Wal-Mart will soon start scheduling employees based on predicted customer loads, requiring the employees to be more "flexible:"
The move promises more productivity and consumer satisfaction, but could demand more flexibility and availability from workers in place of reliable shifts and predictable pay checks, the Journal reported.
Wal-Mart started using the system for some workers, including cashiers and accounting-office personnel, last year, the paper also reported.
This is an example of software developers forgetting their work sometimes has human consequences. The idea of micro-managing employees through software didn't occur to Wal-Mart just recently; in fact, I worked on a system that would have scheduled call-center employees' potty breaks down to 6-second increments almost 10 years ago. I quit, because I thought the software, however profitable, was immoral.
Perhaps I have an extreme view, but really, I think a company has to believe its employees are no more than cattle to treat them like this. Absolutely companies need software to predict customer loads and marketing approaches, and I'm happy to assist. Scheduling employees to this level of precision just goes too far.
The thing is, the people writing the software, like the people paying for it, would never tolerate that kind of control over their own lives. Tell the CEO of a company that he has to take a potty break between 10:15:06 and 10:15:42 and he might clock you (no pun intended). Make his salary dependent on that kind of intrusion and she'll simply go to another company.
The people affected by this kind of scheduling don't have as many options; that's why they work for Wal-Mart. Once Wal-Mart has crushed all the other businesses in the area, the only thing between the employees and indentured servitude might be the state's anemic minimum-wage laws.
What Wal-Mart is doing is legal, but only possible because twenty years of Republican legislatures and right-wing propaganda have stripped workers of the power they accumulated in the 20th Century. It's the early industrial revolution again, with working people getting shafted in new, high-tech ways.
The huddled masses yearning to breathe free live here now.
Weather Now is all new.
We're ecstatic to roll out a completely new visual design by Katie Zoellner. It's actually been lurking as a Beta site for several months. We didn't roll it out because not all of the features from our old site (see http://old.wx-now.com/) are complete. But today is the first day of a new year, which we thought an appropriate moment to finally give Katie's design some exposure.
(Nearly-)Total Internationalization
Notice the flags along the left side of this page. Is one of those flags from your country? Click on it. Almost everything on the site will automagically show up in your country's main language.
We're still working on a lot of the translations, and some of them are tragicomically wrong. If you find a mistranslation, please let us know. We have plans to add a few more languages (does anyone speak Japanese, Mandarin, or Hindi?), as well as to make the site better at guessing your preference.
Also notice that you can now change easily between International System (metric) and English measurements. The site will get better at guessing each visitor's initial preference here, as well.
Vastly improved flexibility
All of the data pages use XML and XSL to provide the data you're looking for. This gives us much more flexibility, and allows us to vary the content much more than we've done in the past.
Take the home page, for example. Each of the sections is independent of the others. Soon, you'll be able to mix and match them as you'd like, or choose from one of the themes that we'll offer.
Lots more under the hood
The Site now uses the Inner Drive Extensible Architecture™ throughout. The Idea™ underpins all Inner Drive Technology applications, of which this is our biggest demonstration.
Stay tuned
We have a lot more cool tools planned for the site, including a massive upgrade of the geographical gazetteer that holds all of our place information and some neat things to do with your mobile PC.
The New York Times (reg.req.) has finally picked up a year-old article by security expert Bruce Schneier, taking the TSA to task for concentrating more on theater than actual security:
FOR theater on a grand scale, you can’t do better than the audience-participation dramas performed at airports, under the direction of the Transportation Security Administration.
As passengers, we tender our boarding passes and IDs when asked. We stand in lines. We empty pockets. We take off shoes. We do whatever is asked of us in these mass rites of purification. We play our assigned parts, comforted in the belief that only those whose motives are good and true will be permitted to pass through.
Of course, we never see the actual heart of the security system: the government’s computerized no-fly list, to which our names are compared when we check in for departure. The T.S.A. is much more talented, however, in the theater arts than in the design of secure systems. This becomes all too clear when we see that the agency’s security procedures are unable to withstand the playful testing of a bored computer-science student.
