FW: Re: The term "operating system"

[chuck <cswiger@widomaker.com>]

  Pieter Nagel <pieter.nagel@epiuse.co.za> writes:
  >On Sat, 15 Nov 1997, cswiger wrote:
  >
  >> No prob! Striping? Do it!  Multi Segment volumes? Go for it!
  >> Install a printer? click, drag, drop - drivers sent over the LAN, boom,
  >> you got it!)
  >
  >Yes, well, instead of clicking 3000 times to grant each of 3000 users
  >the same additional rights, I'd much prefer a less clickety-click UI
  >which allowed me to grant those rights once to an Organistional Unit.
  
  Well, ignorance of another product is no excuse to call it inferior!
  You can assign rights to groups of users in NT. Actually, I'm testing out
  NT5 (if I can get the beta running!) and all the domain architecture
  I struggled to learn is changing once again.
  
  There have been many historical instances of tech rev's driving
  the chicken-little luddites into the arms of the authorities
  for releif. Once steam locomotives ruled, and engineers and
  mechanics made their entire life's career out of steam power.
  But along came diesel/electric locomotives and I'm sure the
  older railwaymen cursed it and the younger adapted, because it
  sure was a lot more effecient and less polluting than coal. Indeed
  diesel 'took over' their world of steam power.
  
  I can understand a company likes 'brand loyalty' to a product, but
  people who want to stand by their Apple products unto the death
  like it's supposed to be some kind of eternal religion...
  I used to be an Atari fanatic and heard people making the same
  noises against commodore 64 users - to me they were both just
  6502's in a box w/ a proprietary ROM. The extent of the religious
  wars and dedication amazes me. Today Atari is a non player.
  Who knows, tomorrow MS might be some small subsidiary of a
  company based in Bangalore. 
  
  Here's a real world solution (at least for the US): Pass a law
  requiring the Social Security Administration to offer 
  entitlement benefits for Novell operators too old to learn 
  new tricks.
  
  Once you learn these things, I like little features like, within
  4 clicks of a blank desktop I can bring up a visual pie chart
  showing how much disk space any of my servers have. These real
  productivity gains allows me to complete my job and have plenty
  of time left to read the mail on am-info.
  
  Of course, you can get disk-space pie charts for Solaris too, but
  why doesn't Sun package it in? Why don't they do market research
  and add all kinds of creature comforts and easy to operate niceties
  that make computing power available to a wider mass market, and then 
  promote it as a viable alternative for ordinary office personnel
  instead of as elitest workstations for engineers only? 
  
  
  --rambling on
  Chuck
  cswiger@widomaker.com