A Job Done Right

By Jerry Pournelle

April 26, 2004

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Build or Buy?

I have recently said that the best way to get a new PC is to build one, and that not only applies to individual BYTE readers but also to businesses, provided they can find competent in-house or consultant support.

A number of readers have challenged that, saying that unless you really like mucking about with the insides of your PC, you're better off buying a "name brand" system, and if you buy "name brand" you will save both time and money.

We'll look into a couple of actual machines this month. One problem is, "Which name brand?"

To begin, you will probably not save money building a machine—at least you won't if you follow my advice. You can certainly build very cheap machines if the cheapest possible is your goal, but I don't advise you to do it. We'll look into that later.

The rewards for building your own, or having someone build you a white box, are more in peace of mind and increased mean time between failures. Generally it costs about the same to build a quality system as it does to buy. Generally.

The Electronic Rights Game

Francis Hamit, an old friend, is experimenting with electronic publishing. In particular, he's trying to make available a number of technical articles he wrote, most of which have, apparently illegally, made their appearance in some large databases available through the public libraries.

It turns out, by the way, that some of these library services are quite a big deal: According to Hamit, Kern County, not one of the largest or wealthiest counties in California, pays something like $20,000 a year for unlimited access to those databases. That's one county. The entire business comes to hundreds of millions of dollars a year. The aggregators build databases and sell their contents to Lexus/Nexus, Factiva, Dialog, etc., who resell documents to large corporations and institutions at $2.95 a copy and up. There is also an intranet market.

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