1) Only VERY rarely have I encountered data entry clerks who know enough about the workings of modern PCs to either re-map the keys or even know there are downloadable apps that will either disable the key or produce an audible warning when it's pressed (or, for that matter, know how to use them effectively). Most that I've encountered have only a very basic understanding of the underlying technologies.
2) Most of the data entry clerks I've encountered do not have user-level priviledges to install such apps, even if they know they exist. Even where they do have the system priviledges to install them, company policies often get in the way. (The good old IT department's "little empires" syndrome where the IT dept says "If it didn't come with the PC when we put it on your desk, you ain't having it!"
3) Prying the keys off a keyboard, whilst cheap, low-tech and simple, is often considered to be akin to vandalism by the types of IT departments described in "2", rendering this option unavailable unless you're looking for a very speedy way to leave the company.
Don't get me wrong... were the IT departments in such organisations suffering the same issues, they'd turn around a solution in line with your suggestions (well... perhaps only the less destructive options) very quickly indeed, but very few IT depts I've worked in / with have been sufficiently "in touch" with the users on the coal-face to give such issues a second thought. The IT department where I work now, for example, laughs in the face of any request for change put in by users that cites savings to thesiness in measures of keystrokes saved as being petty, second-grabbing and irrelevant, despite the fact that on the front lines, saving just a few key-strokes per job will save inordinate amounts of time when multiplied by jobs per operator per day. One of them in the previous place I worked managed to calculate that 15 keystrokes saved per job equated to around 3 million keystrokes saved per year across a team of 10 people, but the IT team just saw the savings per job, rather than the bigger picture, and killed it in it's tracks as a frivolous suggestion, joking that if this guy had his way, he'd turn up in the morning, press one button, the computer would do his whole job for him then he'd go home!
Citation needed for evidence of vista-targeted botnets...
And Twitter / Erris / "Whateverthehellelseyou'regonnacallyourselftogetoutofcarmahell" STFU unless/until you can back up your allegations with these inconvenient little things called "facts" that we've been begging you for for a while. You ain't alone in hating Microsoft. I'm not going to evangelise either way (In fairness, I haven't used enough of Linux to compare knowledgeably due to issues getting my wireless USB working with every distro I've tried), but I sure ain't as vocal in my ignorance as you are!
Seriously... just once... put together a reasoned, proven post that details and documents (with evidence from a reputable source, not just a quote from Erris / A.N.Other sockpuppet) and you'll probably find that:
1) Your Karma will start to rise (not, it would seem, that you care)
2) The flamewars directed at you will cool (but history ain't on your side here, so don't expect it overnight!)
And before anyone suggests I've mistaken jcr for another Erris/Twitter... I haven't. The tirade above was just included here for 2 reasons
1) If posted on it's own it would be modded as off-topic (probably still will, but the first line here is the meat of the post)
2) To discourage (or attempt to discourage) the target from responding to me with either flame or BS.
I see an assumption here... This is always dangerous!
Just cos someone isn't looking at the screen, doesn't mean they're looking at the keyboard.
I take it you've never seen someone doing pages of data entry on forms they know off by heard without looking at the screen barely at all and their eyes permanently glued to the data (on paper) that they're inputting? I know that for the technologically advanced a reliable (if such exists) OCR is a more efficient method of input, but there are some stubborn traditionalists out there to contend with!
I think probably the worst for this kind of thing was one of my former colleagues whose surname was Kerr and his parents had the lack of foresight to call him Wayne!
One problem with all this... didn't your mummy ever warn you of the dangers of meeting people you chat to online in real life? Mine certainly did!
Seriously though... it will be great to see whether all you folks I've come to consider to be an extended, albeit highly dysfunctional, family are really the freaks I imagine you all to be, or whether I'm the only one?
I'd hate to have my illusions dashed by finding out I'm the only one on this site who isn't "normal"... One of the things that most attracted me to this site was intelligent discussion, interspersed with humour (and an enjoyable challenge it often is to try to work out which is which).
