Eh. It's not economical for big business in some cases, but it often does make sense for individuals.
I live in the Southeast US and I get to listen to the politicians and power company execs tell me that our area "isn't good for solar power" when I have to take my tapes and CDs inside in the summer so they don't melt in my car.
Adding a few middling well placed solar panels to your roof to offset your power usage isn't that expensive, and there are companies that will do it in exchange for you paying them an amount of money equal to the difference between your average electric bill (pre-panels) and post-panels for a decade or so.
Energy efficient appliances; why does your stereo use almost as much power when it's off? Actual awareness of the amount of power your appliances are using is a very simple way of reducing your power consumption.
If enough people took modest steps like that, the need for coal and oil power plants could be dramatically reduced, and yes, big business is very much against that, because they're in the business of selling you electricity, and the less you buy from them, the less money they make.
PoTAYto PoTAHto, the point is geothermal is where it is, not where you want it to be, and the costs of transporting power from where it is to where it is needed is prohibitive.
Also, especially the case with active volcanos, you don't want to build a lot of power generation infrastructure right next to something that is intrinsically dangerous and unpredictable.
Even in Iceland, the world leader in geothermal, there is a lot of concern that their attempts to harness the power could accidentally set off some sort of event (earthquake, eruption, explosion) that could put people in danger.
The oil problem is that the big fields are all tapped already, so while there is plenty left, you have to set up tons of small pumping operations to keep up the quantity, and that's going to drive up the price regardless of whether we're doing more or less drilling.
I think we need to work more on adopting alternatives than trying to keep the oil rush going. An increase in efficiency (with attendant drop in demand) will keep the prices down even if the supply doesn't significantly expand.
Because volcano's don't conveniently locate themselves next to large population centers?
Solar and Wind are nice and all, but it's Nuclear power that's going to pull our eco-bacon out of the fire; it is the cleanest source of power per kwh that we've got. Once we start reprocessing the waste, we'll be able to sustain output for a long time.
Yea, because Carter, the only president to have ever had any formal training in any sort of nuclear technology, and also the only president ever involved in the cleanup after a nuclear accident, is all irrational and uninformed where nuclear power is concerned.
The 70's were a different world. Nuclear power meant nuclear weapons, and the public opposition then to nuclear power is hard to even imagine today. Don't blame Carter for the hysteria of the day.
More likely he will say that, "Nuclear is an important part of our national ongoing energy strategy, along with clean, renewable energy in the form of wind and solar and whatever."
Nuclear is the best of a lot of bad options, and regardless of presidents, the return to nuclear power has already begun, as witnessed by the resurge in permit applications since last year.
They = the clients, of course. And yes, it was sprung on us, and it wasn't surprising, but the elevation of the problem to "unsolvable using our solution" was surprising. I posted all kinds of stuff at that time, regarding errors and possible solutions. These days I don't really use it, so I'm obviously not posting.
Looking at Codeweavers page, I'm not all that hopeful, even for the paid support. Still no IE6 (well, still buggy...Buggy is almost worse, complaint-wise), Jesus. IE is often a problem on all-linux deployments, because of IE only websites. Outlook still buggy, that's an issue because of all the managers and their unnatural love for Exchange. I don't actually care about Office myself, but no Access is a big deal for a lot of people...My distaste for Wine is nothing compared to my unending hatred of OpenOffice (though I have high hopes for IBM's Symphony fork).
And a lot of the top requests are games, which isn't all that thrilling. Itunes, Rhapsody.
And all these are HUGE products, not some proprietary product that they probably couldn't even get access to to attempt to make it run under Wine.
No, real world conditions provide the opportunity to view the raw possibilities of SNAFU at close range.
The problem with theory is that theory is nice and clean and abstract, while practice is gritty and dirty and tangled. No theory of software design is going to account for the battle of the egos that goes on between teams who all think that other teams aren't doing half the job that they would be doing.
Then you start moving into budget and manpower issues, and the very real issue that deals with actual varying levels of competence between your design teams. What happens when a dirty real world budgetary constraint makes it so that the project has to be completed more quickly. What can you cut out, and what can you repurpose?
Nice jargon, by the way. If you want to make a "real world" type respect you, the first thing you need to do is throw a bunch of PhD language at him. Then you should probably point out that, even though he has 3 times your experience, you make more money.
You can also end up with weird, inefficient code, because the specs are poorly written and no one is allowed to have enough oversight to realize it.
