Re: My gradebook for Linux

[Bill Ries-Knight <brk@slip.net>]

As I am Intel Products Dealer and a Microsoft OEM System Builder for a living...

We are given a roadmap that shows where the new products are going and we have to
spec from there.  Three things come to mind...

Profits are better on higher cost hardware amd rewards through incentives move us
that way.
.
As the market changes over time, lower power cpu's disappear from the channel
(primary source for LEGIT product) and a fall spec cannot be fulfilled in the
spring (has to do with district contract language to bid) causing peanut counters
to freak.

Competitive bidding against the Sunday Inserts.  The machines in the Ofiice Store
and Home Electronic Stores ahve a certain amount of Jazz that makes the district
people want us to bid against them.
>>>  MORE POWER, ungh, ungh, grunt, grunt, MORE POWER, gotta have MORE POWER.  <<<

There is the reality that as more BloatWare hits the market, it takes more
hardware to make it run faster.  For this we have to thank the GODS of bloatware
from Redmond Washington.  I will admit, 128 mb is smoother with Windows NT than is
32 mb.
What we need to do is  "avoid the bloat" as products are developed.  By urging
development under "C"  rather than "Tools" akin to Visual Basic (Primary source of
Bloat, IMHO) we can keep apps lean and FAST.

I ramble.

Bill

Jim Wildman wrote:

> Good (for the vendor) sales people.  Uninformed purchasers.
>
> I see vendors specify similar machines for what amounts to telnet
> stations.  Gotta have the latest.  Personally, under Windows, I haven't
> seen any speed increase since about a PII 200 or so.
>
> Jim Wildman
> jawildman@cfanet.com
>
> On Fri, 10 Sep 1999, Culp, David wrote:
> >
> > Which brings up another little topic.  Seems my school likes to buy the
> > nearly top of the line stuff.  Here at my workstation Ive got a 400Mhz
> > Pentium II with 128 MB of RAM and photo quality color inkhet printer
> > etc......  Is all that necessary?  Most teachers I know only use their
> > workstation for two reasons, email and wordprocessing.  Why do they do this?
> > Seems a waste of money but someone keeps telling schools they MUST have the
> > top of the line systems.  Who is telling them this and why are they
> > listening.  For the price they paid for my workstation they could have got
> > three 300Mhz Celeron systems with 32MB of RAM etc.....
> >
> > David Culp
> >