NN runs an article on that well-understood impact of excessive information digestion. This often leads to addiction, which can be treated by clinics these days.

Will all this instantly accessible information make us much smarter, or simply more stressed? When can we break to think, absorb and ponder all this data?

“People are already struggling and feeling like they need to keep up with the variety of information sources they already have,” said David Greenfield, a psychologist who wrote “Virtual Addiction.” “There are upper limits to how much we can manage.”

Related items:

• Treating Online Addicts
• Blog Depression
• RPG Fantasy World
• Internet Addiction

Milestone reached: Firefox to be pre-installed rather than downloaded

ARLIER this week I mentioned Blake Ross; The context: the demise of the Windows brand name. Apart from this thought-inspiring quote from Blake, I now come to discover that Hewlett-Packard began bundling Netscape. More recently it was confirmed that Dell pre-install Firefox in the UK.

Next milstone: OpenOffice bundling with all desktops and laptops. This would enable users to work on documents and spreadsheets ‘out of the box’.

An common inner conflict

HERE seems to be a certain apathy among girls towards computer science. This does not necessarily extend to all fields that are engineering-related. My older sister studied computer science, but decided to leave a year early due to lack of interest and passion. She was very much capable of graduating and was a top student in her class. Yet, she had no incentive to staying up all night or becoming obsessed with technology, which was associated with what she perceived as “nerds”. She now works on a Masters degree in management.

These thoughts were stirred up by an article that appeared in the
Boston Globe only yesterday.

Women shunning a field once seen as welcoming

MEDFORD — As a young high school teacher in 1982, Diane Souvaine leapt into graduate school for computer science having taken only one class in the subject.

Wallpaper from Houghi (click image above
to enlarge; non-lossy PNG version)

Below is the summary of an article on user interface revolution. It has motivated me to post links to relevant items of mine.

Will we be stuck with flat rectangles on our desktop forever or will we finally live in a 3D desktop? This article discusses some alternatives and proposes a framework in which future interface designs may be evaluated.

On 3-D desktops, interaction, and display:

• Spherical Desktop
• The Desktop Sphere
• Virtual Desktops in 3-D
• Spherical Display

A few related ‘leftovers’:

• Operating Systems Eye Candy
• KDE Pushed to the Limit
• KDE Plasma
• Next Generation of X

Time and time again, Bill Gates is urging his engineers to push harder towards successful penetration into the Web. His main rival has been identified already and it has a name: Google. Now begins the fight to win over large corporations that can give an exposure boost and yet more marketing pipes. After talks and negotiations with both sides, AOL appear to be getting close to Google. In stake: communication, media, and more.

Under the deal, Google would pay $1bn (£565m) for a 5% stake in AOL, the Wall Street Journal website has reported. The two firms have declined to comment.

Here is an interesting quote comes from Blake Ross on the state-of-affairs between Google and Microsoft Windows. In particular, emphasis is put on the decline of the Windows brand.

As a user, how many times a day do I see “Windows” versus “Google”? My generation doesn’t know or care about “Windows,” and why should they? For all the talk about Google trying to “get onto the desktop,” you rarely hear about the incredible brand strengthening that takes place every time a user types “www.google.com”. Users go to Google and know it; Windows is a foam peanut that comes in the computer box. More than Google trying to get onto the desktop, Microsoft is trying to get onto the Web.

F I ever undertake a repetltive task that pertains to research, I wish to either automate it using existing (preferably free) tools, script it (e.g. bash, Perl or MATLAB which is by all means expenesive), or costomise the desktop environment to minimize the number of moves, clicks, etc. Productivity through convenience can be achieved using clipboard stacks, mouse focus policies and so forth.

I find Linux to be a powerful tool in research. Windows, for instance, could not replace the multi-tasking capabiltities and expresiveness of Linux. Macs likewise, although they are most popular among designers, technical designers included. They are not, as far as I can tell, an optimal programming platform considering the price which they sell for. Singularity from Microsoft is intended to address the deficiencies related to Windows in the research sector. It is Singularity, as well as Monad, that ought to endow Microsoft with the platform that suits so-called “power users”. Monad is a command-line tool for Windows, that has been hacked a few months ago and will therefore be excluded from Windows Vista. In the mean time, KDE will remain my favourite desktop environment. Linus Torvalds could give a polite nod.

Desktop environement productivity tools and essays:

• Desktop Mouse Gestures
• Program Invocation Methods
• Keyboard Accelerators
• Previews on Desktop

A server as your main and central ‘workstation’

AVE you ever wondered if re-entering passwords, restoring settings, synchronising bookmarks, and exchanging files are at all necessary tasks? Could these repeatable tasks possibly be avoided? Is there a way of working from a variety of places, totally oblivious to the location of data and the state of the applications used? To me, there is a simple method for keeping everything in a single place, but it relies on a quick network connection.

I keep all my settings synchronised by always SSH‘ing (must get X-forwarding enabled) to a single machine that acts as a server. All other machines are used merely as terminals; and yet, one must assume the user is always connected via fast fast Wi-Fi or Ethernet. How truly comforting would it be to have all the computers behave in the same way? With good bandwidth in hand, also the level of responsiveness is identical.

This can definitely be done with Windows and Apple Macs although, if you steer way from UNIX and its variants, that might involve complications when it comes to applications, utilities or commercial software (Windows in particular). It is worth emphasising that you need only install software once — on the server. Data is stored on the server as well and this includes settings, browser cookies and so forth.

In short: same everything, different hardware, from different locations, at any time (provided you do not mind electricity bills for workstations that are constantly on). I always leave my machines switched on because I often find that it is a good return (productivity-wise) on investment.

Related items:

• RAID Redundancy
• Computers Become Hosts