#1 let your ISP know NOW that if they deal with this company you will walk...
My ISP (Best Internet, now a division of Verio) couldn't care less if I walked, or, for that matter, if everyone with a shell account walked. They'd probably be glad they could shut down the shell machines.
I doubt this is a hoax. I work for a network management software company, and we've had requests from major-name American ISPs to gather information of this type. We've refused. So there definitely is a "market need" out there waiting to be satisfied, and apparently Predictive Networks wants to satisfy it.
Sure, but IE has already beaten Netscape in the mass market. When has a previously-dominant, now-defeated commercial software product ever made a comeback? Lotus 123 didn't. WordPerfect didn't. dBase didn't. And Netscape won't.
I agree with the great musical satirist Tom Lehrer, who wrote of von Braun:
Gather 'round while I sing you of Werner von Braun,
A man whose allegiance is ruled by expedience. Call him a Nazi, he won't even frown; "Ah, Nazi, Schmazi," says Werner von Braun.
Some have harsh words for this man of renown, But some say our attitude should be one of gratitude, Like the widows and cripples in old London Town, Who owe their large pensions to Werner von Braun.
Don't say that he's hypocritical; Say, rather, that he's apolitical. "Vonce ze rockets are up, who cares where zey come down? "Zat's not my department," says Werner von Braun.
You, too, may be a big hero Once you learn to count backwards to zero. "In German, oder English, I know how to count down, "Und I'm learning Chinese," says Werner von Braun.
--"Werner von Braun", from the Tom Lehrer album That Was The Year That Was (1965)
Who is the "Internet community"? Ten years ago that concept meant something, but I don't think it does anymore. Do all of IBM's employees count? All of Microsoft's? How about AOL's 20 million subscribers?
I suspect over the next ten years or so we'll see the Net, or its successor(s), subjected to the same sort of backward-looking defensive strategies that have been involved in DVD/ebook-style "copyright protection". Right now the Internet doesn't have the right kind of infrastructure to, for instance, restrict access by geography (you can sort of do it by reverse DNS lookups, but that doesn't really work well) so that something illegal in Germany can't be downloaded to or routed through Germany. But there's no reason you couldn't do that in a future "next generation" Internet, given sufficient government funding.
I don't want this to be the case, but I suspect that the Internet we've known, with its great freedom (based on technological limitations, for the most part), is a temporary thing. When it's replaced, the governments of the world will be paying a lot more attention than they did last time, and the resulting network will be quite different in consequence.
If there isn't a shortage of qualified tech-industry workers, I'm very much at a loss to explain exactly why it is that the vast majority of companies I have personally had experience with are staffed by people that don't have any clue what they're doing.
Because the hiring managers are clueless too. As are their bosses, and so on, all the way up to the CEO.
I've felt for several years now that most companies are best understood as dysfunctional families. Daddy, the CEO, doesn't understand his own life or the role he plays in it, and takes out his frustrations on various wife- and child-surrogates (the rest of the company). The VPs and middle managers, representing the older children, deal with the abuse they receive from above by passing it on to their subordinates and learning, by example, that the way to be a good parent/executive is to abuse your inferiors and blame them for everything that goes wrong. The grunts (the youngest children) take all the shit and hope to be promoted because then they'll have someone to abuse. (Usually they start out with better motives than that, but such idealism is quickly crushed out of them in most cases.)
To the extent that there is or can be a solution to this, mostly you just need to find relatively non-dysfunctional companies where everyone seems to be not only competent but also pleasant and respectful of other humans. And you need to be pleasant and respectful of other humans yourself, or you'll just contribute to the further degradation of whatever corporate culture you happen to get into.
It is a truism in psychology that abusive parents were almost always abused themselves as children. I suspect that this applies to the work environment as much as to families. It explains many of the nasty things that happen in companies, including why so many of them seem to be staffed by imbeciles. Many corporate drones aren't really stupid; they've just been beaten into submission by the dysfunctional corporate machine, and no longer really care about anything except not being blamed for whatever goes wrong next. Of course, this defensive attitude tends to encourage things to go wrong, since the workers are thinking much more about covering their asses than about doing things right or looking ahead more than a few weeks.
