🚀 go-pugleaf

I guess my take on this is that both centralized and decentralized computing
have their places. For example, let's look at X terminals vs. X workstations.

I don't think it will come as much of a surprise if I state that X binaries
are relatively large. For a system without shared libraries, these programs
can be anywhere from 500 Kb to 1 Mb or more. Even with shared libraries these
puppies aren't tiny. An average user may have 3 to 10 windows/icons active
on their terminal at any one time. This argues that the computing resource
driving the X terminal needs to be large and powerful. This tends to say
that a centralized system will work more effectively.

However, a little time ago a program called 'dclock' was posted to the
X sources newsgroup and nearly everyone compiled and ran this program.
It had a neat digital display that slowly scrolled the numbers whenever
the hours or minutes changed. Now, whenever the hour changed the centralized
system supporting the users just *crawled* along. It turns out that the
network traffic generated by the smooth scrolling of the numbers was
horrific and that the network was getting saturated. This tends to argue 
that some applications are best left on a dedicated workstation.

Naturally, intelligent workstations with a large centralized server would
be ideal, but other considerations (cost, data security, backup, software
maintenance, ...) also come into play. This leads nicely into the observations
that Rayan was making in his articles.

-david-
-- 
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David Haynes			Sequent Computer Systems (Canada) Ltd.
"...and this is true, which is unusual for marketing." -- RG May 1989
...!{utgpu, yunexus, utai}!torsqnt!david -or- david@torsqnt.UUCP