Wandering Thoughts archives

2006-05-23

Link: Why overtime is bad for everyone

The really interesting bit of Why Crunch Mode Doesn't Work: 6 Lessons for me can be summed up in the lead-in:

There's a bottom-line reason most industries gave up crunch mode over 75 years ago: It's the single most expensive way there is to get the work done.

The article elaborates this, and makes for interesting reading. In the same area is Hours of Work in U.S. History, if one wants another set of data.

(Unfortunately I have lost where I got the first link from.)

links/OnCrunchMode written at 01:41:46; Add Comment

A defense of Unix that always irritates me

One of the things that some people like to trot out in defense of Unix is the old chestnut:

On Unix everything runs as a user process, so you never have blue screen of death reboots like you do with Windows; even if something goes wrong, it's just a user process and your system doesn't go down.

I like Unix, but this sort of defense of it has always irritated the heck out of me. Ignoring how it can be false in practice, it's completely disingenuous.

For a desktop user there is very little difference between losing your entire session because the X server crashed and losing your entire session because your Windows machine rebooted. That your Unix machine hasn't really rebooted, and may even be showing you a happy pleasant login screen a few seconds later, is rather cold comfort.

Unix has a lot of good things going for it. But let's be honest about them, because being disingenuous makes people twitchy even when you have an excellent case. (Which is why it irritates me.)

sysadmin/IrritatingUnixDefense written at 01:14:51; Add Comment


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