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Inc. Technology readers react to articles from Inc. Technology #1, 1998, including Peter Carbonara's "Sleep Is for Wusses" and Debra Cash's "There's No Office Like Home."

No Snooze Is Bad Snooze

" Sleep Is for Wusses," Peter Carbonara's tale of one CEO's quest to get by with as little shut-eye as possible, awakened the indignation of a number of readers:

Mark Landiak's objective of "squeezing the maximum productivity out of every hour of the day and night" is not a good way to run a business or a life. He says he does this in order to spend more time with his family. However, I'm sure his "running tab" of how much time he can spend, what's next on the agenda, and so forth is obvious to his family and his customers.

I'll bet they can practically hear his mental clock ticking away and that they don't enjoy it.

Valerie A. Russo
President
Informed Traveler
Weymouth, Mass.

The cost of fatigue for the 25 million people who work at night or on rotating shifts is estimated to be $77 billion. When you add in the remainder of the workforce, the cost of fatigue is estimated to be well over $150 billion: the result of slower job performance, poor-quality work, poor decision making, industrial accidents, and health-care claims. And drowsy drivers are believed to be the number one cause of fatal single-car accidents.

Your article perpetuates a dangerous myth and obscures the legitimate time-management tricks that Landiak has developed.

Ed Coburn
Publisher Working Nights
Circadian Information
Cambridge, Mass.
publisher@circadian.com

Several people considered Landiak's photograph (in which he looked--by various estimations--somewhere between 45 and 68) ample warning against adopting his no-doze strategy:

Your article was excellent, but I think you should have added a sixth topic: Plan Funeral. Landiak looks like an "old" 39-year-old, and if he doesn't slow down soon, he won't make it to 50.

Richard A. Stein
President
Dick Stein Advertising
Amherst, N.Y.
dsadv@ibm.net

Home-Office Truths

Many readers empathized with the four entrepreneurs who made their home offices their castles in " There's No Office Like Home," by Debra Cash:

I enjoyed your recent article on building the home office of your dreams.

My husband and I run two separate businesses out of our home (software and database design and human-resources consulting). When we bought the house, in 1994, we were very aware of how important its layout and design would be to our businesses. Our two offices had to coexist with each other and with a busy household, and we needed appropriate space for business and social entertaining.

Now we are considering both the need for a new school system and the need for new space to accommodate our changing, growing businesses. I don't know whether we will move again, but if we do, finding a house with the right office space will once again be one of our top priorities.

Barbara Schmidt-Kemp
Managing Director
Human Strategies and Solutions
Montville, N.J.
barb@humanstrat.com

Others took us to task for choosing such anomalous examples:

I am in the process of redesigning my home to include a home office, so when I saw your cover story, I checked it out immediately. I had hoped for some useful information on the dos and don'ts of home-office design, perhaps some recommendations for essential equipment, and maybe some photos of innovations that could be adapted for everyday use.

Instead, all I found were three wordy blurbs about people whose home-office situations are so different from the norm as to make them irrelevant to the majority of your readers. Even the photos in the article were uninformative.

Sharon F.G. Hopkins
Georgetown, Mass.
mommahop@aol.com

Dead Letters

In our last issue we printed a response to a November article on PCs and the Year 2000. The letter stated that the Y2K problem ceased to be a desktop issue with the move to 32-bit software that could handle four positions for the year code. The writer took us to task for being alarmist "when you can simply advance the clock in your computer and watch the result." After receiving a number of letters correcting that correction, we checked into it and discovered that we were right in the first place. Here's the real skinny:

Making a correlation between 32-bit computers and four-digit dates is like saying a car seats eight people because it has a V8 engine. Software for 32-bit computers is just as susceptible to Y2K problems as any other platform. The letter writer is correct in one minor respect: the clock built into newer PCs will handle the year 2000. But the software being run on the computer is an entirely different matter.

Y2K is an issue because many programs manipulate dates in a format called Gregorian (dd/mm/ccyy). In doing so, many omit the century portion of the date, making 1/1/2000 and 1/1/1900 indistinguishable. Any platform is susceptible to Y2K flaws if its software manipulates dates in this fashion.

Richard D. Hornbaker
Consultant
FortÉ Consulting Group
Phoenix