Steve Jobs, what have you learned ?

"One is how much we love our customers and how much we want to take care of them. We were stunned, upset, and embarrassed by the Consumer Reports stuff, but we didn't know enough to be able to address it.

If we'd done this event a week and a half ago, we wouldn't have had half the data we have today. We're engineers, and we want to solve real, hard problems. I don't think we could have done this faster...we've had cots in the labs, cars here all night.

We've been living here. But's human nature to tear down successful people. I see it happening to Google, a great company. Haven't we earned the credibility and trust that we'll take care of our customers?

The reaction has been overblown, and we could use your help with this."

Spot on. Now let's move on.

Cost vs Productivity vs Pacman and how attitudes have to change

Recently Google replaced their logo with a fully working version of Pac-Man to celebrate the birthday of this classic game. This version used a Google logo map, featured Mr and Mrs Pac-Man and was written entirely in HTML - not a line of flash code in sight.

The new logo spread around the web like wildfire becoming a trending topic on Twitter within hours and it seems everyone was playing it.

Mashable later reported that over $120m of productivity was lost as a result Googles stunt and quoted information gathered from a report and blog post by Rescuetime, makers of time tracking software.

I have a real problem with that blog post and the confusion between productivity and cost but before I go on let's look at the definitions.

Productivity is described "The amount of output per unit of input (labor, equipment, and capital). "

Cost is described as "The total money, time and resources associated with a purchase or activity."

and measurement as "productivity might be measured based on the revenue generated by an employee divided by his/her salary."

So in short, productivity and cost are not the same. What one person outputs in 8 hours is not comparable to another. This could be down to training, skills or just character and determination.

On that basis it's impossible to determine what "productivity" was lost. You can determine what cost was lost (albeit by guessing an arbitrary and disputed hourly rate) and translate that to lost revenue in billable hours but even that can't be calculated properly.

Consider someone who played the game, then got back to work and still did all their tasks for the day - productivity was unaffected and the work that was supposed to get done was done.

What about a salesperson targeted with closing $10k of business a day, who got back on the phone, arranged two meetings and closed new business amounting to $17k. They hit their target and did so with hours of the day left - where was the productivity loss there?

This all reflects on the work culture of judging people on the time they spend at work rather than what they output at the end of the day. Productivity is measured on hours and the more time you spend in the office the more "productive" you are. We even see managers saying how certain individuals are "always here late" and "put in the most hours" and cite them as examples of model employees with the "right attitude".

I'd argue that if you're having to work more than your core hours per day you either are incredibly inefficient at your job, you're poor at delegating or you have way to much work assigned to you.

Studies have shown that working longer hours does not make you more productive and can lead to more mistakes and negatively affect your productivity. It also wrongly reports your time and makes people think you're getting your tasks done in core hours when you're not. This has the knock-on effect when quoting for future work, "oh we did that in 16 hours so the price is X" when in reality it took 16 hours PLUS another 12 you didn't know about.

Company owners shouldn't be looking at the people that put in the most hours as being the best workers. They are having to do more hours to complete their work so clearly they either aren't very good, don't have the right training/skills OR you're giving them way to much work to do.

(BTW the only reason company owners don't register or care about this is because it doesn't cost them for people that do this - if it did and people charged overtime it would be a very different story!)

What company owners should be doing is looking at the people that achieve their targets in goals in less time than was allocated, are getting a better work/life balance whilst maintaining personal profitability.

These are the people you should be modeling all your staff on.

Using eBoostr to boost Windows performance under Parallels on OSX

eBoostr is a utility for Windows which was designed to bring the Readyboost feature of Vista to Windows XP and 2000. Readyboost is a technology that utilises the access speeds of USB flash memory to improve your system performance by caching data which can then be retrieved faster than a hard disk.

 

eBoostr has some significant advantages over Readyboost in that you can control more devices, you can specifically “tune” your cache by prioritising the applications and data to store and the cache is retained on reboot meaning that boot up times can be significantly improved.

 

This is all good but eBoostr comes with another benefit if you’re someone like me that uses Virtual Machine software like VMware and Parallels to run Windows under Mac OSX.

 

Typically USB drives running through Virtual Machine software like Parallels doesn’t pass through the full performance of the USB drive to the virtual machine which means whilst eBoostr can work with your USB devices you can gain a performance increase of around 10%, sometimes none and *sometimes* it’ll degrade performance. This is understandable since you’re access the device *through* a virtualised operating system.

 

One neat neat feature of eBoostr though is the ability to select system memory as a primary cache as well as a USB drive. This means that if you have enough memory allocated to your VM, you can partition off for example, 1gb to act as the eBoostr cache.

 

Once the cache is rebuilt you can run the control panel application above to see the performance and how much of the cache is being used at one time. A really useful feature is the ability to test the cache speed. In this mode, eBoostr switches off the caching, tests access speeds and then repeats the test with the cache enabled. In my case I was able to get disk read times of 3.8x the speed of the raw disk speed.

 

The nice thing about eBoostr is you can tell instantly that it works. Install and configure it, load in a couple of apps into the priority list, build the cache and then launch the application and instantly you can see a difference. This is no Placebo.

 

Obviously apps like eBoostr are RAM hungry and you need to be able to afford to give away a gigabyte of RAM in this case but if you have the capacity installed then I highly recommend eBoostr as a way to boost your virtual machine performance.

 

(On a final note, if you’re not running a VM and using Windows natively on your computer, eBoostr has one last feature that makes it worth the money especially if you’re running with a 32-bit operating system and have more than 3gb of RAM installed. Version 4.0 of eBoostr allows you to use the unused memory above the 3gb 32bit OS limit as a cache! This means you get the benefit of using that additional 1gb of RAM on a 4gb configuration without losing any of your existing 3gb RAM accessible by Windows. Neat.)

Why the iPad is, more than just a big iPod touch

I've seen a few comments and tweets on the iPad where it's been dismissed as "just a big iPod Touch"

Well it kind of is as there's no phone and no camera but there's one difference. It's bigger and not just bigger with the same resolution, it's BIGGER.

More pixels, more space, easier to read web pages etc.

It's also faster and more capable and it runs OS 3.2 which has some key features around opening documents in other applications like spreadsheets in iWorks etc. Even if iWorks was available for the Touch it wouldn't be as easy to use as it is on this platform.

A big iPod touch is one thing, the iPad is something else.

Location:Green Close,Grafton,United Kingdom

Why the iPad will change everything

I'll admit I scoffed when the iPad was announced. I doubted it's target market, the cost and how it could compete with Netbooks.

The problem is that one you try one, use some apps you realise that this really is a game changer.

Apple have managed to do something that other manufacturers have struggled to do for years. A tablet that doesn't last 2 hours and has a ready made delivery platform for quite literally any app you could care to imagine.

Competitors take note. Apple have pretty much nailed it with version one with no camera and no flash.

You have been warned, get ready for V2

Written on my iPad

Location:Green Close,Grafton,United Kingdom