William H. Magill on Sat, 19 Oct 2002 00:14:04 -0400


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Re: [PLUG] OT: Linux Business Forum


On Friday, October 18, 2002, at 03:33 PM, Paul wrote:
I didn't mean to say that I was superior in any way. I'm doing the best I
can just like windows sysadmins. I'm just telling other's experience,
YMMV.


I know you didn't say it. I did. It's my prejustice. 8^) What can't you do that Windows admins can do? (My bet is that you lack specific experience with Windows, but that you know the underlying computer theory at a deeper level, and that you could get up to speed with Windows technology fairly quickly.)

This idea of supporting multiple OS is both true and false.

I've supported many different Operating Systems in my 30 years of system administration, some of them concurrently, most of them serially.

While it is true that one can "get up to speed" with any particular OS without too much trouble, the problem comes in defining the speed considered sufficient. And depending upon frequency of usage, your skill with one OS comes at the expense of another. Especially once you get down to the arcane parts where you get paid to hang out as a sysadmin.

One tends to interpret a new OS in terms of the previously well known one.

It's pretty easy to "use" Windows and Linux at the same time, but the system level knowledge of one becomes obscured by the other, especially where the two overlap, but do things differently using the same names. (Microsoft's implementation of Kerberos vs MITs is a very good example here -- same name; very different functionally and philosophically.)

Unix based Sysadmins tend to understand the concept of timesharing and can automatically do it themselves without too much trouble. But "users" don't have a clue, and management is nothing but stupid users. For them it's an Either-Or decision...not both. However, a sysadmin who has only ever had Windows as a model will not likely make the transition to Linux without much pain and suffering... if at all -- the underlying concepts are simply too foreign. That's why we hear so much about "command line phobia."

Mac users are no different. I love Mac OS X, because I'm a Unix person. But Mac OS people are absolutely dumbfounded by it.

T.T.F.N.
William H. Magill
magill@mcgillsociety.org
magill@acm.org
magill@mac.com

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