As manager of the Mathematics Local-Area Network at Grinnell College, I frequently receive telephone calls from sales representatives, quality-control consultants, and suchlike corporate functionaries, desiring me to answer a lot of questions about the exact nature of my job and to evaluate various products and services. I regret (a little) that I can no longer spare the time to answer such questions over the telephone. This page is designed to provide, more efficiently, the answers that I would give by telephone if I had time.
If you are a corporate functionary and you need to know the answer to a question that I have not dealt with here, you may send me an e-mail message containing the question. In addition to replying by e-mail, I'll add the question and answer to this page so that subsequent readers will be spared the trouble.
What is your mailing address?
`Grinnell' is spelled with two Ns and two Ls.
What is the street address there?
Both the town of Grinnell and the college itself are small, so U.S. mail sent to the college doesn't require a street address. If you're sending something through a private delivery service, you can use the address of the building in which I work: 1116 Eighth Avenue.
What is your fax number?
It's (641) 269-4984.
What is your title?
``Lecturer in Computer Science and Philosophy and Manager of the Mathematics Local-Area Network.''
What business is your company in, primarily?
Grinnell College is an educational institution, not a business organization.
How many people are employed by your company?
It's an educational institution, not a company. If you include the administration, the faculty, and the staff, but not the students who work part-time, the college employs about six hundred people.
What is your department's annual computing budget?
That's really none of your business.
What kind of equipment do you have?
MathLAN comprises fifty-eight Hewlett-Packard workstations (fifty-four 712/60s, two 712/100s, one 712/75, and one B160L), seven external two-gigabyte hard disks (purchased from Hewlett-Packard), one CD-ROM drive (purchased from Hewlett-Packard), one DDS tape drive (purchased from Hewlett-Packard), fourteen Sony Trinitron monitors, four Apple LaserWriter printers, one Apple Color LaserWriter printer, one Hewlett-Packard DeskScan II scanner, one Best Fortress backup power supply, and one Safe backup power supply.
How many PCs do you have in your department?
One of our faculty members has a couple of them, but I don't administer them.
How many Macintoshes do you have in your department?
The department has two, and one of our faculty members has a couple of them, but I don't administer them.
What operating systems run on the machines you administer?
HP-UX 10.20.
How many of your systems run Windows 95?
None. You probably didn't mean to be insulting, and I accept your apology.
Does your company ever purchase equipment from third-party suppliers?
Grinnell College is an educational institution, not a company. If you'd like to send information about your products and services, I'd be happy to keep it on file and look at it when the occasion arises.
Do you plan to purchase any equipment in the near future?
We're currently developing proposals for the fiscal year beginning next July 1. We have no plans to purchase equipment between now and then.
On a scale from 1 to 7, would you rate ...
No. My evaluation of whatever you were going to inquire about is qualitative and multidimensional in nature, and I have no idea how to map it onto an ordinal scale. Besides, if I gave you a number, you'd probably average it together with some other numbers. I would disapprove of this operation, since it is fallacious unless the difference between any two evaluations is proportional to the difference between the numbers that they are mapped into. Your scale doesn't meet this precondition. Playing meaningless arithmetical games will only impede your efforts to improve the quality of your product or service.
For each of the following statements, would you say that you (1) strongly agree, (2) agree, (3) neither agree nor disagree, ...
Probably not. Even when the statement makes sense to me and does not presuppose any falsehoods or misconceptions, I generally resent having words put into my mouth in this way.
Do you participate in the evaluation of or recommend the purchase of ...
Yes: application development software, application development tools, application engineering, backup hardware, backup-and-restore software, books, change management tools, communications servers, communications software, compilers, data-analysis software, document management software, editors, electronic data interchange software, e-mail systems, file management, graphical user interfaces, graphics software, image processing, image storage and retrieval, Internet software, keyboards, mass-storage systems, maintenance and repair services, mathematical software, memory upgrades, mice, monitors, multimedia software, network backup software, networking systems, operating systems, power protection, printers, printer-control software, programming environments, software development tools, software maintenance tools, software testing tools, spoolers, spreadsheets, statistical software, system-administration tools, tape-backup hardware and software, terminal-emulation software, text and information retrieval systems, text editors, training, and workstations.
No: accounting software and equipment, alphanumeric paging software, automated software quality systems, bar-code data-collection systems, batch job management software, billing software, business-critical application development and deployment systems, business software, card readers, compact-disk creation, computer-aided design software and equipment, checkpoint restart facilities, client-server software, consulting, customer support systems, database management systems, database management tools, data center management, data-migration tools, data warehousing, decision support systems, disaster-recovery systems, distributed-computing systems, distribution software, electronic forms printing, end-user access tools, end-user computing systems, equipment rental, facility maintenance software, fax automation, fax software, financial software, fourth-generation languages, geographic-information systems, government-related software, groupware, help-desk systems, hierarchical storage management, high-performance systems, human-resources software, industrial terminals, instrument control software, integeration tools, Internet commerce, Internet services, intranets, inventory control, I/O boards, job-scheduling systems, manufacturing software, marketing of any kind, middleware, migration services and tools, millennium-bug fixes, payroll systems, PC integration, personnel software, process-control software, production-planning software, project-management software, public-safety software, quality-assurance tools, RAID storage, records management, report writing, viewing, printing, and distribution, sales software, scheduling software, systems integration consulting, task-management systems, technical documentation and cross-referencing software, and workload-management systems.
Do you approve the purchase of ...
No.
Does your department do any software development?
Yes.
What programming languages do you use for software development?
Mainly Scheme, C, Java, Icon, Pascal, Common Lisp, MATLAB, Maple, Perl, and C++.
What applications are most heavily used?
I would guess that the most heavily used third-party applications on the Mathematics Local-Area Network are Netscape Navigator, MATLAB, XEmacs, Maple, TSSterm, Ghostscript, TeX, and MINITAB.
What technologies do you use to develop Internet applications?
Java; Scheme; XEmacs; CGI; Netscape.
What computer magazines do you read regularly?
Communications of the ACM, ACM SIGPLAN notices, and Software -- practice & experience.
What other magazines do you read regularly?
The American mathematical monthly, Mathematics magazine, Scientific American, Skeptical inquirer, and The New Yorker. And you?
created July 25, 1997
last revised July 10, 2000