On Tue, 1 Dec 1998, Julian Richardson wrote: Answers: They're paying me to sit there and work on the systems. I get to play with even *more* hardware, and I'm even able to request *specifically* what I want under the umbrella that it has to be "NT-Compatible". And I'm not paying for any of it, so who gives a rat's ass if some corporate blow-hard has his head so far in his rectum that he wants to run NT. Besides, NT is a character builder like losing a limb to frostbite or having your house burn down. It's all relative. Linux on a 486 seems much faster on a 486 than Windows 95, for sure. But it's not fast compared to FreeBSD on a PII 450 with 256megs of ram. I tend a flock that has several Linux machines, running as mission-critical http/ftp/mail/proxy servers on fast PII machines with lots of ram. They kick some serious ass. As [often more] stable, fast, and full featured as the Solaris and SCO machines we have running. And much less expensive, yes. In fact, I'm SSH'd into one right now to type this reply... I am *literally* the only person in my company who can do a thing in Unix besides get a directory listing. Any time there's so much as a hiccup in the system, I get called. On vacations, in the middle of the night, on the toilet; no rest for the indespensible. And since I'm not a cutthroat, I can't walk in to the boss and demand "2K a year or I walk..." Basically, being indispensible sucks unless you've got the balls to really use it to your advantage. I'm doing some consulting work for a local community college as a favor to a buddy of mine who's a chemistry prof there, virtually for free (they have me on the Elbonian payscale, like $9 an hour, aka beer money) and I am having a great time arguing with their IS department over putting either a Linux or FreeBSD box up as the server for a lab-verification system. They claimed that "Unix was not supported on the campus" and that "the only Unix system anywhere around was too expensive to have maintained." "Besides," they told me, "NT is so much more stable and secure." My natural follow up question: "What system runs Unix?" "The administration system with staff payroll and all student records and grades." Long reboots are the bane of the users, not mine. And again, I get paid for being there so if they want to run up my timecard with NT and PC's, it their prerogitive. If I can't get something to work right, I grab my company credit card and call Microsoft's tech support at $75 a hit. If they tell me something can't be done with NT, I document it and submit a workaround solution to management, which more often than not involves wiping NT and installing a free Unix... Aaron C. Finney Systems Administrator WFI Incorporated ------------------------------------------------------------------------ "UNIX is an exponential algorithm with a seductively small constant."

Sorry for this OT comment but its important that people read Eric Raymond's Halloween documents at http://www.opensource.org/halloween.html if Julian's story below scares or bothers you. On Tue, 1 Dec 1998, Julian Richardson wrote: Sellam Alternate e-mail: dastar(a)siconic.com ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Always being hassled by the man. Coming in 1999: Vintage Computer Festival 3.0 See http://www.vintage.org/vcf for details! [Last web site update: 11/02/98]