ladkin@kestrel.ARPA (Peter Ladkin) (02/28/86)
In article <393@ur-tut.UUCP>, scco@ur-tut.UUCP (Sean Colbath) writes: > I'm interested in hearing what attitudes various people have to 'billed > computing' in an academic situation. Excellent choice of topic. I worked in UCB Computer Center, which has a *strict billing* policy. The Computer Science Department didn't, as I recall. My dispositions favor no-billing, for the reasons you mention, and still do. However, I found myself playing the billing bureaucrat too easily, for the reason that I could not see any workable alternative to strict billing in a scarce-resource environment. We also billed for connect-time and CPU-time separately on Unix-PDPs and Vaxs, in order to discourage backgrounding as a means of avoiding resource limitations. Needless to say, we had the games turned off, so people just brought their own. Some institutions require PCs of their students, as a way of avoiding most of the resource problem. And the strict billing is required in an environment where the computers are used on government-supported research of certain kinds (e.g. DARPA). So the PC way may be the only possibility. Peter Ladkin
wex@milano.UUCP (03/03/86)
In article <5245@kestrel.ARPA>, ladkin@kestrel.ARPA (Peter Ladkin) writes: > ... Needless to say, we had the games turned off... I was at a site where games (particularly rogue) were thought to be consuming a large share of resources. Our sysop did some checking, wrote some monitoring programs, etc. In a month, he was able to report that monitoring and recording game usage cost about 10x what the games themselves cost. Needless to say, the users were happy, and the administrators (who wanted to restrict/eliminate the games) were not at all pleased. The moral is: look before you shoot. Turning off games seems an easy solution, but it may not be the cause of the problem you're trying to solve! -- Alan Wexelblat ARPA: WEX@MCC.ARPA UUCP: {ihnp4, seismo, harvard, gatech, pyramid}!ut-sally!im4u!milano!wex "No wife, no horse, no mustache."
brad@altunv.UUCP (Brad Silva) (03/04/86)
In article <1083@milano.UUCP>, wex@milano.UUCP writes: > In article <5245@kestrel.ARPA>, ladkin@kestrel.ARPA (Peter Ladkin) writes: > > ... Needless to say, we had the games turned off... > > I was at a site where games (particularly rogue) were thought to be > consuming a large share of resources. Our sysop did some checking, wrote > some monitoring programs, etc. In a month, he was able to report that > monitoring and recording game usage cost about 10x what the games themselves > cost. Needless to say, the users were happy, and the administrators (who > wanted to restrict/eliminate the games) were not at all pleased. > > The moral is: look before you shoot. Turning off games seems an easy solution, > but it may not be the cause of the problem you're trying to solve! Another possible problem with turning off the games, is that the students will invariably get a copy of the source code, and implement the game in thier OWN account! All of the sudden you have 10 copies of rogue or hack using up disk space! (and more memory than one shared text copy!) ptsfa!gilbbs!altunv!brad In Real Life: Brad Silva (707) 538-9084 "Real life? where! get my gun!" "The meek shall inherit the earth, the rest of us will go to the stars!"