Today is my third training day of "Managing and Maintaining a windows 2003 server". As usual at work we end up attending things completely unrelated to our work and leave things directly related to us hanging in the closet. Java Pro, Crisis Management Conference bye bye! To ease the pain, we've got full Internet access available at least during the practicals.

At these lectures I try my best to listen, then let my mind wonder around. Yesterday I found some food for thought when discussing Print Sharing. The tutor highlighted that having a cheap separate ink jet for each employee will turn out much more costly than buying an industrial scale printer serving many users. When you think about it, it makes sense because the running cost of each individual ink jet printer is huge comparatively, approx 2c per paper for the inkjet and 0.2c per paper for the large printer.

I realised that the same principle applies very much to software development. Most of the time before writing a new piece of software I am asked how much time will it take. Naturally I calculate design and development time but in fact I must take into consideration maintenance (and application support) which is probably more time consuming than the actual application development. This argument answered a recent thought of mine; why in the last year I wrote only one application while in the previous year I wrote about five.