While I agree that the "Ribbon" UI is a step in the right direction, I can't see (at the moment, I could well change my mind rapdidly if it ever happens) how the UI would translate into a browser.
As for the return of the menu, this is probably just in response to the sheer nummber of users who had no idea how to do anything with the browser when they hid it by default. They're changing the default back to where it was, not significantly changing the functionality!
This is a risky proposition, as many DVDs released by his members carry notices forbidding their display in public environments, often explicitly including schools along with other, less obvious, locations such as oil-rigs!
While I agree the point should be made, you'd be inviting legal trouble with this more than you would be succeeding in making your point.
It said he was in Year 10, NOT 10 years old! IIRC, Australia, much like the UK, doesn't refer to the various levels of it's schooling as "grades". Year 10 is roughly equivalent to 10th Grade.
There are those who joke about the way americans call the various levels "grades" as opposed to "years"... the logic the jokes follow is that it's to try to stop kids getting confused / disheartened being in Year 5 after 8 or 9 years of schooling cos they keep getting held back. I think the implication of the joke is that american kids get held back more than british kids, but have never seen any evidence to support it. Having said that, there are a damn sight more american kids than british, so statistical probability implies more would be held back in raw numbers, even if not proportionally.
Because we all know that if he'd been using BOTH hands, it would have taken him a damn sight LESS time! 30 minutes? Damn, if his other hand ever left his pants, he'd have that down to 10 minutes!
There are things allowed by the GCs that I would never do, such as imprisoning my kids.
I guess this is a question of degrees... While I believe collective punishment of children is, and should be, allowable (heck, they use it in schools and youth groups all the time in my experience), your suggestion that non imprisonment of your kids should not be allowable could be interpreted as saying it should be illegal to ground your kids. While I recognise there are those parents who wouldn't ground their kids anyway, I feel denying that right to those who would be an overly obvious example of the "nanny-state"...
Maybe a better example from the GC would have been (paraphrasing based on limited memory from classes loooooong ago) If you're going to shoot someone, you must use Jacketed ammunition as opposed to hollowpoints etc...
On a similar note, one of my colleagues was recounting to me about when he visited some friends he'd met online who live in the states...
He was in a bar with them and casually asked the bartender where he could go to "pick up some fags"
Now, in the UK, this would be a commonplace question, merely asking for the nearest place/machine that sells cigarettes... apparently the definition is a little different in a small town in... I think he was saying it was somewhere in Alabama, but I wasn't there myself, so don't quote me on the location.
Needless to say... he didn't get the kind of response he was expecting, instead being told "We don't serve your kind here"... although apparently matters were cleared up somewhat when his immediate response was "My kind? You mean smokers like (and proceeded to point to half the customers)?
Re:Sony BMG does nothing to hurt their reputation
on
Sony Sues Rootkit Maker
·
· Score: 2, Funny
Should that not be DCD - Digital Consumer Disablement?
It was a situation like this that led to Paul Gadd's (AKA Gary Glitter) arrest for paedophillia a few years back.
He took his PC into PC World (IIRC) and one of the techies there found child pornography on his PC and alerted the relevant authorities.
Having said that, this DOES open up a HUGE can of worms with regard to the privacy of data, but I, for one, was happy to see the book thrown at him for this.
Incidentally... it was never clarified whether any action was taken against the techie who found this...?
Slashdot Mirror
No shit?!?
RTFS!!!!
Not trying to play devil's advocate here but:
1) Only VERY rarely have I encountered data entry clerks who know enough about the workings of modern PCs to either re-map the keys or even know there are downloadable apps that will either disable the key or produce an audible warning when it's pressed (or, for that matter, know how to use them effectively). Most that I've encountered have only a very basic understanding of the underlying technologies.
2) Most of the data entry clerks I've encountered do not have user-level priviledges to install such apps, even if they know they exist. Even where they do have the system priviledges to install them, company policies often get in the way. (The good old IT department's "little empires" syndrome where the IT dept says "If it didn't come with the PC when we put it on your desk, you ain't having it!"
