Old PCsenvironmental hazard 3236

It is far "cheaper" to replace off the shelf stuff than to have a maintenance crew babysitting thousands of machines.

Why are you buttuming that all but the first is done? Downtime is 0 seconds if the whole computer is changed on a worker's desk while s-he is sleeping.

There would be if they could be fixed. Using PC-flavored systems trains all users and owners that a hardware glitch means complete replacement. Everybody goes through one, and usually only one, session trying to salvage the system when one hardware piece dies. AFter that, they don't waste their time.

They are. Now these things come in a single box packaged in single box.

Because the OS biz on PCs have the Micpoo business model. And anybody who sells something that is to run or plug into one of these systems has to adapt to the model.

This is the computing training that has been taught. To most of the computer users of today (which is slowing changing), the bells and whistles are the computer service. They don't know any better because they have never been exposed to a system that really provides computing service as a computer system should deliver.

This is slowly changing and, if Unix products start addressing user interface (IOW, get off their high horse of arrogance and start looking at the OS from a user POV), more and more people will learn about what a computer system is supposed to really do for them.

Because they are human. All developers were like this. It took lots of restraint to not do the latest, loveiest thing in lieu of shipping on time. Some (but only a few) developers knew how to contrain themselves. Other ways were to have source management procedures that would police the kiddies who couldn't or wouldn't restrain themselves.

I call this user thruput. You should read Mark Crispin's and my fight three^Wfour months ago where this user thruput was discussed. It is my experience that most bit gods, let alone mere mortals, have absolutely no concept of this thruput (rhroughput so Mark can read the post) and never consider it when going through their tradeoff processes.

The average user, aka the computer system owner, gets the benefit of being able to replace a broken system at a second's notice. Note that this has to do with backwards compatibility (or rather, a planned lack of this aspect.)

Right. All they are using their systems for is TTY access. That's all.

BAH