| William H. Magill on Mon, 10 Feb 2003 11:55:05 -0500 |
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On Friday, February 7, 2003, at 11:34 AM, christophe barbe wrote: The only problems I have is with unsupported hardware features on linux because of undisclosed hardware specification (the most problematic being the suspend/resume feature which is not supported on TiBook3 because of the ATI M7 chip). Anyway this is not enough to give up my freedom. Maybe it's because I've been working with Unix since the beginning, but "freedom" is very relative thing. Long ago, when I had nothing better to do, the idea that I could build my own kernel, write my own drivers, and customize to the nth degree a system was a powerful Siren Song, worth spending 36 hours a day on. Unix was a way of life. There wasn't much time for anything else. But when I got job demands and personal demands that forced me to expect to be able to use my computers as tools instead of lab-rats, my attitudes changed. When I started with Unix, fsck did not exist, and "sync sync shutdown" was normal syntax. I frequently had to edit superblocks manually and all of the other fun things that fsck now does "automagically." Was that giving up freedom? Yes, it was. I was no longer allowed to fix these things on my own, they were just fixed for me. In this world of 24x7 computing service, you don't have the option of "playing" with a down system to find out what went wrong. You need to be able to get it back on-line as quickly as possible. Time IS money in this business. "Options" (another word for freedom) are a very sharp double edged sword. They can allow you to do things which the "manufacturer never intended." But then YOU have to support them. This also tends to preclude the ability to delegate that support to someone else. This can be very good for the ego, but is usually NOT good for the ability to get a full night's sleep, AND it tends to lock you out of any career advancement into management -- management knows that you are too valuable as a tech to promote. And frequently, they lock you in to some particular path which proves to be less than optimal. In short, yes, in an experimental, non-production world, freedom is a good thing. In a production-oriented, enterprise, "bet the company" environment, that good will diminish quite rapidly. There is a place for both. T.T.F.N. William H. Magill # Beige G3 - Rev A motherboard - 768 Meg # Flat-panel iMac (2.1) 800MHz - Super Drive - 768 Meg # PWS433a [Alpha 21164 Rev 7.2 (EV56)- 64 Meg]- Tru64 5.1a magill@mcgillsociety.org magill@acm.org magill@mac.com _________________________________________________________________________ Philadelphia Linux Users Group -- http://www.phillylinux.org Announcements - http://lists.netisland.net/mailman/listinfo/plug-announce General Discussion -- http://lists.netisland.net/mailman/listinfo/plug
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