3) Prying the keys off a keyboard, whilst cheap, low-tech and simple, is often considered to be akin to vandalism by the types of IT departments described in "2", rendering this option unavailable unless you're looking for a very speedy way to leave the company.
Don't get me wrong... were the IT departments in such organisations suffering the same issues, they'd turn around a solution in line with your suggestions (well... perhaps only the less destructive options) very quickly indeed, but very few IT depts I've worked in / with have been sufficiently "in touch" with the users on the coal-face to give such issues a second thought. The IT department where I work now, for example, laughs in the face of any request for change put in by users that cites savings to thesiness in measures of keystrokes saved as being petty, second-grabbing and irrelevant, despite the fact that on the front lines, saving just a few key-strokes per job will save inordinate amounts of time when multiplied by jobs per operator per day. One of them in the previous place I worked managed to calculate that 15 keystrokes saved per job equated to around 3 million keystrokes saved per year across a team of 10 people, but the IT team just saw the savings per job, rather than the bigger picture, and killed it in it's tracks as a frivolous suggestion, joking that if this guy had his way, he'd turn up in the morning, press one button, the computer would do his whole job for him then he'd go home!
Citation needed for evidence of vista-targeted botnets...
And Twitter / Erris / "Whateverthehellelseyou'regonnacallyourselftogetoutofcarmahell" STFU unless/until you can back up your allegations with these inconvenient little things called "facts" that we've been begging you for for a while. You ain't alone in hating Microsoft. I'm not going to evangelise either way (In fairness, I haven't used enough of Linux to compare knowledgeably due to issues getting my wireless USB working with every distro I've tried), but I sure ain't as vocal in my ignorance as you are!
Seriously... just once... put together a reasoned, proven post that details and documents (with evidence from a reputable source, not just a quote from Erris / A.N.Other sockpuppet) and you'll probably find that:
1) Your Karma will start to rise (not, it would seem, that you care)
2) The flamewars directed at you will cool (but history ain't on your side here, so don't expect it overnight!)
And before anyone suggests I've mistaken jcr for another Erris/Twitter... I haven't. The tirade above was just included here for 2 reasons
1) If posted on it's own it would be modded as off-topic (probably still will, but the first line here is the meat of the post)
2) To discourage (or attempt to discourage) the target from responding to me with either flame or BS.
I see an assumption here... This is always dangerous!
Just cos someone isn't looking at the screen, doesn't mean they're looking at the keyboard.
I take it you've never seen someone doing pages of data entry on forms they know off by heard without looking at the screen barely at all and their eyes permanently glued to the data (on paper) that they're inputting? I know that for the technologically advanced a reliable (if such exists) OCR is a more efficient method of input, but there are some stubborn traditionalists out there to contend with!
IIRC, I think that was introduced with SP2, not vanilla XP
RTFS!
Remind me how much you are paying for BLUETOOTH transfer of information again? I could do with a giggle!
Just a hunch here, but the word "Whoosh" doesn't mean much to you, does it?
I think probably the worst for this kind of thing was one of my former colleagues whose surname was Kerr and his parents had the lack of foresight to call him Wayne!
Especially when you bear in mind that, for the rest of the world, the "honour" of that title is reserved for the Welsh!
ISS7??? Didn't know we were past the second space station yet, let alone the seventh... and to think that it's running Vista ???
Maybe I need to trade my tinfoil hat in for a hard-hat...
Great idea...
Does leave those of us outside North America out in the cold...
That being said... just in case this is an idea that finds it's way into reality... may I be the first to nominate:
**Top Member => Twitter!**
I'll leave choosing the definition up to the esteemed members of the judging panel... over to the rest of y'all!
One problem with all this... didn't your mummy ever warn you of the dangers of meeting people you chat to online in real life? Mine certainly did!
