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From: blarson@skat.usc.edu (Bob Larson)
Newsgroups: news.sysadmin,comp.misc
Subject: Re: computer charge back
Message-ID: <16570@oberon.USC.EDU>
Date: 16 Apr 89 20:49:41 GMT
Article-I.D.: oberon.16570
References: <885@hawkmoon.MN.ORG> <1989Apr16.020150.1083@utzoo.uucp>
Reply-To: blarson@skat.usc.edu (Bob Larson)
Organization: USC AIS, Los Angeles
Lines: 27

In article <1989Apr16.020150.1083@utzoo.uucp> henry@utzoo.uucp (Henry Spencer) writes:
>You might want to consider not charging for CPU time at all, provided it
>does not exceed some fraction of connect time.
>What you'll be presenting them with is a "mystery
>charge":  they won't have any idea of how to minimize it or how much
>a specific activity costs them.  This is distinctly user-hostile.

>The same comments apply to charging for memory use and character i/o.

I have the exact oposite complaint about a large commercial bbs I use.
The slower it goes, the more they charge me!  (They charge for connect
time only, at two different rates.  ("free" time is $.25/hour -- strange
definition of free.))  If they had some resoable charging scheme, perhaps
they would have some motivation to fix their kermit file transfer so it
didn't increase the number of characters transfered by 50%, decrease
their network delays, etc.

Not all users are as unaware of resorce usage as Henry seems to assume,
and charging them for real resorces used tends to make them more aware.
(When they notice GNU emacs is more expensive to run than mg, they may
find mg does everything they need.)

-- 
Bob Larson	Arpa: Blarson@Ecla.Usc.Edu	blarson@skat.usc.edu
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