What about time spent unable to work because of a restrictive IT environment? Time spent dealing with an out-of-date OS on which I cannot install newer application software that I need (no, I'm not talking about "time wasters")? Waiting for builds on slow hardware? Not being able to effectively work from home (include here the time I wasted trying, in vain, to get some sort of usable VNC setup on top of the old, IT-managed, company-owned Windows laptop that I'm allowed to VPN with, so I could get to my Linux desktop in the office? I eventually got it working, mostly, but it wasn't usable.)?

You can't treat all employees and all jobs the same.

That's just what I want, to support 30 or 40 different models, brands, or hell even architectures.

There's a difference between "let's have IT support everyone's personal equipment" and "let's not prohibit people from connecting their own computers to the network". Limit it to people considered technically competent, and feel free to reject support requests where the problem appears to not be on your end -- though don't be too quick to dismiss the idea that the problem might be on your end, particularly when dealing with developers and others who ought to have a clue.

To say nothing of when their own personal laptop that they used to surf horse porn last night brings some nasty viruses to work to test the corporate network.

If someone causes a problem due to carelessness, then maybe they lose the privilege of connecting their own stuff. But don't use the firewall as an excuse for crappy internal security.

And finally, what happens when I tell them "Sorry, you're going to need to downgrade your os/office suite/creativity suite/whatever to be compatable with the tools we've already paid thousands of dollars for and aren't going to get a new license just for your special snowflake hardware there".

Accommodating such differences is a separate question from restrictive policies, though I don't see why it's IT's business if some department wants to pay extra for a special license, or for extra IT manpower. If you're asked to pay for it out of your existing budget, that's another matter.

No thanks. I'm happy with standardized hardware.

I'm glad you're happy. Your users -- who may also be highly valued employees that the company wants to be happy -- may not be.

if you keep facebook and yahoo messenger off it (thank god for corporate virus protection that can prevent unauthorized installers/msi files), it'll run nice and quick.

"Runs nice and quick" is not something anyone would ever say about a Windows computer after IT loads their crap on it where I work. Their Linux boxes aren't slowed down quite as much, but they run old software with lots of weird local IT changes (e.g. they override the already old distribution's version of sed with an even older version. They said it was because they thought someone at some point might have depended on that old version, but they didn't seem to have a clue who or why).

We're not limited in the software we can install. We can, in some instances, wipe the OS and install whatever we want and manage it ourselves. But corporate policy prohibits us from connecting a piece of hardware not *owned* by the company to the network, not even to connect from home over the VPN, not even on a virtual machine dedicated to the task.

Seriously, a 5 year old pendium D with 2gb of ram running XP will tear the fuck out of office 2003 or 2007.

My job doesn't involve running "office 2003 or 2007". Or Windows, for that matter. It does involve compiling large codebases, with compilers that grow ever slower in their efforts to make the generated code faster. It also involves a variety of development and communication tasks that benefit from running up-to-date software.

This is work. Do work.

So, does "Fri Jan 14, '11 03:31 PM CST" translate into work hours in your time zone?

Seriously, it's not IT's job to determine the extent to which employees should be allowed to take a break, or what constitutes "work".

Oil consumption will at some point be self-regulating by insufficient supply -- but simply letting that happen on its own schedule would be more disruptive than gradually weaning ourselves off of it, using the revenue raised to accelerate development of alternatives and mitigations, saving more of it for the most important uses later on. Who are you to tell future generations (or the less wasteful members of the current generation, for that matter) that it's our right to suck the oil out as fast as we can?

CO2 is not self-regulating in this manner. We can take explicit action to reduce emissions, hope it magically falls on its own, or endure the consequences. Who are you to tell the rest of us to twiddle our thumbs while you crank out as much CO2 into our atmosphere as you want?

If you live in Aliso Viejo, I'm sorry that you have (or had) idiots in your local government (if you don't live there, then congratulations on the cherry picking), but we are not going to abandon the notion of trying to find collective solutions to collective problems just because someone makes a mistake now and then, or because a few people make grandiose claims of self-sovereignty.

