OT: Data Smog

[Baron Munchausen]

Are you constantly rushing just to keep up with email correspondance? Are you always doing a half-dozen things at once and not getting any of them done? An article in the Seattle Times describes the study of 'data smog' or 'cognitive overload' or whatever you want to call it. Does this sound familiar?

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/pacificnw/2004/1128/cover.html

[geoschmo]

I'll read this when I get the time. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/laugh.gif

[Aiken]

I always say to my boss that I'm not a multitasking device. Unfortunately, he always refuses to understand this http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/frown.gif

[Kamog]

I know what you mean. It seems that I get interrupted a lot at work. While I'm working on my project, people come up to me and say, "do you have a minute?", "can you come help me with this problem?", and when I'm in the middle of helping the person, somebody else interupts and want me to do something else.

[deccan]

Get a good secretary...

[Atrocities]

The seattle times is not a source for news and information that I, nor mose washingtonians, would trust. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/frown.gif

[Arkcon]

I heard about this over on /. And I just seems to me like people want to whine about how our modern culture is worse than the good old days. Thing is its not the people suffering under modern technology who feel this way -- just that there are some people whose job it is to make a comment on our culture. Meh.

Here's a question. What is multitasking, applied to human behavior, I'm not talking about computer operating systems here.

Say you're working, and you get an email. You're not really multitasking if you drop a task to address an email -- you're just switching tasks as time permits. We may do this a lot more often than people realize.

Example, who didn't listen to the radio or T.V while doing homework? Teachers said that that was a bad idea, you weren't concentrating properly. But I couldn't work in a silent environment, it just didn't make sense to me.

'Spose a couple 100 years ago, some lady tended to her mending, while rocking a baby to sleep. Multitasking? Sure, why not? So is such behavior stressful? Evil?

[Suicide Junkie]

The tasks in this sense are the major ones that require near full-concentration.

Walking and chewing are not really tasks.
Tracking the time and updating the mouse pointer aren't really tasks.

To convert from a computer view to the human view is to imagine one computing second or modest fraction thereof as equal to an 8-hour workday.

Zip, a day goes by. The organic unit has answered x calls, and made Y progress on the two major unrelated projects in progress.
Context switching takes a few seconds of that 8-hour day... switching to the phone isn't noticed much because of the automatic handshaking process when you pick up "hello... hello" that covers your switching time.
Then when you switch back from the call, you sit for a second or two going "ok, now where was I... ah."

Plus if you get overloaded with switches, you'll overflow your mental stack and completely forget what you were originally doing before the interruptions started. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif

[Instar]

Part of this problem I think is of computer UI. I can describe a task in 10 seconds that would take me 30 mins of work to do on a computer. The new Microsoft Shell looks cool (MSH or Monad). It might speed tasks up a lot.

[Aiken]

Instar said:
The new Microsoft Shell looks cool (MSH or Monad). It might speed tasks up a lot.

Holy dead cow, they invented /bin/bash! Again.

[Fyron]

But new MS products that are poor copies of years old (if not decades old) products produced by others are always hip and exciting!

[AgentZero]

Instar said:
Part of this problem I think is of computer UI. I can describe a task in 10 seconds that would take me 30 mins of work to do on a computer. The new Microsoft Shell looks cool (MSH or Monad). It might speed tasks up a lot.



Ah, but tis always a case of 'easier said than done'. Very few tasks can be explained in more time than it takes to do them, unless one describes a simple task in exhaustive detail.

And people always have, and always will, tell you that it was better in earlier generations. People in today talk about how much better it was in the '50s, people in the '50s talked about how much better it was in the '30s, etc ad nauseum. Following this logic, the best time was when we all wore loinclothes and lived in caves. But obviously it wasn't that great, since the unrelenting march of progress is powered by a desire to make things better. And if you look at it historically, things in the '50s were better than they were in the '30s, and things today actually are better than they were in the '50s. So I say to anyone who says otherwise, 'Right now is the best time in history to be alive. Deal with it.'

[Baron Munchausen]

aiken said:

Instar said:
The new Microsoft Shell looks cool (MSH or Monad). It might speed tasks up a lot.

Holy dead cow, they invented /bin/bash! Again.



With 'special features' of their own devising, of course. Embrace and extend, though it will suck anyway. I saw a hilarious sig on Slashdot a few days ago: The day Microsoft makes a product that doesn't suck is the day they make a vacuum cleaner.

[Instar]

Baron Munchausen said:

aiken said:

Instar said:
The new Microsoft Shell looks cool (MSH or Monad). It might speed tasks up a lot.

Holy dead cow, they invented /bin/bash! Again.



With 'special features' of their own devising, of course. Embrace and extend, though it will suck anyway. I saw a hilarious sig on Slashdot a few days ago: The day Microsoft makes a product that doesn't suck is the day they make a vacuum cleaner.


Well, frankly, I think you're quick to judge. Have you watched all the videos on Channel9 and the .NET show? Monad looks killer. The shell is no longer a text stream so much, it can treat the output or input as objects which can be reflected against to expose internal members; also, access to the .NET framework is exposed too, IIRC. MSH looks 10x better than anything out today (and I've used a lot of systems, Solaris, Wintel, Linux, Apple 2e http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif )

[Aiken]

I've read the presentation transcript on msdn. I'm not a professional programmer or sysadmin, so my opinion probably worths a little, but it doesn't look 10x more powerful than *sh+perl+gnu utils combination for *nix. And without winfs and 100% .net enviroment it even will be no better than cmd.exe. I just learnt to be very sceptical about "groundbreaking tool with new exciting features" fluff. SE5 is one of the exceptions http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif

[Instar]

aiken said:
I've read the presentation transcript on msdn. I'm not a professional programmer or sysadmin, so my opinion probably worths a little, but it doesn't look 10x more powerful than *sh+perl+gnu utils combination for *nix. And without winfs and 100% .net enviroment it even will be no better than cmd.exe. I just learnt to be very sceptical about "groundbreaking tool with new exciting features" fluff. SE5 is one of the exceptions http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif


Well, to me, a programming and IT pro, the fact that it treats the input and output as streams of objects instead of just text is really innovative. You are right though, without the .NET framework, I can't do much with the exposed members via reflecting. .NET will ship with Longhorn as it is; and I really like the .NET framework. Really amazing how some people brush it off as if sucked, but it beats the pants off of J2SE.