Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!bloom-beacon!bu-cs!encore!bzs From: bzs@Encore.COM (Barry Shein) Newsgroups: comp.windows.x Subject: Re: A Thought on X Terminals Message-ID: <4965@xenna.Encore.COM> Date: 23 Feb 89 18:31:24 GMT References: <19613@agate.BERKELEY.EDU> <611@gt-eedsp.UUCP> <4921@xenna.Encore.COM> <13216@steinmetz.ge.com> Distribution: comp Organization: Encore Computer Corp, Marlboro, MA Lines: 27 In-reply-to: stpeters@dawn.steinmetz's message of 21 Feb 89 19:30:36 GMT Posting-Front-End: GNU Emacs 18.41.15 of Tue Jun 9 1987 on xenna (berkeley-unix) From: stpeters@dawn.steinmetz >Barry, now you've fallen into a fallacy: pulling numbers from >yesterday's technology to argue a point about tomorrow's. My diskless >Sun has all of 2.9MB "in" it's root partition - "in" in quotes because >its root "partition" is an NFS-mounted directory on the server. *WHAT* fallacy? So fine, you can squeeze diskless machines into a little less space, like 8 or 12MB (you never give the actual figure), so what? Aren't we just, then, arguing about the degree? You can cut it about 50%, it's still a heck of a lot more than a terminal that uses about 0MB. The point still stands. Postulating hypothetical non-swapping OS's isn't much of a refutation either, when one shows up, and is actually useful, perhaps it's worth talking about. It's nice that you have ideas, but posting them as refutations of someone else's point when they're actually just orthogonal ideas seems dishonest to me. Yes, I was aware of everything you mentioned when I summarized my thoughts, I just decided they weren't important. For example, how about some real cost analysis of the three approaches (terminal, diskless, squeezed diskless) on a per seat basis at 25, 50, 100 and 500 seats? -Barry Shein, ||Encore||