From: dsolaro at freenet.de (Denis Solaro)
Subject: irc over ssl

On Tue, 25 May 2004 09:59:09 +0100
"Dave Howe" <DaveHowe@....sharp-uk.co.uk> wrote:

> > Hmm.. so the company is hiring them as a "unix/cisco tech weenie"
> > and then forcing them to use Windows?
> *Sigh* you have given a name to my Ongoing Horror.
> 
> I am *forced* to use MS Office - Word, Excel and Outlook - on Windows.  My
> job dutes are to look after the Solaris, HPUX, Compaq Tru64 and Cisco
> kit - but still, my workstation is and must remain Spawn Of Microsoft.


You are not the only one who seems to be under that regime.. The thing I do not
understand is:

What do they expect you to do you X Windows work with then? 

 In fact in one place I have deployed Linux just because it was cheaper than a
dedicated X windows terminal (at least I was lucky to) but it sure did cost less
than buying an unix HP or Sun box or a tektronix box. With it I did the usual
SAM on Hp or Smit under AIX remote job and had the screen full of remote
xsysinfo or top sessions.  There is nothing more needed than that in fact,
especially in WANs where you can remotely do sysadmining for an office halfway
around the world. Ah, SAM was fun.  

I know there are X windows emulation products for MS Windows, but these are
horrible, you can't compile things for them and they cost more than a linux
CD rom.  On top of this the Linux thingy comes with REAL X11, real snmp, real
daemons, real wu-ftp... Oh and what about those amazingly expensive packages
under windows that do... SYSLOG viewing!  Wow!  Syslog... now that must be worth
millions!  No, Zillions! Some place I worked fork some pretty insane money for
one syslog viewer that was sold as "a complete security solution"... the type
that you can replace with a 5 lines perl script. :-)

Yep.. I know management can suck.  And X11 did bother a lot of people with it's
remote connection capabilities when VNC was not around... like 10 years ago.
Cause you didn't have to rush down to the computer room when something needed
to be set, like my NT certified colleague had to :-)  The problem is that "he
looked like he did some work" since he went down to the room in a rush, while
you don't since you were doing the same job from your desk.  I guess Unix or VMS
just were too ahead of their time compared to the rest of the management
practices.

That is why  some questions I sometimes dare ask in interviews are:
"So what machine will be on the desktop? What OS?  And why?"  if the answer is
windows, I just know that it's one of those places that doesn't really have it's
priorities set right and I dare the quit or double game.  It works most times
though.




-- 
Denis Solaro -- denis.solaro@...adoo.fr

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