Are computers increasing or hampering productivity? This article at NY Times talks about the increasing levels of distraction PCs drive us to, with e-mail, Internet, games, music, photos, movies, books, chat, … It’s a form of ADD: attention deficiency syndrome. Harvard Business Review has an article titled Why Smart People Underperform (Jan 2005: subscription required) talks about its impact in the business world.
Why Your Pointy Haired Boss Is A Mathematical Certainty.
The Occupational Employment and Wages report … [shows] how many people have what job and what they get paid. But what is that dot … that employs nearly 2 million people and pays nearly $90,000? Why it’s General and operations managers, of course. It’s an attractive, well-paying job, that doesn’t seem to be too discriminating about who gets hired.
We are the final frontier. The Guardian asks leading scientists what they think will be the next revolution in science. (It’s almost a trend, spawning books like The Next Fifty Years.)
First came the Copernican revolution in the 16th century. The Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus argued that the Earth was not at the centre of the solar system. Charles Darwin got personal more than 300 years later by implying that humans weren’t special either. With the publication of On the Origin of Species, Darwin promoted his theory of evolution via natural selection. Nearly a century later, two Cambridge-based scientists, James Watson and Francis Crick, unravelled the structure of DNA. So what’s next? What will be the fourth revolution?
‘We will invent our successors’ — Seth Shostak
‘We will understand the human mind’ — John Sulston
‘The existence of parallel universes’ — Michio Kaku
‘We will change our genetic makeup’ — Norbert Gleicher
‘We will find out if we are alone’ — Colin Pillinger
‘Humans become a collective intelligence’ — John Barrow
‘We’ll understand thoughts and feelings’ — Steven Pinker
‘The end of the individual’ — Susan Greenfield
‘What if God lives in a part of our brain?’ — Nancy Rothwell
‘What it means to be a person’ — V S Ramachandran
‘Conscious machines’ — Igor Aleksander
‘Higher dimensions’ — Lisa Randall
‘Humans are less miraculous than we thought’ — Stephen Wolfram
MPAA to use digital fingerprints to fight P2P movie sharing. At last, they’re beginning to use technology, instead of regulation, to fight technology.
Google donates infrastructure to Wikipedia. Possible benefits to Google?
How Google Maps works: a look behind the Javascript of Google Maps.
Whereas GMail uses XMLHttp to make calls back to the server, Google Maps uses a hidden IFrame. The method has its benefits.
The push-pins and info-popups are a different matter. Simply placing them is no big trick; an absolutely-positioned transparent GIF does the trick nicely. The shadows, however, are a different matter. They are PNGs with 8-bit alpha channels.
The comments following the post as also quite a read.
Why is Microsoft not opening more source code?
Apparently inappropriate code comments is one of the reasons according to this story. I wonder what kind of things developers put in comments that would be so bad for the rest of us to see?
You can download an up-to-date copy of the entire Internet Movie database, and use software like MovieDb to view it remotely on your computer. My current project: watch the entire top 250 films.
Google blogger fired, possibly for the blogging. Maybe he should talk to the Committee to Protect Bloggers. via MetaFilter