Facebook and Twitter Costing The Uk Economy Billions

According to this article Morse IT has commissioned a survey to find out how much time people spend on-line on sites such as Facebook and Twitter.

Apparently the cost to the UK economy is £1.38bn!!

Why?

Has to be the first question. Perhaps it is me but I tried Twitter and it was rubbish. I was getting "followed" by half the eastern blocks porn stars spamming me with tiny-url.com postings leading to their sites and people who really need to get out more if they want to follow whats going on in my life more than once a day. The only decent use I got was following KDE and other open source developers updates on code and projects. However, they all now use the rather much better identi ca open source stack based alternative to Twitter. So if you do want to follow me thats where to find me!

As far as Facebook goes all I get are friend invites from someone I once worked with or went to school with who would not speak to me in the flesh but wants to boost their Friend Count or stupid games dreamt up by teenage programmers thinking they are "cool". I do however, have a soft spot for Myspace and keep a relatively up to date page there for my second love of music.

The next question is why are more IT departments not locking down these sites. In my current role we do not but then if anyone at my present company spent that long on non work related items it would be noticed as we are so small. Now I know people will say "but if you lock it down then people will use their mobile devices .... " and your right they will.... but it will be at their cost and not their employers. It might also make it harder when they have to use their mobile as it would become more obvious as to what they are doing.

What if Steve Jobs run Microsoft and Steve Ballmer run Apple!

I have just read an extremely funny article which can be found here about what would happen if Steve Jobs took control of Microsoft.

And the follow up is what life at Apple would be like under Steve Ballmer.

Although slightly comical the articles do high light the differences between the two.

Laptop Battery Performance.

An interesting article on laptop battery benchmarking.

Nothing most techies didn't know (appart from perhaps Intel created the tests).

As someone who only uses laptops I find that there are a number of things I can do to exten my battery life. However, at the end of the day I really do not want to have to squint to see the screen because I have the brightness turned down to 20% so I can get another 10 mins out of the battery.

I really find it no problem to be plugged in 80% of the time. In saying that when I ordered my main work laptop I ensured I upgraded the battery to the largest I could get and I can survive running XP and compiling and testing ASP.Net code using Visual Studio for between 2.5 and 3.5 hours unplugged.

Laptops have become very "trendy" and remarkably cheap but I think people have to really consider that to get the best out of using one they should be considering running it on the mains as ofter as possible and see the ability to work unpplugged as a bonus rather than the norm.