I didn't say that cars are evil -- I was just complaining about an environment where one is dependent on them for most or all mobility.

The rhetorical tone was calibrated by the parent post comparing all dense cities to Indian slums.

Yes, access to a wider variety of shops/services/jobs is nice. That's why people clustered into cities in the first place. You've got a much more energy-intensive way of achieving that.

Are there some things that need to be done out in the country? Yes. Are most of the people that live out in the country or in suburbs (the latter in the larger problem, in terms of cumulative effect) today doing that? No. For those that have a real need to be out there, higher fuel costs are just a cost of that line of work, which you can pass on to your urban customers. Somehow I don't think turning farmland into suburban subdivisions is going to help keep the agricultural system going.

It's not about wanting to interfere with anyone's life -- it's a recognition that we're burning more fossil fuel than we can sustain, and needing to bring down that consumption level. Increasing the cost of burning fossil fuel is an extremely powerful tool for achieving that. Government has already been interfering in our lives by discouraging cities in favor of suburbs through various policy decisions.

Before you complain about the tax money spent on cities, check where that tax money mostly comes from -- and don't forget to count people that live in the country or a suburb but commute into the city.

Carbon footprint/fossil fuel consumption is not the only reason I prefer the city (yes, there's waste there too -- the price of dirty, unsustainable energy needs to increase to motivate reduction in *all* sources of waste to manageable levels), and not all cities are the way you describe. There is a middle ground to be had between Levittown and Manhattan.

How does needing to drive for miles at 80 MPH just to get groceries or go to work make my life better? How do the suburbs magically make driving in snow easier? If I live in the city and don't need to keep a car around permanently, I can rent one for occasional trips to the suburbs/country.

I used to live in a duplex in Pittsburgh. I could walk to the grocery store and other local retail attractions -- or I could drive, it wasn't a problem. Parking was a minor nuisance compared to suburbia, but not that bad, and if the snow was bad I could take the bus or walk. I could walk or take the bus to/from the pub.

There was a large park with lots of wooded trails within walking distance, and if I lived elsewhere I could have arrived by bus or car (plenty of street parking in the area), or of course gone to another of the city's several parks. If I just wanted to see trees and squirrels and such, they were right outside my window. It doesn't have to be all concrete.

Schools don't magically turn to crap because of high floor-to-area ratios or the lack of a large parking lot out front. Urban schools suffer mainly because the tax base has fled to the suburbs, and because of the large percentage of students that don't come from a supportive environment at home (again because the middle class fled). Don't confuse the problems of cities with the problems of poverty. If you reverse the demographic migration (which appears to be happening, at least a little bit), things should improve.

As for buliding equity, you can buy a house or condo in the city, and you can rent in the suburbs.

Is the city -- be it a high-density one like New York or Chicago or a moderate-density one like Pittsburgh -- right for everyone? No. Are there some inconveniences (as well as some conveniences)? Sure, but "savagery" is a bit much unless you're talking about some very specific locations. And small towns can, if done right, can be walkable too. I never said suburbia was uncivilized, just that accessing the civilization that is there requires more energy.

Choices are good, as long as you pay your fair share for claiming luxuries that we don't have the resources to extend to everyone. But for a while now (it's starting to get a bit better lately, but not tremendously so), public policy has been pushing suburbanization through zoning, parking regulations, highway funding, tax policy, energy policy, etc. -- rather than letting development patterns respond to market demand.

I work near Parmer and Anderson Mill, so I'm stuck with the car no matter where I live. I live in the Arboretum area as a compromise between some level of local walkability and bus service, not-too-expensive and not-too-crappy apartments, and being not too far of a drive from work.

It's good to hear about some affordable central options -- Austin does seem to be making an effort to get away from its older zoning practices, though I think there's more that they could do (eliminate McMansion, allow duplexes and garage apartments on smaller lots across the entire central city, upzone transit corridors, relax minimum parking requirements, etc). The neighborhoods (a.k.a. people that already own central houses and want prices to be high and nothing to change) seem to have a pretty strong veto over such things (e.g. all the opt-outs on vertical mixed-use).

