Isolated Government Leech asks:
This is an honest query from someone who does not
understand how the real world works. In my job, the OS
is totally transparent to the users. It was VMS, now
it's NT (with obvious hardware replacement). What the
user sees (and what my graduate school books say
management should focus on is the users) are the client
applications. The user never sees the server. And
from what I've seen as the sysadmin, the problems
are almost always in the server applications, not the
OS. Since we didn't develop the applications, when
they break, as they so often do, we call our support
team in DC, who calls the contractor who made the
application.
Bottom Line: The OS does its job. The applications
are errant, and its the developers that get the calls.
If our computers don't work right, our first step is
reboot Win95 (clients) or NT (server), wherever the
problem is. 90-95% of the time this fixes the
problem (this is not just an OS issue - the application
programmers didn't make their code clean up resources
when it crashes).
Big Questions:
1. Why such an uproar over OS's when most problems
are in the applications (except when NT munched
itself one week after I took over).
2a. Why does it matter if the OS is a big name like
Microsoft, or a free OS like Linux, freeBSD, etc?
2b. Do companies call Microsoft or Caldera or RedHat
if some application misbehaves?
3. Do companies have IS departments to fix problems,
or do the IS people call Microsoft? If a company has
an IS department with trained professionals, why
would the company switch from one OS (say Unix) to
another OS (NT)? This seems counter-productive and
expensive to me.
I would appreciate honest answers to these questions,
either via e-mail or here. Because, I just don't get
it.
OBTW: I "grew up" on Microsoft (TRS-80, Apple ][,
MS-DOS, Windows... and recently discovered the power
of Unix through Linux. In my current class, we have
four teams each creating and managing some project.
Three are using Win95+Access. We're using Linux,
Win95, StarOffice, Word, Netscape, MS IE, whatever
it takes. I have recently written an application
that processes CGI data and commands from HTML
forms, puts it in an RDBMS supporting multiple tables,
concatenated keys, foreign keys, queries, selects,
restricts, and reports, entirely in bash (yes, the
DBMS was written in bash, and it's 10x faster than
a commercial SQL product I tested). Inconceivable
for any Win platform. Needless to say, I'm a
hard-core Unix fan now.
George
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