Kerneels comments: >Google APPS are FREE for all educational institution and I just finished >an assignment for an Educational institution but the "old world" can not >compete with FREE.
They are "free" provided the institution and its users agree to Google's terms of service. To oversimplify only slightly, Google provides "free" services in exchange for their ability to do just about anything they like with your data. And they do. Is that "free" deal a good deal? "It depends." The Anne & Lynn Wheeler ID writes: >note that tpc benchmarks include total cost numbers per operation ... TPC benchmarks include dollar figures *advertised* as total cost per operation, yes. They are not in fact total costs. They are very, very partial. For example, they completely omit the biggest IT cost of all in many/most countries: staffing/labor. Understandably so perhaps since it's tough to write such benchmark standards, but costs that are merely hard to calculate are no less real. Moreover, a vendor is under no obligation to deliver the advertised TPC configuration everywhere in perpetuity (or for much time at all). Also, if you modify the configuration or contract terms in any way -- and you inevitably must -- all bets are off. No, I am not referring to IBM behaviors as far as I am aware. But there are such vendor antics in the world. Is anyone really surprised? Then of course there's the fact that no business actually runs a TPC benchmark to fill orders, manage inventory, support a call center, run payroll, forecast demand, and so on. While it might be possible to engineer systems to a well-specified fixed benchmark -- to incorporate a "benchmark mode" (yes, this happens) -- it's a lot harder to engineer well for arbitrary business workloads. TPC also, so far as I am aware, does not include any quality-related metrics. For example, as long as the system doesn't overheat within the benchmark run time it'll score. (And I'm not joking here. Many other processor cores have "turbo" modes which cannot sustain continuous operations due to thermal limits in those modes. It's very tough for benchmarks to keep up with this sort of stuff.) Anyway, while benchmarks are "interesting," let's not put *too* much stock in them. If anything they're getting progressively less interesting over time as real-world workload demands get more complex. We've had quite a bit of discussion in this forum about how difficult it is to have reliable, deterministic measurements with things like out-of-order execution, cache hits and misses (at multiple levels of cache), and so on. Those issues don't even begin to scratch the surface of how complex this stuff has become. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Timothy Sipples GMU VCT Architect Executive (Based in Singapore) E-Mail: [email protected] ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
