
Does Your Boss Have to Pay You While You Wait for Vista to Boot Up? - raju
http://taxprof.typepad.com/taxprof_blog/2008/11/does-your-boss-have.html
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biohacker42
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.

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cstejerean
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.

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olefoo
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?

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misterbwong
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.

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olefoo
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.

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cpr
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? ;-)

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jrockway
_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.

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cpr
No, considering it's software that does the work (the Windows portion of
Wintel).

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jrockway
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).

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gg77
i wouldn't push the power button if they weren't paying me.

