[geeks] Mac definitions

[Shannon]

On 11-Jul-2011 18:35, Michael Parson wrote:

> I think that's nostalgia kicking in, kinda like people saying that cars
> are not built like they used to be.  Personally, I don't want to live in
> a house that has iron water pipes and electrical system installed before
> there were any decent codes.

I agree good codes are nice, especially electrical and plumbing.

But the codes for the actual building in many localities are terrible.
Bad or even dangerous techniques and materials are often "code
compliant" and while the superior might even NOT be complaint.

I live in a heavy storm area, and every year the "code compliant" stuff
falls into the flood waters. The last big hurricane though cost us so
much money, the did finally revamp the building codes to remove the
worst offenders and start allowing good construction again.

Just a point: you can upgrade the wiring and plumbing of an old building.

You can't generally fix bad construction without tearing it down.

> For the cars example, I don't think much more needs to be said than to 
> watch this video:
> 
> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cJrXViFfMGk
> 
> (head-on crash test between a 1959 Chevy and a 2009 Chevy)

Yea, that...

I remember growing up everyone worked on their cars on the weekends. A
friend and I were talking one weekend about how you rarely see "hoods
up" weekends any more.

Now cars generally go 100K miles or more before even getting their first
minor tune up. The ones that suck and can't do that? They generally
sucked back then too.

I love old cars, but do not want to maintain them on a daily basis.

> Sure, and there are AIX admins who get lost if they don't have smitty.
> I'll just put a lot of money on there being more people out there
> calling themselves Linux admins that are lost w/o a GNOME GUI than there
> are HP people lost w/o lanscan.

Probably true, but is it Linux or just the population size?

I generally found the people using proprietary systems like IBM or HP,
especially if that was ALL they used, were more limited in their
creativity and problem solving than people in Sun or BSD or similar
shops.  Or put another way, people in shops where they came up with
solutions rather than just follow the vendors. It just seemed like they
were usually the ones that gave up early and were in "call the tech"
mode in situations where I'd have figured out the issue on my own.

Of course, that probably varied a lot by locality.

> I'm still not convinced about that.  I think the old unix shops were
> set up when there were fewer unix deployments overall, and there was a
> higher barrier to entry, it took smarter and more talented people to get
> things up and running.  

Configuration and limitations in early UNIX definitely made things
difficult. Also let's be honest, a lot of it was kept unnecessarily
cryptic. A lot of things could have been improved a whole lot. I
remember writing my own front-ends to a things or even re-writing some
programs' horrible configuration formats.

Of course, I suppose that is what you are talking about: I was willing
to overcome things I saw rather than give up.

> The dot-com days flooded the market with people
> that were passing themselves off as systems admins, and it seems that a
> lot of them are still out there, doing piss-poor jobs of running their
> shops.

This is very true.

During the whole boom period I saw tons of money being blown, few people
caring about the quality of work being done or bothering to look even a
month ahead into the future, and really poor workers being tolerated,
even encouraged.

It wasn't just technology sector either: it was all bad, at least around
here.

> Have you ever had a conversation with someone that went something along
> the lines of, "Oh, our email is down again, I'm sure Steve will get it
> back online again soon, he's super smart, I just don't know what we
> would do without him."  You probe a little bit and find that this is how
> things go on a daily basis, they just think that core systems going down
> is normal business, and doesn't everyone's company work this way?

Yep... sorta like a global version of "just reboot it" as opposed to
actually finding out WHAT is wrong with a machine.

I sometimes think of bad people and work being like financial debt. As
you accrue more debt (bad people, bad systems, bad software), you have
to assign people to fix the damage and side-effects. Management will
often also assign people to write new software and systems to either fix
problems (band-aids usually) or try and replace the broken stuff with
yet more broken stuff.

Eventually you reach a point where you can't handle the work because so
much of your staff is just struggling to keep the house of cards running.