[ale] bout me company

Thu Feb 14 13:22:14 EST 2002

Geez, guys, I'm very flattered that you think so. Â "It's just the beer talkin'."
;-)

- Jeff

Terry Lee Tucker wrote:
3C6BE742.85A8A8D1 at esc1.com">
  Not only was it strong; it was very well written and very much on target.Thanks Jeff...Russell Hogg wrote:

    Wow,That was strong.Thanks: )Russ_________________________________________russellh at x-soft.com-----Original Message-----From: Jeff Hubbs [mailto:hbbs at attbi.com]Sent: Thursday, February 14, 2002 10:36 AMTo: Stephen TurnerCc: ale at ale.orgSubject: Re: [ale] bout me companyStephen -You have an interesting opportunity here.  Your Win2K Manager (WinManfor short) appears to have been conditioned to believe that OSses aresomething you have to go to school to learn how to utilize.  The wholeof Windows World has been set up to encourage this sort of thinking.Your WinMan might very well feel threatened by you and the things theCFO said.  He would probably feel les
s threatened if he understood thatthe kind of money-sucking "gatekeeper" system that has built itself uparound NT/2K/XP is not a core feature of the Linux world.  /Even if youdecide to teach yourself Win2K/, there's the issue of actually gettingaccess to a legal copy.  You can probably get time-limited or otherwisecrippled 2K versions with training books that are quite expensive, butto actually legally set up a 2K instance will cost hundreds of dollars. Oh, yeah, and you can only do it on one machine at a time, so if youwant to legally set up a tabletop enterprise operation to learn on -with more than one server and a couple of workstations - you'd betterhave a lot of money to spend.Working for the Government as I did at the time I began working with NT,I could buy a few NT licenses without a whole lot of hassle.  But, inthe two private-industry places I've worked, spending a few hundreddollars on /anything/, no matt
er how justifiable, was a big deal. Buying a handful of NT/2K licenses "to mess with" under thosecircumstances would have been quite a hard sell.  With Linux,"gatekeepers" are pretty much nonexistent.  It's a meritocracy; what/you are able to figure out how to do/ is the overarching limitingfactor.  As I have become fond of saying, Linux rewards your time andeffort in pretty much direct proportion.Your WinMan is going to regard you with a lot of turmoil and conflict. If he went to someplace like Gwinnett Tech and took a lot of courseshaving to do with Win2K, he invested a whole lot of time, money, andeffort into being able to support this one company's one operatingsystem.  If he sees you flying around trying to do magical things withLinux, he's got two conclusions he can make:  either your work andknowledge is illegitimate because you didn't come by it by way of agatekeeper the way he did, or he was foolish to have 
put all his eggs inBill's basket.  If it were me, I would tell him that it was admirableand valid to have gone through the gatekeeper system and that with theperspective that the industry works hard to enforce - that you must gothrough the gatekeeper - one could hardly find fault with taking such apath as opposed to some alternative.  I mean, pick up a copy of /Computer User/ sometime and just look at the pages of training ads.  Howcould a person look at that and NOT feel like, well, this is what I mustdo to work with operating systems (my excessive generalization here isdeliberate).Once this guy realizes how low the barriers to entry are for Linux andOpen Source software, he might feel more encouraged.  Now, hisresistance is going to be greater if he has simply never worked with anynon-MS OS before because he won't have a broad enough context with whichto regard Linux.  I worked with VMS quite extensively for a numb
er ofyears before I first saw NT or Linux, so my initial regard for boththose OSses were shaped by my comfort with and understanding of VMS.  Ina lot of ways, I was seeing NT as an attempt to create something like aVAX with a GUI running on Intel hardware.Hey, man, burn the guy some distro CDs (he'll probably flinch at theidea of actually accepting them from you; Bill trains his grasshopperswell)!- JeffStephen Turner wrote:

      well i found out why the win2k network admin doesntlike me much but the IT manager is my friend, the cfosaid the first thing since i been here that madesince, "linux is certainly the future" scares the crapout of win2k manager cause hes the one that said "idont have time to go back to school to learn it." :)looks like i might have a future here ;) no wonder thecfo is friendly to me... well maybe its cause its hisjob but, id like to think more ;)__________________________________________________Do You Yahoo!?Send FREE Valentine eCards with Yahoo! Greetings!http://greetings.yahoo.com---This message has been sent through the ALE general discussion list.See http://www.ale.org/mailing-lists.shtml for more info. Problems should

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