Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!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: <1989Nov29.033131.15314@cs.rochester.edu> Date: 29 Nov 89 03:31:31 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: 26 In <1989Nov29.031045.14612@cs.rochester.edu>, I went and said: | My point is this: your experience shows that, of the two degrees | of centralization that you have tried, the one you call | `centralized' worked for you better than the other. From there to | conclude with DiMarco et al. that this experience is so generally | valid that workstations are just a fad, or that centralization | wins always, there is a tremendous leap of faith. Upon rereading the thread more carefully (it got contaminated in my brain with the 'fad computing' one) I realized that DiMarco never claimed quite any of the above, so I apologize for putting words in his fingertips. To summarize: If I understand him correctly, he believes in the general superiority of centralization, given some conditions of enlightened authority. I believe the necessary conditions to be quite infrequent, so I don't see any a priori advantage of centralization, and my experience tends to support the claim that centralizing *authority* (as opposed to service) tends to harm as often as it helps. -- Cesar Augusto Quiroz Gonzalez Department of Computer Science University of Rochester Rochester, NY 14627 Brought to you by Super Global Mega Corp .com