Friday, May 03, 2002

From The FuzzyStuff Weblob: The Cost of Restarting or Why Power Users / Hackers Get So Damn Angry at Microsoft When I talk to a non geek and go off on an Anti Microsoft rant, they bemusedly tolerate it.  They never seem to quite get it though.  Here's why (and note that I'm writing on my laptop now SOLELY because my desktop is hung and I'm trying to restart it and its taking forever).  They basically think "Well computers crash.  Get over it.  What's the big deal?".  Here it is, fully documented. We use our computers constantly.  I mean 16/7 for me (I sleep a bit, I do eat and I bathe but the rest of the time I'm coding or writing or emailing or something but its almost always in use). Our time is valuable.  Its all we have and its damn valuable.  Here's the math. Take an average geek making $75,000 per year Assume he works 250 days per year (he does more but that's full time) Assume his benefits (i.e. loaded cost) are worth 40% of base (that's standard) so $30,000 Total Cost to the Company: $105,000 If you do the math, that translates to 87.5 cents per minute.  Non one works 100% of a full hour, 8 hours straight but let's keep it simple A typical restart takes 5 minutes to save every open document, shut down, restart.  Yours may vary but I use a lot of Windows so saving everything takes a while.  5 * .875 = $4.375.  That's stolen from me or my company whenever stupid Microsoft Windows errors force me to restart. Now, that's not all folks.  I'm a developer.  I think for a living and it takes me a while, about 30 minutes, to get in and out of the coding zone where I'm productive.  This is a pretty well documented productivity issue with developers.  It's well understood and it's real.  Let's factor that in now.  Please note that some developers take less, some take more but this is probably average. 30 *.875 is $26.25.  $26.25 + $4.375 is a total of $30.625 stolen from me per restart.  Let's extrapolate, we're on a roll here.  Assume 3 restarts per week.  Certainly not uncommon given Microsoft's well documented stability problems.  That's a total of $91.875 per week that me or my company gives away in lost productivity due to inept development practices at Microsoft.  Hey, Solaris or even Linux doesn't crash like this.  I might have to shut down X but I still don't have to restart and I can almost always just kill a program, not restart the whole damn thing.  And, yeah, I do run Windows 2000 not XP.  Guess what?  I no longer trust Microsoft as a vendor.  They've been failing on the issue of building a reliable operating system since DOS was released.  As far as I'm concerned, the only way I'm going to XP is when they give it to me for free.  Why do I have to upgrade because they are incompetent at writing software.  Do any of us really think that it is going to get better?  Thousands of free, unpaid Linux people write stable stuff every single day.  Why does that work but Microsoft can't?  (Why God Why! he screams.) Now, let's take that out over a year long period.  50 weeks per year makes this $4,593.75.  That's per developer you employ.  If you employ 10 software engineers, this is effectively costing you $45,000 plus per year.  And, remember, I'm assuming that your engineers are glued to a keyboard every minute of every 8 hour day.  You know that's not true so this number is higher. Oh, my last restart that led to this rant required a full check disk so I've been waiting for 15 minutes plus this time (and its only at 55 percent now).  Don't even get me started on the costs of this restart.  I can't bear to think about it.  Yes, I do have a second computer to use but that's not the point.  Do you buy every engineer in your company a second computer?  I thought not. Makes you think, huh... 8:02:06 AM    comment []

