Employees waste two days per month surfing the Internet at work.

"irrelevant Web browsing." Known as "wilfing," and apparently people are wasting two days a month at work doing it.

 

Tens of millions of Internet users waste time surfing online at work and at home. And one-quarter of those time wasters spend as much as 33 percent of their time doing it.

 

There's a generation gap, too – those aged 25 and under were three times as likely to wilf away the hours as those over 55.

 

Wilf stands for "What was I looking for?" – as in "I went online to look up stock prices for the boss but found this really funny story at the Onion.com. And did you see that editorial at the Monitor site about Iraq? And then there was a super deal on iPods at apple.com, and I had to buy a few tunes when I was there … ah, hmmm, what was I looking for?"

 

"It's part of what I call the rise of the miscellaneous," he writes in an e-mail.

 

"The big disadvantage is that we get lost all the ... time," Weinburger continues. "It's artificial befuddlement, but we're being befuddled by abundance. That strikes me as better than never being able to lose your way because there's such a scarcity of ways to go." … now what was I doing again?

Human brain a marvel? Not if you ask this guy.

Newsweek: human brain from a Johns Hopkins neuroscientist: "A mouse brain with extra toppings,"and for that matter, the mouse brain is a lizard brain with some extra stuff, and the whole lot is a cobbled-together mess. That's evolution for you. The story is essentially a book review plus profile, and a refreshing break from the usual wonderful-mind stuff one reads. It also seeks to explain why dreams seem, sort of, to make sense. Thank reptiles for that, perhaps.

Is The Term Paper Dead?

The Washington Post has picked up a piece he wrote about cut-and-paste plagiarism: "Plagiarism today is heavily invested with morality surrounding intellectual honesty. That is laudable. But truly distinguishing plagiarism is a matter of intent. Did I mean to copy, was it accidental (a trick of memory), was it polygenesis[?] ... Young people today are simply too far ahead of anything schools might do to curb their recycling efforts. Beyond simply selling used term papers online, Web sites such as StudentofFortune.com allow students to post specific questions and pay for answers." The author argues that in the era we're entering, schools need to rely far less on term papers in assessing students.

Thin Clients are the New Black...

 ... on the ledger sheet, that is. Because according to a new report, it turns out that using these "super slimmed down" alternatives to the PC could reduce your cost of ownership by up to 25 percent, as compared to an office equipped with traditional desktops. Thin clients have been around for years; they are simply a computer that uses a central server for processing activities, where you send your keystrokes and mouse clicks to the server, and you see what is happening on a monitor at your desk. It's very much like having a desktop PC, except that thin clients typically have no almost no moving parts and little memory. This reduces their power consumption dramatically; according to the report, they can use up to 50 percent less energy than a typical PC. No word on the global impact of switching to thin clients, but if just the 10 million or so PCs in operation in the UK would be switched out for thin clients, businesses could save £78m a year and cut CO2 emission by 485,000 tonnes.

http://www.webitpr.com/release_detail.asp?ReleaseID=5616

 

30 Days With Vista - Shot me now

"Hardocp.com has published "30 days with Vista" — with the same author from "30 days with Linux" doing the evaluation. And he doesn't like it. From the article: 'Based on my personal experiences with Vista over a 30 day period, I found it to be a dangerously unstable operating system, which has caused me to lose data [...] Any consideration of the fine details comes in second to that one inescapable conclusion. This is an unstable operating system.'"

 

From: slashdot.org

PowerPoint Bad For Learning

"This article in the Sydney Morning Herald reporting on research done at The University of NSW suggests the use of Microsoft PowerPoint (and similar products) in lectures and meetings actually makes it harder to absorb facts, rather than being a reinforcement of key points."

 

From slashdot.org