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From: chen@gitpyr.UUCP (Ray Chen)
Newsgroups: net.cse
Subject: Re: A slightly different topic...
Message-ID: <1500@gitpyr.UUCP>
Date: Wed, 5-Mar-86 12:49:18 EST
Article-I.D.: gitpyr.1500
Posted: Wed Mar  5 12:49:18 1986
Date-Received: Fri, 7-Mar-86 05:30:03 EST
References: <393@ur-tut.UUCP>
Organization: The Clouds Project, The School of ICS, Georgia Tech
Lines: 22

I think that billing is silly.  There's no reason to bill on a machine
that's being used only by students and faculty.  You can keep
accounting statistics if you want, but why bother billing when all you
do is give the user more "money" if runs out?  It wastes cycles, time,
and it just annoys the users.

I can see billing in a situation where the University is selling
time to outside users.  However, then I think the University should
make a decision.  Are they running the machine for the students
and faculty, or are they trying to make money from the outside world
with it?

It's very hard to do a good job of both on the same machine.  The
situations call for too many conflicting administrative policies.
Profit-oriented machines need accounting, billing, and *strict*
security.  An academic environment can be much looser.

If a University decides it wants to make money, they should admit it
and get a separate machine for the outside world.

	Ray Chen
	gatech!gitpyr!chen