"[T]he life of a typical desktop computer is more like a cat than a ballet dancer..." #readingToday

The initial investigations were less than interesting. Merely collecting data is no guarantee of striking gold, of course. We began by looking at a group of computers used by the staff at the university on their desktops. They were readily available and so setting up the experiment was quite easy . However , the data returned were both sparse and hard to fathom. If you imagine, for a moment, the life of a typical desktop computer, it is more like a cat than a ballet dancer: it sleeps for a lot of the time, we feed it now and then, but it there are no sweeping patterns of regular activity that could be used to find some larger theme, worthy of even a scientific audience.

In Search of Certainty, Mark Burgess, 2013