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Date: 29 Jan 1995 15:13:00 +0100
From: kai@khms.westfalen.de (Kai Henningsen)
Newsgroups: comp.os.linux.misc,comp.os.386bsd.misc,comp.os.os2.advocacy
Message-ID: <5emgJCtzcsB@khms.westfalen.de>
References: <950116203411@lambada> <1995Jan18.214037.6088@cs.cornell.edu>
<3fk4hi$iu8@solaris.cc.vt.edu> <3fm805$ae7@nkosi.well.com>
<3g3npo$ep8@newsserver.nj.nec.com>
Subject: Re: Linux thoroughly insulted by Infoworld!
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Organization: Organisation? Me?! Are you kidding?
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bobp@syl.nj.nec.com wrote on 24.01.95 in <3g3npo$ep8@newsserver.nj.nec.com>:
> HOWEVER, if your business and livelihood depends on the damn computers
> working all the time, every time, then you PAY for that level of support,
> and you PAY DEARLY, and you are GRATEFUL to do it. If you really need the
> machine, you cannot afford to wait three or four days for the Net to get its
> collective act together to produce the correct answer to your question. If
> you really are working in a business, you are probably spending your time ON
> THE BUSINESS. UNLESS YOU ARE IN THE LINUX SUPPORT BUSINESS, YOU MAKE NO
> MONEY TWEAKING LINUX. I love working on cars, for example, but when I'm
> working 12 hour days at work, even I take the car to a garage to have it
> worked on -- my time and effort are better expended on other things. And if
> I need that car FIXED NOW, the odds are that I won't take a day off from
> work to do it, but that I'll drop it off at the garage to have it done.
So? No reason you can't do it that way with Linux. There *are* people in
the Linux support business.
However, with Linux, you have the *additional* option of doing it
yourself, because you have the source. *If* you need it, you got it. If
you don't need it, so what?
To put it another way, you *can* repair that broken cable in your car
yourself, if there's no garage handy and you're in a hurry.
Once I repaired a 1 GB Netware 3.11 file system that was really shot to
hell with a disk editor. I had no specs at all. It cost me about a day of
work, but then I knew and hat tinkered with several other file systems
before I started. Had I got source, it'd probably been about two or three
hours. We *needed* that data. And all VREPAIR offered was to nuke 90% of
the files.
Of course, there are shops that would have recovered the data for us -
maybe in a week, maybe in a month ... (And I sincerely doubt their people
would be as good at it as I. Cough. Oh well, we all are vain about
*something* ...)
(Yes, I know about backups. My boss, however, tends to rip our machines
apart every time one of our customers needs something (like a streamer) in
a hurry ... :-( )
> I love the OS, and I find it fun to dink around with the kernel or with some
> X apps, but, then, I do it as a hobby. If I had my next paycheck
> riding on Linux working correctly every time, all the time,
> I think my views might change.
Well, I'd prefer that to having it ride on Novell working perfect, since I
*know* it doesn't. 1/2 :-)
Kai
--
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