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[Naturegirl1999]

Today, I learned that moving the Universe Sandbox files breaks the .exe file and it can't start. The computer it's on can't use wireless internet, and so I can't reinstall it. The free trial ended anyways, so I wasn't able to much except place various sports stuff in orbit

[martinuzz]

I have done everything that I can think of, checked permissions, re installed, restarted, dumped cache, deleted files and re-downloaded in a very real sense I have done every single step I can find mention of that isn't reg-editing or full system restores, neither of which should be necessary, since every single thing that isn't steam is functioning completely normally, it has tried to update over twenty times now, and I have restarted steam or my computer nearly one hundred times EACH.

I've run checkdisk, system health tools, scanned with Mbam, started in safe mode without networking, started in safemode with networking and every single other thing I can think of.

This is mindless and stupid and I'm far, far too tired to continue today.

Have you tried switching to Big Picture Mode? If that works, you can just switch back to another mode without it breaking again.

[McTraveller]

If you guys think we have trouble with our deterministic computers, just wait for the fun problems we'll get to experience with our non-deterministic quantum computers!

[JoshuaFH]

If you guys think we have trouble with our deterministic computers, just wait for the fun problems we'll get to experience with our non-deterministic quantum computers!

I can't wait to be the old guy that doesn't understand computers, getting talked through how to start my web browser by a man younger than my grandson, but I'm just so damn crotchety and stuck in my ways that just navigating the desktop is a surreal challenge.

[dragdeler]

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[TamerVirus]

As always: "Have you tried turning it off and on again??

[Reelya]

That made me think of that scene in Back to the Future 2 where Marty Jnr is multitasking by watching 32 TV channels at once. And everyone has a fax machine.

[Naturegirl1999]

How would your brain even process 32 different plots simultaneously? No doubt you’ll end up mixing things up, maybe even mashing them all into a merge plot.

[pisskop]

The fax machine bit is what kills me.

32 is an exaggeration, but people already channel surf  3-5 programs when using cable.  And the internet?  you can watch 6-10 or more youtube videos in a half hour.

When working at a desktop you can have 4 windows open at once.  I do it when I get around to modding.

Parsing information when simultaneous feeds are presented is doable I'd argue, if on the subliminal level.  We get bombarded by ads all the time when driving, for instance, even if we dont consciously recognize them.  The movie is being facetious, but the reality is that we maintain different threads all the time, especially in an age where people can talk, text, and listen to a tv, all while waiting for a ride.

[Naturegirl1999]

Switching between channels isn’t the same as listening to and attempting to watch 5 channels simultaneously. Also, what we usually call multitasking is actually attention shifting from one thing to another and switching back. Try listening to something while writing at the same time, I know that if I a, trying to listen to something, but am trying to write, I will either write the wrong things, or when writing, what the person is saying will get the hearing equivalent of blurry.

[Reelya]

Hopping is one thing, but the bit in the movie is specifically about having 32 full-sized screens going in a wall of TV sets.

My main point was about how we wrongly imagine the future as a linear progression of the present: in that one the writers clearly knew about fragmented attention but they extrapolated that as meaning future people would watch multiple TVs at once. This missed the boat, as fragmented attention is actually that you have a TV going in the background, you got a zillion tabs open in the browser of stuff you're going to "get to" any time soon, you hope, you have notifications popping from the 15 different messaging platforms that you limited yourself to and you have some games running on your phone.

EDIT: yeah and I forgot about audio attention there, thanks NG. You can have the TV running in the background, music playing on Spotify, while involved in multiple discussions via browser tabs, phone and email, while your playing a game on your PC and you've got several games on your phone for those few minutes you get up from the PC. Meanwhile you've got downloads and other background tasks your monitoring to make sure they're working ok.

Divided attention is actually more of a fractal / hierarchical thing, rather than a doing 7 things at once thing. The point about the movie being wrong is that their characterization of how information overload would work was wrong. Basically a lot of 80s media talking about the future had this theme of everyone turning into TV zombies: just extrapolating out the issues of that time, people being TV blobs and assuming the near-future was just more blobs. They failed completely to predict the 1990s phenomena where all the rubes got onto the internet.

[TamerVirus]

32 TVs is child's play!

[Naturegirl1999]

Yes, I agree that the fragmentation is more like going to different floors rather than breaking the walls to stand in two floors at once. Yay analogies. Also, considering the Internet didn’t exist at the time BttF (Back to the Future) series was made, I wonder what thing might exist 10-12 years from now that we can’t predict?

[Greiger]

My money is on genetically engineered cattle that eat garbage, breathes CO2, poops hamburgers, urinates distilled water, and milks for hand sanitizer

[NullForceOmega]

Have you tried switching to Big Picture Mode? If that works, you can just switch back to another mode without it breaking again.

I have, and while big picture works normally (albeit poorly) when I switch back everything is still black and unusable.