I bet there was a lot more activity (percentage-wise) in the core before the age of cheap driving (assuming a sufficiently old town). If (when) driving gets expensive again, you may see a renewed interest in that part of town, as well as in putting in more sidewalks.

You want to live in the sticks and still have an urban lifestyle (i.e. frequent access to the rest of civilization), you get to pay the costs of the dwindling resources that lifestyle consumes. As for small towns, the core of them is usually pretty walkable, but they've sprawled out with the automobile just as the larger cities have.

I'm sorry to hear about the poor train service you have -- but that's a local issue that needs to be taken up with the transit agency (and/or the politicians who are probably starving it for funding). I wish I had any transit service at all that went to the sprawly place where I work...

You claim to speak for all Americans and Europeans?

I would much rather live in a proper city (they're not all slums) than a suburb or exurb. I hate being tied to a huge hulk of oil-gobbling pollution-spewing metal that I must take everywhere I go (and always be sober to do so), with so much land being dedicated to the storage of said hulks of metal at every destination (you say you don't like concrete -- do you like asphalt?). Unfortunately, the city I live in (Austin, but it applies in much of the US) has zoned mostly low density and thus high density areas are expensive due to limited supply relative to demand, and jobs are scattered in the suburbs, so I'm stuck with the car.

If you like your exurb (but apparently not the one you work in, since you feel the need to commute), fine, but don't complain about gas tax increases or other driving charges to pay for your highways and to keep CO2 and oil consumption under control. Don't complain if you get charged higher utility rates than urban customers because you need more pipe/wire distance per person. Don't complain if more of your local taxes have to be spent on police and fire coverage to cover the same number of people. Don't complain if state/federal tax money is spent on the more efficient population centers, particularly for things like transit. Don't complain that natural gas/electricity has to be kept cheap so you can heat/cool your large detached house.

So they're still around by the time they become public domain -- and not locked away in rotted, obsolete, DRMed 95-year-old media.

Roads are for MOTOR vehicles in practice. Bicycling is recreation, not transportation.

Bullshit. That many places are hostile to bicycle use does not make it illegitimate as a transportation mode.

BTW I grew up in urban New Jersey and never knew anyone who got hit as a pedestrian. The accepted rules:

Stay the fuck off the road.

That's hard when there's no sidewalk or other place to walk. In many places in the US, people view pedestrians the same way you view bicycles.

Look before you cross so nothing is close enough to be ABLE to hit you.

So I should camp out at the corner for hours until traffic dies down, lest some driver turn without checking the crosswalk?

Once I was crossing at a crosswalk, with a walk signal. The turning car closest to me yielded. The car behind that one couldn't conceive of what was holding up his turn, and swerved around the car in front to turn from the far lane. Missed me by a couple feet.

Of course there are also idiot pedestrians and bicyclists that jump out into traffic recklessly, expecting people to slam on their brakes -- but even for those who are behaving reasonably, some audible warning of what the big hunks of metal are doing is useful. We can't look everywhere at once.

The point is that zombies, and many other things that you really don't want to happen to your single-user machine, can happen without root access (though probably with reduced ability to hide their activities).

It's increasingly making sense to put security boundaries between apps (especially Internet-facing ones), not just users -- at which point this is not just relevant to "multi-user" systems.

BTW, desktops can certainly be multi-user, whether it be multiple people that have legitimate physical access to the machine, a desktop that's also doing some server duties, etc.

You're assuming that those 100 men would vanish in the absence of employment -- rather than consume resources funded by unemployment, or perhaps another job that was viable only because the glut of available labor pushed wages low enough, or because the work week was shortened to spread the work among everyone.

People don't just go away because their job did.

Would it be a more productive use of that nuclear energy than displacing fossil fuel for existing electricity generation?