Why Telecommuting Is a Pipe Dream

For years now we have been told about the joys of telecommuting —the promise that any day we’ll be able to go to work by just going into our home office. We all know the benefits of telecommuting. Will it ever happen for the majority of people who could do their jobs at home? No.

Why? The answer can be summed up in one word:

Control

An employer pays the employee not only to do the job, but also for a certain period of time during their day. For most of us, that is forty hours. During that time they want to be able to supervise what you do, what you say, who you talk to, when you take a break, when you take a cigarette break, when you go to the bathroom, and when you go to lunch. They want to be able to know what you are doing on “their” time, whether that be on the Internet, or any of a host of other things. It all boils down to power.

For the U.S. business person, they less care about if the job gets done than that they can control you while you are doing it. One of the “perks” of being a manager is being able to tell people what to do. If that perk were gone, why would anyone want the hassle and the added responsibility that management brings?

Look at Bill Gates and Microsoft. Every businessperson wants to be Bill Gates. Many think it is because of all of the money that he has and is at his disposal. But money is just a side benefit. The real thrill is the power! Think of it: Bill Gates is the most powerful man in the world. He is more powerful than even the heads of governments, the U.S. government included.

He can, if he wanted to, shutdown and shut people out of their computers worldwide. On any given Tuesday, the Windows “patch” could include a time bomb to disable the computer. Most computers have this “feature” installed on them with the Windows Genuine Advantage. If you have a computer running Vista, just see what happens when the computer “thinks” you are running a pirated copy of Windows. You are locked out of the computer and all of your applications and possibly files—only getting to use Internet Explorer for one hour before the computer automatically logs you out.

Imagine the chaos (economic and otherwise) that would occur if Microsoft were to shut down all of their software—everywhere. I am not saying, or even insinuating that they will. But they do have the power.

It is that same lust for power, albeit on a smaller scale, that precludes the vast majority of businesses from allowing their workers to telecommute to do their jobs.

“But,” you say, “My company has given me a laptop to use and I can VPN into work at any time of the day or night. I can access e-mail, files on the network shares, business applications just as easily in the comfort from my own home as I can from work.” This is all true. But the question is: whose time are you doing those business-related tasks? If you are doing it on your own time, at your convenience, then that is just an added bonus for the company. They’ve got you, as it were. Some may say, “But I was sick last Tuesday and they let me work from home because I had such a bad cold.” Again, this is very true. But, ask your self the question of what benefit was that to the company? Are you salaried? If so, then they have paid for that time whether you are home sick or in the office. Keeping you at home on that day made sound business sense. You were a seething cauldron of contagion and you would be bringing that in with you to the office. This way, with letting you VPN into the company, they can get the work out of you without the extra “bonus” of you quite possibly making the entire office (including the managers) sick.

It has been said that power is the greatest aphrodisiac. A statement couldn’t be more true. What do successful business people with lots of money want? — more money? No. Power. For them, it is the only thing that makes the game worth playing. It is the thing that gives them the thrill on the inside and makes the whole rat race worth running.

Almost Impressed

Sunday I had a difficult time staying asleep. I work nights, so I need to sleep during the day. Weekends are my long days, when I work 12-hour days (7 PM to 7 AM) Saturday and Sunday.

As a test I had set up a small alarm program on my Mac to see if it would go off as scheduled. I have to leave for work by 6:30 PM, so I set the alarm for 6, as a failsafe.

Sunday was the Fall Back day, so I made sure to set all of my clocks back 1 hour before I went to sleep Sunday morning. Windows XP set itself back. My Mac was turned off Saturday because I was not using it and so no need for it to draw power.

At 5 PM I heard a quiet noise. It was my Mac bringing itself to life! After a moment I thought, “It thinks it is 6 PM, since it hasn’t “fallen back” yet, so it is trying to wake me up!” And as I suspected, the alarm did not go off because the Mac correctly set itself back to 5 PM and then went back to sleep. I did not want to get up, so I was awake, but still in bed at 6 PM when the Mac once again came back to life. This time, for some reason, the monitor did not power on, but the rest of the computer did. At 6:10 PM I switched my mouse over to the Mac (I have a KVM switch to share the keyboard & mouse with my computers) and moved the mouse. The monitor came to life. The alarm program said it was 6:00 PM, then instantly switched to 6:10 PM and started beeping. I know that the alarm program has a function that one can select to bring the computer up out of sleep. I did not know that it would also bring the computer back up after it was shut off.

If only it would have started beeping at 6 PM I would have been very impressed.

