You Got Mail

Apparently modern life is not hectic enough; otherwise why would we keep inventing new ways to interrupt it? Cell phones. Pagers. One way, two way. IM... We are interrupt junkies. Managed to scrape some quiet time to read a book? No worries, mate, in a few seconds the phone will r-r-ring. Enjoying a moment of serenity? Don't panic, an SMS will take care of that soon.

Even email, which was polling-based initially, was turned into an interrupting medium. And nobody does it better than Microsoft Outlook, which launches a full scale attack on your senses as soon as a message lands in your inbox: an icon of an envelope pops up, the computer chimes, a translucent preview of the message fades in...

These notifications may be cool, but are they helpful? Interrupts improve latency, since they force you to drop what you're doing and pay attention to the arriving message. The associated context switch, however, takes its toll. Indeed, polling is better geared towards high throughput.

I wish that our communication schemes could distinguish between messages that are latency-sensitive and ones that are not. For now (most of) my notifications are turned off.

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Zzzzz...