That's more of a management problem, I suppose, but I've all too often seen "glue" methods that were expanded beyond their scope due to the fact that the designers of Method A and Method C were never allowed to meet, and the people who came up with glue Method B were forced to all sorts of unholy kludge make them work with each other.
This idea that I should devote all this time to a resource that I find to be completely marginal is absurd. Are you devoting your time to ironing out problems in Mono? But why not?!
I've used Wine; I'm hardly an expert, but Wine experts are probably not the target audience for the software. I have needs that would be filled by Wine; it doesn't fill them.
The times I've tried using it to fill them, I've regretted it.
I've only used Wine professionally in full Linux migrations. I've been involved in 6 to date, which isn't a huge number, but is enough to have a pretty robust idea of the problems. The smallest was 80 people, and the largest was ~500 people. Industry-wise, it was finance(bankruptcy), finance(insurance), medical, medical, dental, and media (print).
In those situations, there turned out to be TONS of industry specific applications, and they were mostly not portable, and not supported in the sense of "we'll fix it so it runs on linux."
The first one we'd really counted on Wine; we'd worked out how to use every application that they said they needed in Wine, and we deployed it based on that. They were wrong, basically, and we spent so much as to take a substantial loss trying to make the situation work out to the benefit of everyone involved. This was in 2004, so not exactly state of the art, but the target Windows was 98, so we'd thought it was a safe bet.
Since then I've used Wine on some desktop stuff, but we've always bid up the terminal services end of it, and frankly, though I'm not a huge fan of MS, the terminal services stuff has always worked fairly well for us, and it requires a lot less work than Wine does, and it's substantially easier to deploy new stuff on it because it generally works "out of the box" as it were.
The main negatives are licensing and cost, and for big deployments its less of a factor, especially since you can reduce your licensing requirement for other software once you've got all the terminal crap set up.
I'd be happy to use a Wine that delivered reliably, and maybe I'll spend some more time playing with 1.0, and give it a shot for some stuff, next time a migration project rolls around.
I think in the end though, it's going to be more about native applications than Wine.
No, I haven't used Wine in about a year, and even then it was for my personal stuff, and no business purpose.
I don't see that expecting a product to work is necessarily a character flaw on my part, any more than not being willing to devote my life to Wine and Wine issues.
I'm not going to sit and list apps I've had problems with...I doubt you'll have heard of most of them, and some of them I've willfully blotted out of my memory. The first and worst was some goddamn proprietary banking interface; real crapware, but I had to have it. Had a 750,000 dollar migration hinging on it, and I couldn't get support for money, or begging, and I couldn't fix it myself.
Ended up using Win4Lin which is an emulator, and almost solved all my problems. Fucking FONT corruption, I shit you not, on two goddamn custom applications which, I'm sure I don't have to even say it, was completely unacceptable to the client.
So I ended up using terminal services. Whole thing was a disaster. And the lesson I took out of it was "Wine is completely unreliable."
You can't go into a professional deployment with a huge unknown. You will run into homegrown apps, you will run into industry specific software.
Who is going to help you with that? Who is going to compensate you for all the time spent trying to make it work? It's not worth paying people to make it work, and there is no point unless you're trying to capture a specific niche.
In the end, you save yourself ever-so-much pain by just setting up terminal services.
Exactly my point. No one gives a shit. And sure, you can pay a company to care, but their cheap package won't cut it, and their expensive package starts costing as much as doing it with terminal services, so you're just throwing money away.
Which is why Wine is worthless...It's only fit for hobbyists and geeks, because they're the only people who have the time and patience to make their software work when it doesn't work first thing.
That's actually more my point. Native apps are the answer, not half-assed compatibility hacks like Wine. If Lotus Notes didn't suck so bad, selling Linux would be a dream...Likewise OpenOffice.
Whatever dude, if you didn't like the "emulator" jab, fine. But I've sweated blood on Wine projects, and I've gotten jack from the community.
If you go in the door without planning on using some sort of terminal services for the bulk of your windows apps, you're screwed, because the company will have forgotten to tell you about any number of windows apps that will turn out to be flat impossible to run in Wine, and no one will give a damn.
In my experience the absolute best way of dealing with a big migration is tossing as much of the old software as possible, and using terminal services for the stuff that just won't transfer to the new platform.
