Thursday, March 11, 2010

This needs to be done.

Wouldn't you like to be able to take a day - or a week - off, whenever you wanted?

Is it me, or is one of the main stresses in life due to having to be at work *every* work day for years on end, *on time*, or risk being fired, which poses the further risk of living on the street?

Aside from the needlessly totalitarian exactly-on-time aspect, I can see why a company wouldn't let you just take a day, or a week, off whenever you wanted. If there's only 10 other people working there who can fulfill your position, then they can't necessarily afford to lose a spot unplanned. Even if there's 1,000 people working for the company who can fulfill your position, most of them are probably in other cities.

If there were 1,000 people who could fill in for the same position working within one facility, they should be able to afford to let people take some time off whenever they want (barring holidays, etc.), because statistically it will even out and you'll always have roughly the same amount of people who *want* to work that day because they need to make enough money to live. Of course, whether companies actually *would* provide that grace to their employees just because they can is probably a different matter, but that's not the point here.

What if people, in general, had say...5 different jobs? Instead of working the same job every day, you'd work a different one every day of the week. Except it would be more efficient if you didn't always work the same job the same day of the week - if it switched around according to need. Now, instead of hiring one person for a position, they'd hire 5, and each person would work 1/5th of the time, more or less. If a company otherwise had 10 people interchangeable for a certain position, now they have 50. Arrangements would have to be made, somehow, inter-company and between companies and employees, on a day-by-day basis. This could all be automated online, by simply letting the employee bid for a day or string of days off, and letting the computer do the rest of the work and tell people where to go.

This also makes life more fulfilling for the employee, by breaking the monotony of having to do the same thing, and work with the same people, every single work day, and by expanding his/her working skillset.

Wednesday, March 10, 2010

Friday, March 05, 2010

Uniform / easier PC's

PCs would be a lot easier for a lot of people if there were only one type of connection - for everything.

ps/2 ports for keyboard and mouse are all but obsolete, pretty much any new k/b or mouse uses usb. but we still have, for example, cat-5e ports. why not make network cables use USB ends?

that still leaves a few more things that could be converted - at least once we get the new usb 3.0 spec.

SATA? Why? Just replace it with USB. Put USB ports inside the computer.

PCIe? Replace it with USB. Provide sufficient means for cards to dock inside the computer. In fact, strategically place the USB port inside the dock so we don't have to use wires. This could be done with internal drives, too.

That pretty much leaves just HDMI, VGA, and DVI output. VGA is analog but totally obsolete. There's no reason to use VGA anymore. In fact it's a travesty unless you have a CRT. HDMI is a bit outside our domain of consideration because it's an interface to a non-computer device; you can't control that, there are too many non-computer devices out there. DVI, on the other hand, could be usurped by USB. Let's see.. usb 3.0 will be 3.2 gbit/s after protocol overhead, one pixel is 24 bits, that's a possible 64 frames per second at 1920x1080 resolution. Well, I guess it just barely cuts it in that department. We can always sell new monitors with USB connectors that require up to 3.2 gbit/s, and after that use dvi... until we get USB 4.0

Wouldn't it be awesome if there all computers had exactly one type of port and came with about 12 of them?