline, Flux Capacitors, Pink Floyd Discographies, etc. Britannica doesn't even have an entry at all!
It is about as useful as citing a dictionary.
If you're arguing about the meaning or the spelling of a word, what else would you cite?
I went to public school; I think there's an Illinois state law that says you can't be a teacher unless you rode the short bus when you went to school. My mon's dictionary was invaluable when a teacher thought I made up the word Hierarchy" and it wasn't in her abridged dictionary. It changed an F to a B+.
A science teacher gave me an A on a paper I wrote on physics because he couldn't understand it. No way he would have understood anything cited by wikipedia, he probably would have had trouble with an encyclopedia.
The link to "Hierarchy" is there on the off chance that the old bitch is not only still alive but reading slashdot as well.
Better yet, if your teacher won't let you use wikipedia, use Uncyclopedia.
Yes, which would affect the size of the source without bloating the code. That's why I asked. If 5 megs of the 6.3 megs of source is comments, that's a GOOD thing. Little or no bloat and the code is decipherable.