multi-processing

[cellio]

Recently I found myself discussing web sites that force an ad at you for some amount of time before you can get to the content. (Some comics sites do this intermittently.) I said that this doesn't bother me, as I'll just do something else (read the next piece of email, launch another browser window, whatever) and check back in a minute. The ad gets a very small slice of my attention; by keeping it there for 15 seconds they don't get anything like 15 seconds' worth of my eybeall time. The person I was talking with found this approach unusual, but I suspect it's fairly common among my friends.

Once upon a time multi-processing was harder. I remember the days of a terminal (not computer!) connected to the ARPANet via 1200-baud modem, watching the next Usenet article sloooowly appear on the screen. It's not like I could do anything else electronic in parallel. Sometimes I did menial tasks like paying bills in parallel, but mostly I think I put up with it. Windowing systems set us free.

Now, I'm often doing a bunch of things at once, and this sort of thing is a minor speed bump rather than a noticable problem. In fact, my morning routine pretty much consists of, in parallel: reading two streams of email, checking half a dozen comics, checking the company Wiki, checking the day's meetings, updating and compiling my source tree, and reading news headlines. If the folks who came up with the ad strategy aren't just desperately guessing, they must have reasons to believe that people will sit and wait for their comic strip. Do enough people really do that?

Comments

[cellio]

I use virtual desktops so I can keep groups of related windows together without having lots of desktop clutter. So maybe it means I have a dozen shells and half a dozen emacs windows open (and several browser windows); the CPU can handle it. :-)