It seems like the only real use of CSS is to make sure people in Japan can't play the movie if they buy it in the States, or some such nonsense.
So if I'm living in the USA, and I have a library of DVDs bought locally, and then I move to Europe and take my library with me, I'd better make sure to keep an American DVD player around. Meanwhile, I'll have to buy a European DVD player to watch any discs I buy or rent there...
Well, I suppose in practice it's no worse than the NTSC/PAL problems, but at least that technological conflict was the result of historical accident, not because greedy broadcasters wanted to control access to their shows. This time around, it's sheer greed and stupidity, and I resent it.
One thing I don't quite understand about this whole issue...
Let's assume I take a pre-recorded DVD (of, say, The Matrix) and a blank DVD. I copy all the bits from the Matrix disc to my blank disc. (I don't decrypt anything; I just copy everything, encrypted or otherwise, from one disc to the other.) Have I successfully created a pirate copy of The Matrix, or will my copy not work for some reason? In other words, does DVD encryption function as DVD-to-DVD copy protection, or does it merely prevent DVDs from being read by unlicensed devices? If it isn't copy protection, then it's useless; there is so much data in a DVD edition of a two-hour movie that it's impractical to store it on your hard disk and share it with friends over the Internet.
A typical DVD disk can contain advertisements that viewers normally cannot skip or fast forward through.
I don't have a DVD player yet, and have only seen DVD in store demos. Is it really true that some DVDs contain commercials that standard DVD players won't let you skip or fast-forward over? That sounds pretty vile. Some VHS tapes I have bought contain more than ten minutes of advertising before the feature program. If DVDs also have these ads, and prevent you from skipping them, then I think I'll just forget about DVD and wait for a more consumer-friendly digital video standard.
Kylix is "a high performance Linux application development environment that will support C, C++, and Delphi development", according to the Borland/Inprise web site.
Thanks for the very detailed and thoughtful reply. I'm afraid if I tried to respond to all of it I'd get nothing done today, so I'll just touch on a few points.
First, I may not have been in AV development since '93, but I haven't been ignorant of developments since then. I do know about MS Office macro viruses, HTML-embedded viruses, etc. (Last year, our office got hit by Melissa. Needless to say, all the people who got it were running either Norton or McAfee, but of course the scanners were useless because they didn't yet know about Melissa.)
One can easily resolve the MS Office problem (and still use MS Office, which, of course, is a problem in itself for a variety of reasons) by disabling macros. Similarly, I have Outlook Express configured to treat incoming mail as if it were in the IE "Restricted Sites" zone (which I have customized to totally disable ActiveX, Java, cookies, and scripting -- IMHO, HTML in email is only for text formatting and hyperlinks, not active content).
I also follow a variety of other security-conscious practices, such as write-protecting diskettes, configuring my machines to boot only from the hard disk, not running binaries obtained from untrusted sources, etc.
One might observe that this is a lot of work to go to just to not have to use a virus scanner. Sure. But the point is that it is quite possible to be safe without a scanner. The worst problem is Microsoft's stupid security defaults, which are equivalent to a large sign saying "Shoot Me".
I want to respond specifically to this statement:
There are now known worms that can infect a computer using Outlook Express (with HTML and ActiveX extensions turned on) without even opening the mail itself (just by previewing the mail).
The thing to understand is that the Preview pane in OE opens the mail. Don't think, as your statement implies you do, that previewing a message in OE is any different from viewing it in a separate message window. This is the great danger of the Preview pane: it makes it absolutely impossible to select a message without opening it at the same time. And of course you can't delete a message, or move it, without selecting it. The moral of this story is that if you have scripting and the Preview pane enabled in OE, you are risking disaster. (Of course, by default, both are enabled.)
What, you mean back around 1990? They were on a huge buying spree back in those days. Peter Norton Computing, Think, the Whitewater Group, Central Point, and the companies that originally made PC Anywhere, ACT!, and the MultiScope debugger (sorry, names forgotten) come to mind offhand as Symantec acquisitions of the early '90s.
Symantec more or less owns that market segment at this point, aside from Network Associates, who are even more loathesome.