If you do that, most of the problems just go away. The biggest issues I've had with Linux migrations are things like IE, Exchange, and Office. Firefox is finally killing off the need for IE, so that's less of a problem. OpenOffice still sucks, but if IBM manages to pull off the whole Lotus/Symphony thing, that problem could solve itself (though Lotus would have to get a LOT better).
Then you throw the remaining apps on terminal services, and you're good to go. That takes care of all the apps that will never ever EVER run on stuff like Wine, as well as things that don't run as well, or need to much maintenance.
Once the OS becomes popular enough, you'll end up with native apps, and life will be sweet.
People who defend Wine have never had to make it work for anything that wasn't for their personal use.
The problem with Wine is that they really try and make you believe that just around the corner they're going to be able to do anything Windows can do, and they push it for people who really need Windows apps.
It's wholly unsuitable for that. If you really need those apps, you had better invest in an environment that will run them, and run them well, because Wine doesn't cut it.
I used to post bug reports and be really active on the lists...and I used to try and use Wine.
Now I just complain. That's about all it's worth to me these days. Maybe someone will read this, and think twice about trying to build anything commercial around Wine, thereby profiting from my experiences with it.
And why should I read the page again when you can't even be bothered to read my whole post? I usually prefer "Wine is not easy" or "Wine is not efficient" or "Wine is nasty excrement" as far as pithy self-referential acronyms go. The only reason I can see why it would not be an emulator is that emulators usually work.
Version 1.0 is usually buggy, but most times it doesn't take 15 years for version 1.0 to make it to the "buggy" stage.
Even if you get an app working, chances are it will break with every update. How do you sell that to someone? "Here is this new cool operating system, and here is the guy you're going to have to employ to configure every single windows-based application you want to try out...Oh, and no guarantees, he may not be able to get it to work."
You just can't work that way. No business project ever comes with a complete list of software.
There are applications that you've never heard of that 2 companies in the world still use, and it will be an absolute deal breaker if you can't make them work in Wine, but since no one uses them, no one on the lists will give half a shit no matter how important it is to you personally and inevitably, someone will tell you, "You need to program the functionality in yourself and stop complaining" which is the point at which you realize that depending on this program is utterly pointless and you get on with your life.
I've seen it. Usually the deal breaker for me is something obscure, and not something like "Photoshop".
I'm sure I'll end up getting strafed by the fanboys, but I've been burned by Wine too many times. For my personal use, it's fine to sit and fiddle with it for a while to get it to work.
For a situation where you're trying to sell a linux deployment to some big customer, that just doesn't fly...A hundred fiddly little apps that all need special attention to run correctly under wine, and every one that craps itself makes you look like more and more of a jerkoff to your client.
No one will fix it if it does either; it's just not dependable, especially if your problem is with older, or special purpose business software, and that stuff is critical for business deployments.
That it's finally bug-free? That I won't have to spend hours working with each individual application? Or just that they decided it was time to increment the number?
I'm betting on the latter.
Wine's a waste of time as far as I'm concerned; we need native applications not half-assed emulators (and yes, it goddamn well IS an eumulator). Every time I have needed Wine to work on a piece of commercial software I have been disappointed.
The goal should be to help linux break into the business market, but the things that run most reliably are games.
If we had a backup, wouldn't it be possible to break the encryption using the backed-up data as a crib? Why force the key directly when you know what is in a large chunk of the cyphertext?
Oh, I agree. I'm not saying my opinion has any special weight.
But this sort of social survey irks the crap out of me. It's masturbation. Asking a number of people how they feel about X gets you nothing but fuzzy, worthless data.
Even the overall measurement of productivity is itself fuzzy, because goals are often poorly defined. I blew an hour yesterday on a corporate conference call dealing with some esoteric software purchasing decision; was it a waste of time or was it far more important than the code I could have been writing? I may never know.
I feel pretty much the same about IM. For me personally, it fills no niche I couldn't fill with email. My most common use is to pass random tech questions around to my non-work geek friends. It's helpful to me, but I could just look the info up as well; slower in the short run, but it would improve my understanding past the point of just having someone tell me the answer.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh yea, also: See Pompei.
Eh. It's not economical for big business in some cases, but it often does make sense for individuals.
I live in the Southeast US and I get to listen to the politicians and power company execs tell me that our area "isn't good for solar power" when I have to take my tapes and CDs inside in the summer so they don't melt in my car.
Adding a few middling well placed solar panels to your roof to offset your power usage isn't that expensive, and there are companies that will do it in exchange for you paying them an amount of money equal to the difference between your average electric bill (pre-panels) and post-panels for a decade or so.
