Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!cs.utexas.edu!wuarchive!udel!rochester!quiroz
From: quiroz@cs.rochester.edu (Cesar Quiroz)
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: X-terms v. PCs v. Workstations
Message-ID: <1989Nov28.223422.6817@cs.rochester.edu>
Date: 28 Nov 89 22:34:22 GMT
References: <1128@m3.mfci.UUCP> <1989Nov22.175128.24910@ico.isc.com> <3893@scolex.sco.COM> <39361@lll-winken.LLNL.GOV> <17305@netnews.upenn.edu> <1989Nov25.000120.18261@world.std.com> <1989Nov27.144016.23181@jarvis.csri.toronto.edu> <1989Nov27.213238.24130@cs.rochest
Reply-To: quiroz@cs.rochester.edu (Cesar Quiroz)
Organization: University of Rochester, Department of Computer Science
Lines: 59

Hmmm.  I have been thinking about the ongoing disagreement with John
DiMarco.  Two things.  First, one problem seems to be that he keeps
proposing technological reasons for centralization (worse, for
centralization of authority, not just of service) whereas the other
side keeps telling him in subtle ways that the problem isn't
technological, but political/sociological.  So, let's try again:

    THE PROBLEM IS NOT TECHNOLOGICAL.

The second difficulty is that the opposition central v. distributed
is a continuum.  Successful solutions depend on centralizing what
needs to be centralized (do you want to contract for your own power
lines? or LANs?), but nothing else.  (You wouldn't want to walk to
the warehouse every morning to check out a keyboard, to be returned
at 5:00, now would you?)

In this posting I will deal only with the first source of
difficulty, the nature of the problem (technical or political?).  I
claim that statements of the form 

    ``If <x does the right thing> Then <y wins>'' 

can't persuade people who know that x rarely ever does the right
thing.  For instance:

(jdd)
| Power isn't necessarily a bad thing. If those with power (i.e. control over
| the computing resources) use this power to serve the users' needs, then 
| everybody is happy. If a centralized computing authority does not serve
| the users' needs, then it is not fulfilling its intended role. ...

First, what is seen as the intended role of the centralized
_authority_ may surprise you.  Often it is to end the fiscal year
under budget, or with billings that exceed the cost of the center.
That they should, in an ideal world, do otherwise, doesn't help the
users whose work moves like cold molasses.  The ideal behavior of
such centrals is not a question here; the actual or perceived
performance of them is.  For instance, on the issue of maximum
single point use:

(jdd)
| If everyone is being served from the same big pot, what one group doesn't
| use is available to everyone else. 

If ...

In my experience (already > 6 years stale) the first thing a central
authority does is impose quotas.  [OK, show of hands, how bad is
this, out there in the real world?]  Once you are over quota, it
doesn't matter how many free resources there still are.  Remember,
once you centralize power there will be someone with nothing better
to do than to invent rules and invest disproportionate amounts of
effort to enforce them.

-- 
                                      Cesar Augusto Quiroz Gonzalez
                                      Department of Computer Science
                                      University of Rochester
                                      Rochester,  NY 14627


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