On Wed, Oct 21, 2009 at 3:55 AM, <tord_at_mindless.com> wrote: > > Traffic, another modern man's plague: > > Tord's full remarks probably apply to every large city (which is one reason I no longer live in a large city). The USA's solution to traffic has always been to build more freeways but even we are running out of room for them. I do a lot of remote work from my comfortable sofa in my Spongebob jammies and personally feel that a great many people could do the same but don't. For numerous reasons; some good and some not so good, I expect. Earlier in my life I would have resisted tele-commuting as I quite enjoyed the give and take of office work and occasionally heading out to the plant to watch my creations take form. But we used slide rules and drafting machines then and thought we had traffic problems but didn't, really. Little did I realize how my HP35 and early work on an Intel 4004 was going to change things. Cisco, a company about which I have mixed feelings, has been touting a virtual office in which you set up a cubicle in the corner of one of your rooms at home and then that cubicle becomes your "office" at the office via a VPN (virtual private network) and high bandwidth audio/video. I envision a line of 50-inch LCD monitors each with a virtual office displayed on them extending down a hallway at some company headquarters. If there is a group meeting then they simply switch your a/v to the room where the meeting is to take place... with both human and virtual attendees. More monitors. It's at least a partial solution. I'm not sure it would work well for factory workers what with latency and plant failures, etc. But perhaps one day you could be a CNC machine operator from your kitchen. Or drive a tractor from your flat in Singapore. Certainly it's feasible... if expensive. Probably much less expensive than the way we're headed now. Especially for island cities like where Tord lives and works. Craig *************************************************************************** PaddleWise Paddling Mailing List - Any opinions or suggestions expressed here are solely those of the writer(s). You must assume the entire responsibility for reliance upon them. All postings copyright the author. Submissions: PaddleWise_at_PaddleWise.net Subscriptions: PaddleWise-request_at_PaddleWise.net Website: http://www.paddlewise.net/ ***************************************************************************Received on Wed Oct 21 2009 - 08:43:24 PDT
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