On Monday 28 April 2003 06:50 pm, Manuel Lora wrote:
> Wow. What I found great about this last message was not the content but the
> form. It was a good narrative. A nice little essay. Props.
>
> ml
>
> PS. get a tech writing gig in magazines and journals mmay....
Thanks.
I never considered that line of work before, but if I could work at home...
OK, so I've been a computer programmer / sys admin since '80,
starting out on Fortran and RTE-XL on an HP 1000 (before
HP-9000's were sold). Maybe it's pent-up frustration about how
well things used to work, and how much M$ has buggered it
up. 20 years ago, crashing wasn't something that "just happened".
Coming around full circle, my daughter uses Windoze for AIM
and her webcam (not for what you think). Her computer crashes
frequently, much to her un-surprise. On the other hand, whenever
my Linux box needs to be rebooted, she is genuinely surprised,
and I have to offer some sort of explanation. Usually it involves
alpha GATOS drivers. To be fair, watching TV in Windoze crashes
within a few minutes, with GATOS it takes hours. Uptime now
is 11 days (since last power outage longer than one hour). Linux
just works.
That same power outage that plunged the west bank of St. Charles
parish into darkness in the wee hours of Holy Thursday knocked
more than a few machines at the plant offline. Only two machines
were lucky enough to have UPS's that could sustain them. One was
my Linux box in my office that is my everyday beater, now with
350 days uptime and 400+ processes from two Oracle instances
(one is 8.1.7, the other is 9.0.1), X, KDE, VMware, Apache, etc.
It was the only pleasant surprise when I came in on my day off
to see my Linux box still running the Matrix screen saver.
Three years ago I bet my job that Linux would be a better database
platform than Windoze. Now I'm on the corporate Linux rollout team.
Do the math.
Andy Johnson
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Received on 04/28/03
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