Energy efficient appliances; why does your stereo use almost as much power when it's off? Actual awareness of the amount of power your appliances are using is a very simple way of reducing your power consumption.
If enough people took modest steps like that, the need for coal and oil power plants could be dramatically reduced, and yes, big business is very much against that, because they're in the business of selling you electricity, and the less you buy from them, the less money they make.
PoTAYto PoTAHto, the point is geothermal is where it is, not where you want it to be, and the costs of transporting power from where it is to where it is needed is prohibitive.
Also, especially the case with active volcanos, you don't want to build a lot of power generation infrastructure right next to something that is intrinsically dangerous and unpredictable.
Even in Iceland, the world leader in geothermal, there is a lot of concern that their attempts to harness the power could accidentally set off some sort of event (earthquake, eruption, explosion) that could put people in danger.
The oil problem is that the big fields are all tapped already, so while there is plenty left, you have to set up tons of small pumping operations to keep up the quantity, and that's going to drive up the price regardless of whether we're doing more or less drilling.
I think we need to work more on adopting alternatives than trying to keep the oil rush going. An increase in efficiency (with attendant drop in demand) will keep the prices down even if the supply doesn't significantly expand.
Because volcano's don't conveniently locate themselves next to large population centers?
Solar and Wind are nice and all, but it's Nuclear power that's going to pull our eco-bacon out of the fire; it is the cleanest source of power per kwh that we've got. Once we start reprocessing the waste, we'll be able to sustain output for a long time.
Yea, because Carter, the only president to have ever had any formal training in any sort of nuclear technology, and also the only president ever involved in the cleanup after a nuclear accident, is all irrational and uninformed where nuclear power is concerned.
The 70's were a different world. Nuclear power meant nuclear weapons, and the public opposition then to nuclear power is hard to even imagine today. Don't blame Carter for the hysteria of the day.
More likely he will say that, "Nuclear is an important part of our national ongoing energy strategy, along with clean, renewable energy in the form of wind and solar and whatever."
Means the same thing really; McCain pushed so-called "clean coal" at the same time as he pushed Nuclear, which is a bit more Republican of him, since coal states are red states, and big electric has no desire to stop building coal plants.
Nuclear is the best of a lot of bad options, and regardless of presidents, the return to nuclear power has already begun, as witnessed by the resurge in permit applications since last year.
Steam isn't that bad really...Don't have to keep up with your media, it's convenient and mostly transparent.
//Disclaimer: I work with a lot of commercial software that comes with goddamn physical dongle keys, so "logging in" seems trivial in comparison.
I'm not a crazy about DRM but I'm a lot more concerned about ease of use than I am about having to be a registered user. Just not a big deal.
They = the clients, of course. And yes, it was sprung on us, and it wasn't surprising, but the elevation of the problem to "unsolvable using our solution" was surprising. I posted all kinds of stuff at that time, regarding errors and possible solutions. These days I don't really use it, so I'm obviously not posting.
Looking at Codeweavers page, I'm not all that hopeful, even for the paid support. Still no IE6 (well, still buggy...Buggy is almost worse, complaint-wise), Jesus. IE is often a problem on all-linux deployments, because of IE only websites. Outlook still buggy, that's an issue because of all the managers and their unnatural love for Exchange. I don't actually care about Office myself, but no Access is a big deal for a lot of people...My distaste for Wine is nothing compared to my unending hatred of OpenOffice (though I have high hopes for IBM's Symphony fork).
And a lot of the top requests are games, which isn't all that thrilling. Itunes, Rhapsody.
And all these are HUGE products, not some proprietary product that they probably couldn't even get access to to attempt to make it run under Wine.
No, real world conditions provide the opportunity to view the raw possibilities of SNAFU at close range.
The problem with theory is that theory is nice and clean and abstract, while practice is gritty and dirty and tangled. No theory of software design is going to account for the battle of the egos that goes on between teams who all think that other teams aren't doing half the job that they would be doing.
Then you start moving into budget and manpower issues, and the very real issue that deals with actual varying levels of competence between your design teams. What happens when a dirty real world budgetary constraint makes it so that the project has to be completed more quickly. What can you cut out, and what can you repurpose?
Nice jargon, by the way. If you want to make a "real world" type respect you, the first thing you need to do is throw a bunch of PhD language at him. Then you should probably point out that, even though he has 3 times your experience, you make more money.
