[rescue] Re: [geeks] THIS. MAKES. ME. SICK.

[Devin L. Ganger]

On Fri, Jun 15, 2001 at 07:49:22AM +0100, Paul Sladen wrote:

> On Thu, 14 Jun 2001, Devin L. Ganger wrote:

> > Failing that, I can telnet in to it and do all sorts of regular and
> > extraordinary administrative tasks via a command line (including
> > remotely reboot it).
 
> I am constantly amazing by the excitment in an NT admins voice when they
> discover a new feature/utility in Windows.

With all due respect to Bill (who may very well see fit to bounce my ass
from this list, and if he does, with my blessing), a hearty FUCK YOU
to Mr. Paul Sladen, who apparently can't be bothered to read, let alone
assemble a single sentence of proper English.  ("I am constantly amazing
by..."?  "vommit"?)

This was a nice little technical argument until you decided to start
slinging mud.

One of the oft-touted "reasons" why Unix is so much superior to W2K/NT
is the "lack of command-line support" that *everyone* knows Windows
suffers.  Well, two months as a contractor in a test job for Microsoft
taught me the lie in that.  I learned more about the internals of
Windows NT -- and how to avoid the GUI *and* get work done, without
ever having to reboot -- from the command line in that job.

The comment above was in direct response to someone on this list who
posted in such a fashion as to imply that one could not remotely
administer and/or reboot a Windows box without having to buy add-on
software.  My comment above was direct rebuttal to that criticism,
not the blind praise of some newbie who doesn't have real-world
cross-platform experience and thinks that the sun rises, sets, and
is debriefed in Redmond, WA.

Flat-out, most people who slag NT/W2K have no fucking idea what they
are talking about.  There are *plenty* of reasons to slag it, but
they can't be bothered to actually find out what they really are.

All hardware sucks; all software sucks.  *Every* OS that exists is
a mixture of design compromises, as is every chip architecture, bus
design, ad nauseum.  (Does "Faster, cheaper, better -- pick two"
ring any bells?  Even if the compromise is affordability, there's
a compromise in *any* design decision.  As such, all operating
systems have flaws.  Not a damn one exists -- or will exist -- that
doesn't have at least one major flaw.

Well, the smart admin learns the strengths *and* the flaws, and
you match them up with the task at hand.  If you're especially
vulnerable to a particular flaw, you avoid that OS.  If this means
that 9 times out of 10, you avoid NT/W2K, so be it -- as long as
you use it that 1 time out of 10 when it's the best for the job.

I'm no $150,000/year admin, but it doesn't take one to make NT
work and work just as reliably as your favorite variant of Unix.
I've been doing it for several years.  My mentor *is* one of
the $150K guys -- and he makes Windows do things that no one
else I've ever seen can make it do.  More importantly, he can
pass that knowledge along.  And most of the time, the people
who are supposed to learn that knowledge can't be bothered
because everyone "knows" that Windows isn't reliable.

There's a time and a place for Windows.  I'll be the first to
tell you that it doesn't belong in nearly as many places as
Microsoft wants you to think it does.  I'd look long and hard
at all sorts of solutions before I designed an all-NT network.
But will I automatically cast it aside without evaluation?
Not a chance.  Some things it does more quickly and easily
than any other choice -- and with the proper amount of work
and knowledge, I can make it as safe and reliable as any other
component of my enterprise.

If you can't do that, then maybe it's time to look at your
own flaws instead of those of NT.  After all, *those* are
documented and easily reproduced, if you know where to look.

-- 
Devin L. Ganger <devin at thecabal.org>
find / -name *base* -exec chown us:us {} \;
su -c someone 'export UP_US=thebomb'
for f in great justice ; do sed -e 's/zig//g' < $f ; done