You guys missed my point completely.
I did not say, "ugh, unix good, mmm, windoze bad"
I said that I considered the MS OS offerings to be immature.
Stability running a single application isn't enough.
The binary adder I built with discrete components back in
high school was solid as a rock. It never 'crashed'.
To clarify...
I do not consider an operating system that must be halted and
restarted in order to install or upgrade an application to be
very mature.
As for business purchases of MS products, it's worth noting that
the majority of 'critical' applications run under UNIX. These would
include:
telephone switching
transaction processing
large database applications
billing systems
manufacturing systems
transportation routing and control systems
As for voting with their pocketbooks...
It's not always the better product that sells.
VHS beating out Beta for example.
People are comfortable with the familiar. Many executives
making IT spending decisions are operating from a position
similar to that of the timid traveler who will only eat at
McDonalds...Never mind that the best seafood pizza ever
made is being offered out of a brick oven mounted in the
back of an old pickup truck down by the wharf. (Papeete
1989 :-)
I've seen many businesses with a wall of rack mount
compaq servers and a legion of button pushers all dedicated
to handling the same email that could be taken care of by
a $5k unix box and a few hours a month attention from a
sendmail knowledgeable sys admin . Same for DNS.
-Bob
David W LeJeune, Sr wrote:
The 'curious toy' you refer to powers 95% of all US Businesses computing
needs. A secretary running Word, or an accountant running an accounting
program under windows rarely has system crashes, primarily because they are
using a 'stable' piece of software. As a software developer who started in
1961 programming in Autocoder, I can tell you it's rarely the operating
system that causes program crashes. We have gotten smarter in protecting
the journeyman programmer from himself, but he still manages to screw up
periodically. Don't get me wrong, I prefer Linux/Unix to Windows, and early
windows had some serious problems. The MAC OS, until the most recent
version, was even worse. But businesses that spend lots more money than
I'll every have continue to buy Windows based systems. They vote with their
pocket books.
Dave
----- Original Message -----
From: "Ken Brown" <ken.d.brown@verizon.net>
To: <tentec@contesting.com>
Sent: Friday, March 14, 2003 3:45 PM
Subject: Re: [TenTec] "Remember, it's a computer."
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