For most people, I recommend not using anti-virus software at all. AV is a non-solution to something that is mostly a non-problem.
It's a non-solution because most AV software protects only against known viruses, and is therefore useless against anything newer than the most recent signature update you've installed. Of course, the kind of virus you are most likely to encounter is a new one that the virus scanners don't know about yet, so what good is your scanner doing? (There have been attempts to develop techniques of recognizing "virus-like behavior", but the eternal problem with that is that there is nothing that most viruses do that isn't also done by perfectly harmless, useful, legitimate software, especially debugging tools.)
It's mostly a non-problem because viruses just aren't that common and are, for the most part, easily avoided by simply not being stupid. I haven't run an anti-virus package on any of my computers since I left the Norton AntiVirus development team in 1993, and have never been hit by a virus in the almost seven years since then.
It makes sense for people producing executable images of software for distribution to have a scanner handy just to be as sure as possible that the software they're giving out isn't infected, but most of us aren't in that situation.
Btw, the best source for free, up-to-date information on viruses (and even more importantly virus hoaxes, which greatly outnumber viruses) is the Computer Virus Myths web site.
Cute, but nothing special. It reads like an off-the-cuff story he gave to Fortune either because they'd asked him for some comments on the future or just because all the usual SF markets turned it down.
I think we can more or less take it as a given that whatever the world is like in 2035, it won't be much like this story, for the same reason the 1990s weren't like any of the old SF stories that tried to imagine them. I re-read some old Larry Niven stories recently; he speculated (probably not too seriously) that the '90s would have manned visits to Pluto and cheap commercial teleportation, but computers don't figure much more into his 1960s vision of the '90s than they did in the real life of the '60s. (Which is precisely the point, I guess; writers tend to imagine the future as being sort of like today except for one or two specific, isolated changes, which isn't how the real world works.)
In a way, what a lot of SF is really about isn't the future, but more how these isolated changes that writers imagine might affect us if we had them today. This story, though, is more like a satire on the present (the joke about companies lasting only 18 months reminded me of Netscape, which lasted somewhat longer than that but was so clearly doomed from the beginning that I never saw the point of its existence other than as a typical Jim Clark get-richer-quick stock scam). As such it's mildly amusing, but it doesn't really say anything new.
As someone who has often harshly criticized your articles here on/., I want to thank you for your responses to the interview questions. It is interesting to see you responding to us, rather than just posting articles. (You hardly ever seem to contribute to the threads that arise in response to your writings -- probably you're too busy.)
For the sake of form, I'll point out just one little bit of cultural myopia on your part. You criticize Christianity (in the form of the Christian Right) for involving itself in politics more than other religions. This is true in the USA only because Christianity was, historically, the dominant religion of this country (and it arguably still is today -- IIRC, about a third of all Americans still consider themselves Christians of one variety or another). It is certainly not true worldwide, as can be shown by even the briefest examination of the Arab countries (for example), many of which are dominated by Islam far more than we are by Christianity. So I don't think that your statement, as a criticism of Christianity relative to other belief systems, holds up; Christianity is no more inclined to control society than Islam or some other religions. It just happens to have the dominant position in the country you live in, which is quite a different thing.
Because, as the article said, some objects on the display are sized in pixels, and shrink to ridiculously small sizes on a 200-ppi display. A 32x32 icon would be about 0.16 inches, too small for most people to make it out. Similar problems would occur with images in web pages. (I already have trouble, even on a 1024x768 laptop, reading text embedded in some web page images.)
You may be thinking that the driver could just automatically resize icons and bitmaps when drawing them, but that poses a problem for the rest of the display. If a program wants to draw a 202x202 box and then put a 200x200 inside it, it will be a problem if the driver decides on its own to inflate the bitmap to, say, 400x400. Suddenly it isn't fitting into its rectangle anymore. And if the driver inflates everything, scaling all coordinates to some more viable size, then you aren't really using the display's full resolution -- the rest of the system thinks the display is really 96 ppi or something, and the driver is inflating and interpolating (which takes time to do well, and doesn't look as good as a true 200 ppi image).
