linimon@attctc.Dallas.TX.US (Mark Linimon) (12/01/89)
In article <18794@watdragon.waterloo.edu> tbray@watsol.waterloo.edu (Tim Bray) writes: >I think the big reason [that MIS groups get such a bad rap] >is that they suffer from the same timesharing problems >that the big machines do. There are never enough of them to go around, so >the users end up waiting and pissed off. Simply put, there are very few >groups in the world that have the organizational and technical skills to >keep a variety of complex OSes and network facilities running, while >simultaneously dealing politely with the ignorant, all while seriously >overworked. It can be done, but it's hard. And it's rare than organizations understand that these things Need To Be Done and Take Time. So they buy a number of *nix workstations, that clearly don't need any time spent on maintenance or system administration :-), and give them to end-users who don't always understand some of the issues involved. Training? What's that? We bought the whole manual set... Well, I didn't mean for this to come out as a flame, but I think it's a relatively common occurrence. There is administration cost incurred on any style of computing; you can pay for it centrally or distributed, and up-front or in lost time when you find out no one ever understood how to do backups... It's just a matter of educating everyone, management and technical folks alike, and I don't have any generic answer. Note; this has strayed sufficiently far from architecture that I have directed followups to comp.misc. Mark Linimon linimon@attctc