Four billion dollars to airport security that doesn't work. Could we expect anything more from this Administration (762 days, 2 hours left)?
Usability guru Jakob Nielsen takes on the remarkable UIs that appear in film:
Break into a company—possibly in a foreign country or on an alien planet—and step up to the computer. How long does it take you to figure out the UI and use the new applications for the first time? Less than a minute if you're a movie star.
...
Countless scenes involve unauthorized access to some system. Invariably, several passwords are tried, resulting in a giant "Access Denied" dialog box. Finally, a few seconds before disaster strikes, the hero enters the correct password and is greeted by an equally huge "Access Granted" dialog box.
At least we no longer have large bipedal robots shouting "Danger! Danger!"
We're back, with the ParkerCam. I didn't intend to go five days without posting anything, but the office DSL modem—a crappy 2Wire model—has sporadically dropped the internal network connection. So while the DSL worked just fine, the modem stopped communicating with the rest of the office. No blogs, no email, no weather: quelle horreur.
More later.
A member of the Windows Vista team explains (via Joel Spolsky):
I worked on the "Windows Mobile PC User Experience" team. This team was part of Longhorn from a feature standpoint but was organizationally part of the Tablet PC group. To find a common manager to other people I needed to work with required walking 6 or 7 steps up the org chart from me.
So after 12 years, you still have to go to the Start menu to stop the computer.
Last Monday was the first anniversary of this blog. I completely forgot.
As penance, I will now post this photo Anne took ten minutes ago (she and Parker are at home; I'm still at World Headquarters):
The ParkerCam is such a hit (Anne refreshes it more than I do, it turns out), I replaced the ailing, sunburned, five-year-old Intel camera with the same model that I use for the Inner Drive webcam. It's easy to see why; here's the "before:"
And the "after:"
(The new camera is so good, if you open the bottom image in its own window you can read half my programming library.)
<Geek Stuff>
Alas, the new camera and I had a disagreement initially. It's a Logitech QuickCam Orbit that I'm running through Sascha Keller's VisionGS Webcam software. I had to reduce the thread priority of VisionGS to get it to play nicely with my computer. And I have Microsoft Index Service turned off until I shut down the Webcam, because it was taking every available processor cycle. The Index service sometimes repopulates its database after an unexpected reboot, and There were also several reboots involved. I also disturbed poor Parker's sleep a few times commenting *ahem* on the installation process.
</Geek Stuff>
It's working now. And if Parker moves we'll see if the face- (puppy-) tracking feature works.
Here's a great idea (via AVweb): using Microsoft® Flight Simulator as a training aid:
Here's how Microsoft Flight Simulator as a Training Aid helps aviators get the most out of every hour in the air or the virtual skies:
- Student Pilots can use the information in this book to enhance book-learning, review specific concepts and skills, and in preparing for formal flight instruction.
- Certificated Pilots can complement real-world flying with additional hours in the virtual skies, upgrading flying skills and learning about advanced aircraft and procedures.
- Flight Instructors will discover new ways to use Flight Simulator as a teaching tool in ground school classes and pre- and post-flight briefings.
- Virtual Aviators (Flight Simulator hobbyists) will learn more about real-world flying and enhance their enjoyment of virtual flying.
My dad got a copy of the latest Flight Simulator version for his birthday, and even on his old clunker of a computer it looks incredible. On his computer it's a little jumpy as the display sometimes lags behind the simulation, but if you're training to do holding patterns or instrument approaches, the realistic ground display isn't helpful anyway.
Someday, when I have oodles of time, I may pick up a copy for myself.
I am not happy today.
My company's Exchange server, which handles all of our email, crashed in a maddening fashion. Apparently the server's security database got damaged when the server rebooted after a critical update. The only way to fix it is to rebuild the server. This requires building another server first, so that our Websites don't go down in the interim. It's going to take us probably three days to fix the problem, partially because we've got client work to deliver before we can really care about the email outage.
In related news, I'm reading a new book:
