[2215] in Commercialization & Privatization of the Internet
Re: Low end users
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Richard Mandelbaum)
Fri Jan 31 13:01:58 1992
To: perry@mcl.unisys.com (Dennis Perry)
Cc: rma@tsar.cc.rochester.edu, HORN%athena@leia.polaroid.com, com-priv@psi.com,
In-Reply-To: Your message of Thu, 30 Jan 92 08:45:51 -0500.
Date: Fri, 31 Jan 92 12:58:10 -0500
From: Richard Mandelbaum <rma@tsar.cc.rochester.edu>
You are 100% correct. I have been rtrying to convince people
to make such honest comparisons for more than 7 years now
with spotty results. All too often people know the answer
before the question and then simply try to prove they were right
to begin with. there are excellent reasons to go to
distributed computing,micros and workstations in the
appropriate circumastance. Saving gobs of money is usually not
one of them if one really lood honestly at all costs rather
than just the piece necessary to prove ones case.
Cheers
Richard
____________________
Richard, I guess my literay allusion was to the fact that we often
fool ourselves into believing what we want to believe and gather
the data to support our bias and belief. This is true especially
in the computer center debate vs distributed or workstation issues in
terms of support. with distributed systems there is a system manager
for each machine, but he is not classfied as a systems manager and the
refoe
we don't have one and are not paying for one. This is true of worksta
tions
as well. Each workstation owner is his own system manager. to the ex
tent
that he does that and not what he does for a "living" he hides the cos
t
of support. When you add up all the pieces, they are greated than
the economy of scale you get with large computer centers. But, there
are other good reasons to go to workstations, etc, not just support co
sts!
Presumably productivity more than makes up for the time spent in self
support.
dennis
