Sorry for this OT comment but its important that people read Eric
Raymond's Halloween documents at
http://www.opensource.org/halloween.html
if Julian's story below scares or bothers you.
On Tue, 1 Dec 1998, Julian Richardson wrote:
> >> Now let me get this straight. You say Linux worked -- that implies
> >> that it was in place at one point, then NT was put in there and that
> >> NT didn't work.
>
> Ah, but there's the problem.
>
> NT - about a day to get set up and working (or not at all in this
> case!). Needs lots of hardware. Costs lots.
>
> Linux - about an hour to set up, runs on old Pentium 60's (yes, I know
> it runs fast even on 486 machines, but in this case a P60 was all that
> was around and free). Doesn't cost anything.
>
> Management - "oh, that's quite impressive. But we don't know anything
> about Unix, but do know NT, so we have to stick with that".
>
> Not that I'm rather stressed out at the way the computing industry
> blindly follows the big players round (sarcasm mode is on here, folks!)
> - but I run up against this brick wall time after time. People high up
> in a company see something as a risk unless they have to invest lots of
> time and money in puchasing it and supporting it - they just don't seem
> to feel safe if the product in question is low-cost (or free!) and runs
> itself without any trouble, even if such "features" are rammed down
> their throats. It's a very scary industry.
>
> >> you then wrote a _Java_ program to do
> >> what should be handled by something two or three layers down?
>
> yup, took about 30 minutes too. I got fed up with NT wanting to reboot
> every ten minutes, the PC taking five minutes to boot, the
> 32x-speed-all-the-bells-and-whistles CDROM drive taking a minute to spin
> up to speed before I could access it to install software... I'm sure
> most of you have been there!
>
> cheers
>
> Jules
>
> >
>
Sellam Alternate e-mail: dastar_at_siconic.com
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Received on Tue Dec 01 1998 - 15:47:44 GMT