RSS: Lightweight Web Syndication. "Along came My.UserLand, an RSS-based portal with a difference: archiving. While MNN displayed only the latest version of a particular channel, UserLand archived snapshots on an hourly basis. The RSS 'aggregator' was born. Aggregation brings with it a new concept, the decoupling of items (stories) from their parent channels. Rather than a set of web sites being boiled down into rectangular news-boxes, RSS can be presented as a confluence of feeds from disparate sources with a focus on timeliness rather than channel. While maintaining an item's original association with its channel, Meerkat ('An Open Wire Service') presents items in reverse-chronological order, also allowing filtering, searching, grouping, and sharing." [via CodingTheWeb.com Newslog: RSS] Unless you've seen and used an RSS news aggregator, you won't really understand that paragraph, but there is a lot of power in it. I'm struggling with the concept of RSS because I know how it helps me and I can see its potential in so many other contexts. But I don't know enough about it to help move my vision forward. Radio's news aggregator is a great starting point, but sometimes the limitations frustrate me. This article by Rael Dornfest provides a nice, concise history of RSS that even I can understand (at least, on some level). It was written in July, 2000, and even then the whole metadata issue was rearing its head: "As RSS continues to be re-purposed, aggregated, and categorized, the need for an enhanced metadata framework grows. Channel- and item-level title and description elements are being overloaded with metadata and HTML. Some are even resorting to inserting unofficial ad-hoc elements (e.g., , , ) in an attempt to augment the sparse metadata facilities of RSS. Discussion forum syndicators are forced to rely upon title-based threading. Aggregators are grappling with the problem of providing information about the original source of an item when removed from its channel context. News syndicators are wondering where to embed a company's stock symbol, currently relegated to silliness. Solutions to these and future RSS metadata needs have primarily centered around a) the inclusion of more optional metadata elements in the RSS core, b) XML-namespace based modularization, and c) putting the RDF back into RSS. For an overview of the modularization versus core extension discussion, take a look at Leigh Dodds' recent XML-Deviant column, 'RSS Modularization.' " Obviously some of these things have been addressed in the interim (Radio and other tools now support categories, titles, etc.), but as a librarian, I'm really missing the contexts that would link everything together. I should be able to easily find all of the blogs written by lawyers, librarians, or law librarians. Rael concludes that metadata is the key, and I find myself agreeing: "RSS has seen a large degree of adoption from independent content producers, yet has failed to grab the attention of mainstream content providers. Perhaps the high eyeball/effort ratio message just hasn't been delivered. Or is it the "terminal beta" feel of RSS with its < 1.0 versioning that makes anyone but early adopters nervous? The word needs to get out, in executive summaries, and white papers, and adoption by more key mainstream web sites. RSS also needs more "killer apps," which can be provided (in this author's opinion) by a richer metadata framework within which to build. Scalable extensibility is a must if RSS is to continue being re-purposed. Yet this extensible RSS must remain relatively simple (somewhere between HTML and hard-core RDF should do!) and backward-compatible in a way that will bring the current user-base along, rather than leaving it behind." Obviously the generation of RSS feeds by the New York Times, the Spartanburg Herald-Journal, and the Baltimore Sun are one giant leap for mankind, but we've still got a ways to go. So almost two years later, I'm asking the same questions Rael was - how do we get there? [The Shifted Librarian] 6:46:35 AM    comment []

LCD Paint Licked. "Homes of the future could change their wallpaper from cream to cornflower blue at the touch of a button, says Dirk Broer. His team has developed paint-on liquid crystal displays (LCDs) that offer the technology.... Current LCDs on digital watches, mobile phones and laptops sandwich the crystal between heavy glass plates. The complicated production process is time-consuming, expensive and restricts the size of screens to just 1 metre square. Broer and his colleagues have devised a new open-sandwich technique that instead deposits a layer of liquid crystal onto a single underlying sheet. Working at Eindhoven University of Technology and Philips Research Laboratories in the Netherlands, Broer's team has already produced prototypes on glass and plastic; fabric could be next. The technique could create giant TV screens, digital billboards and walls that change colour. Slim, plastic LCDs sewn into fabric could display e-mail or text messages on your sleeve. 'It depends what future societies want,' says Broer. The technique should feed people's thirst for smaller, cheaper gadgets. Conventional glass LCDs now make up an increasing part of a laptop's weight - plastic versions could change that, says Peter Raynes, who studies LCD technology at the University of Oxford, UK.... 'Don't expect to buy a watch featuring one of the new displays in the next six months,' warns Raynes, however. He cautions that the technique needs work: compared with glass, the thin outer layer may be more easily penetrated by oxygen or water that degrade the crystal.' [Nature, via Slashdot] This has definite implications for ebooks, PDAs, and wearable computers, among other things. Can the OQO be made even lighter? Or maybe you'll just plug it into your jacket and look at your sleeve. Does this make computer displays embedded in glasses even more feasible? Could I project a map onto the corner of my car's windshield using my PDA? So many ideas.... [The Shifted Librarian] 6:45:58 AM    comment []