On 05/19/2010 01:47 AM, Timothy Sipples wrote: > Tony Harminc writes: >> The biggest difficulty is returning the time when the rental >> period is over. I suggest buying it outright... > > I don't understand this comment, but maybe that's my fault? The System z > Remote Development Program is a month-at-a-time rental. But the rental > continues month-to-month (with your code and data undisturbed) unless you > want to stop renting. > > - - - - - > Timothy Sipples > Resident Architect (Based in Singapore) > STG Value Creation and Complex Deals Team > IBM Growth Markets > E-Mail: [email protected] ... English Semantics. That which you "rent/lease" must be returned to owner at end of lease. That which you "buy" does not.
You can rent/lease hardware and hardware resources, which gives you access to the hardware; but execution time on hardware to which you don't have access by ownership or lease can only be bought because there is no way to return the time at end of lease. The case you describe should be more accurately described as a rental of hardware resources - for example DASD subsystem space for retaining your data whether you are actively using it or not. If a company providing the kind of service described calls it "leasing of computer time", they are abusing the English language. I would be willing to bet that anyone providing such services would charge based on the physical resources used, not the clock hours in the lease duration or the clock hours your applications are running. It is the hardware resources that are rented, not the "time". Perhaps pedantic; but then programming itself is a very pedantic exercise, where misuse of one "verb" in a program can cause total failure. Joel C Ewing -- Joel C. Ewing, Fort Smith, AR [email protected] ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html
