Yesterday I was in my local bakery, buying a muffin. The owner was training a new employee, and they were fiddling with something at the touch-screen PC which served as the cash register.
The owner was trying to scan the employee’s fingerprint, using a little USB fingerprint scanner that sat on the counter. They were having some difficulty making the thing work.
They wandered off, enabling me to pay another staff member for my muffin. I asked her what the fingerprint scanner was for.
It’s a biometric time clock (this company makes them). Employees ‘clock in’ at the the start of their shift by scanning their fingerprint at the front counter.
Does anybody else think that’s a bit creepy? Talk about not trusting your employees. The message is “I think you’re going to lie to me, so I’ve devised a foolproof system to foil you.”
It’s been about fifteen years since I worked in customer service, but I never actually had to clock in at any of my jobs. If I was late, the manager just hassled me. I could never be particularly late for those early shifts where a manager wasn’t around (probably common in a bakery), because I had a bunch of stuff to do before a certain time (also, I’d imagine, like a bakery).
In any case, I wouldn’t leave the USB scanner in view of the public. I imagine there are lots of patrons who have the same response that I did.
Here’s my useless idea of the day. What if we could watch live or recorded screencasts of a writer’s screen as they write? The writer–from Stephen King to your favourite local blogger–installs some software on their computer, and it broadcasts the activity in their word processor (or authoring tool of choice) in real time to the web.
Here’s a quick example of what I’m talking about, courtesy of Victor Hugo:
It kind of combines Webex and RobotReplay with the popular notion of radical transparency. It sounds banal, but so does Twitter, and people seem to like that.
The technology for this obviously already exists. There’d be a little work in building plugins for MS Word, NotePad,browser forms and whatever else people write in. But other than that it would be simple.
If you’re Stephen King, maybe you offer some kind of premium subscription that enables people to spy on your writing. Hardcore fans, knowing that King usually writes in the morning, would log in to watch him putter away on his latest novel.
Of course, no writer that I know would permit this. As the saying goes, “there are two things you never want to see made, sausage and legislation”. I’d add most forms of writing to that list.
I was reading the local paper today, and perused an article about Microsoft targeting smaller companies in their forthcoming acquisitions. The article featured a photo of a couple Microsoft ‘booth babes’ at a tradeshow, showing off some peripherals (copped from Yahoo! News):
Maybe I’m just getting old, but don’t these young women look about twelve years old? Particularly the one on the right, who has ‘Hardware’ emblazoned on her crop-top. Of course, there’s a big market for webcams among paedophiles, so maybe it’s just good marketing.
It has nothing to do with so-young-it’s-creepy girls, I’ve always really liked Microsoft’s keyboards. I pretty much buy them exclusively.
