Tom Nelson highlighted a tweet from an attendee at Gore’s training lecture in Chicago for junior climateers. I thought a comparison would be apt.
Al Gore’s desktop:
Anthony’s desktop:
And in answer to those wondering, no I didn’t clean mine up. It looks like that every day.
I don’t think Al understands the concept of folders.
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tidy desk(top) tidy mind
Not sure being a flat-desktopper translates to being a flat-earther but I see some correlation.
Sign of a disordered mind?
We used to have the proverb: Order is for simpletons (no insult here), intellectuals have mastered chaos.
Al Gore must surely have an Al Gore Rhythm to deal with the mess. 😉
Anthony is missing an ‘Al Gore’ icon on his desktop.
In an idle moment he could hit the delete key
‘Do you wish to delete Al Gore?’
Yes yes yes
‘I don’t think Al understands the concept of folders’ or many other concepts either like basic maths , but it does look a bit odd for the ‘father ‘ of the internet .
But to be fair given this failed politician has made many millions out selling ,ironically, ‘hot air ‘ I think it does not matter .
Looking at Gore’s wallpaper I believe it is indicative of the size of the void between his ears…
Looks to me like Al if very unorganized.
James Allison:
Still no. The difference in performance will be completely negligble with the number of icons Gore has. It would take at least hundreds of files to cause a discernible performance hit. In the article you linked to, the guy had over 2,000. That’s why it mattered.
Gore has maybe a hundred files on his desktop. There is no practical difference between having that many and having 10.
JimF says:
July 31, 2013 at 7:59 pm
“Gore’s using a Mac. Anthony’s using a PC. Gotta give Gore the win on this one. The “desktop” in Mac can be made all neat and proper like the Windows “do it our way or else” layout (although Microsoft stole the “windows” from Apple, they sure as heck never got “the touch and feel”).”
Jobs stole the Window concept from Xerox Parc.
Gates tried to license Jobs’ system for PC’s but Jobs wouldn’t deal.
So Microsoft rebuilt it.
Brandon, admit that you don’t know what you’re talking about. Admit it.
UK Sceptic says:
August 1, 2013 at 1:32 am
Looking at Gore’s wallpaper I believe it is indicative of the size of the void between his ears…
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Yes, but is it revolving ‘widdershins’?
Like most “managers” he messed up the one thing he does wihtiout a secretary/ personal assistant. It is a common phenomenon with “mamagers”, they are overgrown babies who need to be minded.
If I did not know the identity of the two individuals who made those two desktops then what could I deduce about the individuals? {assuming an individual made them both, that they weren’t constructed by many individuals over a period of time}
I think many profiling type aspects could be deduced. There are professionals who make a living from doing that kind of deduction.
If we know a great deal about each of the individuals, which is the case with Anthony and Al, then several more orders of magnitude info can be deduced.
One thing I can deduce is that one individual is not in a situation where there is the expectation of efficient info management whereas the other individual has a significantly greater expectation. There are many other aspects that can be projected.
This is fun.
John
It’s somewhat offensive to see this kind of childish name calling on this otherwise excellent site. Whether a person appears to be messy/cluttered or neat/organized has little or no relationship to their abilities or intelligence. You aren’t going to find studies to support the idea the a clutters computer desktop indicates any kind of low mental ability or that an organized desktop indicates superior mental ability.
On a secondary note, as a system admin and desktop support for over 17 years I know for a fact that the current Mac OS has a much superior search function than the Windows desktop. Finding relevant data/information on a Mac is significantly easier than on Windows. The underlying organization of the files in the user space is irrelevant to your ability to find the data.
Skrallz:
You come across as kind of creepy. I hope you aren’t representative of… anyone.
John Whitman:
Assuming you didn’t use the file names to help, there’s really not much you could deduce. Practically anything you came up with could be countered with a number of other possibilities. No decent profiler would ever draw much of a conclusion from these two images.
No. At that point it’d mostly be projecting biases.
Your use of the word “projected” is spot on. For all you know, Al Gore has a perfectly efficient directory structure that he uses for thousands of different things. That is not precluded by a cluttered desktop. In fact, having a cluttered desktop can be an efficient way to access the myriad things one doesn’t want to put into a hierarchical structure.
I’m curious what people would say if they saw my desktop/directory structure. I’m curious how that’d contrast to if they instead saw servers I’ve setup/ran.
Many of histories greatest minds were notoriously scatterbrained and disoragnized.
Many sociopaths are known to be meticulous and organized.
Therefore, using the same “logic” as many others here, we can conclude that Gore is a genious and Watts is a sociopath.
QED.
Now, if this seems ridiculous and void of logic, that’s because it is. Just like this thread and any “conclusions” that people are drawing from it. Comical, perhaps. Substantive, not even close.
Jeeze. I’m pure feng shui austere or something. I shove all my folders off to the sides or sorta hide them among stuff in my background photos. http://oi39.tinypic.com/s3g6me.jpg
– – – – – – – – –
Brandon Shollenberger,
Hey, appreciate your thoughts on my comment.
Per your first point, we disagree on the potential yield of comparative profiles of the two desktops as is. I would enjoy an analysis by a couple of independent (of each other) highly ranked (based on success rate) teams of professional forensic experts. I think there is potentially a surprising amount of deductions that are reasonable based on the desktops ‘as is’. Any deductions would not necessarily reflect negatively on either individual, right?
Per your second point. The nature of your desktop, although I am sure is extremely interesting, adds nothing to the comparative analysis of the two desktops in the main post. As, to efficiency of visually scanning the icons in the two desktops, the one with icons in rows and columns would be a more efficient scan; thus my comment about efficiency of info management. I looks to me like maybe you presumed I was being pejorative to Gore by that observation; if so why the presumption?
John
RCon, definitely.
John Whitman:
Indeed. However, there are too many reasons one might have a desktop like either of these for one to glean much useful information. This is especially true if one doesn’t know what the machines are used for.
For example, both desktops could easily belong to the same person if one was a work machine and the other a home machine. The layout alone tells us nearly nothing.
On the contrary. It adds two things. First, contrasting my personal desktop to the desktop of an MS 2008 server I manage shows exactly what I mentioned above: A cluttered personal machine with a professionally organized “work” machine.
Second, it shows one should be careful of what they conclude about Al Gore based on this. People who criticize Gore for his desktop ought to criticize me as well. I doubt many would do so outside the context of this specific issue. That makes my example a useful cautionary tale.
I wasn’t. I simply know you’re wrong. Grids are not always the most efficient when it comes to visually scanning. Squarish layouts like that are not inherently optimal. In fact, clustering is often used as a way to increase search efficiency.
Moreover, nothing about Watts’s desktop indicates efficiency. We have no idea what is directory structure is like. It could be a complete mess. It could have a crazy amount of nesting. It could have any number of other issues we don’t know about. What we do know is if all Gore needs quick access to is on his desktop, and he can instinctively remember where things are, he’ll at least match Watts on efficiency.
I know I can. I can quickly navigate my desktop with 40+ icons with my eyes closed. If I didn’t have that many icons on my desktop, I’d be less efficient. And if not for laziness, I’d probably turn off the gridding feature too.
“I don’t think Al understands the concept of ANYTHING.”
FTFY, Anthony.
Macs have a ‘desktop’ folder where all those files are listed in a window – in alphabetical order, by date, kind or size etc. My desktop looks just like Al’s – but I never even look at it…
@Fred Jensen – so does windows.
Al Gore has made tons of money off of the AGW claim. Never forget that. Was money his only reason – who knows? He’s despicable.
People still click on desktop icons/leave them visible?
Put your most used programs on a toolbar or in a hotcorner, hit the windows/super/whatever-mac-calls-it key and type a letter or two, hit enter… what am I missing?
I mean, perhaps if you were constantly shutting programs down and reopening them, or rebooting your machine all the time it might make sense… I dunno, do windows systems still need to be shut down regularly?
@max – Re: “do windows systems still need to be shut down regularly?”
Only if you want to use it efficiently.
Efficiently like, electricity use, or some imagined efficiency where a system which slows down and gets unstable is superior to one which doesn’t have those problems?