You can also end up with weird, inefficient code, because the specs are poorly written and no one is allowed to have enough oversight to realize it.
That's more of a management problem, I suppose, but I've all too often seen "glue" methods that were expanded beyond their scope due to the fact that the designers of Method A and Method C were never allowed to meet, and the people who came up with glue Method B were forced to all sorts of unholy kludge make them work with each other.
This idea that I should devote all this time to a resource that I find to be completely marginal is absurd. Are you devoting your time to ironing out problems in Mono? But why not?!
I've used Wine; I'm hardly an expert, but Wine experts are probably not the target audience for the software. I have needs that would be filled by Wine; it doesn't fill them.
The times I've tried using it to fill them, I've regretted it.
I've only used Wine professionally in full Linux migrations. I've been involved in 6 to date, which isn't a huge number, but is enough to have a pretty robust idea of the problems. The smallest was 80 people, and the largest was ~500 people. Industry-wise, it was finance(bankruptcy), finance(insurance), medical, medical, dental, and media (print).
In those situations, there turned out to be TONS of industry specific applications, and they were mostly not portable, and not supported in the sense of "we'll fix it so it runs on linux."
The first one we'd really counted on Wine; we'd worked out how to use every application that they said they needed in Wine, and we deployed it based on that. They were wrong, basically, and we spent so much as to take a substantial loss trying to make the situation work out to the benefit of everyone involved. This was in 2004, so not exactly state of the art, but the target Windows was 98, so we'd thought it was a safe bet.
Since then I've used Wine on some desktop stuff, but we've always bid up the terminal services end of it, and frankly, though I'm not a huge fan of MS, the terminal services stuff has always worked fairly well for us, and it requires a lot less work than Wine does, and it's substantially easier to deploy new stuff on it because it generally works "out of the box" as it were.
The main negatives are licensing and cost, and for big deployments its less of a factor, especially since you can reduce your licensing requirement for other software once you've got all the terminal crap set up.
I'd be happy to use a Wine that delivered reliably, and maybe I'll spend some more time playing with 1.0, and give it a shot for some stuff, next time a migration project rolls around.
I think in the end though, it's going to be more about native applications than Wine.
No, I haven't used Wine in about a year, and even then it was for my personal stuff, and no business purpose.
I don't see that expecting a product to work is necessarily a character flaw on my part, any more than not being willing to devote my life to Wine and Wine issues.
I'm not going to sit and list apps I've had problems with...I doubt you'll have heard of most of them, and some of them I've willfully blotted out of my memory. The first and worst was some goddamn proprietary banking interface; real crapware, but I had to have it. Had a 750,000 dollar migration hinging on it, and I couldn't get support for money, or begging, and I couldn't fix it myself.
Ended up using Win4Lin which is an emulator, and almost solved all my problems. Fucking FONT corruption, I shit you not, on two goddamn custom applications which, I'm sure I don't have to even say it, was completely unacceptable to the client.
So I ended up using terminal services. Whole thing was a disaster. And the lesson I took out of it was "Wine is completely unreliable."
You can't go into a professional deployment with a huge unknown. You will run into homegrown apps, you will run into industry specific software.
Who is going to help you with that? Who is going to compensate you for all the time spent trying to make it work? It's not worth paying people to make it work, and there is no point unless you're trying to capture a specific niche.
In the end, you save yourself ever-so-much pain by just setting up terminal services.
Exactly my point. No one gives a shit. And sure, you can pay a company to care, but their cheap package won't cut it, and their expensive package starts costing as much as doing it with terminal services, so you're just throwing money away.
Which is why Wine is worthless...It's only fit for hobbyists and geeks, because they're the only people who have the time and patience to make their software work when it doesn't work first thing.
I've got no patience left for the fairy tale.
That's actually more my point. Native apps are the answer, not half-assed compatibility hacks like Wine. If Lotus Notes didn't suck so bad, selling Linux would be a dream...Likewise OpenOffice.
Whatever dude, if you didn't like the "emulator" jab, fine. But I've sweated blood on Wine projects, and I've gotten jack from the community.
If you go in the door without planning on using some sort of terminal services for the bulk of your windows apps, you're screwed, because the company will have forgotten to tell you about any number of windows apps that will turn out to be flat impossible to run in Wine, and no one will give a damn.
Terminal services are your friends.
In my experience the absolute best way of dealing with a big migration is tossing as much of the old software as possible, and using terminal services for the stuff that just won't transfer to the new platform.
