On Wed, 30 Oct 2002 21:02:20 -0800 (PST) Trevor Warren wrote:
Relevant Educational Insitutions accross the country.
If that's one of the targets, it makes sense to highlight the 1 Server many (dumb) terminals scenario too. The benefits are:
- For the same cost of hardware, more seats can be provided. Now get a larger hall to house the lab!
- It is easier to maintain one server than 20 workstations. If the server is Linux and the workstations are Windows, the disparity grows even more.
- Students get access to high quality software. The comparisons are again, quite glaring - TC++ vs GCC, Emacs/Vi vs. Notepad/Wordpad, Mozilla vs. IE....
- Install once, available everywhere software.
- The temperamental advantage that someone growing on Unix has over someone growing on Windows. (Matters a lot, seriously).
HR-wise, it might seem at first that the school would have to hire a highly qualified sysadmin to maintain the server but that extra salary is more than overcome by elimination of "Lab Incharge"s who's sole responsibility is to clean up the disks, run defraggers and install the same software over and over on each system. IMHO, a good teacher can very well handle the duty of sys-administration so, for the school, the TCO indeed comes down.
<Flashback> We had these two labs "Unix" and "HP", running VMS and HP-UX in our University's Computer Centre (CC). Even though the hardware was old and crappy, the quality of software we got was what kept most of us geeky types holed in there. We hardly ever went into the "Foundation Lab" running Windows on P-Is. Believe it or not, there was just one Pentium-I server running Linux that handled upto 50 concurrent users! I don't know how much RAM was there and whether it did SMP. </Flashback>
HTH