MS Windows is already capable of resizing icons to whatever size you like (in Win98 and Win2K, at least) -- play around with the icon size control in the Appearance tab of the Display control panel to see the effect. But this doesn't seem to affect all icons -- only those on the desktop, and presumably those of any other program that goes out of its way to look up the desired size in the registry and rescale all its icons. And it doesn't help with non-icon images. And the resulting images are kind of ugly.
So I really don't think that it answers the issues to say that the display manufacturer should deal with this problem at the driver level. The real issue is that everyone is used to dealing with computer displays in the range of 70-100 ppi, and the farther you go beyond that, the more problems you're going to have. Ultimately I think we need to get completely away from the notion of measuring things in pixels, or defining stored images as arrays of pixels. Once you do that, the problem more or less goes away.
The processor has not been the limiting factor for some considerable time. If it had been, we'd all be using Dec Alphas by now.
Well, there is no single limiting factor. I agree that you could improve overall performance much more drastically by speeding up the bus and main memory, and by farming out tasks to intelligent peripherals, but faster CPUs do result in noticeable performance improvements. The inability of Alpha NT to run Intel NT binaries, and the non-existence of Alpha Win98, probably has much more to do with Intel's continuing dominance than anything else.
If you're copying files from one drive to another, there is NO reason, WHATSOEVER, for the main processor to be involved at all.
Actually, at least one peripheral -- the video card -- has become pretty intelligent. Back before, oh, 1994? it was normal for Windows video drivers to directly manage every bit of every pixel in the graphical display. Then came now-standard "Windows accelerator cards" which basically do what you're asking for (within the video domain).
So why did this happen for video cards, but not for disk drives? Probably because most users (who aren't running high-traffic Web sites at home) aren't complaining about the disk performance. They were complaining about video performance. Also, I'm not sure that NT or Win98 are really flexible enough to accept a plug-in replacement for the standard filesystem drivers, in which case there isn't much motivation for anyone to create such a product. (I'm assuming that a "filesystem accelerator card" would basically be a disk controller with a filesystem driver built in or loaded at boot time, which would then accept high-level filesystem requests from the OS's filesystem driver and take care of all the underlying details, just as is done with video accelerator cards.)
I agree that some sort of middle ground between "no regulation" and "just like you were in the office" is needed here. I think one way of generalizing it might be to say that the company is responsible for any equipment they provide for your use at home, but the home work environment itself, and any equipment not provided by your employer, is your problem. This way, the company isn't responsible for the collapse of your basement staircase, or for the ergonomic properties of equipment you bought on your own, but they are responsible if you use, even at home, an ergonomically-poor computer keyboard that they supplied to you. I can still see some grey areas in this scheme, and the details (where the devil is) would have to be worked out, but I think it's the right way to go.
But should your employer be required to provide you with certain items (work chair, desk, computer)? If not, then I can imagine that having a really good home office setup might make you a more desirable job candidate. ("Jim and John both look like really good engineers, but John's less likely to have RSI trouble due to his ergonomic keyboard... Jim's Internet connection sucks and his machines are old and slow, whereas John has a really up-to-date setup, very professional... Let's hire John.") I can see how, over time, this might lead to equipment costs being borne by employees rather than employers. Telecommuters would, in that way, start to look more like external contractors than real employees.
And here's one more issue: If you are responsible for the condition of your home work environment, should OSHA have authority over you? I would argue that they shouldn't, since this is your home, not a corporate environment that your employer requires you to work in, over which you have no control. (Then again, if your job requires you to telecommute, is your employer essentially forcing you to work in an unregulated and therefore potentially unsafe environment? I sense a slippery slope here...)
I didn't rant, and I actually did read the article's first two pages. I wasn't impressed enough to go on. The MBTI, like most other psychological tests of its type, is basically designed around false dichotomies. And it doesn't surprise me that McConnell thinks that most programmers really work 80 hours a week under normal circumstances. He is or was, after all, a Microsoft project manager, and Microsoft's culture is well known.
McConnell is right that the hours required per week can be reduced by good engineering habits, but this is almost a truism; it's just one way of saying, "Work smarter, not harder." It's also irrelevant to the issues of personality stereotypes and MBTI statistics.
