[rescue] Oh no! This poor Origin server.....

[Jonathan C. Patschke]

On Thu, 1 Apr 2004, Dave McGuire wrote:

>    "Support costs".  So you pay a clueless vendor drone to have someone
> to yell at instead of hiring a competent technical staff and paying
> them enough to keep them around.

Well, it depends on the company.  My support from Sun has generally been
good, but is occasionally spotty.  My support from SGI was great back in
1996, but sucked in 2000.  Microsoft support even used to be pretty
decent in the mid-90s.

The support we get from IBM is absolutely terrific.  The FE that
normally drops buy here knows his way around AIX a lot better than I do
(which is somewhat embarassing) and has never failed to diagnose the
exact problem with our system on the first try.  Phone support has been
equally good, except for one time when I called about a software
development problem with WebSphere AS and one time when they transferred
me to an overseas call center and I couldn't understand the lady through
her accent.

>    I will *NEVER* work for a big company again.  Never.

I think I've developed the same mentality.  I wouldn't mind working for
a big company I own, though, because my first responsibility after
getting an employee or two would be to codify my perception of
management ethics and make it part of the employee handbook.  That'd
give me a crutch against the decline into suithood.

>    Which, of course, means it's nothing more than suit bullshit.

At some level, yes, but it's valid bullshit.  Oracle licensing hits home
around here.  Their prices are insane, and they charge PER CLOCK TICK.
So, upgrading processor architectures is a Good Thing.  Funny, though,
that means it costs more to run Oracle on an Pentium 4 than on a
Pentium 3, instead of less. :)

-- 
Jonathan Patschke  ) "Being on the Internet is not the same as being
Elgin, TX         (   famous.  That's like calling Cheetos 'dinner'."
USA                )                                    --Metal Steve