Report: Info overload costs $900 billion, blame Mr. Rogers

By Julian Sanchez | Published: December 30, 2008 - 05:30PM CT

Between checking your Twitter feed, responding to an IM from an old college friend, and reading frivolous articles at tech news sites, you're already less productive than you could have been today. But how much does such behavior actually cost your company, or the economy as a whole? One consulting firm thinks it has the unsettling answer: about $900 billion annually.  

Basex, a New York-based research company, has been studying the problem of "information overload" for years. In a 2005 study, through intensive interviews with and monitoring of knowledge workers, it produced the headline-grabbing estimate that unnecessary interruptions and distractions, and the time needed to get focused on work again, eat up 28 percent of an average workday, to which they assigned a current dollar value of some $650 billion for the US economy as a whole.

Now, in an ongoing study, Basex seeks to gauge the total loss from "information overload"--which includes all the other ways the problem of sifting through an ever-expanding universe of data eats time. According to CEO Joseph Spira, in addition to that 28 percent lost to interruptions, information workers spend 15 percent of the day searching, 20 percent in meetings, and only 25 percent on "productive content creation."

To dramatize those findings, Basex has produced an "Information Overload Calculator" that draws on its own calculations, combined with industry salary averages from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, to provide a ballpark estimate of "overload" costs at your own company.

Of course, Basex makes its money selling solutions to the problem it's diagnosing. So, like the exterminator's assessment of the scale of your rodent problem, it's probably worth taking with a grain of salt. The estimates use time as a proxy for output, and if the baseline is a Platonic ideal worker doing frictionless information sifting, any real-world firm will have ineradicable "costs" of this kind. But Basex estimates also don't seem wildly out of sync with other recent research placing the cost for an information-intensive 50,000 employee firm at about $1 billion annually.

I have had the same Hotmail account for about ten years. I have always been able to work with my Hotmail account through Firefox on GNU/Linux. Microsoft recently updated Hotmail and the update has broken compatibility with Firefox on Linux.

While I'm able to start a new message and type-in addresses and subjects, it is not possible to type any text in the message field.

After a brief search I found that others have also noticed this problem. I don't know if this is intentional on MS' part or if it is a bug. I am attempting to contact Microsoft to get to the bottom of this problem. I'll add to this post as more info becomes available.

UPDATE:
After researching further this appears to specific to Iceweasel. Although Iceweasel is really Firefox renamed, apparently the "Iceweasel" UserAgent ID prevents it from working properly with Hotmail. Instructions for changing the UserAgent ID can be found here.

Linux Carried Along on Netbooks Wave

International Data Corporation (IDC) has analyzed PC sales figures for EMEA in the third quarter of 2008 and discovered that netbooks are responsible for more than half the nearly 30% sales growth. Linux is to ride along on the wave, which is to remain at its current level.

According to IDC, the number of computers sold grew 27% from the previous year. Around half of them consisted of the mini-notebooks known as netbooks. In the third quarter of 2008 around 2,000,000 netbooks in Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA) found their way out of warehouses. The draw of these devices is not supposed to let up despite the current world economic crisis, at least in the number of units sold, even if price competition and monetary exchange rates make the predictions less optimistic. The Linux contingency of these netbooks is considerable and helps propel it further into the world market.

PC vendor Acer leads total sales in the EMEA market in the third quarter with 21% and has thus surpassed HP, the leader as recently as the last quarter of 2007. Noteworthy is that the Korean company, with its Aspire One, has moved from second place within three quarters, according to analysts. Third place goes to Dell, which lost a few percentages, and Asus pushed its way to fourth place from the previous fifth with a current 3.7%. HP has meanwhile moved out of the top four.

Acer and Asus thus have the lion's share of netbooks between them, at 80% according to IDC.

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Run Mac OS X on a PC

By Brian Hurley 

Posted in Operating Systems, 20th October 2008 11:33 GMT

Special Report Want to run Mac OS X on a PC? Perhaps you don't want to pay the premium for Apple's hardware - or Apple doesn't make the kind of computer you need, such as a netbook. Because of its native roots in Motorola and PowerPC code, this has traditionally required instruction level emulation. Two things have changed. Apple based Mac OS X on NeXT code, which could run on Intel. And since 2006 Apple has been making Intel PCs. In theory, installing Mac OS X on a PC is much easier. How do you go about it?[1]

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[1] I am not sure why anyone would want to do the above, do you?

Apple seem to be doing their utmost to keep the Pystar case from going to trial and to keep any hint of what is being negotiated with Pystar under seal. 

Could it be Pystar have a case? Oui? Yes? Si? ja? да? 是? はい?

--Dietrich

(Or "freedom of speech won't feed my children")

Last month I noted that Matt Asay, one of the highest profile proponents of open source software, had changed his position on the use of proprietary extensions as a means of attracting paying customers to software based on open source code.

Having previously advocated a 100% open source approach, Matt conceded that "If adding a hint of proprietary software to a solution is done in such a way to encourage a purchase but not compel long-term lock-in, I'm no longer convinced that this is wrong. If it puts food on the table without putting anyone out, where is the harm?"

Matt is not the only open source advocate to have accepted that proprietary and open source software are not mutually exclusive, as has been proven by the findings of The 451 Group's latest CAOS report, "Open Source is Not a Business Model".

With this research report we were trying to answer the age old question "How do vendors generate revenue from open source software?". In order to answer it we analyzed the business strategies of 114 open source-related vendors, including open source specialists such as Red Hat and Alfresco, and those for which open source is used more tactically, such as IBM and Oracle.*

Some of the more interesting findings are as follows:

• The majority of open source vendors utilize some form of commercial licensing to distribute, or generate revenue from, open source software.
• Half the vendors assessed are using hybrid development models -- combining code developed via open source projects with software developed out-of-sight of open source project members.
• Vendors using hybrid development and licensing models are balancing higher development and marketing costs with the ability to increase revenue-generation opportunities from commercially licensed software.
• The license used for an open source project (reciprocal or permissive) has a strong influence on development, vendor licensing and revenue-generation strategies.