>
> 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)
Must be lousy books.
> 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).
>
It also matters how the OS handles the errant applications and such. I'd
say the uproar over stability, scalability, efficiency of an OS is
justified.
> 2a. Why does it matter if the OS is a big name like
> Microsoft, or a free OS like Linux, freeBSD, etc?
>
It doesn't matter to open-minded individuals who want to get the job
correctly.
> 2b. Do companies call Microsoft or Caldera or RedHat
> if some application misbehaves?
>
Yes, they try.
> 3. Do companies have IS departments to fix problems,
> or do the IS people call Microsoft?
Yes, and yes. When they run into an MS problem where the code needs to be
fixed they call MS and they wait a year or two and maybe it gets fixed.
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.
>
>From Unix to NT: because they've fallen to the MS marketing machine.
>From NT back to Unix: when they realize they've made a mistake by
installing NT and they want something reliable, scalable, etc.
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