The Scientific American, quoting research by San Rafael California-based SBT Accounting Systems Inc, says waiting for programs to load or for help to arrive, double checking printouts for accuracy and format, re-arranging disk files, not to mention games, takes most of us over half a workday per week. And a recent Gartner Group report, which terms the practices fitzing, reckons it costs $5,590 per computer, per year. Meantime, the same Scientific American article quotes Nathan Myhrvold, Microsoft Corp’s vice president of applications and content, who coined Nathan’s First Law at the Association for Computing Machinery in Silicon Valley last March. It runs as follows: Software is a gas. It expands to fill its container.
