Re: Computers

[sample@lyon.edu (John D. Sample)]

At 1:03 PM on 2/25/97, <phys-l@mailer.uwf.edu> wrote:
> From: "Richard W. Tarara" <rtarara@saintmarys.edu>
> A couple more REAL differences between systems.  Until system 8 (or
> whatever Apple is going to call it) appears--where are all the Win95,96,97
> jokes now ;-) --you can't get true multitasking on the Mac.  For most
> people this is not important, but if you want to be printing a long
> document while surfing the web with a major calculation going in the
> background--PC.
>
> Also, because of its much stronger ties to the business world, office
> suites (word-processor, speadsheet, data base, and presentation software)
> are more sophisticated, more tightly integrated, and more functional in the
> PC world.  There are three major players--Micro$oft, Lotus(IBM), and
> Borland(Corel).  There is also great support for customizing these
> applications for individual company use--Visual Basic is primarily for
> doing such.  This is probably not important to most physicists, although
> the newest suites integrate web authoring tools as well.
>
> Software bundling is another factor that needs to be considered when
> comparing prices.  The direct marketers (Gateway, Dell, Micron, etc.)
> bundle a surprising amount of current and useful software for little or no
> additional money.  Office 97 professional version runs over $500 retail but
> can be had bundled 'free' or for an extra $100 with many PC purchases.  How
> about the Mac world--I don't keep up, but I don't think the offers are so
> good (especially since the office software is at least a generation
> behind--although M$ promises to keep supporting the Mac).

It is certainly true that you can get more for less $ in the PC world, but
I've never seen training costs or tech support costs considered.

Frequently (in my limited experience) the workplace views manpower costs as
"fixed" and computer hardware/software as "additional" and something whose
costs need to be minimized.  One example:  I had tons of data on an HP
computer running HP Basic and nothing else.  It was not connected to the
network.   For certain analyses I needed the data on another machine;
whether it was a PC, Mac or mainframe didn't matter.  I just didn't feel
like writing my own spreadsheet and graphing applications in Basic.  Rather
than invest in the hardware to connect the HP to the rest of the lab, or
the software for the HP, they had me write the data into notebooks and
retype what I needed on another machine.  My salary was already paid so
apparently it didn't matter that much of my time was wasted.

When choosing a computer for the workplace I think many businesses take a
similar attitude.  They ignore the hours of lost productivity due to
training, equipment set up, and malfunctions.  That's not to say manpower
costs are enough to swing the decision one way or another, it's just that
they aren't considered.

Chip

And now I'm going to go watch "How to Get the Most Out of Your VHS
Recorder" on my BetaMax, and I promise only to talk physics here in the
future.