<OT> your_details

[Net Llama!]

On Thu, 26 Jun 2003, Bill Campbell wrote:
> Hackers aren't the only thing that cause serious economic loss.  The lost
> productivity waiting for Windows systems to reboot, even if there's no data
> loss,  I did some rough calculations after reading an article that said
> United Parcel Service had about 160,000 Windows machines (bragging of
> course :-).  Assuming that each machine had only one unscheduled reboot a
> day with no data loss, the cost for lost time per year was well over
> $10,000,000 USD (closer to 20M).

In a former life i was a sysadmin for UPS (this was about 5 years ago).
Something to keep in mind is that a large number of their windoze boxes
are not in use all the time, or even on 9-5 schedules.  Many are nothing
more than dumb terminals to their mainframe, and sit idle for hours at
a time.  It was not at all uncommon for techs in UPS facilities to go
around the building after a shift ended, and reboot all the boxes, so that
they'd be 'fresh' when the next shift began an hour or two later.  So
while, i agree that windoze need(s/ed) to be rebooted often, at UPS alot
of that was done when they were not in use.

The fun part was having to reboot their NT PDC boxes, which incapacitated
an entire facility for 15-30 minutes while it came back up.  That's where
the money was lost, cause it wasn't just the people who were sitting idle,
but delayed package delivery, which UPS was often obligated to pay fines
to their preferred customers on.

-- 
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Lonni J Friedman				netllama at linux-sxs.org
Linux Step-by-step & TyGeMo		     http://netllama.ipfox.com