Tim Gray, writing in the New York Reviews of Books, has a very interesting article that asks whether it has become impossible to find the uninterrupted blocks of time that are needed to read serious works of literature, and whether the change in the reading environment is also changing how books are written.
Ordinarily I ignore the "Computer Bad! Destroy Society!" arguments, but I have to say that what he describes seems all too familiar. I can't recall the last time that I actually sat down for two or three hours just to read.
I grew up spending hours each day, every day devouring books of all sorts. Is this a thing that's lost to people raised with Internet, Game Consoles, and Smartphones? Pardon me if I sound like an old fart.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Tork on Sunday June 15 2014, @05:26AM
I do think there's a point to be made about technology changing people's expectations. There's a Calvin and Hobbes cartoon where the father is ranting about how back in the days where people wrote letters nobody expected an answer before next week, that these days they expected a phone call right away. Welp I can tell you in the last five years the expectations of my general output has risen dramatically. But I've also been given more software and hardware power to achieve those goals. One could see it as technology is increasing expectations, but it's also the solution to delivering on those expectations
The timing of this article is interesting. I talked about my work life landing at home. This weekend in particular I've been remoting into my work machine to finish up a task. The thing is, though, I'm doing that at my leisure this weekend INSTEAD of having to come in to the office for 10 hours. And you know what I'd be doing? Waiting five minutes for a file to open. Waiting twenty minutes for a process to finish. Waiting an hour after kicking off a second process to finish. Waiting five minutes for the newly embiggened file to be saved. Waiting half an hour for the file to be converted into another format and then ten minutes of QC. Multiply that by the number of files I have to do and, yeah, long day. I'm doing this from home and spending time with my wife during those wait periods. The impact on my home life is surprisingly minimal. If I didn't have a few technological things in place, I'd probably just now getting home in time to have dinner and go to bed. Blargle on that.
🏳️🌈 Proud Ally 🏳️🌈
(Score: 2) by VLM on Sunday June 15 2014, @12:09PM
"And you know what I'd be doing?"
I have spent decades of my working life writing little scripts to automate the whole process including exception reporting and alerting when it inevitably runs off the rails. Automated systems to restart the process under some failure conditions is interesting.
First you make a big state machine flowchart where every process has a pass/fail. The a script to figure out what state you're in and how to get to the next state. No need to make it event driven if it "works" 24x7 who cares if its only 95% efficient. Then run that script (which hopefully executes in less than 1 minute) every minute.
When you get fancy you install an off the shelf batching / queuing system and if you have distinct resources then set them up as reservable in the queuing system and just load it up and let 'er rip. So only one process (or two or whatever) tortures the database while another floods the network or whatever. Also put little plugins for munin graphs and nagios alerts in so its all compatible with the rest of the system.
If you're doing something CLI / unix-ish this is trivial. If doing something GUI, you're outta luck those kill productivity.
So at work I am able to read a work related book, and at home I can read any book I feel like, until I get a failure alert.