Linux Frustrations

The thing that frustrates me the most regarding Linux (I use this term very broadly, meaning the kernel, but more importantly, the programs that run on top of the kernel) is that the programs that have any complexity at all do not work as advertised.
I have a portable media player that I use all of the time. It is the Archos 404. The device itself is a Linux computer. I like to synchronize my music and video files between it and my desktop PC. I also like to listen to podcasts and vidcasts on it as well. This process is seamless using Windows Media Player. It also works equally well with Rhapsody, or other media software. This process also works equally seamlessly using Apple’s iTunes and my iPod Shuffle.
So, in my quest to find an alternative to Windows, the latest incarnation of Linux that I installed on my computer was OpenSuse.
OpenSuse comes with probably more programs than one would ever need. The first one I tried with my Archos 404 was Rhythmbox. It did not see my Archos as a portable device. The Archos has three USB settings — Windows Media mode, PC hard drive mode, and charge-only mode. Since Rhythmbox is not Windows Media, I first tried PC hard drive mode. OpenSuse did detect this and mounted the drive on my desktop, but Rhythmbox would not recognize it even after I told it where it was mounted. So in my frustration, I tried Amarok.
Amarok appears to be a very versatile program. It keeps one’s media organized, will download podcasts, will play streaming media and supposedly sync with media players. Again, it would not see the Archos. I tried it first in PC hard drive mode, then Windows Media mode and got the same results—it would not see it. I manually tried to configure it and still had no luck. The best that I could do was to copy the files over manually using Konqueror. I know I could use rsync to keep everything on the same page, but this is not intuitive.
My computer is a very standard computer. It is a Dell Dimension 8300. It has an Intel Pentium IV 2.8 GHz processor, 1 GB RAM, 2 hard drives and 2 DVD/RW drives. It also has a very standard ATI Radeon 9800 Pro card that supports 3D acceleration and has 128MB of RAM on the video card. The reason I give you the specifications on it is not to impress but to state that this is a very standard personal computer. Also installed in the computer is a Hauppage PVR-150 cable television card. This card has a built-in MPEG2 encoder and is considered by many to be the paradigm of TV capture cards. Every modern Linux distribution I have installed sees this card. Most install the drivers for it. And in none of them has it ever worked. The best that I could ever do was to get a TV window open via mplayer. Under Windows, this card works beautifully.
I realize that Hauppage makes the drivers and some applications for the card for the Windows platform, and that the ivtv project does the development for the Linux side of it.
The reason I go into such detail is this:
Many Linux fans state every year that Linux is ready for the desktop — that Linux can go step for step with Microsoft and win, — that Linux will someday replace Windows as the desktop of choice for most people. This will not happen. Why?—because people want their computers to work. The vast majority do not want to fool around with configuration files that are best modified as “root” in a terminal window via vi. They want their computer to do what they want it to do, when they want it to do it. That is why, I believe, that the Mac is gaining market share daily on the desktop, while Windows is slowly loosing its iron grip on desktop computing.
I’ve had an IBM-compatible computer ever since 1988 with my Zenith eaZy PC. Before that I had an Atari 130 XE computer. Never until this year have I owned a Mac. Wanting to see what all of the fuss was about; I went onto eBay and bought a G4 Power Mac. Once I installed OS 10.4 (Tiger) I realized what all of the excitement was about. It just works! Plug my iPod in and iTunes comes up, downloads my new podcasts and automatically syncs with the iPod. Safari and Camino work well for browsing the Internets. Quicktime does a good job of playing whatever media is thrown at it. Installing a program is as simple as mounting the .dmg file and then dragging the icon into the Applications folder. Want to see your widgets? Just click on the icon in the finder bar (I think that is what that bar is called) and there are your widgets. Click it again and they go away. It is a thing of beauty. I have never thought of any operating system as a thing of beauty before this.
This is the lesson that people who write software need to learn. Most people want their computer to be an appliance that is versatile and easy to use. They do not want to muck around under the hood. They don’t want to compile their own kernel, or even want to know what a kernel is or what it does. The people who developed UNIX got this concept back in the day with having simple programs that did one, maybe two, things very well. If more was needed, the output from one program could serve as the input of another program for further processing. This same simplicity and ease of use needs to conveyed into all programs that end users will use. Until those that develop software for Linux distributions learn this, the fruit of their efforts will always be flawed.
~~Of course, that’s just my opinion—then again, I could be wrong.~~

Intro

This is where I'll be posting my rants & raves. There are just sometimes when one has lot either let off steam, or to just speak one's mind. Right now, I'm feeling pretty good, though my best friend just had to put his dog Bailey down today. I definitely can wait for that day when I have to make the same decision concerning Pixy.