[rescue] Its all the same (was: THIS. MAKES. ME. SICK)

[James Fogg]

Here I go, opening my big mouth again...

Dudes... Its all the same!
Linux, BSD, ATT Unix, MS_Windows, UNICOS, AOS/VS, VMS, VM, GCOS...
Is All Sayim Ting.

At the bottom line, where the data meets the users, all o/s's do the same
things. They, and the hardware they run on, are nothing but machines designed
to be analogous to office workers (and not as good, just faster and recently
cheaper). They store, they shuffle, they transfer, they present, they compare,
they add, subtract, multiply and divide. I haven't seen one yet with an
affordable coffee-fetcher option (available with pendulous breasts or steely
pecs, in your choice of blonde, brunette or titian). Hell, even my voicemail
computer can't identify a salesman and hang up (basic telephony skills required
of even entry-level secretaries).

Some O/S's are tweaked for certain functions. Some O/S's cater to the user.
Some O/S's are quick and simple (think imbedded). Ultimately they do the same
things, and in many respects, do it the same way internally.

Successfull selection and implementation of an O/S and hardware combination
requires deeply skilled people who know the vagarities and pitfalls of the
platforms  in question and the applications that run on top of the O/S. Having
used many of the O/S's out there, I can tell you that any of them can be a
screaming success if used corectly. If we are speaking of general purpose O/S's
(unix varients and MS Windows varients among them) I can tell you they all
work well and all have their problems Though I will admit, to anybody familiar
with big O/S's, the famous instability of MS Windows may seem unaceptable, it
has enjoyed a good run. I hear that Win2k is solving a lot of the availability
problems (ok, I will wait and see, its hard to believe).

My employer uses Linux, MS Windows and Solaris, all with good success.
Honestly, from a cost-overhead view, the MS Windows machines seem to beat the
Unix varients to hell. Sure, they aren't reliable, but we can admin 150 (approx)
NT/2K machines with two administrators, but we use 5 admins to handle about 50
unix varient machines (and they are kept busy). I will admit we crunch far more
data on *nix, but to a freshly minted (inexperienced) executroid it
wouldn't appear to be cost effective.

On Wed, 13 Jun 2001, THOU SPAKE:
> What exactly is this "prime time" anyway?  
<remainder clipped>
-- 
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	 James D. Fogg, Network Engineer
	Vicinity Corporation - Lebanon, NH

     DESK (603) 442-1751 - CELL (603) 252-1864
     PAGER (802) 742-0280 - HOME (603) 526-7729
            EMAIL jfogg at vicinity.com

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