I think McConnell's best line (within the part of the article that I read, at least) is this:
One study of designers in general (not just software developers) found that the most creative problem solvers seem to move easily between the S/N, T/F, and P/J distinctions.
This, to me, basically says that the MBTI's dichotomies are useful, if at all, only for those of average or below-average creativity -- precisely not the most interesting and desirable employees.
Silly me -- I quoted the wrong paragraph in my reply. I meant to quote this one:
IMHO, this is not OK. I should have the same rights not to see anything I choose not to see in the library or in the home. They're my eyes, and they don't belong to any damn advertiser or web master.
To the last sentence, I can only reply that you can choose what to focus your eyes on, but you don't get to restrict what is there to see.
But on a community-based computer, advertisers and sites I personally deem offensive to me can shove what they like down my throat, and there is nothing I can do to stop them. My boundaries, and my right to protect them, cease to exist.
You seem to be equating web surfing at home with web surfing in public. This is sort of like saying that because no one has a right to barge into your house to preach at you, therefore no one has a right to stand up in a public place to preach. I do not believe your equation holds. Your right to privacy is not absolute when you are in a public place.
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I doubt this is a hoax. I work for a network management software company, and we've had requests from major-name American ISPs to gather information of this type. We've refused. So there definitely is a "market need" out there waiting to be satisfied, and apparently Predictive Networks wants to satisfy it.
Sure, but IE has already beaten Netscape in the mass market. When has a previously-dominant, now-defeated commercial software product ever made a comeback? Lotus 123 didn't. WordPerfect didn't. dBase didn't. And Netscape won't.
from the Tom Lehrer album That Was The Year That Was (1965)
I suspect over the next ten years or so we'll see the Net, or its successor(s), subjected to the same sort of backward-looking defensive strategies that have been involved in DVD/ebook-style "copyright protection". Right now the Internet doesn't have the right kind of infrastructure to, for instance, restrict access by geography (you can sort of do it by reverse DNS lookups, but that doesn't really work well) so that something illegal in Germany can't be downloaded to or routed through Germany. But there's no reason you couldn't do that in a future "next generation" Internet, given sufficient government funding.
I don't want this to be the case, but I suspect that the Internet we've known, with its great freedom (based on technological limitations, for the most part), is a temporary thing. When it's replaced, the governments of the world will be paying a lot more attention than they did last time, and the resulting network will be quite different in consequence.
I've felt for several years now that most companies are best understood as dysfunctional families. Daddy, the CEO, doesn't understand his own life or the role he plays in it, and takes out his frustrations on various wife- and child-surrogates (the rest of the company). The VPs and middle managers, representing the older children, deal with the abuse they receive from above by passing it on to their subordinates and learning, by example, that the way to be a good parent/executive is to abuse your inferiors and blame them for everything that goes wrong. The grunts (the youngest children) take all the shit and hope to be promoted because then they'll have someone to abuse. (Usually they start out with better motives than that, but such idealism is quickly crushed out of them in most cases.)
To the extent that there is or can be a solution to this, mostly you just need to find relatively non-dysfunctional companies where everyone seems to be not only competent but also pleasant and respectful of other humans. And you need to be pleasant and respectful of other humans yourself, or you'll just contribute to the further degradation of whatever corporate culture you happen to get into.
It is a truism in psychology that abusive parents were almost always abused themselves as children. I suspect that this applies to the work environment as much as to families. It explains many of the nasty things that happen in companies, including why so many of them seem to be staffed by imbeciles. Many corporate drones aren't really stupid; they've just been beaten into submission by the dysfunctional corporate machine, and no longer really care about anything except not being blamed for whatever goes wrong next. Of course, this defensive attitude tends to encourage things to go wrong, since the workers are thinking much more about covering their asses than about doing things right or looking ahead more than a few weeks.
Well, I suppose in practice it's no worse than the NTSC/PAL problems, but at least that technological conflict was the result of historical accident, not because greedy broadcasters wanted to control access to their shows. This time around, it's sheer greed and stupidity, and I resent it.
