🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <18794@watdragon.waterloo.edu> tbray@watsol.waterloo.edu (Tim Bray) writes:
>I think the big reason [that MIS groups get such a bad rap]
>is that they suffer from the same timesharing problems
>that the big machines do.  There are never enough of them to go around, so
>the users end up waiting and pissed off.  Simply put, there are very few
>groups in the world that have the organizational and technical skills to
>keep a variety of complex OSes and network facilities running, while
>simultaneously dealing politely with the ignorant, all while seriously
>overworked.  It can be done, but it's hard.

And it's rare than organizations understand that these things Need To
Be Done and Take Time.  So they buy a number of *nix workstations, that
clearly don't need any time spent on maintenance or system administration :-),
and give them to end-users who don't always understand some of the issues
involved.  Training?  What's that?  We bought the whole manual set...

Well, I didn't mean for this to come out as a flame, but I think it's
a relatively common occurrence.  There is administration cost incurred
on any style of computing; you can pay for it centrally or distributed, and
up-front or in lost time when you find out no one ever understood how to do
backups...

It's just a matter of educating everyone, management and technical folks
alike, and I don't have any generic answer.

Note; this has strayed sufficiently far from architecture that I have
directed followups to comp.misc.

Mark Linimon
linimon@attctc