🚀 go-pugleaf

isr@rodan.acs.syr.edu (Michael S. Schechter - ISR group account) writes:
>As a research department computing manager, it never ceases to amaze me that

As a news admin, and as someone who knows how things are at the local 
University department that runs a news system, it never ceases to amaze me
how totally ignorant of basic economics some people can be.  

>the Central Computing types, with multi-million-dollar budgets whine about
>a few hundred meg of storage, that would be used for their entire campus...

(Multi-million?  Not even close.  These guys are running on $300,000 at most,
and the vast share of that goes to paying for the salaries of the student
assistants in the labs, and the sysadmin staff.  Maybe, if they're lucky, they
have some extra money to buy computer hardware, but this doesn't often 
happen.)

>There is NO excuse for a major facility to complain about lack of
>disk space these days. 

Bwahahaha.  Since you think disk space is so easy to come by, perhaps you 
would care to donate some to the University here?

>Buy resonable CPU's for
>secretaries instead of 486/33's or Q950's;

Hah.  The secretary (singular) doesn't have anything that fancy.  The
system administrator *does* have a Quadra 700 on his desk; in addition to 
being his desktop machine, it's the news server, and he puts up with the
(decidedly non-trivial) load providing Usenet service to the whole campus 
puts on his machine.  

>It's just where you want to spend your money: for toys for yourself&
>your staff  -or- for your users, you are paying for all of it.

Face it, as far as the local University administration is concerned, 
*Usenet* is nothing more than a toy for the staff.  The only reason the
local University still has Usenet access is that the sysadmin and I were 
able to set up a news server using his desktop Quadra and a disk drive
salvaged off a defunct Sun-3; if that drive ever goes, Usenet is *history*
at that site, since there is No Fucking Way the Powers that Be are going to
pay for a replacement drive just for Usenet.  If you went in to the head honcho
there and told them that they oughta buy a big disk drive just for news 
(instead of, say, buying one so they could allow the users to have a 3 Meg 
disk quota instead of 2 Meg, or buying some modems that actually go faster than
2400bps), he'll laugh at you.  If you say that they oughta buy one just so the
students can look at 5 days worth of dirty GIFs, he'll fall on the floor 
from laughing so hard.  

Look, *you* think Usenet is important.  *I* think Usenet is important, so
much so that I bought my own machine for it, with my own money (which is
probably more than *you*'ve ever done).  But the people who sign purchase
orders at Universities *don't* think this.  Wake up and smell the coffee.

You think disk drives are cheap.  Fine.  *You* send us one.  We prefer
the 1.2GB Fujitsu SCSI drives.  Write me and I'll tell you the address to
put on the package.  Put up or shut up.
--
Richard Todd	rmtodd@essex.ecn.uoknor.edu  rmtodd@chinet.chi.il.us
  rmtodd@servalan.uucp  New Improved Domain: rmtodd@servalan.servalan.com