Let's assume I take a pre-recorded DVD (of, say, The Matrix) and a blank DVD. I copy all the bits from the Matrix disc to my blank disc. (I don't decrypt anything; I just copy everything, encrypted or otherwise, from one disc to the other.) Have I successfully created a pirate copy of The Matrix, or will my copy not work for some reason? In other words, does DVD encryption function as DVD-to-DVD copy protection, or does it merely prevent DVDs from being read by unlicensed devices? If it isn't copy protection, then it's useless; there is so much data in a DVD edition of a two-hour movie that it's impractical to store it on your hard disk and share it with friends over the Internet.
Don't complain until Britney Spears releases Brinux with the marketing campaign, "Boot me baby one more time"...
Kylix is "a high performance Linux application development environment that will support C, C++, and Delphi development", according to the Borland/Inprise web site.
First, I may not have been in AV development since '93, but I haven't been ignorant of developments since then. I do know about MS Office macro viruses, HTML-embedded viruses, etc. (Last year, our office got hit by Melissa. Needless to say, all the people who got it were running either Norton or McAfee, but of course the scanners were useless because they didn't yet know about Melissa.)
One can easily resolve the MS Office problem (and still use MS Office, which, of course, is a problem in itself for a variety of reasons) by disabling macros. Similarly, I have Outlook Express configured to treat incoming mail as if it were in the IE "Restricted Sites" zone (which I have customized to totally disable ActiveX, Java, cookies, and scripting -- IMHO, HTML in email is only for text formatting and hyperlinks, not active content).
I also follow a variety of other security-conscious practices, such as write-protecting diskettes, configuring my machines to boot only from the hard disk, not running binaries obtained from untrusted sources, etc.
One might observe that this is a lot of work to go to just to not have to use a virus scanner. Sure. But the point is that it is quite possible to be safe without a scanner. The worst problem is Microsoft's stupid security defaults, which are equivalent to a large sign saying "Shoot Me".
I want to respond specifically to this statement:
The thing to understand is that the Preview pane in OE opens the mail. Don't think, as your statement implies you do, that previewing a message in OE is any different from viewing it in a separate message window. This is the great danger of the Preview pane: it makes it absolutely impossible to select a message without opening it at the same time. And of course you can't delete a message, or move it, without selecting it. The moral of this story is that if you have scripting and the Preview pane enabled in OE, you are risking disaster. (Of course, by default, both are enabled.)For most people, I recommend not using anti-virus software at all. AV is a non-solution to something that is mostly a non-problem.
It's a non-solution because most AV software protects only against known viruses, and is therefore useless against anything newer than the most recent signature update you've installed. Of course, the kind of virus you are most likely to encounter is a new one that the virus scanners don't know about yet, so what good is your scanner doing? (There have been attempts to develop techniques of recognizing "virus-like behavior", but the eternal problem with that is that there is nothing that most viruses do that isn't also done by perfectly harmless, useful, legitimate software, especially debugging tools.)
It's mostly a non-problem because viruses just aren't that common and are, for the most part, easily avoided by simply not being stupid. I haven't run an anti-virus package on any of my computers since I left the Norton AntiVirus development team in 1993, and have never been hit by a virus in the almost seven years since then.
It makes sense for people producing executable images of software for distribution to have a scanner handy just to be as sure as possible that the software they're giving out isn't infected, but most of us aren't in that situation.
Btw, the best source for free, up-to-date information on viruses (and even more importantly virus hoaxes, which greatly outnumber viruses) is the Computer Virus Myths web site.
But if you solved the Beale cipher, would you announce the solution or just go get the gold and keep quiet about it?
I think we can more or less take it as a given that whatever the world is like in 2035, it won't be much like this story, for the same reason the 1990s weren't like any of the old SF stories that tried to imagine them. I re-read some old Larry Niven stories recently; he speculated (probably not too seriously) that the '90s would have manned visits to Pluto and cheap commercial teleportation, but computers don't figure much more into his 1960s vision of the '90s than they did in the real life of the '60s. (Which is precisely the point, I guess; writers tend to imagine the future as being sort of like today except for one or two specific, isolated changes, which isn't how the real world works.)
In a way, what a lot of SF is really about isn't the future, but more how these isolated changes that writers imagine might affect us if we had them today. This story, though, is more like a satire on the present (the joke about companies lasting only 18 months reminded me of Netscape, which lasted somewhat longer than that but was so clearly doomed from the beginning that I never saw the point of its existence other than as a typical Jim Clark get-richer-quick stock scam). As such it's mildly amusing, but it doesn't really say anything new.
