moraes@cs.toronto.edu (Mark Moraes) (03/23/90)
The last time this thread came up (under the titles "Fad computing" and "X-terminals vs workstations"), some of us went offline and had our little private flame war, er, rational discussion. Some points that were brought up: - The problem with single-user vs shared is mainly political, partly emotional, almost never technical. (So let's get this debate out of comp.arch, please -- it has almost nothing to do with architecture other than the fact that computers are involved periperally in the debate) - There's a warm fuzzy feeling of "knowing this machine is MINE, all MINE, and you can get your grubby paws off it, thank you." By the same token, there's this warm fuzzy feeling of having the latest, most sexy hardware on your desk, often giving you the same effective throughput as the last generation... - Some shared computing facilities (SCFs) start to dictate what hardware their users run. `No, you can't buy machines from vendor X even if they're more cost-effective because we don't like them, or because it'll spoil our "special relationship" with vendor Y.' - Some shared computing facilities (SCFs) start to dictate what software their users run. (In particular, many sysadmins let their personal idiosyncrasies get in the way of user support -- things like sh vs csh vs ksh, vi vs jove vs emacs, suntools vs X10 vs X11, troff vs TeX vs *[Ww]ord* etc) - SCFs usually involve charging or cost sharing of some form, which is always a minefield of political problems. Accusations that one group of users is subsidizing another, that charges are biased, etc creep in. People end up preferring to pay larger amounts of money just to get free of the strings. - Some SCFs start setting arbitrary resource limits, even if users are willing to pay for more. (Anecdotes about the computer centres that wouldn't let you print more than N pages per month go here) - Most SCFs hate networks of workstations, especially diskless workstations since they're a pain to administer. - Some people believe that running your own workstation is a piece of cake. After all, the vendors ship systems that can be used straight out of the box. - Sysadmins? What sysadmins? That's what grad students are for! - Disk disasters? What disk disasters? - Networks are a snap! - Security is too expensive; no one will break into our machines! - Vendors ship secure systems that casual hackers can't break into easily! - Why bother upgrading the operating system? - Having multiple servers and machines makes your environment more tolerant of faults. (memories of 45 machines symlinking to a single shared news partition, mail partition, or /etc/motd go here) - Having Unix get between your window system and your display can be a real drag; typically, a cheap windowing terminal gets better responsiveness than your expensive workstation/cruncher because it doesn't have to do system calls just to process mouse movement. - People who want single-user machines are best advised to go and buy some brand of personal computer, unless they're sufficiently Unix-savvy, or willing to learn a fair bit of arcania. Mark. PS: Oh yeah, for the humour impaired, some of the items above should probably have smileys after them...