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Required Reading for Telemanagers
Ken Coar’s “The Sun Never Sets on Distributed Development” (ACM Queue 1(9), December/January 2003) is a fine, succinct, and to-the-point(s) article. Absolutely required reading for every telemanager.
I’m sure I’ll include some of Ken Coar’s insights in our training.
Jack M. Nilles, California
State of the Carrier Industry?
I greatly appreciated Dave Patterson’s “A Conversation with Jim Gray” (ACM Queue 1(9), June 2003).
I wish, however, that Dave and Jim had spent more time discussing data transfer speeds and prices in a corporate WAN and compared that with the price of shipping hard drives via snail mail.
Jim or Dave, it would be helpful to receive feedback on the state of the carrier industry and when their speeds and prices might become competitive again. We have a global data collection project going now and cannot tie up our already full, 256-KB frame network with this data. For now we have bought several 250-GB USB drives for less than $300 each. These provide a monthly transfer from each major European site.
Joe Fenn, Colorado
JIM GRAY RESPONDS: The paper “Distributed Computing Economics” (http://research.microsoft.com/research/pubs/view.aspx?tr_id=655) gives the relative costs of WANs and LANs. It appears that LANs are about 10,000 times less expensive than WANs.
Even with volume discounts, sending data over the Internet is expensive.
Originally published in Queue vol. 2, no. 1—
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