For the sake of form, I'll point out just one little bit of cultural myopia on your part. You criticize Christianity (in the form of the Christian Right) for involving itself in politics more than other religions. This is true in the USA only because Christianity was, historically, the dominant religion of this country (and it arguably still is today -- IIRC, about a third of all Americans still consider themselves Christians of one variety or another). It is certainly not true worldwide, as can be shown by even the briefest examination of the Arab countries (for example), many of which are dominated by Islam far more than we are by Christianity. So I don't think that your statement, as a criticism of Christianity relative to other belief systems, holds up; Christianity is no more inclined to control society than Islam or some other religions. It just happens to have the dominant position in the country you live in, which is quite a different thing.
You may be thinking that the driver could just automatically resize icons and bitmaps when drawing them, but that poses a problem for the rest of the display. If a program wants to draw a 202x202 box and then put a 200x200 inside it, it will be a problem if the driver decides on its own to inflate the bitmap to, say, 400x400. Suddenly it isn't fitting into its rectangle anymore. And if the driver inflates everything, scaling all coordinates to some more viable size, then you aren't really using the display's full resolution -- the rest of the system thinks the display is really 96 ppi or something, and the driver is inflating and interpolating (which takes time to do well, and doesn't look as good as a true 200 ppi image).
MS Windows is already capable of resizing icons to whatever size you like (in Win98 and Win2K, at least) -- play around with the icon size control in the Appearance tab of the Display control panel to see the effect. But this doesn't seem to affect all icons -- only those on the desktop, and presumably those of any other program that goes out of its way to look up the desired size in the registry and rescale all its icons. And it doesn't help with non-icon images. And the resulting images are kind of ugly.
So I really don't think that it answers the issues to say that the display manufacturer should deal with this problem at the driver level. The real issue is that everyone is used to dealing with computer displays in the range of 70-100 ppi, and the farther you go beyond that, the more problems you're going to have. Ultimately I think we need to get completely away from the notion of measuring things in pixels, or defining stored images as arrays of pixels. Once you do that, the problem more or less goes away.
So why did this happen for video cards, but not for disk drives? Probably because most users (who aren't running high-traffic Web sites at home) aren't complaining about the disk performance. They were complaining about video performance. Also, I'm not sure that NT or Win98 are really flexible enough to accept a plug-in replacement for the standard filesystem drivers, in which case there isn't much motivation for anyone to create such a product. (I'm assuming that a "filesystem accelerator card" would basically be a disk controller with a filesystem driver built in or loaded at boot time, which would then accept high-level filesystem requests from the OS's filesystem driver and take care of all the underlying details, just as is done with video accelerator cards.)
But should your employer be required to provide you with certain items (work chair, desk, computer)? If not, then I can imagine that having a really good home office setup might make you a more desirable job candidate. ("Jim and John both look like really good engineers, but John's less likely to have RSI trouble due to his ergonomic keyboard... Jim's Internet connection sucks and his machines are old and slow, whereas John has a really up-to-date setup, very professional... Let's hire John.") I can see how, over time, this might lead to equipment costs being borne by employees rather than employers. Telecommuters would, in that way, start to look more like external contractors than real employees.
And here's one more issue: If you are responsible for the condition of your home work environment, should OSHA have authority over you? I would argue that they shouldn't, since this is your home, not a corporate environment that your employer requires you to work in, over which you have no control. (Then again, if your job requires you to telecommute, is your employer essentially forcing you to work in an unregulated and therefore potentially unsafe environment? I sense a slippery slope here...)
McConnell is right that the hours required per week can be reduced by good engineering habits, but this is almost a truism; it's just one way of saying, "Work smarter, not harder." It's also irrelevant to the issues of personality stereotypes and MBTI statistics.
I think McConnell's best line (within the part of the article that I read, at least) is this:
This, to me, basically says that the MBTI's dichotomies are useful, if at all, only for those of average or below-average creativity -- precisely not the most interesting and desirable employees.