4 ms·

Does Your Boss Have to Pay You While You Wait for Vista to Boot Up?

7 points by raju 18y ago

olefoo 18y ago
I would say that if you are requiring someone to be there and they can't do their work because you made poor purchasing decisions and have no coherent technology strategy, then you're still responsible for paying them. //someone did tell the call center owners about wake-on-lan, right?
- misterbwong 18y ago
  While I agree with your sentiment, I do find the article's numbers a bit suspect. 15-30 minutes a day for booting and shutting down seems like a stretch even for the most underpowered computers.
  - olefoo 18y ago
    Having seen what can happen to even new computers that are fully 'locked down' with multiple spyware scanners and user restriction software; all of which needs phone home for updates on boot on a network made of 10-base-T hubs... the 10-15 minutes strikes me as plausible. //those of us who can take care of our own networking and system administration don't always realize how good we have it.
biohacker42 18y ago
Yes. Your boss may be able to weasel out of paying hourly employees, but your boss is paying for the boot and reboot times of all the FTE. Your boss can't opt out of that. Which is why your organization should strive to configure all machines to be fast and response. Not just at boot time, but all the time. Further more, if you are developing a multi-platform application you should get a machine for each platform and a KVM switch. But alas the company I currently work for, is penny wise and pound foolish. They are "saving" money on desktops by giving the devs multi-boot machines, that require rebooting to switch platforms. And the developers are by no means cheap. Penny wise and pound foolish is extremely common in the corporate world. And a few companies like Toyota that are pound SMART, eat their competitors' lunches.
- cstejerean 18y ago
  Using multi-boot to test on multiple platforms sounds painful, but giving every developer multiple machines and a KVM sounds wasteful. Finding a way to leverage virtualization would be much better IMHO.
- cabalamat 18y ago
  > But alas the company I currently work for, is penny wise and pound foolish. They are "saving" money on desktops by giving the devs multi-boot machines, that require rebooting to switch platforms. And the developers are by no means cheap. At one of my previous employers, developers didn't even have their own machine, they had to share from a pool. And the company periodically sent spies round to our department to make sure all the machines were being used; if they weren't, we were obviously over-equipped and they could take one of the Sparcstations away...
cpr 18y ago
Why wouldn't they just logout and let auto-sleep save energy? Logging in can't take more than a few seconds on a reasonable modern desktop or laptop. Seems like this is really a failure of the Wintel monopoly to produce reasonable machines that auto-sleep. (Whoops, is my Apple fanboiismo showing? ;-)
- jrockway 18y ago
  Seems like this is really a failure of the Wintel monopoly to produce reasonable machines that auto-sleep. (Whoops, is my Apple fanboiismo showing? ;-) Considering the hardware is exactly the same as the "wintel monopoly" machines, yes.
  - cpr 18y ago
    No, considering it's software that does the work (the Windows portion of Wintel).
    - jrockway 18y ago
      Actually, it's the software in the ACPI tables that does the work. Presumably the BIOS provides the same information to both Windows and OS X (although some BIOSes intentionally lie to Linux).
gg77 18y ago
i wouldn't push the power button if they weren't paying me.

7 points by raju 18y ago

I would say that if you are requiring someone to be there and they can't do their work because you made poor purchasing decisions and have no coherent technology strategy, then you're still responsible for paying them. //someone did tell the call center owners about wake-on-lan, right?

misterbwong 18y ago
While I agree with your sentiment, I do find the article's numbers a bit suspect. 15-30 minutes a day for booting and shutting down seems like a stretch even for the most underpowered computers.
- olefoo 18y ago
  Having seen what can happen to even new computers that are fully 'locked down' with multiple spyware scanners and user restriction software; all of which needs phone home for updates on boot on a network made of 10-base-T hubs... the 10-15 minutes strikes me as plausible. //those of us who can take care of our own networking and system administration don't always realize how good we have it.

biohacker42 18y ago

Yes. Your boss may be able to weasel out of paying hourly employees, but your boss is paying for the boot and reboot times of all the FTE. Your boss can't opt out of that. Which is why your organization should strive to configure all machines to be fast and response. Not just at boot time, but all the time. Further more, if you are developing a multi-platform application you should get a machine for each platform and a KVM switch. But alas the company I currently work for, is penny wise and pound foolish. They are "saving" money on desktops by giving the devs multi-boot machines, that require rebooting to switch platforms. And the developers are by no means cheap. Penny wise and pound foolish is extremely common in the corporate world. And a few companies like Toyota that are pound SMART, eat their competitors' lunches.

cstejerean 18y ago
Using multi-boot to test on multiple platforms sounds painful, but giving every developer multiple machines and a KVM sounds wasteful. Finding a way to leverage virtualization would be much better IMHO.
cabalamat 18y ago
> But alas the company I currently work for, is penny wise and pound foolish. They are "saving" money on desktops by giving the devs multi-boot machines, that require rebooting to switch platforms. And the developers are by no means cheap. At one of my previous employers, developers didn't even have their own machine, they had to share from a pool. And the company periodically sent spies round to our department to make sure all the machines were being used; if they weren't, we were obviously over-equipped and they could take one of the Sparcstations away...

cpr 18y ago

Why wouldn't they just logout and let auto-sleep save energy? Logging in can't take more than a few seconds on a reasonable modern desktop or laptop. Seems like this is really a failure of the Wintel monopoly to produce reasonable machines that auto-sleep. (Whoops, is my Apple fanboiismo showing? ;-)

jrockway 18y ago
Seems like this is really a failure of the Wintel monopoly to produce reasonable machines that auto-sleep. (Whoops, is my Apple fanboiismo showing? ;-) Considering the hardware is exactly the same as the "wintel monopoly" machines, yes.
- cpr 18y ago
  No, considering it's software that does the work (the Windows portion of Wintel).
  - jrockway 18y ago
    Actually, it's the software in the ACPI tables that does the work. Presumably the BIOS provides the same information to both Windows and OS X (although some BIOSes intentionally lie to Linux).

gg77 18y ago

i wouldn't push the power button if they weren't paying me.