Date: Thu, 03 Aug 2000 04:30:14 +0200 From: "Andrei A. Dergatchev" <A.Dergatchev@tn.utwente.nl> To: freebsd-newbies@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: new books, changing my pt. of view Message-ID: <3988D936.13CEF26E@tn.utwente.nl> References: <DBB3921EFE2AD211A81500A0C9B5FE760579452C@msg04.scana.com> <06a801bffc9d$73c1a9c0$1600010a@pmr.com> <014e01bffcb8$7d46fed0$847e03cb@ROADRUNNER> <002401bffcdf$7c2f89a0$0adf7ad1@beefstew> <023e01bffcef$594cc550$847e03cb@ROADRUNNER>
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Q. How much time average University physics professor will need to spent to find if a given voltage is 220 V or 110 V if left without voltmeter ? A. Several hours for most of them. "Something new" is indeed a crucial issue here imho. When one is confronted with unknown, there is no choice but to investigate, and without experience of how to investigate things fast in this particular field it will take sizeable chunk of the day. To understand something "sufficiently well" one got to have _a lot_ of time to learn, because one have to *know* beforehand. However, there are advantageous points - nowadays Internet is everywhere in academia, Linux/*BSD are popular and I know a lot of student are tinkering with the code just for fun of it. So, probably when these guys are going out, one in business and another in support, it does make sense for them to talk like that :-) - if both engineer of the client and consultant know how to deal with problems, than it can work out eventually :-) Rest of us who are not lucky enough to have such knowledge got to bother about having the docs ;-) Andrei > Yeah for sure ..... I've got a heap of FreeBSD gateway boxes running around > the city, ranging from neanderthal Wang 386's to a relatively modern dual > P100 > and the things just keep on trucking. However the headaches resulting from > attempts to > make sense of ANY existing documentation when I'm trying to figure out > something new are something else again !!!!. I for one am reluctant to setup > anything in FreeBSD for a business client unless I've already understood the > issue sufficiently well that I have written my own docs. There's no way one > can install / configure something unfamiliar & be confident it will work, > and no way to guarantee of prompt feedback from the already over-committed > list regulars. When one is under pressure to get the thing working like > yesterday its usually more expedient to resort to a different solution .... > even if its less robust, at least the office girl can be trained to hit the > "reset" button. If I had my choice (and money wasn't an issue) I'd probably > have all my office clients running Solaris 8 / StarOffice, but the realities > are that "everyone knows Win98 / MS Office", its relatively cheap, and > hitting "re-set" occasionally doesn't always wreck it :) The fact that its > somewhat of an unpedigreed canine is another issue ... it does the job. > > for How on earth anyone seriously expects "real world" consultants to > recommend FreeBSD to their clients is beyond me. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-newbies" in the body of the message
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