[rescue] ECC [was: Re: WOT: Ebay changes to IBM from Sun E10Kservers?]

[Joshua D. Boyd]

On Thu, Jul 10, 2003 at 01:01:31PM -0400, Dave McGuire wrote:

> > What home user cares about that?
> 
>    Uhhhh, people who do real things with their computers rather than 
> just playing games?

No, I think most home users who do work other than games (say, email,
writing reports, databases to manage workflow, etc) still don't care
that much. 
 
> >>    With this "I like my stuff to work all the time" attitude, am I 
> >> just
> >> being too intolerant?
> >
> > For certain. Users are more bothered with their wallet then with some 
> > obscure
> > rare problem they never heard about. If it makes the pc 10 percent 
> > cheaper
> > it's a good deal. ecc is considered overkill for normal fault-tolerant 
> > users.
> 
>    These people are morons, and they get what they've got coming to them.
> 
>    "My computer crashed, and I lost <xxxx>, can you help?"  NO.

"These people" also aren't given the tools to evaluate how reliable what
they are getting is.  They walk into a local computer store because they
feel more comfterable doing so, and if they even ask, they get told that
ECC is something they don't need.  They aren't given any metric other
than Mhz to evaluate performance (which is agrevating to us, but
ultimately performance doesn't really matter to them since anything that
can be bought new is fast enough), and they most especially aren't given
metrics to evaluate any needs other than what peripherals they might
want, especially not for evaluating stability.