If you do that, most of the problems just go away. The biggest issues I've had with Linux migrations are things like IE, Exchange, and Office. Firefox is finally killing off the need for IE, so that's less of a problem. OpenOffice still sucks, but if IBM manages to pull off the whole Lotus/Symphony thing, that problem could solve itself (though Lotus would have to get a LOT better).
Then you throw the remaining apps on terminal services, and you're good to go. That takes care of all the apps that will never ever EVER run on stuff like Wine, as well as things that don't run as well, or need to much maintenance.
Once the OS becomes popular enough, you'll end up with native apps, and life will be sweet.
People who defend Wine have never had to make it work for anything that wasn't for their personal use.
The problem with Wine is that they really try and make you believe that just around the corner they're going to be able to do anything Windows can do, and they push it for people who really need Windows apps.
It's wholly unsuitable for that. If you really need those apps, you had better invest in an environment that will run them, and run them well, because Wine doesn't cut it.
I used to post bug reports and be really active on the lists...and I used to try and use Wine.
Now I just complain. That's about all it's worth to me these days. Maybe someone will read this, and think twice about trying to build anything commercial around Wine, thereby profiting from my experiences with it.
And why should I read the page again when you can't even be bothered to read my whole post? I usually prefer "Wine is not easy" or "Wine is not efficient" or "Wine is nasty excrement" as far as pithy self-referential acronyms go. The only reason I can see why it would not be an emulator is that emulators usually work.
Version 1.0 is usually buggy, but most times it doesn't take 15 years for version 1.0 to make it to the "buggy" stage.
Even if you get an app working, chances are it will break with every update. How do you sell that to someone? "Here is this new cool operating system, and here is the guy you're going to have to employ to configure every single windows-based application you want to try out...Oh, and no guarantees, he may not be able to get it to work."
You just can't work that way. No business project ever comes with a complete list of software.
There are applications that you've never heard of that 2 companies in the world still use, and it will be an absolute deal breaker if you can't make them work in Wine, but since no one uses them, no one on the lists will give half a shit no matter how important it is to you personally and inevitably, someone will tell you, "You need to program the functionality in yourself and stop complaining" which is the point at which you realize that depending on this program is utterly pointless and you get on with your life.
Or...And this is a radical thought...Use Windows Terminal Services to deploy your apps off a Windows server, and bypass the whole nightmare.
Frankly, that's the only way to do it. No lag time, no third parties, no depending on the developers to fix problems.
Sure, you have to pay for it, but it works, and you can usually sell it by calling it "license management".
I've seen it. Usually the deal breaker for me is something obscure, and not something like "Photoshop".
I'm sure I'll end up getting strafed by the fanboys, but I've been burned by Wine too many times. For my personal use, it's fine to sit and fiddle with it for a while to get it to work.
For a situation where you're trying to sell a linux deployment to some big customer, that just doesn't fly...A hundred fiddly little apps that all need special attention to run correctly under wine, and every one that craps itself makes you look like more and more of a jerkoff to your client.
No one will fix it if it does either; it's just not dependable, especially if your problem is with older, or special purpose business software, and that stuff is critical for business deployments.
That it's finally bug-free? That I won't have to spend hours working with each individual application? Or just that they decided it was time to increment the number?
I'm betting on the latter.
Wine's a waste of time as far as I'm concerned; we need native applications not half-assed emulators (and yes, it goddamn well IS an eumulator). Every time I have needed Wine to work on a piece of commercial software I have been disappointed.
The goal should be to help linux break into the business market, but the things that run most reliably are games.
If we had a backup, wouldn't it be possible to break the encryption using the backed-up data as a crib? Why force the key directly when you know what is in a large chunk of the cyphertext?
Oh, I agree. I'm not saying my opinion has any special weight.
But this sort of social survey irks the crap out of me. It's masturbation. Asking a number of people how they feel about X gets you nothing but fuzzy, worthless data.
Even the overall measurement of productivity is itself fuzzy, because goals are often poorly defined. I blew an hour yesterday on a corporate conference call dealing with some esoteric software purchasing decision; was it a waste of time or was it far more important than the code I could have been writing? I may never know.
I feel pretty much the same about IM. For me personally, it fills no niche I couldn't fill with email. My most common use is to pass random tech questions around to my non-work geek friends. It's helpful to me, but I could just look the info up as well; slower in the short run, but it would improve my understanding past the point of just having someone tell me the answer.