From: "Wesley J. Landaker" <wjl@...>
Date: 2003-08-07T01:12:10+09:00
Subject: Re: newbie question from a smalltalker

Apparently, Dave Thomas recently wrote:
>>What I can say is that (for me) the real fun in programming comes from
>> designing and not from typing, where the last is a mere obstacle to
>> obtain the first.
>>
>
> Design? Where's the productivity is design? You're only working when
> you're typing, so the more you do, the harder you're working.

Wow, this is a good idea! I can just see it: you hook up a little device
to the keyboards of your employees that is wired to a lightblub on top of
their monitors. Every time they press a key, it increments a counter, and
every time some determined amount of time passes, say, a few seconds, the
counter is decremented... then, the lightblub is hooked up so that it is
as bright as the counter is large.

This way, if a employee is typing a lot, the lightbulb will be very
bright, but if they stop for more than a few seconds, it will start to get
dimmer and dimmer until it finally goes off, which would take, say, a
minute.

Yeah, this is great! So now all the boss has to do is walk around and look
at people's lightbulb and he'll know who to go have a little talk with, to
let them know that they are "not pressing enough keys", and thus not
working hard enough.

OH! Better yet! The wires for the lightbulbs could run into a big back
room and be hooked up in a grid... yeah, and someone could sit and monitor
them and when they start to go dim, the person monitoring would do
something... like... yes! good idea! press a button that gives the person
with a dim lightbulb an ELECTRIC SHOCK!!! Sweet!

... I think I'm going to go implement this right now. (Maybe I could write
the lightbulb interface in Ruby?)

Wes ;)