On Tue, 24 Sep 2002, Crispin Cowan wrote: > Greg Jorgensen wrote: > > > On Tuesday, September 24, 2002, at 10:20 PM, Shaun Savage wrote: > > > >> I have seen some of the MS support people, and they are worthless. > >> One person spent two hours trying to hook up a 8 port hub. The docs > >> stated port 8 was the crossover connection but if you looked at the > >> hub, port 1 was. > > > > We've all seen incompetence, but extrapolating from a few individuals > > to conclude that Microsoft-trained techs "are worthless" doesn't help > > the discussion. You will find incompetence on all platforms and in all > > environments. > > On the one hand, I agree that anecdotal evidence doesn't help make the > case for one vendor's support being better than anothers. In fact, I've > never heard of a vendor that you could not easily dredge up horror > stories about. > > On the other hand, I think there is something more here. The point&click > nature of Windows administration makes it much easier for an incompenent > person (no real understanding of what they are doing) to *appear* > competent. In contrast, UNIX (Linux, whatever) demands that the admin > know what they are doing to a fair degree before they can get anywhere. > > UNIX is user friendly. It's just selective about who its friends are. There is an assumption that because there is a GUI, it is easier to admin. In the case of Microsoft products, nothing could be further from the truth. Proper administration of a Windows box requires archane knowledge. To make many of the changes needed requires knowing which registry settings to set and how to set them. This is not obvious. Much of this information is found in obscure technical notes or handed down from other admins via oral tradition and/or interpretive dance. And then you have to remember everything you changed the next time you apply a service pack in order to make sure that none of the settings were reset to default or something else. Unix is claimed to be harder to administrate, but I have found the reverse to be true. Most everything is in plain text (with the exception of sendmail.cf) in a single directory hierarchy. With Microsoft, it could be damn near anywhere. Usually there are at least a couple places you have to go to nail down a process to make sure it does not come back on its own.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Tue Sep 24 2002 - 17:27:21 PDT