Subject: Re: help! absolute beginner
From: Erik Naggum <erik@naggum.no>
Date: 1998/12/15
Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp
Message-ID: <3122685146348197@naggum.no>

* rusty craine <rccraine@flash.net>
| Freeware may have it's place but maybe not in the real wrold, that is if
| the above is anywhere close to the real world. (real world = where the
| money is spent)

  my current client is a financial news agency.  they have some annoying
  real-time and uptime requirements.  we run this system on two Intel 133
  MHz Pentium¹ machines that used to be disk servers and which were ready
  for generational garbage collection (i.e., old trash) because none of the
  Microsoft crap could run reasonably on them.  they run Linux 2.0.35 and
  Allegro CL 5.0.  no need to upgrade or buy expensive hardware (more of
  them are lying around), and all the money could be invested in software.
  so far, they've been doing great.

  I'd certainly rate this a real world application.  without Linux, we
  would have had to request a 50% larger initial budget for new hardware,
  which wouldn't have been a useful suggestion to the board at the time.

#:Erik
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¹ 52 bogomips, compared to 400 bogomips for my development machine.  sigh.
-- 
  man who cooks while hacking eats food that has died twice.