Seriously though... it will be great to see whether all you folks I've come to consider to be an extended, albeit highly dysfunctional, family are really the freaks I imagine you all to be, or whether I'm the only one?
I'd hate to have my illusions dashed by finding out I'm the only one on this site who isn't "normal"... One of the things that most attracted me to this site was intelligent discussion, interspersed with humour (and an enjoyable challenge it often is to try to work out which is which).
The term is geek, and it's a badge I wear with pride, you insensitive clod!
Slapping your head on your forhead... that's quite an achievement by anyone's standards!
Yeah, right... As if Yoda would EVER recommend anything Imperial !?!
While I agree that the "Ribbon" UI is a step in the right direction, I can't see (at the moment, I could well change my mind rapdidly if it ever happens) how the UI would translate into a browser.
As for the return of the menu, this is probably just in response to the sheer nummber of users who had no idea how to do anything with the browser when they hid it by default. They're changing the default back to where it was, not significantly changing the functionality!
This is a risky proposition, as many DVDs released by his members carry notices forbidding their display in public environments, often explicitly including schools along with other, less obvious, locations such as oil-rigs!
While I agree the point should be made, you'd be inviting legal trouble with this more than you would be succeeding in making your point.
It said he was in Year 10, NOT 10 years old! IIRC, Australia, much like the UK, doesn't refer to the various levels of it's schooling as "grades". Year 10 is roughly equivalent to 10th Grade.
There are those who joke about the way americans call the various levels "grades" as opposed to "years"... the logic the jokes follow is that it's to try to stop kids getting confused / disheartened being in Year 5 after 8 or 9 years of schooling cos they keep getting held back. I think the implication of the joke is that american kids get held back more than british kids, but have never seen any evidence to support it. Having said that, there are a damn sight more american kids than british, so statistical probability implies more would be held back in raw numbers, even if not proportionally.
Because we all know that if he'd been using BOTH hands, it would have taken him a damn sight LESS time! 30 minutes? Damn, if his other hand ever left his pants, he'd have that down to 10 minutes!
I guess this is a question of degrees... While I believe collective punishment of children is, and should be, allowable (heck, they use it in schools and youth groups all the time in my experience), your suggestion that non imprisonment of your kids should not be allowable could be interpreted as saying it should be illegal to ground your kids. While I recognise there are those parents who wouldn't ground their kids anyway, I feel denying that right to those who would be an overly obvious example of the "nanny-state"...
Maybe a better example from the GC would have been (paraphrasing based on limited memory from classes loooooong ago) If you're going to shoot someone, you must use Jacketed ammunition as opposed to hollowpoints etc...
On a similar note, one of my colleagues was recounting to me about when he visited some friends he'd met online who live in the states...
He was in a bar with them and casually asked the bartender where he could go to "pick up some fags"
Now, in the UK, this would be a commonplace question, merely asking for the nearest place/machine that sells cigarettes... apparently the definition is a little different in a small town in... I think he was saying it was somewhere in Alabama, but I wasn't there myself, so don't quote me on the location.
Needless to say... he didn't get the kind of response he was expecting, instead being told "We don't serve your kind here"... although apparently matters were cleared up somewhat when his immediate response was "My kind? You mean smokers like (and proceeded to point to half the customers)?
Should that not be DCD - Digital Consumer Dis ablement?
It was a situation like this that led to Paul Gadd's (AKA Gary Glitter) arrest for paedophillia a few years back.
He took his PC into PC World (IIRC) and one of the techies there found child pornography on his PC and alerted the relevant authorities.
Having said that, this DOES open up a HUGE can of worms with regard to the privacy of data, but I, for one, was happy to see the book thrown at him for this.
Incidentally... it was never clarified whether any action was taken against the techie who found this...?
Maybe I'm just being a pedant, but what's this doing under IT?
/. can be hit-and-miss, but this one just seems ridiculous!
Surely better placed under either Science, Politics or YRO?
I know categorisation of new threads on
Great Dilbert reference...
now where's the car analogy...? It must be here somewhere!?!