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Well wait a second, couldn't the same thing be said about books? Or public basketball courts? Or study rooms or anything that is made publicly available and i
by blhack 16y ago
Well wait a second, couldn't the same thing be said about books? Or public basketball courts? Or study rooms or anything that is made publicly available and isn't unlimited?
Yes I could build a cluster in my house if I wanted one, but 15 year old me couldn't, and 15 year old me would have spent his entire childhood in the library if the one described here existed.
- hugh3 16y agoNot really. A library can easily buy more books than everybody in the surrounding communities could possibly want at any given time, which is why if you go to the library you'll see books on the shelves. Books are cheap and I can't use any more than a few at a time. But any legitimate cluster user can easily use an entire mini-cluster, all the time, on their own. (I know I can!) So the demand for the resources can easily outstrip the supply, for any reasonable value of supply. A decent M-node cluster with a good backbone costs N thousand dollars per node, where N is some surprisingly high number. If you have more than M users it's pretty much useless for everybody since I can't do anything I can't do on my home computer, and if you have fewer than M users it's a damn poor use of library money to buy an expensive cluster that hardly anyone's going to use. PS. This thread reminds me that my library books are a week overdue, I should return them right now. Thanks!
- blhack 16y agoBut it doesn't specifically have to be a cluster. The point is to make libraries more than just a warehouse for print, but a place for continued learning.