[clue-talk] Apple riding the Tsunami of....

[Nate Duehr]

Sean LeBlanc wrote:

>The whole argument you are making about things not breaking could be applied
>to some UNIX systems in general. People still generate the usual FUD about
>*nix being harder to support, needs more admins, higher paid admins, etc. I
>think people believe what they want to believe and come to the conclusions
>they want to come to when it comes to TCO, uptime, and the like. I
>personally believe that using computers will remain difficult, depending on
>what you are doing. If you are doing word processing, well, then, no it
>shouldn't be that hard, and Xerox, Apple, MS and others have worked to make
>it so that it isn't. But there are other apps that aren't so easily
>abstracted away by putting an interface on them...even the person who wants
>to do serious document layout will run into troubles with the GUI
>eventually. Word irritated me enough over layout issues that I ran to LaTeX. 
>  
>
Heh... you know, reading this again, I agree that certain things 
*should* be hard on computers... because they've never been done before 
or they're highly customized to a particular business, etc. 

But the stuff that most people focus on when setting up "support desks" 
etc... wouldn't be problems forever if there were some incentive to 
permanently fix them.  The standard support setups at most companies 
AWARD things being broken that need to be fixed.  And they don't mind if 
it's the same things broken over and over and over.  That's a recipie 
for what we see today -- same problems, same issues -- if you talk to 
your buddies who work in IT at other companies, you can share stories 
about the companies having the exact same problems, and yet -- those are 
the problems that management and staff never permanently fix.

Kinda fun to watch, like watching a bad car wreck seems fun to watch at 
first, isn't it?  ;-)  It is getting old to watch after about 15 years 
of it.

Your comments about Unix TCO, and admins and such... is probably 
well-summarized by a friend of mine's comment: The best system admins 
are lazy.

What he means by this is that if something is happening that shouldn't 
be and the admin can write a script or make smart changes that make the 
problem "easy" to fix, or better yet, if the problem occurs it fixes 
itself... the best ones do.  They don't want to deal with that problem 
ever again.

Nate