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...Pack collection of software may be of more immediate value to computer users. Windows XP users, that is. Google Pack is intended to supplement the software that ships with a PC, providing it with a bit more security and ease of use. If that sounds like a slap in Microsoft's face, well then, maybe...
...Assuming your computer already comes with WordPad, for working on Microsoft Word files without running Word-and assuming, as Google would, that you use some Internet-based e-mail program such as Gmail-this might very well be the last software you install on your PC. It's not as complete as Apple's iLife suite-for one thing, there's no video editor-but for most people it's satisfactory. The only additions I would make to the Pack would be iTunes, the best music manager period, as well as QuickTime, which is often a download away when...
...Some are unrelated but nonetheless welcome: the Basex report found that 62% of workers at all levels said being interrupted by a friend with a nonbusiness-related question was "acceptable" (though the boss might take a different view). Several studies, including one by Mary Czerwinski, a senior researcher at Microsoft, show that interruptions at the beginning and the end of a task are the most detrimental to performance. An interruption when work has just got under way "blows away the goals you've established," says Czerwinski, while a ping or a knock at the end of the process "breaks...
...TECHNOLOGY THAT'S overloading our circuits help address the problems it has created? Czerwinski and her bosses at Microsoft think so. She's helping design an intelligent office-communication system that calculates whether an interrupting e-mail or IM should be transmitted immediately or delayed on the basis of, among other factors, the worker's appointments and projects that day, his past preferences and habits and the organizational-chart relationship between sender and receiver. "Something like this has got to happen sooner or later," says Czerwinski, though she acknowledges that it raises privacy issues. The alternative is to turn...
Czerwinski has also been helping Microsoft design alternatives to current software products to allow workers to stay on task for longer periods, even as onscreen interruptions arrive. In next-generation systems, which Microsoft's competitors are pursuing as well, interruptions are designed to be less intrusive--nothing flashes, pops up or makes a noise--and the alerts appear on the periphery of a screen that's larger than today's standards so that workers stay centered on their main task. The key, she says, is for an incoming message to provide just enough information for the worker to judge whether...