Re: WDSC vs SEU

----- Original Message -----
From: <MichaelQuigley@xxxxxxxxxx>
To: <wdsci-l@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Wednesday, October 17, 2007 11:44 AM
Subject: Re: [WDSCI-L] WDSC vs SEU

Dave Shaw wrote: "no one has handed them a silver platter holding a
powerful PC with WDSCi installed and fully set up"

I think that's a poor excuse (not for the poor developer who's stuck with
an outdated PC, but from the management that refuses to look at upgrading
the equipment).

I don't disagree with you, but we do work for rather different organizations. We have roughly 150 AS/400 developers. Ideally, we'd have someone survey all the developer PCs, determine which ones can run WDSCi adequately as is (I estimate between a quarter and a third), which ones just need memory upgrades (probably half or a little more), and which ones need replacing. The replacements would cost a good bit more than 400 dollars, since for ease of support we only buy Dells (hundreds of them per year for the whole corporation), developers are mostly getting laptops with docking stations and CRTs, and we're currently transitioning from MS Office 2000 to Office 2003 as we buy new PCs. We're spending anywhere from 1800 bucks for a low-end unit where we can reuse the monitor to 2700 for a high-end model with everything. The upgrade budget is finite, so currently upgrades are made when the individual developers request them. We have a lot of people who say they'd like to try WDSCi,
but their PC can't run it. Are they going to their managers and asking for upgrades, though? No, not even the ones that only need a 50 or 100 dollar memory upgrade, which is almost a no-brainer despite the finite budget.

Then there's the install. Many of us do have adequate hardware. How many have actually gone to the trouble of installing it? Roughly ten. The rest are waiting for someone to install and configure it for them. Maybe someone should - but that's not a small time commitment, and they're not asking for it, they're just letting it go until someone else convinces management to impose it from above. That leaves a handful of us who use it and are trying to convince either management to impose it or the apathetic developers to ask for it, or both. Do I sound frustrated?

Anyway, I think I have rather less sympathy for our 'poor developers' than you do. I'm still trying to convince them to ask for it, and still trying to convince management to impose it, and I'm confident that in time it will become standard here. It's just frustrating at the moment, and I don't have a lot of patience for the apathetic programmers who won't pursue something like this on their own.

Dave Shaw
Mohawk Industries