City Of Toronto

[Tom Legrady]

Ten years ago I worked in an office of 8 developers which used a Sparc 
10 with 32 MB ( or maybe 64 MB, I forget ) and 1 GB HD, driving a bunch 
of NCD Xterminals. We were using vi & emacs and ruunning gcc all day long

Phillip Mills wrote:

> On Saturday, December 27, 2003, at 01:23 PM, Howard Gibson wrote:
>
>> On Sat, 27 Dec 2003 08:08:49 -0500
>> Phillip Mills <pmills-5bG9SNWDbRX3fQ9qLvQP4Q at public.gmane.org> wrote:
>>
>>>
>>> Quote:
>>> "The city's problem is that 14,000 of its 17,500 computers are of 1999
>>> vintage or older, which means that the operating system they run on is
>>> Microsoft Windows NT, a program which the software company will no
>>> longer support after some time next year, and they do not have the
>>> capacity to run on the next generation of software, Windows XP, which
>>> the city plans to switch to."
>>>
>>    My 1998 computer works okay as long as I do not launch KDE.  I 
>> have added a lot of RAM since I bought the thing, 64MB to 256MB.  My 
>> second hand laptop has 64MB of RAM.  I am running Red Hat 8 on both 
>> machines.
>>
>>    I am here to tell you that 64MB is not enough for Red Hat 8.  If I 
>> cannot get more than 64MB into the laptop, this will be its final 
>> upgrade.
>>
>>    I suspect that if you install the latest version of Linux onto 
>> these old machines, you will teach a bunch of people to hate Linux.   
>> A clever administrator may get these machines to work efficiently, 
>> but new machines are probably easier and more reliable, Linux or no 
>> Linux.
>
>
> I don't have a problem with anything you're saying, except that I miss 
> the point.  I certainly wouldn't be happy doing software development 
> with 64MB on any of my systems, whether Linux, Mac, or MS.
>
> I have a Dell P3 733 that was given to me with NT 4 Workstation 
> running.  I have it dual-booting with NT and SuSE 8.1/KDE.  The 
> interface feels faster under Linux than Windows.  Years ago -- when NT 
> 4 was new -- I converted a PII to Linux and used it as an Internet 
> gateway for a 20-person office.  Running NT, it wouldn't have worked 
> as well...if at all.  Since the people referenced in the above quote 
> are using NT already, then equivalent functions on a Linux system 
> should *not* be a *worse* experience for performance.  I think one 
> would have to try really hard to install Linux such that it felt 
> slower than NT on any given system.
>
> If workers need upgraded systems because of their job functions or 
> because the standard for acceptable performance has changed, that's 
> fine.  If they need them just to do an XP upgrade -- like the article 
> suggests -- that seems terribly wasteful.
>
> ........................
> Phillip Mills
> Multi-platform software development
> (416) 224-0714
>
> -- 
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