On Tue, Oct 18, 2005 at 09:56:56PM -0500, michael hast wrote:
> I've got a good one for you--thread related. I work for a very
> small company that has no room for full-time IT. So, there is a
> gentleman that will come in on an on-call basis to
> tune/repair/kick-with-his-boot our M$ Exchange servers and XPee
> terminals. He came in today, and I saw him poking our servers with a
> stick to try to get them to work as they sit in full view of my desk. I
> casually asked him, "So, you ever play with Linux?"
> "I have," he responded, "Although not nearly enough. There's a lot
> of cool stuff you can do with it, but I just don't have time."
> After a short silence I again addressed him, "My wife and I are
> trying to set up some file sharing at our house, but we are having a
> little trouble with it."
> To which he said, "Are you running XP?"
> Confused by my answer, he asked, "2000?"
> Finally, I told him, "Debian."
> Incredulously, he said, "You're not running ANYTHING Microsoft?"
> To which I clarified, "Well, the X-Box."
> He again asked, "You have multiple machines at home in a network and
> they are ALL running Linux?"
> "Yes."
> "You are more brave than me," he responded, "That's pretty
> courageous to not have ANY Windows PC's."
> He was really nice the whole time, but it was clear that he was
> finding it very difficult to wrap his brain around using Linux that
> fully.
<snip>
It's called "comfort zone".
About ten years ago, before I started my own company, I worked for a
"Microsoft Solution Partner", doing FoxPro programming on an accounting
package called "SBT". Right at the end, I started hearing about this
Linux stuff. I'd used Xenix before, and thought it was cool, but didn't
have enough tools. So I bought one of those "Linux On A Drive" things
(hard drive with Linux pre-installed) and put it in my home computer. I
was impressed, especially compared with what I'd seen on Xenix. I played
around with it, and mentioned it to one of my co-workers. He had no use
for it whatsoever. Now, we had to reinstall our Windows on our
workstations once every six months, because it would just start flaking
out. We didn't trust Microsoft NT networking, so everything was stored
on a Novell network. And we were a "Microsoft Solution Partner"-- the
_experts_ in Microsoft software. And this co-worker had no use for
Linux. Why? Because Microsoft, as bad as it was, was his bread and
butter. He was completely bought and paid for by Microsoft.
I wrote some of the hairiest FoxPro code you ever saw for that company--
basically an RPG (IBM minicomputer language, not "role playing game")
emulator to handle incoming EDI invoices for a customer. FoxPro was
_never_ designed to do that kind of thing. I'm sure they cursed me when
I left over that, but it was the best solution for that situation and
that customer, from a maintenance standpoint. It would have been a
hundred times faster and simpler with Linux, Perl/Python, and
PostgreSQL/MySQL. But to this day, I guarantee the owner of that company
hasn't looked twice at Linux.
Comfort zone.
-- Paul M. Foster ----------------------------------------------------------------------- This list is provided as an unmoderated internet service by Networked Knowledge Systems (NKS). Views and opinions expressed in messages posted are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of NKS or any of its employees.
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