HUANGY at SLUVCA.SLU.EDU wrote:
: like seqed much more often those those programs which need the network.
: You know, it could be a pain in the neck to use those GCG programs when
: the system loads on VAX are getting heavier. If you can edit these sequences
: off the line or the network, and then upload the files up to the network.
If the load on a central machine is getting too high there are reasons to
believe that (as you are talking on a VAX) the machine might be too small
to carry the load. On the other hand, depending on your installation, the
machine might be perfectly adequate but just this manic friday afternoon
as all people want to try out something you hit a period of peak overload.
Sites which I have seen usually talk about an average load of less than
30% if a whole month is being analyzed. Surely there are periods where the
load is >>100%, but who can afford to pay a Ferrari in order to have a
car, if most of the activity is to go shopping rather than being on a
racing ompetition once a year?
: Life could be a little bit easier.
Depends for whom; reading the press I conclude that a reasonable desktop
networked PC is more expensive than a departemental (not campus-, or
corporate wide) machine. You can easily prove me being wrong by ignoring
maintenance, software licenses and maintenance staff cost. However, teaching
in a distributed environment is expensive, too. So the end user might be
happy but the budget is not. Counter argument would be that you are
in a university and corporate business accounting does not run that strictly
in academic universities. True, but we ought to face massive budget cuts
here (in Switzerland) with respect to the fact that we're not the only
high-tech organisation any longer in the state and the state has not the
increased budget to account for all new technology which is theoretically
available.
Conclusion being, make the GCG programs better, put them on a *departmental*
workgroup (lets say one per floor), and maintain it as a distributed cluster,
that were the most cost-efficient way of doing (for us).
: I would like to know where I can ftp these source files if there
As mentioned earlier in this group, the GCG package is a commercial package
not public domain. And, its a lot of code. You don't seriously want
to port the code yourself. I maintain the package at our site since version
5, and can tell that the past nine years would not have been spent well if
I would have tried to do the UNIX port on a individual basis. And, at least
UNIX is an operating system (pun intended), compared with those run-time
programs that are called operating systems on PC's . I am purposely negative
on 16-bit versions here. The new ones are a lot better, but still require
significant experience and are difficult to handle on networks due to their
absence of a login service for remote use.
Regards
Reinhard Doelz
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