roy@phri.UUCP (Roy Smith) (12/02/85)
I'm not sure what made me do it, but I realize now that I never should have posted my $10,000 flame. Apologies all around; it was just plain a stupid thing to do. To salvage something useful from it, let me point out that this is a good argument in favor of moderated groups. Had net.news.group been moderated my flame would surely have been rejected. -- Roy Smith <allegra!phri!roy> System Administrator, Public Health Research Institute 455 First Avenue, New York, NY 10016
geoff@desint.UUCP (Geoff Kuenning) (12/05/85)
In article <2036@phri.UUCP> roy@phri.UUCP (Roy Smith) writes: > I'm not sure what made me do it, but I realize now that I never >should have posted my $10,000 flame. I guess I shouldn't have kept my mouth shut when everybody jumped on Roy. I think he has a point. Many people seem to think that, because disks come in big hunks, it does not make sense to talk about the cost of small hunks. Any accountant can tell you this is not so. Here are two examples. On my machine, I am so short of disk space that I have been forced to stage some less-important files off to secondary storage. The shorter I get on space, the more secondary storage (floppies, in my case) I have to buy. That's a very real incremental cost, and I can certainly see a 250k-byte increment in my costs (though it's small). On larger machines, there comes a point when the system administrator decides to add a new disk, at a $3000-$5000 cost. This is usually the result of some "straw" breaking a camel's back. There are 3000 sites on the net; it is not too hard to believe two of them are so close to the bursting that Rich's 250k pushed them over. There's your $10,000. But even without these concrete examples, any accountant can tell you that every *bit* stored on disk has a finite cost. An analogy is the way they used to run Disneyland, where you had to buy a whole bunch of ride tickets in advance in a booklet. You paid $5.00 or something for a book, but a given ride cost the coupon equivalent of $.50 or $.75. It is *not* correct to treat this as if you had made a single $5.00 expenditure followed by going on a bunch of free rides. Every time you take a ride, you have spent $.50. -- Geoff Kuenning {hplabs,ihnp4}!trwrb!desint!geoff