[rescue] NeWS

[Richard]

In article <20060202163907.GA27863 at widomaker.com>,
    Charles Shannon Hendrix <shannon at widomaker.com>  writes:

> I told them the problem was the industry was given the choice of cheap,
> fast, or good, and they chose cheap and ajourned the meeting before
> picking one of the others.

I think it would be more fair to say that the marketplace chose price
as the overriding goal for software and hardware.  For a long time now
the industry mantra has been "price performance ratios" as the measure
of "goodness".  However, now that most hardware has acceptable
performance for most problems, people are starting to ask themselves
if price/performance is the best metric by which everything should be
judged.

Maybe mean time between failures is a better metric, shifting an
emphasis back to reliability.  Maybe shortest time to repair is a
better metric, shifting an emphasis to a reduction in downtime.  Dave
Patterson gave an excellent talk at the UofU a couple years ago where
he discussed this shift away from price performance ratios and towards
an emphasis on reliability.  His current research in this area is
described here: <http://roc.cs.berkeley.edu>; the talk was quite
interesting.
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