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[Aaron Howell]

Actually, its interesting the whole phenomena of windows and teaching people not to think.
(I believe the jargon file refers to it as a "point and drewl interface for that very reason.)
as a system administrator for a university, I get to see a lot of the course material, and how its changed over the years.
When I started my degree in 1996, much of the content was done under Unix, or, even better, VMS.
Now, in 2002, nearly all of it is windows, visual basic and java.
What we are doing today is producing graduates who have no concept whatsoever of how to work with legacy systems,
stick any of this years graduates in front of an xterm and make them log into vms and they won't even make it past the password prompt.
I think this will have a two-fold effect.
Firstly, more and more companies will move initially to Windows based implementations of whatever, because thats all their brand new graduates know how to work with,
and they've all their lives had how good Windows is drummed into them.
following that will come a time of hysteria not unlike y2k (I'll call it y2.01k) when all of a sudden quite a lot of the world's major companies
are going to discover that there's no new blood with any Unix or other legacy operating system experience, and those of us who do are going to be pulling massive salaries, because its going to be cheaper to maintain those legacy systems than it will be to re-implement the whole thing in Windows.
in fact, in many cases, a windows reimplementation won't even be an option due to their being no code portability between X platform and anything running under Windows.
Interesting times ahead I think.
Regards
Aaron
On Thu, Aug 29, 2002 at 01:23:04PM -0500, Gregory Nowak wrote:
> Yeah, I offer webmail on my site for that very same reason. When I tell my friends that they can also log into the system and get an actual shell prompt at which they could learn how to use GNU/Linux without installing it on their boxes, I get "oh ... well that's hard". When I insist that it's not hard at all, the end result is still "well, I just think I'll stick to webmail because it's easier". Has windblows made people's brains turn to mush, or what?
> Greg
> 
> 
> On Thu, Aug 29, 2002 at 12:41:47PM -0500, Raul A. Gallegos wrote:
> > I totally agree Ann.  But life and trends being the way they are right now
> > there is nothing we can do about html messages.  I am not big on webmail for
> > that exact reason yet I have it on my site for my friends who use
> > asmodean.net to check their email?  Why? because these friends of mine don't
> > know better.  I tease them about it.  So am I advocating html and web usage
> > for email?  Probably if you look at it that way, but I don't like it.
> > 
> > 
> > PS: Just as a smartass remark, there are more than just ftp, telnet, http,
> > pop3 style traffic on the web, oops on the net.  lol.  But I'm sure you know
> > that.  As I said, smiling big as I'm being a smartass.
> > --
> > If you perceive that there are four possible ways in which a procedure can
> > go wrong, and circumvent these, then a fifth way will promptly develop.
> 
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| Aaron Howell                  Kitten Internet            |    |
| aaron at kitten.net.au           Internet consultancy,      |    |
| Phone: +61-417-625550         System administration,     |    |
| fax: +61-7-36010099           system design/integration. |    |
| icq: 6715521                  http://www.kitten.net.au   |    |
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